In the instant the scream died and the splash of terrific fire had vanished. Only a rapidly dying glow remained.
"What was it?” asked Russ dazedly. “What happened? Ten engines every one of them capable of over five billion horsepower and every one of them screaming!"
"Craven,” said Greg grimly. “He let us have everything he had. He simply drained his accumulator stacks and threw it all into our face. But he's done now. That was his only shot. He'll have to build up power now and that will take a while. But we couldn't have taken much more."
"Stalemate,” said Russ. “We can't hurt him, he can't hurt us."
"Not by a damn sight,” declared Greg. “I still have a trick or two in mind."
He tried them. From the Invincible a fifty billion horsepower bolt of living light and fire sprang out as all ten engines thundered with an insane voice that racked the ship.
Fireworks exploded in space when the bolt struck Craven's ship. Screen after screen exploded in glittering, flaming sparks, but the ship rode the lashing charge, finally halted the thrust of power. The beam glowed faintly, died out.
Perspiration streamed down Greg's face as he bent over a calculator and constructed the formula for a magnetic field. He sent out a field of such unimaginable intensity that it would have drawn any beryl-steel within a mile of it into a hard, compact mass. Even the Invincible, a hundred miles away, lurched under the strain. But Craven's ship, after the first wild jerk, did not move. A curious soft glow spread out from the ship, veered sharply and disappeared in the magnetic field.
Greg swore softly. “He's cutting it down as fast as I try to build it up,” he explained, “and I can't move it any nearer."
From Craven's ship lashed out another thunderbolt and once again the engines screamed in terrible unison as they poured power into the ship's triple screen. The first screen stopped all material things. The second stopped radiations by refracting them into the fourth dimension. The third shield was akin to the anti-entropy field, which stopped all matter… and yet the ten engines bellowed like things insane as Craven struck with flaming bolts, utilizing the power he had absorbed from the fifty billion horsepower Greg had thrown at him.