"Well, I'm a son-of-a-gun!" declared Sherman, as he put the Monitor into a spiral climb at nine hundred miles an hour to avoid any counter-attack. "If they haven't found a gravity screen! I didn't think it was possible. Goes to show you you never can tell, especially with Lassans. Look out folks, here comes the gaff, I'm going to loop!"
For as he spoke the formation of green globes had opened out—swiftly by ordinary standards, though slowly in comparison with the frantic speed of the American rocket-vessel. From half a dozen of them the racking yellow ray of infra-sound leaped forth to seek the audacious ship that had attacked them single-handed. All round her they stabbed the atmosphere, striking the few clouds and driving them apart in a fine spray of rain, but missing the Monitor as she twisted and heaved at frantic speed.
Twenty miles away and high in the air they pulled up to recover themselves.
"And that," Sherman went on with his interrupted observation, "explains why they aren't using those blue beams for support any more. Of course a gravity screen that would work against our beam would work against the gravity of the earth just as well. They must have some way of varying its effect, though. They aren't rising very fast and haven't got much speed."
"Probably the Lassans can't stand the acceleration," suggested Murray.
"Probably you're right. They can't have less than one Lassan in each globe.... Of course, they might control them by radio, with the thought-helmets and have the crews all robots, but that wouldn't be a Lassan way of doing things. And I doubt if they'd think radio safe, anyhow, even if they know about it, of which I'm not sure. We're shedding any amount of static around, and would play merry hell with most any radio. Wish I knew how they worked that gravity screen, though. I'll bet a boat-load of Monitors against a thought-helmet that it's magnetic."
"Wish we had some way to signal the rest of the fleet," said Ben, as they swung into their position at the head of the formation again. "I don't want them pushing in there with the gravity-beam if it isn't going to do any good."
Murray laughed. "They'll find it out soon enough. I think we've got plenty speed to beat those infra-sound rays, too. If that's as strong as they come, we've got 'em licked."
"Don't crow yet, boy friend," said Gloria. "You don't know what those babies have up their sleeves—excuse me, their trunks."
As the American fleet formed for a mass attack, the Lassan globes had been rising, and now they were a bare five thousand feet below the rocket-cruisers, swinging along at a height of 25,000 feet above the earth in the last rays of the setting sun. As the green globes rose they took their places in a formation like an enormous crescent, the ends of which were extended as each new globe came up to join it.