"Burn out the ground under them!" came the order. "Tip them over--slag them down!" Sharply downward angled twoscore of the beams which had been expending their energies upon Boskone's radiant defenses. Downward into the lake of lava which had once been pavement. That lake had already been seething and bubbling; emitting momently bursts of lambent flame. Now it leaped into a frenzy of its own; a transcendent fury of volatilization. High-explosive shells by the hundred dropped also into the incandescent mess, hurling the fiery stuff afar; deepening and broadening the sulphurous moat. "Deep enough," Haynes spoke into his microphone. "Tractors and pressors as assigned--tip him over." The intensity of the bombardment did not slacken, but from the maulers to the north there reached out pressors, from those upon the south came tractors; each a beam of terrific power, each backed by all the mass and all the driving force of a veritable flying fortress. Slowly that which had been a building leaned from the perpendicular, its inner defensive screen still intact. "Chief?" From his post as observer, Kinnison flashed a thought to Haynes. "Are you beginning to think any funny thoughts about that ape down there?" "No. Are you? What?" asked the port admiral, surprised. "Maybe I'm nuts, but it wouldn't surprise me if he'd start doing a flit pretty quick. I've got a CRX tracer on him, just in case, and it might be smart to caution Henderson to keep up on his toes." "Your diagnosis--'nuts'--is correct, I think," came the answering thought; but the port admiral followed the suggestion, nevertheless. * * * * * And none too soon. Deliberately, grandly, the Colossus was leaning over, bowing in stately fashion toward the awful lake in which it stood. But only so far. Then there was a flash, visible even in the inferno of energies already there at war, and the already coruscant lava was hurled to all points of the compass as the full-blast drive of a superdreadnought was cut loose beneath its surface! To the eye the thing simply and instantly disappeared; but not to the ultra-vision of the observers' plates, and especially not to the CRX tracers attached by Kinnison and by Henderson. They held, and the chief pilot, already warned, was on the trail as fast as he could punch his keys. Through atmosphere, through stratosphere, into interplanetary space flew pursued and pursuer at ever-increasing speed. The _Dauntless_ overtook her proposed victim fairly easily. The Boskonian was fast, but the Patrol's new flier was the fastest thing in space. But tractors would not hold against the now universal standard equipment of shears, and the heavy secondaries served only to push the fleeing vessel along all the faster. And the dreadful primary beams could not be used--yet. "Not yet," cautioned the admiral. "Don't get too close--wait until there's nothing detectable in space."