* * * * * I was on the little flying platform which sallied out as a test to attack these isolated projectors. Snap and I and one other volunteer went. He and I held the shield; Snap handled the controls. Our exit-porte was on the lee side of the building from the hostile search-beam. We got out unobserved and sailed upward; but soon a light from the ship caught us. And the projector bolts came up.... Our sortie only lasted a few minutes. To me, it was a confusion of crossing beams, with the stars overhead, the swaying little platform under me, and the shield tingling in my hands when the blasts struck us. Moments of blurred terror.... The voice of the man beside me sounded in my ears: "Now, Haljan, give them one!" We were up over the peak of the rim with the hostile projectors under us. I gauged our movement, and dropped an explosive powder bomb. It missed. It flared with a puff on the rocks, twenty feet from where the two projectors were mounted. I saw that two helmeted figures were down there. They tried to swing their grids upward, but could not get them vertical to reach us. The ship was firing at us, but it was far away. And Grantline's search-beam was going full-power, clinging to the ship to dazzle them. Snap circled us. As we came back I dropped another bomb. Its silent puff seemed littered with flying fragments of the two projectors and the bodies of the men. We flew swiftly back and got in. * * * * * It decided Grantline. For an hour past Snap and I had been urging our plan to use the gravity platforms. To remain inactive was sure defeat now. Even if our buildings did not explode--if we thought to huddle in them, helmeted in the failing air--then Miko could readily ignore us and proceed with his loading of the treasure under our helpless gaze. He could do that now with safety--if we refused to sally out--for we could not fire our weapons through our windows.[1] [Footnote 1: To fire a projector through the walls or windows would at once wreck the protective Erentz system. The enemy ship has pressure portes, constructed for the emission of the weapon-rays. Grantline's only weapons thus mounted were his search-beam and zed-ray.] To remain defensive would end inevitably in our defeat. We all knew it now; it was obvious. The waiting game was Miko's--not ours! And he was playing it. The success of our attack upon the distant isolated projectors heartened us. Yet it was a desperate offensive indeed upon which we now decided! We prepared our little expedition at the larger of the exit portes. Miko's zed-ray was watching all our interior movements. We made a brave show of activity in our workshop with abandoned ore-carts which were stored there. We got them out, started to recondition them.