Front matter (continued 5)

But even as he had spoken, Randall, in the control-chair, had flashed his hands over the six control-switches, and as Marlin and I clambered with Whitely into the other three chairs, we felt ourselves pressed down with terrific force against them as the space-flier shot out from Triton with colossal speed! But at the same moment the cylinders that had formed again into their close-grouped mass, had leaped forward with us and the next moment saw space-flier and cylinders alike whirling out from the atmosphere of Triton into the empty void of space! I glanced back, saw that the cylinders were close behind our hurtling space-flier, flashing after it somewhat beneath it, so as to clear its great force-ray shooting back toward Triton and flinging it outward. And as I glanced back, I saw Triton's dull-gleaming sphere, with the pale giant force-ray that stabbed from its side toward the sun, growing each instant smaller! But dead ahead of us, though somewhat beneath our level, there loomed the colossal green sphere of Neptune, growing in size as we rushed on at immense speed from its moon!

On we went, and as Randall's hands flashed over the control-switches, Marlin and Whitely and I staring tensely forth with him, we were aware that from the mass of onracing cylinders behind slender force-rays were again questing toward us, though the range was too great for them to loose them accurately at this terrific speed. At any moment, though, one of those concentrated, pencil-like rays might cleave through our space-flier in a lucky hit, and unless we escaped from these relentless pursuers, the space-flier and ourselves were certain of destruction. This I saw, and saw too that Neptune's colossal cloudy sphere lay close before us, so awful was the speed of our flight and pursuit, and as it loomed gigantic before us, filling the heavens, it was apparent that we would pass close above its surface. Suddenly I turned to Randall, shouted in his ear above the thundering throbbing drone of our generators.

"Neptune!" I cried. "There's a chance to smash these pursuing cylinders there!"

"But how—?" he began. Shouting in his ear, I explained to him the desperate inspiration that had come to me. I saw his eyes and those of Marlin and Whitely widen as they heard, and then he nodded grimly, clutched the control-switches tighter.

And now about us was sounding again the roar of air as we shot through Neptune's atmosphere, shot above the surface of the huge planet with the cylinders rushing still at equal speed behind us, their deadly rays stabbing this way and that in slicing sweeps toward us. Through the cloudy mists of Neptune's upper atmosphere we flashed, straight onward, with the dark metal surface of the giant world's vast roof clear now to our eyes far beneath. And as we shot over it I saw Randall's grip tighten on the control-switches, saw him glance back toward the pursuing cylinders, behind and a little beneath us, and then abruptly he had flung open the switch of the great force-ray that was driving us on, our rear-ray! Instantly the speed of the space-flier slowed, and in a split-second the onrushing cylinders, racing on unslowing in that moment, were hurtling past beneath us. And as they did so, another switch had clicked under Randall's hands and straight down upon those cylinders from the space-flier's bottom was driving down another mighty force-ray!

In the next instant we had a glimpse of those massed cylinders that had been rushing thus beneath us driven down by the power of our great force-ray with inconceivable speed and force, driven down in a whirling, confused mass toward the vast metal roof of great Neptune below! And as our great ray, traveling across their mass, drove them thus downward with colossal power, we saw a moment later the cylinders of that mass crashing downward against that roof, shattering into crumpled, wrecked masses of metal upon the mighty structure, annihilated with all inside them on that roof as our great ray drove them down against it! Half at least of that mass of cylinders perished thus in the first crash downward and before the rest could gather again to whirl up to the attack, our great ray was playing upon them also, crashing them down upon the great roof of death, until in only a moment more but a half-dozen of the cylinders remained intact! And these, as their fellows crashed to death beneath us, were gathering and speeding away from this death that smote from above, were going back toward the dull-gleaming disk of Triton!

Marlin and Whitely and Randall and I were all crying out in that moment as the surviving cylinders flashed away in flight, and then Marlin and I had turned toward our two friends. "Whitely—Randall—!" Marlin was saying. "You escaped those Neptunians that first discovered us, then? We saw the fragments of wreckage your pursuers brought back, and Hunt and I never dreamed you might still live!"

"It was a trick that enabled us to escape," Whitely explained. "When they discovered us there beneath Neptune's roof—chased us up through that roof and up into the great cloud-belts, I saw that we could not long escape those pursuing cylinders. So, while Randall drove the flier through the mists and while they searched in those mists for us, I battered and broke with blows of a large tool some of the spare plates and instruments we carried. Then, as they came closer to us, their force-rays slicing through the mists in search of us, I cast those fragments loose from the flier, and when they struck against the pursuing cylinders in the mists, when those cylinders saw the wrecked fragments, they had no doubt but that their force-rays had struck us somewhere in the cloud-layer and annihilated us. We lay in the shrouding mists until we saw them returning toward Neptune's surface. We realized then that you two had been captured by whatever manner of creatures these Neptunians were, and saw the cylinders, with you in one of them, going down beneath Triton's roof. For days, therefore, Randall and I waited around Triton's surface, hoping against hope to get down inside in some way and find you, and had almost given up hope, when we saw the cylinder you had stolen racing up from Triton, and were able to save it and you from the pursuing cylinders."

