The ship was suddenly in normal space; its screen up. The dog-fight had been ended. The terrestrial ships had been completely defeated. The _Ancient Mariner'_s appearance was a signal for all the moleculars in sight. Ten huge ships, half a dozen small forts and now the unshielded Dome, joined in. Their screen tubes heated up violently in the brief moment it took to dive behind the hill, a tube fused, and blew out. Automatic devices shunted it, another tube took the load--and heated. But their screen was full of holes before they were safe for the moment behind the hill. Instantly Wade dropped the defective screen. Almost as quickly as the screen vanished, a cylinder of artificial matter surrounded the entire ship. The cylinder was tipped by a perfect cone of the same base diameter. The entire system settled into the solid rock. The rock above cracked and filled in behind them. The ship was suddenly pushed by the base of the cylinder behind them, and drove on through the rock, the cone parting the hard granite ahead. They went perhaps half a mile, then stopped. In the light of the ship's windows, they could see the faint mistiness of the inconceivably hard, artificial matter, and beyond the slick, polished surface of the rock it was pushing aside. The cone shape was still there. There was a terrific roar behind them, the rock above cracked, shifted and moved about. "Raying the spot where we went down," Arcot grinned happily. The cone and cylinder merged, shifted together, and became a sphere. The sphere elongated upward and the _Ancient Mariner_ turned in it, till it, too, pointed upward. The sphere became an ellipsoid. Suddenly the ship was moving, accelerating terrifically. It plowed through the solid rock, and up--into a burst of light. They were _inside_ the dome. Great ships were berthed about the floor. Huge machines bulked here and there--barracks for men--everything. The ellipsoid shrank to a sphere, the sphere grew a protuberance which separated and became a single bar-like cylinder. The cylinder turned, and drove through the great dome wall. A little hole but it whirled rapidly around, sliced the top off neatly and quickly. Again, like a gigantic teapot lid, the whole great structure lifted, settled, and stayed there. Men, scrambling wildly toward ships, suddenly stopped, seemed to blur and their features ran together horribly. They fell--and were dead in an instant as the air disappeared. In another instant they were solid blocks of ice, for the temperature was below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. The giant tamper set to work. The Thessian ships went first. They were all crumpled, battered wrecks in a few seconds of work of the terrible disc.