No unprotected metal can endure even momentarily the ardor of such beams, and they played on, not only until every plate and girder of the vessel and every nut, bolt, and rivet of its monstrous crew had been blasted out of all semblance to what it had once been, but until every fragment of metal had not only been liquefied, but had been completely volatilized. At the instant of cessation of the brain-scrambling activities of the automatons the Communications Officer had begun an insistent broadcast. Aboard all of the ships there were many who did not recover--who would be helpless imbeciles during the short period of life left to them--but soon an intelligent officer was at every control and each unit of the Terrestrial Contingent was exerting its maximum thrust at a right angle to its line of fall. And now the burden was shifted from the fighting staff to the no less able engineers and computers. To the engineers the task of keeping their mighty engines in such tune as to maintain constantly the peak acceleration of three Earth gravities; to the computers that of so directing their ever-changing course as to win every possible centimeter of precious tangential velocity. CHAPTER IV _The Sun's Gravity_ Ferdinand Stone was hollow-eyed and gaunt from his practically sleepless days and nights of toil, but he was as grimly resolute as ever. Struggling against the terrific weight of three gravities he made his way to the desk of the Chief Computer and waited while that worthy, whose leaden hands could scarcely manipulate the instruments of his profession, finished his seemingly endless calculations. "We will escape the sun's mighty attraction, Doctor Stone, with approximately half a gravity to spare," the mathematician reported finally. "Whether we will be alive or not is another question. There will be heat, which our refrigerators may or may not be able to handle; there will be radiations which our armor may or may not be able to stop. You, of course, know a lot more about those things than I do." "Distance at closest approach?" snapped Stone. "Two point twenty-nine times ten to the ninth meters from the sun's center," the computer shot back instantly. "That is, one million five hundred ninety thousand kilometers--only two point twenty-seven radii--from the arbitrary surface. What do you think of our chances, sir?" "It will probably be a near thing--very near," the physicist replied, thoughtfully. "Much, however, can be done. We can probably tune our defensive screens to block most of the harmful radiations, and we may be able to muster other defenses. I will analyze the radiations and see what we can do about neutralizing them."