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Again the humming atostor, the strain Slowly Devin lifted from his seat. With thrashing arms and startled, staring eyes, he drifted gently across the room. Abruptly he fell to the floor, unhurt by the light Lunar gravity. "I advise," said the motor in its grumbling voice, "an immediate exodus." It stopped speaking, and practiced what it preached.
The men inside the fort jerked and quivered as the strange beam, a small, small fraction of it, penetrated the eight feet of outer wall, the six feet or so of intervening walls, and the mercury atostor reserves. "Concentrate all those UV beams on one spot, and see if you can blast a hole in him before he shakes it loose," ordered the ray technician. "He'll wiggle if you start off with the beam.
The atostor, the ionizer, and the twin ion-projectors were as before, great, rigid, metal structures that would maintain the meeting point of the ions with inflexible exactitude under any acceleration strains.
Instantly, according to instructions issued by Commander McLaurin, a fleet of ten of the tiniest, fastest scouts darted out. As soon as possible, a group of three heavy cruisers, armed with all the inventions that had been discovered, the atostor power system, perfectly conducting power leads, the terrible UV ray, started out. The scouts got there first.
And to him the explosion of the atostor reservoirs was a terrible and mystifying calamity. To the men in the five tiny scout-ships, it was also a surprise, and a painful one. Even space-hardened humans were burned by the terrifically hard ultra-violet from the explosion. But they got some hint of what it had meant to the Mirans from the confusion that resulted in the fleet.
The great copper conductors, charged with the same atostor force that was used in the mercury fuel, were perfect conductors, they had not heated. But the eleven thousand tons of discharged mercury metal had been completely charged in just a bit better than eleven minutes. The pumps wouldn't force it through the charging apparatus any faster than that.
I'm willing to bet that thing simply shoved the whole electron system of the mercury out a notch that it simply hasn't any K-ring of electrons now. I'm trying some other metals. Douglass is going to have MacBride make up half a dozen more machines. Machines they need a name. This ah this is an 'atostor. MacBride's going to make up half a dozen of 'em, and try half a dozen metals.
Kendall shrugged. "There isn't a lot of apparatus. I'm going to install them in my ships, and in the bank. I suspect we haven't a lot of time left." "How near ready are those ships?" "About. That's all I can say. They've been torn up a bit for installation of the atostor apparatus. Now they'll have to be changed again." "Anything more coming?" Buck smiled slowly.
He's developed a system, which, thanks to the power we can get in that atostor, will sextuply ionize oxygen gas. Now: what does that mean?" "Spirits of space! Concentrated essence of energy!" "Right. And in preparation, Cole here had one made up for me. That and something else. We'll just hook it up "
Then the "dead-man" took over the ship and the stored power in the atostor tanks blasted in a terrible flame that shattered the metal hull to molecular fragments. The interstellar cruiser shuddered, and rolled half over at the blasting pressure. Leaking seams appeared in her plates. The scouts raced back to Luna as the Miran settled heavily, and a trifle clumsily to Phobos.
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