"But you, Marlin—Hunt—" Whitely continued. "You have learned how and why these Neptunians are sending forth the great ray that is turning the sun faster? We saw that ray and another great ray on opposite sides of Triton—Is it not possible that we alone might be able to halt that ray?"

Marlin solemnly shook his head. "No chance, Whitely, for us," he said. "Perhaps no chance even for all the forces of Earth!" And quickly he told, while Whitely and Randall listened enthralled, of the captivity of us two in Triton's strange and swarming world; of the gigantic tale of Neptune's past and the purpose of its peoples, as it had been told us by the great globe of the Council of Thirty; of our desperate escape and flight across the dark side of Triton and our wild crashing upward through the roof and out from Triton. "We alone," Marlin concluded, "can never halt either of those great rays, for each has countless cylinders and Neptunians within to guard it, and each has twenty control-boxes of which one alone can keep it operating. No, our one chance is to get back to Earth, to gather there the great fleet of space-fliers which the World President and the World Congress planned to build in our absence, and to come out in that great fleet with the most powerful weapons available and endeavor to crush these strange Neptunians, to halt that great ray of doom that is turning the sun ever faster! For unless we can do that, unless we can bring Earth's fleet of space-fliers out here and halt the great sun-ray, that ray will in sixty days more have finished its work, will have split the sun and loosed doom upon all its planets except Neptune! And so it is back to Earth that we must race now at our utmost speed!"

Marlin's solemn voice ceased, and there was silence for a moment in the space-flier, we four gazing toward each other without speaking. By then the flier, with the tremendous impetus of its flight still driving it forward, had swept on and out over great Neptune now, out of the giant world's cloudy atmosphere and into empty space beyond it. And, with Neptune's giant globe filling the firmament behind us, Randall snapped on again our rear force-ray, sent that ray radiating back toward the vast disk of Neptune itself. And then again we were forced deep in our chairs as the flier's tremendous speed accelerated once more, the flier hurtling with greater and greater velocity through the gulf of space toward the far little disk of fire that was the sun, far ahead. For it was toward it, toward our Earth, that we were going from Neptune, from the solar system's edge, to carry back word to Earth of the nature of the doom that hung above it and to gather Earth's forces to forestall that doom!

CHAPTER XIII

The Gathering of Earth's Forces

Staring ahead into space from the control-chair of our racing flier, I heard Whitely's voice from beside me. "Seventeen days," he was saying. "And in two more days we ought to reach Earth."

I nodded abstractedly, gazing ahead. "Two days at the most," I said. "We're inside Jupiter's orbit now, and once through the asteroidal belt, there'll be nothing to delay us."

For as Whitely and I gazed outward, Marlin and Randall sleeping now in two of the space-flier's bunks, we could see that we were approaching, indeed, that belt of whirling asteroids that marked the division between the four inner and the four great outer planets of the solar system. To the left, dropping behind us, gleamed the gigantic cloud-belted sphere of Jupiter with its stately train of attendant moons, as great a mystery to us as when we first had passed it. A side force-ray was holding the flier out still from the mighty planet's attraction, while ahead and to the right from us now gleamed crimson Mars. Yet it was not these that held the eyes of Whitely and myself, nor even the increasing fiery circle of the sun before us, but the bluish-white little spot of light that was expanding slowly in size and brilliance as we shot on toward it, the little spot of bluish light that was our planet, Earth.

For days we had gazed toward that little light-spot as our space-flier went on and on through the solar system's vast reaches toward it. For seventeen days, now, even as Whitely had said, we had been racing inward from Neptune at utmost speed on our desperate journey back to our own world. The space-flier's great rear force-ray, pushing back against giant Neptune, had hurled the flier in through the outer reaches of our universe with an acceleration of velocity that was so great as to prove almost our undoing. For more than once that terrific pressure of that acceleration on us, despite our shock-absorbing apparatus, had so affected our bodies as to overcome us with successive fits of nausea and unconsciousness. And once, just after we had swept in past great Saturn and its mighty rings, fearful of those great rings after our former misadventure with them, I had awakened from my sleep-period to find Randall and Marlin, in the control-chairs, quite unconscious from the flier's terrific acceleration, the flier itself speeding onward without any guiding hand on its controls.

