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After some experimenting with the unfamiliar controls Costigan learned how to operate the Nevian visiray, and upon the plate they saw the Cone of Battle hurling itself toward Roger's planetoid. They saw the pirate fleet rush out to do battle with Triplanetary's massed forces, and with bated breath they watched every maneuver of that epic battle to its savagely sacrificial end.

"Do you see anybody?" Tom asked. "Not a sign ... but I'm really looking for other rocks. I can see three that aren't too far away, but none of them have claim marks. This one must have been the only one Roger was working." They stared at the ragged surface of the planetoid.

Flawlessly those instruments noted every detail of the destruction of Roger's fleet, of the transformation of the armada of Triplanetary into an unknown fluid, and finally of the dissolution of the gigantic planetoid itself. Then furiously Cleveland drove his beams against the crimsonly opaque obscurity into which the peculiar, viscous stream of substance was disappearing.

"Any such, however, will not be allowed inside the planetoid area after the rest of us return from wiping out that patrol. We attack in one minute." "Would not one do better by stopping on?" Baxter, in the quarters of the American, was in doubt as to the most profitable course to pursue. "I should leave immediately if I thought that that ship could win; but I do not fancy that it can, do you?"

Hundreds of small planetoids and various-sized pieces of space junk drifted in the cold vacuum of space overhead. Roger looked around. The asteroid he was on was so small and the horizon such a short distance away that the base of Miles' giant black ship was half-covered by the curvature of the planetoid.

But the object sought was so far away that the small spy-ray sets of the Secret Service men, intended as they were for close-range work, were unable to make contact with the invisible planetoid for which they were seeking.

That conflict ended, he watched the Triplanetary fleet reform its battle cone and rush upon the planetoid. "Destruction, always destruction," he sighed, adjusting his power switches. "Since they are bent upon mutual destruction I can see no purpose in refraining from destroying all of them. We need the iron, and they are a useless race."

Then, all the attention of the Nevians and the greater part of their power output devoted to the neutralization of that last desperate thrust, the metal wall of the planetoid opened and the First Section shot out into space.

Came simultaneous questions and explanations. "Their power-source is very probably the intra-atomic energy of iron; and if so, much remains to be done before I can proceed with my plan. I must have the most powerful structure in the known Universe before I can act. In the light of what I have just learned, the loss of the planetoid is but a trifle."

Moreover, considering the general relation between the inclination of planetoid orbits and their eccentricities, it is probable that among the orbits of these undetected planetoids are many of the most eccentric. But while recognizing the incompleteness of the evidence, it seems to me that it goes far to justify the hypothesis of Olbers, and is quite incongruous with that of Laplace.