Rods, cones, planes, and shears of pure force bored, cut, stabbed, and slashed. Bombs and dirigible torpedoes charged to the skin with duodec sought out the red-cloaked ships. Beams, sheathed against atmosphere in Q-type helices, crashed against and through their armor--beams of an intensity almost to rival that of the Patrol's primary weapons and of a hundred times their effective aperture. And not singly did those beams come. Eight, ten, twelve at once they clung to and demolished dreadnought after dreadnought of the Expeditionary Force. Eichmil was well content. "We can hold them and we are burning them down!" he gloated. "Let them loose their negative-matter bombs! Get the analysis of those beams--build them! They are burning out projectors, which means that they cannot keep this up indefinitely. They will have to retire, what there are left of them, for more munitions; and when they come back we will blast them out of space!" He was wrong. Grand Fleet did not stay there long enough so that even the projectors of the Eich could destroy more than a few thousands of ships. For even while the cylinder was forming, Kinnison was in rapid but careful consultation with Thorndyke, checking intrinsic velocities, directions, and speeds. "QX, Verne--_cut_!" he yelled. Two planets, one well within each end of the combat cylinder, went inert at the word; resuming instantaneously their diametrically opposed intrinsic velocities, each of some thirty miles per second. And it was these two very ordinary, but utterly irresistible planets, instead of the negative-matter bombs with which the Eich were prepared to cope, which hurtled then along the axis of the immense tube of warships toward Jarnevon. Whether or not the Eich could make their planet inertialess has never been found out. Free or inert, the end would have been the same. "Every Y14M officer of every ship of the Patrol, attention!" Haynes ordered. "Don't get all tensed up. Take it easy; there's lots of time. Any time within a second after I give the word will be p-l-e-n-t-y o-f t-i-m-e--_cut_!" The two worlds rushed together, doomed Jarnevon squarely between them. Haynes snapped out his order as the three were within two seconds of contact, and as he spoke all the tractors and all the pressors were released. The ships of the Patrol were already free--none had been inert since leaving Jalte's ex-planet--and thus could not be harmed by flying débris.