"Not a chance," answered Pete. "We're out of this fight."
"No, we're not," said Ben. "Look!"
Before the Mardinex there began to erupt a myriad of tiny, winking spots. The meteor spotting equipment and projectile intercepting equipment were flashing the interferers one after the other with huge bolts from the secondary battery of the Mardinex.
Ben counted the flashes and then asked the technician: "How many spotters has the Mardinex?"
"Thirty."
"Good. The torps have a chance then." The nonradiating torpedoes would be ignored by the spotting equipment since the emission of the interferers made them appear gigantic and dangerously close to the nonthinking equipment. The torpedoes, on the other hand, would be approaching the Mardinex from below and slowly enough to be considered not dangerous to the integrating equipment. If they arrived before the spotting circuits destroyed the entire case of interferers—
The lower dome of the Mardinex suddenly sported a jagged hole. And almost immediately there was a flash of explosive inside of the lower portion of the Martian ship. The lower observation dome split like a cracked egg, and the glass shattered and flew out. Portholes blew out in long streamers of fire around the lower third of the Mardinex and a series of shattering cracks started up the flank of the ship.
