* * * * * With the terrific acceleration employed by the hexan spheres, it was not long until the leading squadron of fighting globes neared the Vorkulian war-cone. This advance guard was composed of the new, high-acceleration vessels. Their crews, with the innate blood-lust and savagery of their breed, had not even entertained the thought of accommodating their swifter pace to that of the main body of the fleet. These vast, slow-moving structures were no more to be feared than those similar ones whose visits they had been repulsing for twenty long Jovian years--by the time the slower spheres could arrive upon the scene there would be nothing left for them to do. Therefore, few in number as were the vessels of the vanguard, they rushed to the attack. In one blinding salvo they launched their supposedly irresistible planes of force--dazzling, scintillating planes under whose fierce power the studying, questing, scouting fortresses previously encountered had fled back southward; cut, beaten, and crippled. These spiraling monsters, however, did not pause or waver in their stolidly ordered motion. As the hexan planes of force flashed out, the dull green metal walls broke into a sparkling green radiance, against which the Titanic bolts spent themselves in vain. Then there leaped out from the weird brilliance of the walls of the fortresses great shafts of pale green luminescence--tractor ray after gigantic tractor ray, which seized upon the hexan spheres and drew them ruthlessly into the yawning open end of that gigantic cone. Then, in each group of seven, similar great streamers of energy reached out from fortress to fortress, until each group was welded into one mighty unit by twenty-one such bands of force. The unit formed, a ray from each of its seven component structures seized upon a designated sphere, and under the combined power of those seven tractors, the luckless globe was literally snapped into the center of mass of the Vorkulian unit. There seven dully gleaming red pressor rays leaped upon it, backed by all the power of seven gigantic fortresses, held rigidly in formation by the unimaginable mass of the structures and by their twenty-one prodigious tractor beams. Under that awful impact, the screens and walls of the hexan spheres were exactly as effective as so many structures of the most tenuous vapor. The red glare of the vortex of those beams was lightened momentarily by a flash of brighter color, and through the foggy atmosphere there may have flamed briefly a drop or two of metal that was only liquefied. The red and green beams snapped out, the peculiar radiance died from the metal walls, and the gigantic duplex cone of the Vorkuls bored serenely northward--as little marked or affected by the episode as is a darting swift who, having snapped up a chance insect in full flight, darts on.