"You intimated something about help," Martin suggested. "Can you release some of the other ships from the automaton's yoke, after all?"

"Got to—or roast. This is bound to be a battle of attrition—we can't crush her screens alone until her power is exhausted and we'll be in the sun long before then. I see only one possible way out. We'll have to build a neutralizing generator for every lifeboat this ship carries, and send each one out to release one other ship in our Fleet from the robot's grip. Eleven boats—that'll make twelve to concentrate on her—about all that could attack at once, anyway. That way will take so much time that it will certainly be touch-and-go, but it's the only thing we can do, as far as I can see. Give me ten good radio men and some mechanics, and we'll get at it."

While the technicians were coming on the run Stone issued final instructions:

"Attack with every weapon you can possibly use. Try to break down the Dresden's meteorite shields, so that you can use our shells and torpedoes. Burn every gram of fuel that your generators will take. Don't try to save it. The more you burn the more they'll have to, and the quicker we can take 'em. We can refuel you easily enough from the other vessels if we get away."

Then, while Stone and his technical experts labored upon the generators of the screens which were to protect eleven more of the gigantic vessels against the thought-destroying radiations of the automatons, and while the computers calculated, minute by minute, the exact progress of the Fleet toward the blazing sun, the flagship Washington drove in upon the rebellious Dresden, her main forward battery furiously aflame. Drove in until the repellor-screens of the two vessels locked and buckled. Then Captain Malcolm really opened up.

That grizzled four-striper had been at a loss—knowing little indeed of the oscillatory nature of thought and still less of the abstruse mathematics in which Ferdinand Stone took such delight—but here was something that he understood thoroughly. He knew his ship, knew her every weapon and her every whim, knew to the final volt and to the ultimate ampere her Gargantuan capacity both to give it and to take it. He could fight his ship—and how he fought her!

From every projector that could be brought to bear there flamed out against the Dresden beams of an energy and of a potency indescribable, at whose scintillant areas of contact the defensive screens of the robot-manned cruiser flared into terribly resplendent brilliance. Every type of lethal vibratory force 

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