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.But uselessly, for they were drowned in great transpon beams, as one huge battleship after another leaped close and retired before seriously weakened.The battleships of Tefflan were in frank retreat, but the Magyans held on like leeches, attacking vigorously, and the Tefflans realized"in dismay that their opponents would not leave them.In haste, the Tefflans raced for the protection of the great defenses on the planet, the one moon of Teff-el, and the ten orbital forts they had set up.And one by one the great Magyan battleships started their new apparatus as it was installed.Crude-not very effective-but the momentum-wave field was distorted and twisted, till it gripped the Tefflan ships.Like a gigantic hand, it clutched them and slowed them.The six battleships that had fallen behind came up now, nearer than before, then held back also.Frantically the Tefflan commanders turned their waning power into the drive, while cruisers attacked desperately to free the greater ships.Grimly, the Magyan battle fleet held on and rained terrific magnetic-field bombs on the cruisers, that warped and twisted and fused their frames and their armor, and the Shal torpedoes ate their way in.There were no more thermite bombs, but the gravity bombs were being supplied now largely from the six ships which had retired to the supply ships and had all their power coils recharged.The gravitational balls were wasting their energy in a compartment they had blasted to gas and molten waste.The accumulators which had been centered here were gone, along with the engines.The Tefflan captains saw their power declining-the last dregs of energy slipping away.Huge fatigue rays drove at the now-close Magyan ships, and the armor and frames began to crumble slowly-slowly.The ships fell back abruptly.Those ships were deserted, too weak now, and radio-controlled.Their momentum-drives pulled back, and the Tefflan ships pulled on.Their beams were wasted once more in disintegrating the huge masses of those four old hulks.After that, they had no hope.Their power was so far gone, to attempt to destroy more ships meant complete loss of the entire fleet.1 The Magyan ships closed in.Heavy cruisers of the Magyan fleet closed in-Bright transpon beams sectioned the Tefflan hulks neatly and with dispatch a few thousand miles beyond the ultimate range of the orbital forts and the planetary defense beams.The battleships were sectioned, and each ship of the Magyan fleet took a piece in tow according to its power.The cruisers were sectioned where they had been destroyed further in space, and the five-hundred-million-mile trip back to Magya begun.Teff-el, was, for the first time in centuries, totally without a battle fleet, and yet the Magyan ships did pot dare to approach.For-those orbital forts were as invulnerable to a battleship as a battleship might be to a one-man spy ship without weapons.And, further, Magya received back, of its thirty-six brave battleships, seventeen.A battle between battleships of space is not like a sea battle, for the battleship of space never sinks, and every portion is capable of fighting until every man within is killed; a battle between space battleships is to the death of every individual.When, space battleships were destroyed, they were annihilated completely.Only the millions of tons of fined steel that the Magyans were towing back remained.There was no hope of learning the secret of the death beams and the fatigue ray, for the apparatus had been fused completely by a built-in accumulator.A touch of an emergency button, the release of all air pressure on a special valve-and the apparatus was reduced to scrap.So, though TefHan contributed millions of tons of steel to the new battle fleet, they contributed no knowledge.XIAABN WAS worried as he rejoined his friends after.the conference.Page 48ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlSpencer looked at him questioningly."Couldn't make anything out of the wreckage?""No," replied Aarn; "but that's not what's worrying me.That's a minor point.We don't need that, with the latest plan.I suggested it, and I got us into trouble.Quite rightly, and with every reason, the Magyans are wild for it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]