"Cut!" and the lone purple circle disappeared from tank and from reducer. The master technician had cut his controls and every pound of metal and other substance surrounding the negasphere had been absorbed by that enigmatic volume of nothingness. No connection or contact with it was now possible; and with its carefully established intrinsic velocity it rushed engulfingly toward the doomed planet. One of the mastodonic fortresses which lay in its path vanished utterly, with nothing save a burst of invisible cosmics to mark its passing. It approached its goal. It was almost upon the planet before any of the defenders perceived it; and even then they could neither understand nor grasp it. All detectors and other warning devices remained static, but: "Look! There! Something's _coming_!" an observer jittered, and Jalte swung his plate. Jalte saw--nothing. Eichmil saw the same thing. There was nothing to see. A vast, intangible nothing--yet a nothing tangible enough to occult everything material in a full third of the cone of vision! Jalte's operators hurled into it their mightiest beams. Nothing happened. They struck nothing and disappeared. They loosed their heaviest duodec torpedoes; gigantic missiles whose warheads contained enough of that frightfully violent detonate to disrupt a world. Nothing happened--not even an explosion. Not even the faintest flash of light. Shell and contents alike merely and, oh, so incredibly peaceful, ceased to exist. There were important bursts of cosmics, but they were invisible and inaudible; and neither Jalte nor any member of his crew were to live long enough to realize how terribly they had already been burned. Gigantic pressors shoved against it; beams of power sufficient to deflect a satellite; beams whose projectors were braced, in steel-laced concrete down to bedrock, against any conceivable thrust. But this was _negative_, not positive, matter--matter negative in every respect of mass, inertia, and force. To it a push was a pull. Pressors to it were tractors--at contact they pulled themselves up off their massive foundations and hurtled into the appalling blackness. * * * * * Then the negasphere struck. Or did it? Can nothing strike anything? It would be better, perhaps, to say that the spherical hyperplane which was the three-dimensional cross-section of the negasphere began to occupy the same volume of space as that in which Jalte's unfortunate world already was. And at the surface of contact of the two the materials of both disappeared. The substance of the planet vanished; the incomprehensible nothingness of the negasphere faded away into the ordinary vacuity of empty space.