"Nope, can't be done." Seaton frowned, still immersed in the hitherto unstudied problem of the reprojection of a projected image. "Need over two hundred thousand relays and—um—synchronization—neuro-muscular—not on this outfit. Wonder if it can be done at all? Have to look into it sometime—but excuse me, Radnor, I was thinking and got lost. Ready to go? I'll watch you on the plate here and be ready to offer advice—not that you'll need it. Shoot!"
Radnor snapped on the power and he and his aid shot their projections into one of the opposing fortresses, Siblin and his associate going into the other. Through compartment after compartment of the immense structures the as yet invisible projections went, searching for the power rooms. They were not hard to find, extending as they did nearly the full length of the stupendous structures; vaulted caverns filled with linked pairs of mastodonic fabrications, the liberator-converters.
Springing in graceful arcs from heavily insulated posts in the ends of one machine of each pair were five great bus-bars, which Radnor and Siblin recognized instantly as secondary leads from the converters—the gigantic mechanisms which, taking the raw intra-atomic energy from the liberators, converted it into a form in which it could be controlled and utilized.
Neither Radnor nor Siblin had ever heard of five-phase energy of any kind, but those secondaries were unmistakable. Therefore all four images drove against the fivefold bars their perfectly conducting fields of force. Four converters shrieked wildly, trying to wrench themselves from their foundations; insulation smoked and burst wildly into yellow flame; the stubs of the bars grew white-hot and began to fuse; and in a matter of seconds a full half of each prodigious machine subsided to the floor, a semimolten, utterly useless mass.
They drove their fields of force against the fivefold bars.
Similarly went the next two in each fortress, and the next—then Radnor's two projections were cut off sharply as the Chloran's impenetrable zone of force went on, and that fortress, all its beams and forces inoperative, floated off into space.
Siblin and his partner were more fortunate. When the amœbus commanding their prey threw in his zone switch nothing happened. Its source of power had already been destroyed, and the two Valeronian images went steadily down the line of converters, in spite of everything the ragingly frantic monstrosities could do to hinder their progress.