It lasted but a few seconds, then the “squirt” switch functioned and the Cloudmen images and their weapons disappeared.

“So that's how they do it!” said Burrel. “No wonder they got half our ships with it before we found out about it.”

“Turn on those dampers, quick,” ordered Val Marlann. “We're likely to get another burst from the stereo any moment.”

Gordon felt the hair on his neck bristling as the Ethne rushed now into the zone of battle itself. An awful moment was approaching.

Giron had the Empire and Kingdom ships massed in a short defensive line with its left flank pinned on Deneb's great, glaring white mass. The heavier columns of the League fleets were pressing it in a crackling fire of flaring ships, seeking to roll up the right flank.

Space seemed an inferno of dying ships, of flames dancing between the stars, as the Ethne fought forward to the front of the battle. Its own guns were thundering at the Cloud phantoms that were hanging to it steadily, repeatedly emerging from dark-out to attack.

“Giron, we're here!” Gordon called. “Now spread your line out thinner and withdraw at full speed.”

“If we do that, the League fleets will bunch together and tear through our thinner line like paper,” protested Giron.

“That's just what I want, to bunch the League ships as much as possible,” Gordon replied. “Quick, we'll-”

Again, the stereo-image of Giron suddenly was replaced by a Cloudman with the rod-shaped weapon.

The weapon loosed a blue bolt-but the bolt died, smothered by the fields of the “dampers.” Then the “squirt” switch functioned again to cut the stereo.

“The way they've cut our communications would be enough alone to decide the battle!” groaned Hull Burrel.

In the radar screen, Gordon tensely watched the maneuver that was now rapidly taking place in space before them.

Giron's columns were falling back westward swiftly, turning to run and spreading out thinly as they did so.

“Here comes the League fleet!” said Val Marlann.

Gordon too saw them in the screen, the massed specks that were thousands of League warships less than twelve parsecs away.

They were coming on in pursuit but they were not bunching as he had hoped. They merely held a somewhat shorter and thicker line than before.

He knew that he'd have to act, anyway. He couldn't let them get closer before unloosing the Disruptor, remembering Jhal Arn's caution.

“Hold the Ethne here and point it exactly at the center of the League battle line,” Gordon ordered hoarsely.

Giron's fleets was now behind them, as the Ethne remained facing the oncoming League armada.

Gordon was at the control-panel of the Disruptor transformer. He threw in the six switches of the bank, turning each rheostat four notches.

The gauge-needles began to creep across the dials. The generators of the mighty battleship roared louder and louder as the mysterious apparatus sucked unimaginable amperage from them.

Was that power being stored somehow in the force-cones on the prow? And what had Jhal Arn told him? Gordon tried to remember.

“-the six directional gauges must exactly balance if the thrust is not to create disaster.”

The gauges did not balance. He frantically touched this rheostat, then that one. The needles were creeping up toward the red critical marks, but some were too fast, too fast!

Gordon felt beads of sweat on his face, felt stiff with superhuman strain as the others watched him. He couldn't do this!

He dared not loose this thing in blind ignorance.

“Their columns are coming fast-eight parsecs away now!” Val Marlann warned tightly.

Three, then four of the needles, were on the red. But the others were short. Gordon hastily notched up their rheostats.

They were all above the red mark now but did not exactly match. The Ethne was shaking wildly from the thunder of its straining turbines. The air seemed electric with an awful tension.

The needles matched. Each was in the red zone on the gauge, each at the same figure – “Now!” cried Gordon hoarsely, and threw shut the main release-switch.

PALE, ghostly beams stabbed out from the prow of the Ethne toward the dim region of space ahead. Those pallid rays seemed almost to creep slowly forward, fanning out as they did so.

Gordon, Hull Burrel and Val Marlann, crouched at the window frozen and incapable of movement as they looked ahead. And there seemed no change.

Then the massed specks in the radar screen that marked the position of the Cloud fleet's advancing line seemed to waver slightly. A flicker seemed to run through that area.

“Nothing's happening!” Burrel groaned.

“Nothing! The thing must be-”

A point of blackness had appeared far ahead. It grew and grew, pulsing and throbbing.

And swiftly it was a great, growing blot of blackness, not the blackness of mere absence of light but such living, quivering blackness as no living man had ever seen.

On the radar screen, the area that included half the Cloud fleet's advancing battle-line had been swallowed by darkness. For there was a black blot on the screen too, a blot from which radar-rays recoiled.

“God in Heaven!” said Val Marlann, shaking. “ The Disruptor is destroying space itself in that area!”

The awful, the unimaginable answer to the riddle of the Disruptor's dread power flashed through Gordon's quaking mind at last.

He still did not understand, he would never understand, the scientific method of it. But the effect of it burst upon him. The Disruptor was a force that annihilated, not matter, but space.

The space-time continuum of our cosmos was four-dimensional, a four-dimensioned globe floating in the extra-dimensional abyss. The thrust of the Disruptor's awful beams destroyed a growing section of that sphere by thrusting it out of the cosmos. It flashed across Gordon's appalled mind in a second. He was suddenly afraid. He convulsively ripped open the release switch of the thing. Then as the next second ticked, the universe seemed to go mad.

Titan hands seemed to bat the Ethne through space with raving power. They glimpsed stars and space gone crazy, the huge glaring white mass of Deneb heaving wildly through the void, comets and dark stars and meteor-drift of the void streaming insanely in the sky.

Gordon, hurled against a wall, quaked in his soul as the universe seemed to rise in mad vengeance against the puny men who had dared to lay desecrating hands on the warp and woof of eternal space.

Gordon came back to dull awareness many minutes later. The Ethne was whirling and tossing on furious etheric storms, but the starry vault of space seemed to have quieted from its insane convulsion.

Val Marlann, blood streaming from a great bruise on his temple, was clinging to a stanchion and shouting orders into the annunciator.

He turned a ghastly white face. “The turbines are holding and the disturbances are quieting. That convulsion nearly threw our ships into Deneb, and quaked the stars in this whole part of the galaxy!”

“The backlash reaction!” Gordon choked. “It was that-the surrounding space collapsing upon the hole in space the Disruptor made.”

Hull Burrel hung over the radar screen.

“Only half the Cloud ships were destroyed in the convulsion.”

Gordon shuddered. “I can't use the Disruptor again. I won't.”

“You won't have to!” Burrel said eagerly. “The remainder of their fleet is fleeing back in panic toward the Cloud.”

They were not to be blamed, Gordon thought sickly. To have space itself go mad and collapse around one-he would never have dared unloose that force if he had known. “I know now why Brenn Bir warned never to use the Disruptor lightly!” he said hoarsely. “Pray God it never will be used at all again.”