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As the howling wail came to a climax in a blast of sound Kromodeor threw over a lever, as did every other projector officer in every other heptagon, and there was made plain to any observer the reason for the burns and scars in the tortured space between the lofty inner and outer walls of Vorkulia.
As surely as though he had used those controls for years Kromodeor shot the visiray beam out into space. One hand upon each of the several dials and one eye upon each meter, it was a matter only of seconds for him to get in touch with Vorkulia.
Kromodeor, in the wardroom, turned to Wixill as the two prepared to take their respective watches. "It looks as though the first action would come while we're on duty. I've got just one favor to ask, if you have to economize on power, let Number One alone, will you?" "No fear of that," Wixill hissed, with the Vorkulian equivalent of a chuckle.
Finding his communicator screens likewise lifeless, he slipped to the floor and wriggled to the room of the Chief Power Officer, where he found Wixill idly fingering his controls. "Are we out?" asked Kromodeor, tersely. "All done," the Chief Power Officer calmly replied. "We have power left, but we cannot use it, as they have crushed our screens and are fusing our outer walls.
Since the troops had entered the fortress as close to their goal as possible, it was not long until the leading platoon reached the door behind which Kromodeor lay. Tools and cylinders of air were brought up, and the engineers quickly fitted pressure bulkheads across the corridor.
Zerexi shouldn't have gone into a knot so early against such a fast man." "Oh, I don't know," argued Kromodeor. "His big mistake was in that second body check.
Many of its component units would go down, but it would go on and on and on until every hexan trace had disappeared or until the last Vorkulian heptagon had been annihilated. In one of the lowermost heptagons, one bearing the full brunt of the hexan armament, Kromodeor reared upright as his projector controls went dead beneath his hands.
It was only a matter of moments until not a hexan vessel remained; and the Vorkulian juggernaut spiraled onward, now at full acceleration, toward the hexan stronghold dimly visible far ahead of them a vast city built around Jupiter's northern pole. At the controls of his projector, Kromodeor spun a dial with a many-fingered, flexible hand and spoke.
There, after a brief glance around the room, he coiled up beside a fellow officer who, with one eye, was negligently reading a scroll held in three or four hands; while with another eye, poised upon its slender pedicle, he watched a moving picture upon a television screen. "Hello, Kromodeor," Wixill, Chief Power Officer greeted the newcomer in the wailing, hissing language of the Vorkuls.
Its pavement was of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of the walls, was burned and blackened and seared as though by numberless exposures to intolerable flame. In a lower compartment of one of these enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor, First Projector Officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board.
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