"Go!" shouted Sherman, and Ben threw the switch. There was a terrific explosion, the Monitor pitched wildly, then, under control swung round and began to climb again. Through the thinning cloud of yellow smoke, they could see a long black scar across the globe's top, with lines running out from it, like the wrinkles on an old, old face.
"Damn!" said Sherman. "Only nicked him. They must have something good in the line of armor on that thing. Look how it stood up. Watch it, everybody, we're going to go again, Gloria!"
Again the searchlight beam swung out and down, sought the green monster. But this time the Lassan globe acted more quickly. The yellow ray lifted, probed for them, caught them in its beam. Instantly, the occupants of the Monitor felt a racking pain in every joint; the camera-boxes of the gravity-beam trembled in their racks, the windows, set in solid steel though they were, shook in their frames, the whole body of the rocket-ship seemed about to fall apart.
Desperately Sherman strove with the controls; dived, dodged, then finally, with a raised hand to warn the rest, side-slipped and tumbled toward the earth, pulling out in a swinging curve with all power on—a curve that carried them a good ten miles away before the yellow ray could find them.
"Boy!" said Murray Lee, feeling of himself. "I feel as though every joint in my body were loose. What was that, anyway?"
"Infra-sound," replied Sherman. "You can't hear it, but it gets you just the same. Like a violinist and a glass. He can break it if he hits the right note. I told you those babies would get something hot. They must have found a way to turn that pure light of theirs into pure sound and vibrate it on every note of the scale all at once, beside a lot the scale never heard of. Well, now we know."
"And so do they," said Ben. "That bozo isn't going to hang around and take another chance on getting mashed with our gravity beam. Even if we did only tip him, I'll bet we hurt him plenty."
"All I've got to say," replied Sherman, "is that I'm glad we're made of metal instead of flesh and blood. If that infra-sound ray had hit us before, we'd be mashed potatoes in that field down there. No wonder the signal station went out so quick."
"Do we go back and take another whack at them?" asked Murray Lee.