He drove the massive switches in, and as that dull red beam struck the cliff's base there was made evident the awful effect of a concentrated beam of real and pure heat upon such an utterly frigid world. Vast columns of fire roared aloft, helping Stevens, melting and destroying the very ground as the bodies of the Sedlor in that gigantic ant-heap burst into flames. Clouds of superheated steam roared upward, condensing into a hot rain which descended in destructive torrents upon the fastnesses of the centipedes. As the raging beam ate deeper and deeper into the base of the cliff, the mountain itself began to disintegrate; block after gigantic block breaking off and crashing down into the flaming, boiling, seething cauldron which was the apex of that ravening beam.
Hour after hour Stevens drove his intolerable weapon into the great mountain, teeming with Sedlorean life; and hour after hour a group of Titanian spheres stood by, deluging the surrounding plain with a flood of heavy fumes, through which the holocaust could not spread for lack of oxygen. Not until the mountain was gone—not until in its stead there lay a furiously boiling lake, its flaming surface hundreds of feet below the level of the plain—did Stevens open his power circuits and point the deformed prow of the Forlorn Hope toward Titania.
1 ([return])
The moon subtends an angle of about one-half of a degree.
CHAPTER VII
The Return to Ganymede
"Must you you go back to Ganymede?" Barkovis asked, slowly and thoughtfully. He was sitting upon a crystal bench beside the fountain, talking with Stevens, who, dressed in his bulging space-suit, stood near an airlock of the Forlorn Hope. "It seems a shame that you should face again those unknown, monstrous creatures who so inexcusably attacked us both without provocation."
"I'm not so keen on it myself, but I can't see any other way out of it," the Terrestrial replied. "We left a lot of our equipment there, you know; and even if I should build duplicates here, it wouldn't do us any good. These ten-nineteens are the most powerful transmitting tubes known when we left Tellus, but even their fields, dense as they are, can't hold an ultra-beam together much farther than about six astronomical units. So you see we can't possibly reach our friends from here with this tube; and your system of beam transmission won't hold anything together even that far, and won't work on any wave shorter than Roeser's Rays. We may run into some more of those little spheres, though, and I don't like the prospect. I wonder if we couldn't plate a layer of that mirror of yours upon the Hope and carry along a few of those bombs? By the way, what is that explosive—or is it something beyond Tellurian chemistry?"
"Its structure should be clear to you, although you probably could not prepare it upon Tellus because of your high temperature. It is nothing but nitrogen—twenty-six atoms of nitrogen combined to form one molecule of what you would call—N-twenty-six?"