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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.
Then what was left of the cones would separate into individual heptagons, which would so systematically blast every hexan thing into nothingness as to make certain that never again would they resume their insensate attacks upon the Vorkuls. Having counted the cost and being grimly ready to pay it, the implacable attackers hurled themselves upon their objectives.
Better we rig up another set, and put a relay of observers on this job!" The Vorkul-Hexan War Vorkulia, the city of the Vorkuls, was an immense seven-pointed star. At its center, directly upon the south pole of Jupiter, rose a tremendous shaft its cross-section likewise a tapering seven-pointed star which housed the directing intelligence of the nation.
The red and green beams snapped out, the peculiar radiance died from the metal walls, and the gigantic duplex cone of the Vorkuls bored serenely northward as little marked or affected by the episode as is a darting swift who, having snapped up a chance insect in full flight, darts on. "Great Cat!" Far off in space, Brandon turned from his visiray screen and wiped his brow.
High-explosive shells, canisters of gas, and the frightful aerial bombs and radio-dirigible torpedoes of highly scientific war all were thrown with lavish hand, as fast as the projectors could be served. But thrust for thrust, ray for ray, projectile for massive projectile, the Brobdingnagian creations of the Vorkuls gave back to the hexans.
With resounding crashes, the structure parted at the weakened points, the furious upheaval stopped and, the tractor beams shut off, the shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in clashing, grinding ruin upon the city. The enormous duplex cone of the Vorkuls did not attempt to repeat the maneuver, but divided into two single cones, one of which darted toward each point of rupture.
The edge was outlined by a low rail, and bulwark and floor were padded with thick layers of a hard but smooth and yielding fabric. In this star-shaped ring two young Vorkuls were contending for the championship of the fleet in a contest that seemed to combine most of the features of wrestling, boxing, and bar-room brawling, with no holds barred.
This pavement was intended solely to prevent vegetable growth and carried no traffic whatever, since few indeed of the Vorkuls have ever been earth-bound and all traffic was in the air.
Wings crashed in fierce blows, hands gripped and furiously wrenched. Two powerful bodies, tapering smoothly down to equally powerful tails, corkscrewed around each other viciously, winding up into something resembling tightly twisted lamp cord; and the two Vorkuls, each helpless, fell to the mat with a crash.
A whistling, shrieking ululation rent the air and the officer's coils tightened as he reared a few feet of his length upright, shooting out half a dozen tentacular arms to various switches and controls upon his board, while throughout the great heptagon, hundreds of other Vorkuls sprang to attention at their assigned posts of duty.
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