by the generator was obtained by robbing the headquarters ship of its auxiliary supply. Converter units were available in the Lavoisier itself, but the main radiator tubes had to be cannibalized from the 150 A equipment aboard.

Slowly the mass of improvised equipment grew. It would have been a difficult task on Earth with all facilities available for such a project, but with these makeshift arrangements it was a miracle that the generator continued to develop. A score of times Underwood had to make compromises that he hoped would not alter the characteristics of the wave which, two weeks before, he would have declared impossible to generate.

When the equipment was completed and ready for a trial check, the huge lab was a mass of hay-wiring into which no one but Moody and Hansen dared go.

The completion was an anti-climax. The great project that had almost halted all other field work was finished—and no one knew what to expect when Hansen threw the switch that fed power from the converters into the giant tubes.

As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Only the faint whine of the converters and the swinging needles of meters strung all over the room showed that the beam was in operation.

On the nose of the Lavoisier was the great, ungainly radiator a hundred feet in diameter, which was spraying the unknown depths of space with the newly created power.

Underwood and Terry were outside the ship, behind the huge radiator, with a mass of equipment designed to observe the effects of the beam.

In space it was totally invisible, creating no detectable field. It seemed as inactive as a beam of ultraviolet piercing the starlit darkness.

Underwood picked up the interphone that connected them with the interior of the ship. "Swing around, please, Captain Dawson. Let the beam rotate through a one hundred and eighty degree arc."

The Captain ordered the ship around and the great Lavoisier swung on its own axis—but not in the direction Underwood had had in mind. He failed to indicate the direction, and Dawson had assumed it didn't matter.

Ponderously, the great radiator swung about before Underwood could shout a warning. And the beam came directly in line with the mysterious gem of the universe which they had found in the heart of the asteroid.

At once, the heavens were filled with intolerable 

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