"I don't see how they can keep that up for very long." Seaton frowned as he read his meters and saw at what an appalling rate their store of metal was decreasing. "But he talked as though he knew his stuff. I wonder if--um--um--" He fell silent, thinking intensely, while the others watched his face in strained attention; then went on: "Uh-huh, I see--he _can_ do it--he wasn't kidding us." "How?" asked Crane tensely. "But how can he, possibly, Dick?" cried Dorothy. "Why, they aren't _anything_, really!" "They can't store up power in themselves, of course, but we know that all space is pervaded by radiation--theoretically a source of power that outclasses us as much as we outclass mule power. Nobody that I know of ever tapped it before, and I can't tap it yet; but they've tapped it and can direct it. The directing is easy enough to understand--just like a kid shooting a high-power rifle. He doesn't have to furnish energy for the bullet, you know--he merely touches off the powder and tells the bullet where to go. "But we're not quite sunk yet. I see one chance; and even though it's pretty slim, I'd take it before I would knuckle down to his nibs out there. Eight said something a while ago, remember, about 'rotating' into the fourth dimension? I've been mulling the idea around in my mind. I'd say that as a last resort we might give it a whirl and take a chance on coming through. See anything else that looks at all feasible, Mart?" "Not at the present moment," Crane replied calmly. "How much time have we?" "About forty hours at the present rate of dissipation. It's constant, so they've probably focused everything they can bring to bear on us." "You cannot attack them in any way? Apparently the sixth-order zone of force kills them?" "Not a chance. If I open a slit one kilocycle wide anywhere in the band they'll find it instantly and it'll be curtains for us. And even if I could fight them off and work through that slit I couldn't drive a zone into them--their velocity is the same as that of the zone, you know, and they'd simply bounce back with it. If I could pen them up into a spherical--um--um--no use, can't do it with this equipment. If we had Rovol and Caslor and a few others of the Firsts of Norlamin here, and had a month or so of time, maybe we could work out something, but I couldn't even start it alone in the time we've got." "But even if we decide to try the fourth dimension, how could you do it? Surely that dimension is merely a mathematical concept, with no actual existence in nature?" "No; it's actual enough, I think--nature's a big field, you know, and contains a lot of unexplored territory. Remember how casually that Eight thing out there discussed it? It isn't how to get there that's biting me; it's only that those intellectuals can stand a lot more grief than we can, and conditions in the region of the fourth dimension probably wouldn't suit us any too well.