"Maybe you shouldn't have niggled him so far." "I was a little rough on him," agreed Billy. "But I pushed him right to the limit of my safety. I applied all the traffic will bear. I had to, to show my boldness and to intrigue his fancy, since I knew that in all their victorious twenty thousand years of conquest they had never hit a race that stood up and told him off, face to face." "You knew what you were doing, as usual," admitted Downing. "But I came to tell you that Hendricks has the tripod beam and the associated junk is set up and ready for the job of jerking the guts out of VanMaanen's Star." * * * * * It was not too impressive on the surface. Brimstone was cold and forbidding and airless, the only planet to the runaway star known as VanMaanen's Star. A useless system save for experiments of this nature, but excellently adapted for such. The solar intake beams were operating efficiently. The torrents of power they would drag out of the star and use to develop the unthinkable pressures necessary to move the core of the star would come into the acceptor tubes. Foot-thick superconductors connected the intake beams to those to be used for the tearing process. And these superconductors were maintained at the temperature of liquid helium by a liquid-cooling system. Liquid helium needed no circulation, since its heat-conducting properties were such that no local heating in a bath of liquid helium is possible. Normal evaporation from the open bath at one side kept the system cold, all the way through to the superconductors. "Good thing they don't have to use switches or breakers, otherwise I don't know how they'd handle the energy," said Lane. "A sort of grid-controlled intake--swell stuff. Well, fellers, let's get in the control room and see what gives." Hendricks handed Billy a small chromium-plated case the size of a cigarette pack. "We're putting personnel snatchers on all of us. If this blows--in fact if the whole planet blows, we all end up a couple of thousand miles in space, all canned up in incompressible spheres. Safety first, I say." "That's how you saved the gang in the earthquake experiment, isn't it?" "Uh-huh," admitted Hendricks. "Well, let's take off. We've got everything nailed down tight." Hendricks advanced the power. The meters read up, and the anchoring tractors moved slightly in their gimbals and became immobile. The projectors forming the tripod of inflexible beams took up all the remaining slack in the beam system. Not one piece of unprotected matter was left to form a weak link. Beams of sheer energy, efficient to within a fraction of a percent of the ideal one hundred percent, linked the beams invisibly. A system of inflexible energy, driven and maintained by the energy output of a star--driven to rip the core out of the star itself.