"Yeah, but if they've got accumulator capacity enough to hold off our entire cosmic intake and get back to Jupiter besides, I'm a polyp! We're going to take that ship, fellows, and learn a lot of stuff we never dreamed of before. Ha! There goes his beam—pay me the four, Quince."
The dazzling wall of incandescence had blinked out without warning, and Brandon's beam bored on through space, unimpeded. He shut it off and turned to his fellows with a grin—a grin which disappeared instantly as a thought struck him and he leaped back to his board.
"Sound the high-acceleration warning quick, Perce!" he snapped, and drove in switch after switch.
"Cosmic intake's gone down to zero!" exclaimed MacDonald, as the Sirius leaped away.
"Had to cut it—they might shoot a jolt through that band. Just thought of something. Maybe unnecessary, but no harm done if ... it's necessary, all x—we're taking a sweet kissing right now. You see, even though we're at pretty long range, they've got some horrible projectors, and they were evidently mad enough to waste some power taking a good, solid flash at us—and if we hadn't been expecting it, that flash would have been a bountiful sufficiency, believe me—Great Cat! Look at that meter—and I've had to throw in number ten shunt! The outer screen is drawing five hundred and forty thousand!"
They stared at the meter in amazement. It was incredible, even after they had seen those heptagons in action, that at such extreme range any offensive beam could be driven with such unthinkable power—power requiring for its neutralization almost the full output of the prodigious batteries of accumulators carried by the Sirius! Yet for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that beam drove furiously against their straining screens, and even Brandon's face grew tense and hard as that frightful attack continued. At the end of twenty-two minutes, however, the pointer of the meter snapped back to the pin and every man there breathed an explosive sigh of relief—the almost unbearable bombardment was over; the screen was drawing only its maintenance load.
"Wow!" Brandon shouted. "I thought for a minute they were going to hang to us until we cracked, even if it meant that they'd have to freeze to death out here themselves!"
"It would have meant that, too, don't you think?" asked Stevens.
"I imagine so—don't see how they could possibly have enough power left to get back to Jupiter if they shine that thing on us much longer. Of course, the more power they waste on us, the quicker we can take them; but I don't want much more of that beam, I'll tell the world—I just about had heart failure before they cut off!"
The massive heptagon was now drifting back toward Jupiter at constant velocity. The hexans were apparently hoarding jealously their remaining power, for their wall screens did not flash on at the touch of the visiray. Through unresisting metal the probing Terrestrial beams sped, and the scientists studied minutely every detail of the Vorkulian armament; while the regular observers began to make a detailed photographic survey of every room and compartment of the great fortress. Much of the instrumentation and machinery was familiar, but some of it was so strange that study was useless—days of personal inspection and experiment, perhaps complete dismantling, would be necessary to reveal the secrets hidden within those peculiar mechanisms.