The outside projectors were switched on and the fleet fell into a small cone formation. With the flagship in the lead, they set out to investigate the planets from a distance. The electroscope on the flagship should permit them to make fairly close surface examinations from a safe distance. Ten planets they found circling the mighty star. Three of the planets would be directly habitable for man. But on none did they find the great cities they had expected to see. They only saw strange globes of lambent fire darting about. From planet to planet they went, the red glow lighting a great sphere twenty feet in diameter, but for a hundred feet about it the air glowed purple under the ionizing force of some strange radiance. When they moved, they were shooting comets, with brilliantly glowing heads of red and long tails of blue. But they seemed to live on all the planets. Even in the blazing minor star they lived, darting in and coming out of its flames as unconcernedly as a Solarian ship would dart in or out of an atmosphere. Could it be that those men had spoken the truth? It seemed incredible--impossible--but these men had learned millions of years ago that nothing is impossible, and were ready to credit anything if they had reason to believe it so. For two days those great ships wheeled above the planets, deep in space, undetected. Then one of the glowing Force beings passed close--a scant ten thousand miles away, and through the electroscope, and by means of the electronic activity meters, by spectroscope and pyrometer, by all the complex instruments of their age, they studied him. And the result was conclusive. They were living, sentient beings--Force creatures, conscious pools of titanic energies, forces so great they lived by, that no material body could serve them, and their limbs were the forces that nature had given them. Those forces, which man had spent thousands of years in discovering, a kind nature had given these beings. But in return she seemed to have decided that they needed no brains, for they possess no intelligence. Had man waited another billion years, there might have been intelligence developed in these strange creatures. What an intelligence it would have been--an intelligence based on forces of atomic nature! But they too had been discovered. In some strange way the creature had sensed them, and sent a call to his friends, for across all the system they could see the strange creatures racing at a velocity that could not be much short of that of light, for while the men were material, and as such could not travel at that speed, the force beings, by their very natures akin to light, could very probably attain to that motion. * * * * *