He did. They were the most terrible weapons ever created by men. They had ended war by making all battles mass suicide for both sides. They were beams of the same neuronic frequencies utilized in the disciplinary circuits which kept men enslaved.
But where the disciplinary circuits were used in place of police and prisons and merely tortured the individual citizen to whom they were tuned—wherever he might be upon a planet—the fighting-beams killed indiscriminately. They induced monstrous, murderous currents in any living tissue containing the amino-chains normally a part of human flesh.
They were death-rays. They killed men and women and children alike in instants of shrieking agony. But no planet could be attacked from space if it was defended by such beams. It was two thousand years si
