Time thus passed quickly, so quickly that, almost before the travelers were aware, the vast planetoid slowed down abruptly to feel her cautious way among the crowded stars of our Galaxy. Though a mere crawl in comparison with her inconceivable intergalactic speed, her present pace was such that the stars sped past in flaming lines of light. Past the double sun, one luminary of which had been the planet of the Fenachrone, she flew; past the Central System; past the Dark Mass, whose awful attraction scarcely affected her cosmic-energy drive--hurtling toward Earth and toward Earth's now hated master, DuQuesne. DuQuesne had perceived the planetoid long since, and his robot-manned ships rushed out into space to do battle with Seaton's new and peculiar craft. But of battle there was none; Seaton was in no mood to trifle. Far below the level of DuQuesne's screens, the cosmic energies directed by the Brain drove unopposed upon the power bars of the space fleet of Steel and that entire fleet exploded in one space-filling flash of blinding brilliance. Then the _Skylark_, approaching the defensive screens, halted. "I know that you're watching me, DuQuesne, and I know what you're thinking about, but you can't do it." Seaton, at the Brain's control, spoke aloud. "You realize, don't you, that if you clamp on a zone of force it'll throw the Earth out of its orbit?" "Yes; but I'll do it if I have to," came back DuQuesne's cold accents. "I can put it back after I get done with you." "You don't know it yet, big shot, but you are going to do exactly nothing at all!" Seaton snapped. "You see, I've got a lot of stuff here that you don't know anything about because you haven't had a chance to steal it yet, and I've got you stopped cold. I'm just two jumps ahead of you, all the time. I could hypnotize you right now and make you do anything I say, but I'm not going to--I want you to be wide awake and aware of everything that goes on. Snap on your zone if you want to--I'll see to it that the Earth stays in its orbit. Well, start something, you big, black ape!" * * * * * The screens of the _Skylark_ glowed redly as a beam carrying the full power of DuQuesne's installations was hurled against them--a beam behind which there was the entire massed output of Steel's world-girdling network of superpower stations. But Seaton's screens merely glowed; they did not radiate even under that Titanic thrust. For, as has been said, this new _Skylark_ was powered, not by intra-atomic energy, but by the cosmic energy liberated by all the disrupting atoms in all the suns of all the Galaxies of all the universes. Therefore her screens did not radiate; in fact, the furious blasts of DuQuesne's projectors only increased the stream of power being fed to her receptors and converters.