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As she spoke, the two men stepped out of the "testing shed" the huge structure that housed their Osnomian-built space-cruiser, "Skylark II." Seaton waddled clumsily, wearing as he did a Crane vacuum-suit which, built of fur, canvas, metal and transparent silica, braced by steel netting and equipped with air-tanks and heaters, rendered its wearer independent of outside conditions of temperature and pressure.
The captive was standing utterly rigid, eyes closed, every sense and faculty mustered to resist that cruelly penetrant attack upon the very innermost recesses of his mind. Crane and Dunark scarcely breathed as the three-dimensional picture in the visualizer varied from a blank to the hazy outlines of a giant space-cruiser.
There was no space-cruiser at the bottom of the sea. There was evidence of one, yes. There were patches of plating, and there were naked, twisted girders. The dangling underwater camera faithfully reported what it saw by the light that was lowered with it. But there was no space-cruiser. There were only the rather small fragments of what had been one a little while before.
When a submerged space-cruiser, planning assassination, was itself blown to bits with no chance to strike back, the Mekinese fleet was approximately somewhere else. When a cabinet meeting disheartened King Humphrey, the fleet was much nearer to Kandar. But days of highly-tedious eventlessness were still ahead of the war-fleet.
The passengers felt each hair striving to stand on end as the very air became more and more highly charged and this was but the slight corona-loss of the frightful stream of destruction being hurled at the other space-cruiser, now scarcely a mile away!
Locked in each other's arms, they watched the scene until Stevens thought it time to send his message. Then, running hand in hand toward the huge space-cruiser, they were snatched apart and drawn up toward the double airlocks of the main entrance.
In due time the reinforcements from the other planets arrived, and the mammoth space-cruiser attracted attention even before it landed, so enormous was she in comparison with the tiny vessels having her in tow. Resting upon the ground, it seemed absurd that such a structure could possibly move under her own power.
That cruiser It could hardly act without information on when to act. So there's a pair of spies in a little shack on the cape. They've got an underwater cable going under the sand beach and out and down to the space-cruiser. They're watching the fleet on the ground with telescopes. When they see activity around it, they'll tell the cruiser what to do." Then she smiled more broadly.
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