"Yes; but I'll do it if I have to," came back DuQuesne's cold accents. "I can put it back after I get done with you."
"You don't know it yet, big shot, but you are going to do exactly nothing at all!" Seaton snapped. "You see, I've got a lot of stuff here that you don't know anything about because you haven't had a chance to steal it yet, and I've got you stopped cold. I'm just two jumps ahead of you, all the time. I could hypnotize you right now and make you do anything I say, but I'm not going to—I want you to be wide awake and aware of everything that goes on. Snap on your zone if you want to—I'll see to it that the Earth stays in its orbit. Well, start something, you big, black ape!"
The screens of the Skylark glowed redly as a beam carrying the full power of DuQuesne's installations was hurled against them—a beam behind which there was the entire massed output of Steel's world-girdling network of superpower stations. But Seaton's screens merely glowed; they did not radiate even under that Titanic thrust. For, as has been said, this new Skylark was powered, not by intra-atomic energy, but by the cosmic energy liberated by all the disrupting atoms in all the suns of all the Galaxies of all the universes. Therefore her screens did not radiate; in fact, the furious blasts of DuQuesne's projectors only increased the stream of power being fed to her receptors and converters.
The mighty shields of the planetoid took every force that DuQuesne could send, then Seaton began to compress his zones, leaving open only the narrow band in the fourth order through which the force of gravitation makes itself manifest. Not only did he leave that band open, he so blocked it open that not even DuQuesne's zones of force, full-driven though they were, could close it.
In their closing those zones brought down over all Earth a pall of darkness of an intensity theretofore unknown. It was not the darkness of any possible night, but the appalling, absolute blackness of the utter absence of every visible wave from every heavenly body. As that unrelieved and unheralded blackness descended, millions of Earth's humanity went mad in unspeakable orgies of fright, of violence, and of crime.
But that brief hour of terror, horrible as it was, can be passed over lightly, for it ended forever any hope of world domination by any self-interested man or group, paving the way as it did for the heartiest possible reception of the government of right instead of by might so soon to be given to Earth's peoples by the sages of Norlamin.
Through the barriers both of mighty space ship and of embattled planet Seaton drove his sixth-order projection. Although built to be effective at universal distances the installation was equally efficient at only miles, since its control was purely mental. Therefore Seaton's image, solid and visible, materialized in DuQuesne's inner sanctum—to see DuQuesne standing behind Dorothy's father and mother, a heavy automatic pistol pressed into Mrs. Vaneman's back.
"That'll be all from you, I think," he sneered. "You can't touch me without hurting your beloved parents-in-law and you're too tender-hearted to do that. If you make the slightest move toward me all I've got to do is to touch the trigger. And I shall do that, anyway, right now, if you don't get out of this System and stay out. I am still master of the situation, you see."
"You are master of nothing, you murderous baboon!"