Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/28

26 "Thank our lucky stars that Faragaut here, and I, bought up all the mercury in the system, and had it brought to earth. We at least have a supply of materials for the atostors.

"They don't seem to do much good."

"They're the best we've got. All the photocells on earth and Venus and Mercury are at present busy storing the sun's power in atostors. I have two thousand tons of charged mercury in our tanks here in the 'Lunar Bank'."

"Much good that will do—they can just pull and pull and pull till it’s all gone. A star-fish isn't strong, but he can open the strongest oyster just because he can pull from now on. You may have a lot of power—but."

"But—we also have those new fifteen-foot UV beams. And one fifteen-foot UV beam is worth, theoretically, nine five-foot beams, and practically, a dozen. We have a dozen of them. Remember, this place was designed not only to protect itself, but earth too."

"They can still pull, can't they?"

"They'll stop pulling when they get their fingers burned. In the meantime, why not use some of those IP ships to bring in a few more cargoes of charged mercury?'" [sic]

"They aren't good for much else, are they? I wonder if those fellows have anything more we don't know?"

"Oh, probably. I'm going to work on that crumbler thing. That's the first consideration now."

"Why?"

"So we can move a ship. As it is, even those two we built aren't any good."

"Would they be anyway?"

"Well—I think I might disturb those gentlemen slightly. Remember, they each have a nose-beam eighteen feet across. Exceedingly unpleasant customers."

"Score: Strangers; magnetic field, atomic bombs, atomic power, crumbler ray. Home team; UV beams."

Kendall grinned. "I'd heard you were a pessimistic cuss when battle started—"

"Pessimistic, hell, I'm merely counting things up."

"McClellan had all the odds on Lee back in the Civil War of the States—but Lee sent him home faster than he came."

"But Lee lost in the end."

"Why bring that up? I've got work to do." Still smiling, Kendall went to the laboratory he had built up in the "Lunar Bank." Devin was already there, calculating. He looked unhappy.

"We can't do anything, as far as I can see. They're using an electric field all right, and projecting it. I can't see how we can do that."

"Neither can I," agreed Kendall, "so we can't use that weapon. I really didn’t want to anyway. Like the neutron gun which I told Commander McLaurin would be useless as a weapon, they'd be prepared for it you can be sure. All I want to do is fight it, and make their projection useless."

"Well, we have to know how they project it before we can break up the projection, don't we?"

"Not at all. They're using an electric field of very high frequency, but variable frequency. As far as I can see, all we need is a similar variable electric field of a slightly different frequency to hetrodyne theirs into something quite harmless."

"Oh," said Devin. "We could, couldn't we? But how are you going to do that?"

"We'll have to learn, that's all."