Then, while Stone and his technical experts labored upon the generators of the screens which were to protect eleven more of the gigantic vessels against the thought-destroying radiations of the automatons, and while the computers calculated, minute by minute, the exact progress of the Fleet toward the blazing sun, the flagship _Washington_ drove in upon the rebellious _Dresden_, her main forward battery furiously aflame. Drove in until the repellor-screens of the two vessels locked and buckled. Then Captain Malcolm really opened up. That grizzled four-striper had been at a loss--knowing little indeed of the oscillatory nature of thought and still less of the abstruse mathematics in which Ferdinand Stone took such delight--but here was something that he understood thoroughly. He knew his ship, knew her every weapon and her every whim, knew to the final volt and to the ultimate ampere her Gargantuan capacity both to give it and to take it. He could fight his ship--and how he fought her! From every projector that could be brought to bear there flamed out against the _Dresden_ beams of an energy and of a potency indescribable, at whose scintillant areas of contact the defensive screens of the robot-manned cruiser flared into terribly resplendent brilliance. Every type of lethal vibratory force was hurled, upon every usable destructive frequency. * * * * * Needle-rays and stabbingly penetrant stilettos of fire thrust and thrust again. Sizzling, flashing planes cut and slashed. The heaviest annihilating and disintegrating beams generable by man clawed and tore in wild abandon. And over all and through all the stupendously powerful blanketing beams--so furiously driven that the coils and commutators of their generators fairly smoked and that the refractory throats of their projectors glared radiantly violet and began slowly, stubbornly to volatilize--raved out in all their pyrotechnically incandescent might, striving prodigiously to crush by their sheer power the shielding screens of the vessel of the automatons. Nor was the vibratory offensive alone. Every gun, primary or auxiliary, that could be pointed at the _Dresden_ was vomiting smoke- and flame-enshrouded steel as fast as automatic loaders could serve it, and under that continuous, appallingly silent concussion the giant frame of the flagship shuddered and trembled in every plate and member. And from every launching-tube there were streaming the deadliest missiles known to science; radio-dirigible torpedoes which, looping in vast circles to attain the highest possible measure of momentum, crashed against the _Dresden's_ meteorite deflectors in Herculean efforts to break them down; and, in failing to do so, exploded and filled all space with raging flame and with flying fragments of metal.