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Updated: June 4, 2025
The old Venerian who had brought them there walked up to Arcot and spoke to him in a softly musical language, a language that was sibilant and predominated in liquid sounds; there were no gutturals, no nasals; it was a more musical language than Earth men had ever before heard, and now Arcot started in surprise, for he understood it perfectly; the language was as familiar as English.
Finally, they motioned to the ship, which dropped to ten feet, and the three men leaped lightly to its door and entered. The door snapped shut, and the ship shot toward the city. The magnetic wall opened for a moment, and the ship shot through. Within seconds, if was out of sight, lost in the busy air traffic above the city. "Well," said Arcot, "now we go back to the hills and wait."
As if by magic, every ship in the air above the city shot downward, dropping suddenly out of sight. In seconds, the air was cleared. "It seems they've spotted us," said Arcot in a voice he tried to make nonchalant. A fleet of great, long ships was suddenly rising from the neighborhood of the central building, the tallest of the group.
Space was utterly black about them now; there wasn't the slightest hint of light. The ten seconds that Arcot had allowed dragged slowly. Then at last came the heavy crashing of the huge relays; the current flowed back into the storage coils, and space became normal again. They were alone in the blackness. Morey dove swiftly for the observatory.
As a final test, Arcot, having finished the ship, suggested that the Venonian officer and one of the men of his ship have a trial of mental powers. Zezdon Afthen tried first, and between the two ships, racing along side by side at a speed unthinkable, the two men struggled with those forces of will. Quickly Zezdon Afthen told Arcot what he had learned.
Despite the fact that the voltmeter seemed to be shorted out by the relux plate, the needle pointed steadily at twenty-two. Arcot changed the current through the magnet, and the reading dropped to twenty. The rays had been on at very low power, the air only slightly ionized, but as Arcot turned a rheostat, the intensity increased, and the air in the path of the beam shone with an intense blue.
That accounts for its blackness, and the softness as Arcot has truly depicted it. Also, since it absorbs heat waves and changes them to electrical charges, it tends to become cold, as the frost Arcot has shown indicates. Remember, that that is infinitely hard as you see it, for it is artificial matter, but Arcot has seen natural matter forced into this exceedingly explosive atomic figuration.
In twenty minutes, the sergeant returned with the news that there was no strong force there. Clive at once took two hundred of his English infantry, the men who had fought at Arcot, and quietly left the watercourse and made his way round towards the rear of the grove.
Thus the force about to attack Arcot amounted to five thousand men; while the garrison under Clive's orders had, by the losses in the defence of the fort, by fever and disease, been reduced to one hundred and twenty Europeans, and two hundred Sepoys; while four out of the eight officers were hors de combat.
He had discovered from the minds of several who had been killed by the magnetic field Arcot had used, and not destroyed, that they had a base in this universe. Thett's base was somewhere near the center of the galaxy, on a system of unusually large planets, circling a rather small star. But what star their minds had not revealed.
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