"But how are you going to approach that close when _their_ guns are effective at two hundred feet?" Lolan countered. Idly he glanced at the piles and piles of ray pistols still being doled out. "How do they operate? Draw on the Martian power station, I suppose?" Mora pointed at a massive apparatus at the upper end of the hall. "Electronic power," she told him. "We generate our own power. As long as the turbines are running, the guns will operate." Lolan's eyes went a little wide at that. He scratched his head, scowled, then walked off a little. He whirled about and came back to them. "That gives me a clue! The Martian guns also draw from a central station. Only it's a radioactive type of power. Underneath the barracks there's a huge mass of _radite_. If that stuff were carried off, they'd have guns no more effective than water pistols!" Irak snorted. "Who's going to carry it off? It weighs tons. I've seen it. It's like a great lump of radium. If you get too close, even, you'll be poisoned." "We couldn't carry it off--in its present form! But there is a large, unused sewer hole in a room near it. If we could break it up, using workmen's lead suits, it might be possible to drop it into the underground river. Contact with the water would result in an explosion that would destroy its radioactivity." Atarkus licked his lips. "Would this be possible? Could anyone get that close to it without being caught?" "We could try!" Lolan gave back. "If the plan succeeded--well, we number twenty thousand in Areeba to the Martians' two. Once their weapons were destroyed, the city would be ours!" "Then it must be attempted!" Atarkus raised his fist high. "Irak--call the leaders. We must lay our plans tonight, for the struggle tomorrow!" They met in a little alcove off the main room, ten men whose grim countenances stamped them as men ready to die for the cause. Lolan sensed immediately, as they took places around a long table, that he was being looked to as their leader. And old Atarkus willingly fell away to make room for younger, more dynamic blood. When all were quiet, Prince Lolan stood up. It came to him strongly, the feeling that everything, the fate of every soul on Venus, hinged on what happened in this little room tonight. His voice came gravely, freighted with importance.