His mind was afire with the significance of his discovery as he burst into the control room. The others had rejoined Dreyer there. Mason and some of his men were struggling to replace some of the probes now that the attack upon the ship had ceased for the moment. "We've found it!" Underwood shouted. "We've got the weapon that Dragbor turned upon Sirenia!" Illia screamed at the sudden impact upon her worn nerve cells. Mason whirled around in horror and cried, "Underwood! Where are you?" "We can hit them wherever they try to hide," said Underwood, "No matter where Demarzule tries to flee, I'll find him. There's no place in the Universe he can hide from me!" _CHAPTER SEVENTEEN_ Underwood's physical body recovered slowly from the severe shock of the operation. He was immune to the pain of it, however, for having the _abasic_ senses was like possessing another body. He could close all the normal channels of perception and exist with his consciousness operating only through the _abasic_ senses. While the fleet sped about the planet on its path of useless destruction, Underwood spent his hours practising the use of his new powers. Gradually, he obtained an understanding of their properties and some of their functions. The _tri-abasa_ was the sensory organ, located at the base of his brain, which could pick up distant, focusable sensations which any of his normal five senses could detect. They were controllable in their subjective effects, however, as he had found when going beyond the limits of the ship. Though he had been unaware of the interstellar cold, it had no subjective effect upon his body or his sensory apparatus. The _dor-abasa_ was the organ of communication, but it worked in combination with the _tri-abasa_ in order to transmit and receive sensory effects. So it was that the two of them in combination could transmit not only ordinary communication, but could convey the actual sensations of heat, cold, light, sound. And these same two organs were capable of dispensing swift and silent death. How this happened was the greatest mystery Underwood had to solve. He experimented by hurling the powers upon an artificial nervous system rigged up from a network of wires. A strong electric field was definitely measured within the wires, but it had properties that were not within the physicists' prior experience. Regardless, Underwood continued with his practising and found that he could increase the strength of that field more each time. If necessary, a full understanding of how it destroyed nerve tissue could wait until they reach their objectives upon Earth. The third organ, the _seaa-abasa_, was the strangest of all. Interconnected intimately with the other two through nerve channels, it nevertheless had no obvious functions. Jandro had referred to it as the receptacle of life. It appeared to be the belief of the Dragbora that everything representing the individual could be drawn into the seaa-abasa when death approached.