And so he rushed, his oxygen carefully adjusted, out through the massive main-city-lock almost on the heels of Onupari's helmeted men, and they, for the greater part drunken and stumbling blindly along, heeded him not. The rockets were coming from Kaa, out of Kaa flashing flames in the night! But they would be far too late! Onward he ran, his heart screaming protest against the violence of his pace, an endless mile across the desert waste. Onupari's men were streaming up the gleaming aluminum plated ramp now, pouring into the bowels of the ship resting on the ways. Frederix drove forward, a disrupter clenched in his right hand, leaped towards the ramp, yards behind the last man. And Meevo, thin, haughty Meevo, stood before him, recognition dawning in his wide, cruel eyes, hand reaching for a disrupter. Frederix heard the faint purring of the warming atomics. The Vron in his way! He must reach the controls, wreck them, even though his life be in forfeit! He brought the gun up even as Meevo whipped out his. Frederix fired first--right into that glassite helmet--red burst of flame, blood spurting out of a jugular vein severed from nothingness; the Vron's decapitated body crumpled. But the lock crashed shut, and a man loomed within a lighted gun turret. The atomics were hissing more loudly now, the intense wave of heat driving Frederix back. A leader flashed past him, fabricating an ionized path for the incredible bolt of lightning which crashed nearby, sucking him into the very heart of a stunning thunderclap. He regained his feet unsteadily, tried to run on, intent on escaping the roaring atomics ere they blasted him with their dispersed fury. He stumbled, went down, and his mad eyes saw the outdistanced robot coming towards him. A lightning leader flashed, smiting the metallic automaton squarely in the fuel compartment--_the radium compartment_--fusing the whole into a blinding, white hot, leaping electrical aura which strung itself out in a roaring, seething, zigzagging finger _which leaped backwards along that ionized pathway towards the ship_! [Illustration: _In a glory of pyrotechnic thunder the ship was off--but in seeking revenge the captain made one mistake!_] A tiny voice keened above that mad tumult, shrilling out of that gutted, wrecked automaton: "_We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!_" Even as that plaintive, laughing voice cut across the prostrate, half-blinded man's brain, so spoke more mightily the thunder of the atomics, flinging the mighty hull up the ways into the illimitable starshine. His nerve centers revolted. The agonizing white of afterjets initially super-charged; then that excruciatingly painful splash of furious lightning intermeshed and blazing in supernal glory on the ship's side. The very roof of the heavens seemed to cleave in twain. The universe became one crazy, all encompassing roar; the skies were a livid, screaming wave of white, brain singeing, ear bursting agony.