Jalte's base, all the three hundred square miles of it, was taken at the first gulp. A vast pit opened where it had been, a hole which deepened and widened with horrifying rapidity. And as the yawning abyss enlarged itself the stuff of the planet fell into it, in turn to vanish. Mountains tumbled into it, oceans dumped themselves into it. The hot, frightfully compressed and nascent material of the planet's core sought to erupt--but instead of moving, it, too, vanished. Vast areas of the world's surface crust, tens of thousands of square miles in extent, collapsed into it, splitting off along crevasses of appalling depth, and became nothing. The stricken globe shuddered, trembled, ground itself to bits in paroxysm after ghastly paroxysm of disintegration. What was happening? Eichmil did not know, since his "eye" was destroyed before any really significant developments could eventuate. He and his scientists could only speculate and deduce--which, with surprising accuracy, they did. The officers of the Patrol ships, however, _knew_ what was going on, and they were scanning with intently narrowed eyes the instruments which were recording instant by instant the performance of the new cosmic super-screens which were being assaulted so brutally. For, as has been said, the negasphere was composed of negative matter. Instead of electrons, its building blocks were positrons--the "Dirac holes" in an infinity of negative energy. Whenever the field of a positron encountered that of an electron, the two neutralized each other, giving rise to two quanta of hard radiation. And, since those encounters were occurring at the rate of countless trillions per second, there was tearing at the Patrol's defenses a flood of cosmic rays of an intensity which no spaceship had ever before been called upon to withstand. But the new screens had been figured with a factor of safety of five, and they stood up. The planet dwindled with soul-shaking rapidity to a moon, to a moonlet, and finally to a discreetly conglomerate aggregation of meteorites before the mutual neutralization ceased. "Primaries now," Haynes ordered briskly, as the needles of the cosmic-ray-screen meters dropped back to the points of normal functioning. The probability was that the defenses of the Boskonian citadels would now be automatic only, that no life had endured through that awful flood of lethal radiation; but he was taking no chances. Out flashed the penetrant super rays and the fortresses, too, ceased to exist save as the impalpable infradust of space. And the massed Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol, making its formation, hurtled outward through the intergalactic void. XXIV.