Kinnison knew that it was useless to assault that dome. He could, perhaps, crack its screens with his primaries, but he did not have enough stuff to reduce the whole establishment and therefore could not use the primaries at all. Since the enemy had been taken completely by surprise, however, he had a lot of time--at least a minute, perhaps a trifle more--and in that time the old _Dauntless_ could do a lot of damage. The power plant came first; that was what they had come out here to get. "All secondaries fire at will!" Kinnison barked into his microphone. He was already at his conning board, every man of the crew was at his station. "All of you who can reach twenty-seven, three-oh-eight, hit it--hard. The rest of you do as you please." Every beam which could be brought to bear upon the powerhouse, and there were plenty of them, flamed out practically as one. The building stood for an instant, starkly outlined in a raging inferno of incandescence, then slumped down flabbily; its upper, nearer parts flaring away in clouds of sparklingly luminous vapor even as its lower members flowed sluggishly together in streams of molted metal. Deeper and deeper bored the frightful beams; foundations, subcellars, structural members and Gargantuan mechanisms uniting with the obsidian of the crater's floor to form a lake of bubbling, frothing lava. "QX--that's good!" Kinnison snapped. "Scatter your stuff, fellows--hit 'em!" Kinnison then spoke to Henderson, his chief pilot. "Lift us up a bit, Hen, to give the boys a better sight. Be ready to flit, fast; all hell's going to be out for noon any second now!" Ships--warships of Boskone's mightiest--caught cold. Some crewless; some half-manned; none ready for the stunning surprise attack of the Patrolmen. Through and through them the ruthless beams tore; leaving, not ships, but nondescript masses of half-fused metal. Hangars, machine shops, supply depots suffered the same fate; a good third of the establishment became a smoking, smoldering heap of junk. Then, one by one, the fixed-mount weapons of the enemy, by dint of what Herculean efforts can only be surmised, were brought to bear upon the bold invader. Brighter and brighter flamed her prodigiously powerful defensive screens. Number One faded out; crushed flat by the hellish energies of Boskone's projectors. Number Two flared into ever more spectacular pyrotechnics, until soon even its tremendous resources of power became inadequate--blotchily, in discrete areas, clinging to existence when all the might of its Medonian generators and transmitters, it, too, began to fall. "Better we flit, Hen, while we're all in one piece--right now," Kinnison advised the pilot then. "And I don't mean loaf, either. Let's see you burn a hole in the ether."