Page:Robert William Cole - The Struggle for Empire; A Story of the Year 2236 (1900).djvu/67

a powerful apparatus for radiating a force which would annihilate the attraction of cohesion wherever it happened to strike, and with another apparatus which would send destructive waves of the force Ednogen, that could kill any human beings that they might impinge upon. These awful engines of destruction would have been enough, but there was yet another that could paralyze the motor-power of an approaching vessel, and thus leave it helpless and useless. To counteract the influence of any such engines that the enemy might possess, there were receivers that could annihilate these forces should they impinge upon them. The ether of space and a kind of matter that could be made to radiate in elliptical waves were the basis of these terrible forces that were about to be wielded by the two great races for the destruction of one another. However, since neither they nor the interstellar ships had yet been used in actual warfare, the leading authorities expressed