beam-head had been lowered below the keel. Jonny's brilliant eyes clung to the panel of gauges, and finally he opened the field-switch.

"Now!"

They crowded around the view-plate in the keel, peering half-blindly down against the glare of the raging Sun-sea below. The dredge was projecting a powerful, concentrated magnetic field down into that ocean of flaming gas like a sucking straw. But for moments they saw nothing. Time that seemed endless went by. Then—

"Here she comes!" yelled Loesser.

A column of flaming vapor was shooting up from the fiery ocean below. Compared to the gigantic mass of Sol, it was the merest filament, the flimsiest thread of fire.

But it was rushing up and up toward the hovering "Phoenix," a finger of fiery vaporized elements drawn irresistibly up along the beam of magnetism to the ship.

Another salvo of shells went off in space somewhere close by and rocked the ship with its wave of force. But next instant came a heavier impact, as the fiery column of gas reached the nozzles below the ship.

They heard a deafening roar. That up-sucked stream of vaporized elements was being drawn through the heat-proof nozzles and intakes, through the Markheim filters that screened out its copper atoms, and was then being shot downward again by the kickback's negative field.

"The kickback's working!" Jonny Land yelled. "If the effect of it is what we calculated, we've done it!"

CHAPTER IX

An Earthman Comes Home

For the moment, none of them paid any attention to the fact that precious copper was solidifying in the cooler coils into granules of metal that were being blown into the bunkers. The real test was what their beam of magnetic force was doing to the surface of the Sun.

Did it seem incredible, as it almost did to Carlin, that such a fragile finger of force could in the least disturb the mighty orb below? He knew better. He knew the unnaturally delicate balance of a star's surface, which a slight change of pressure artificially induced could stir into a whirl that would expand in giant Sun-spots. If that happened, it would mean chaos.

"No sign of a whirl yet," Jonny breathed, peering down through black glare-proof lenses. "No sign 

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