"Very well," I nodded, and pressed the attention signal of the non-commissioned officer in charge of the big forward ray projector.
"Ott? Commander Hanson speaking. I have special orders for you."
"Yes, sir!"
"Direct your ray, narrowed to normal beam and at full intensity, on the spot directly below. Keep the ray motionless, and carry on until further orders. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly, sir." The disintegrator ray generators deepened their purr as I turned away.
"I trust, sir, that I did the right thing in following you with the Ertak?" asked Hendricks. "I was absolutely without precedent, and the circumstances were so mysterious—"
"You handled the situation very well indeed," I told him. "Had you not been waiting when we fought our way into the open, the nearly invisible things on the outside might have—but you don't know about them yet."
Picking up the microphone again, I ordered a pair of searchlights to follow the disintegrator ray, and made my way forward, where I could observe activities through a port.
The ray was boring straight down into a shoulder of a rocky hill, and the bright beams of the searchlights glowed redly with the dust of disintegration. Here and there I could see the shadowy, transparent forms of the creatures that the self-constituted rulers of this world had doomed to a demi-existence, and I smiled grimly to myself. The tables would soon be turned.