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But the hexans were really intelligent, as has been said. They had had time to prepare for what they knew awaited them, and they were rendered utterly desperate by the knowledge that, no matter what might happen, their course was run.
But he did not try so near death was he that his mighty muscles did not even quiver at the trenchant bite of the surgeon's tools. Von Steiffel and his aides, meticulously covered with sterile gowns, hoods, and gloves, worked in most rigidly aseptic style; deftly and rapidly closing the ghastly wounds inflicted by the weapons of the hexans.
Brandon yelled, but the suggestion was entirely superfluous. Even before the wall-screen had died, Westfall's beam was trying to get through it, and when the visiray revealed the interior of the heptagon, the quiet and methodical physicist was shaken from his habitual calm. "Why, they aren't the winged monsters at all they're hexans!" he exclaimed. "Sure they are."
"I believe so, sir," answered the other officer, at the screens of the six periscopic devices which covered the full sphere of vision. "No reports from the rim, and all screens blank." Once more a vessel had issued from the jealously secret city of Zbardk without betraying its existence to the hated and feared hexans.
A portion of that conduit fully thirty miles in length was in the air, a twisted, flaming inferno of wrecked generators, exploding ammunition, and broken and short-circuited high-tension leads before the hexans could themselves cut it and thus save the remainder of their fortifications.
In that energy walls, doorway, and space-lines, as well as most of the hexans, vanished utterly. But the beam could not be used again. Every surviving enemy had hurled himself frantically into the thickest ranks of the police and the battle raged fiercer than ever. It did not last long. The ends of the column had already closed in.
Because of the enormously high gravity of Jupiter the hexans there are safe from human attack save for ineffectual long-range bombardment, but Io is being attacked constantly and it is probable that in a few more years Io also will be an abandoned world. Some of you may have received the impressions that the hexans are to triumph immediately, but such an idea is wrong.
After twenty years of preparation two long lifetimes and for the first time in our history, we are actually going to war!" "I have thought of it at length. It is disgusting. Compelled to traffic with an alien form of life! Were it not to end in the extinction of those unspeakable hexans, it would be futile to the point of silliness. I cannot understand them at all.
"Therefore, friends, you see how little we are able to do for you, we a race fighting for our very existence and doomed to extinction save for a miracle. We cannot take you to Callisto, for it is besieged by the hexans and the driving forces of your lifeboats, practically broadcast as they are, would be detected and we should all be destroyed long before we could reach safety.
You will not be able to carry enough fuel to land there in fact, nearly all the journey will have to be made without power, traveling freely in a highly elongated orbit around the sun but if you escape the hexans, you should be able to reach home safely, in time. It is for the consideration of this plan that this meeting has been called." "Just one question," Breckenridge spoke.
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