All leaves had been canceled. Every detector, every beam, every device of defense and of offense was fully manned. Every man was keyed up and alert. And Gerrond, while the least bit apprehensive that something was about to happen which was not in the book, was pretty sure in his stout old war-dog's soul that he and his men had stuff enough. At two minutes before midnight the armored president and his escorts left Gerrond's private office. One minute later they were passing the door of the specified room. A bomb exploded shatteringly behind them, armored men rushed yelling out of a branch corridor in their rear. Everybody stopped and turned to look. So, the hidden Kinnison assured himself, did an unseen observer in an invisibly hovering, three-dimensional hypercircle. Kinnison threw the door open, flashed an explanatory thought at the president, yanked him into the room and into the midst of a corps of Lensmen armed with devices not usually encountered even in Patrol bases. The door snapped shut and Kinnison stood where the president had stood an instant before, clad in armor identical with that which the president had worn. The exchange had required less than one second: it had been observed by no one. "QX, Gerrond and you fellows!" Kinnison drove the thought. "The president is safe--I'm taking over. Double time straight ahead--hipe! Get into the clear--give us a chance to use our stuff!" The unarmored men broke into a run, and as they did so the door of Room Twenty-four swung open and stayed open. Weapons snouted out, shoved by armored men. Armored men and heavy weapons erupted from other doors and from more branch corridors. The hypercircle, which was, in fact, the terminus of a hyperspatial tube, began to thicken toward visibility. It did not, however, materialize. Only by the intensest effort of vision could it be discerned as the sheerest wisp, more tenuous than the thinnest fog. The men within the ship, if ship it was, were visible only as striations in air are visible, and no more to be made out in detail. Instead of a full materialization, the only thing that was or became solid or tangible was a dead-black thing which reached purposefully outward and downward toward Kinnison, a thing combined of tongs and coarse-meshed, heavy net. Kinnison's DeLameters flamed at maximum intensity and minimum aperture. Useless. The stuff was dureum; that unbelievably dense and ultimately refractory synthetic which, saturated with pure force, is the only known substance which can exist as an actuality both in normal space and in that pseudospace which composes the hyperspatial tube. The Lensman flicked on his neutralizer and shot away inertialess; but that maneuver, too, had been foreseen. The Boskonian engineers matched every move he made, within a split second after he made it; the tong-net gripped and closed.