Yet despite this we had grimly driven the flier to the utmost acceleration possible, its speed steadily mounting toward the maximum in those succeeding days that we flashed inward from Neptune. For behind us Neptune's calm, green little disk of light, though diminishing steadily in size as we receded from it, seemed like a baleful signal of doom shining there behind us. For out from Neptune, or rather out from its moon, Triton, the giant force-ray of the Neptunians was still radiating toward the sun, thus shadowing all the solar system with the cataclysmic doom to come. For, as we flashed inward, Marlin had used his astronomical instruments to determine the fact that the sun's rotatory period had now decreased to a little over eight days, and was decreasing still by the same amount of four hours each day, its spin accelerated each day by the same amount as the colossal force-ray from Triton kept upon its side its unrelenting pressure. And within half a hundred days more, as we knew, that rotatory period of the sun would have decreased until its huge mass would be spinning once in every hour, would be spinning then so fast that it must inevitably be riven asunder into a new double star by its own centrifugal force, engulfing all its planets save Neptune alone!

So it was that we spared not ourselves but drove the space-flier in through the solar system toward Earth with a speed unthinkable, almost, using an acceleration that was all but death for us. For the one hope of preventing that colossal sun-cataclysm, as Marlin had said and as we all knew, was to reach Earth soon and then at once fly back out from Earth toward Neptune again with the great space-flier fleet, which, if the World President and the World Congress had not failed us, would be waiting on Earth for us. With that fleet we must sally back across the solar system once more to its outer edge, to great Neptune, and must fall upon Triton and the giant force-ray that was shooting from Triton to the sun, with all our power. If we could vanquish the Neptunians long enough to destroy the giant sun-ray's mechanism, to halt that ray, we would have halted the acceleration of the sun's spin, would have saved the sun and its planets from the cataclysmic doom that now threatened them. But if we could not, if the Neptunians with their countless cylinders and great weapons were too strong for us, then we could but perish there in struggling with them, since in that case nothing could halt the doom that they were loosing from Triton upon the sun and the solar system.

And as Whitely and I gazed out through the flashing flier's windows, we knew that scant enough was the time left for us in which to do these things. Even if we were safe on Earth in the next two days, as we hoped, there would remain but little more than forty days before the coming of the dread cataclysm that threatened, and it would require half that time for the space-fliers of Earth to make their way back out across the solar system to Neptune. So that now there lay over my mind that deepening shadow of impending colossal disaster that had hovered over all our minds during the strange days of our racing inward through the solar system, making me gaze somberly enough toward the bluish light-spot in the darkness of space far ahead that was our goal now. To the left, though, Jupiter's great globe had dropped far behind now, and as I saw that I cut out our side-ray, and turned toward Whitely.

"We're at the edge of the asteroidal belt now," I told him, "but I'm not going to slow our speed. We'll just flash on through it and take our chance."

He nodded gravely. "I'll wake Marlin and Randall now to help me keep watch," he said.

A moment later, having done so, Marlin and Randall freed themselves of the straps of the bunks and climbed across the flier to take their places beside Whitely in watching for the great menacing asteroids. And as we passed on through the belt of those whirling perils, Marlin and Whitely and Randall watched for hour on hour there beside me, though so vast was the maximum speed at which our flier was going now, more than eight million miles an hour, that before they could more than get a flashing glimpse of a nearby asteroid we would have passed it. We were relying almost wholly on blind chance to take us through the asteroidal belt at that lightning speed, yet so desperate was this grim race back to Earth from the solar system's edge, that we preferred to trust thus to chance, rather than to slow our speed or to delay by an hour our arrival on Earth. And chance, for the time, favored us, for some hours later we had won through the perils of the asteroidal belt without more than a few split-second glimpses of the great whirling spheres of peril. And then, as we shot across the orbit of Mars with the planet's dull red shield still farther to the right, I began to slow our terrific speed, for by this time the Earth was expanding rapidly before us.

And now, too, the sun was flaming before us, in all the halo-like glory of its great corona, with a brilliance blinding to our eyes after the dim shades of Neptune and its moon. Yet even with that brilliance dazzling us we could make out plainer and plainer the sphere of Earth, seeming to our eyes a thin silver-blue crescent as it spun there between our inrushing flier and the sun, its tiny moon-spot growing brighter too. Marlin and Whitely and Randall watching tensely beside me, I cut out altogether the great force-ray at the flier's rear, which, even when our speed had reached its maximum, drove us straight onward and kept that speed unvarying against the gravitational influences from either side which were not large enough to require an opposing side-ray. Snapping that rear-ray out, I sent another force-ray from the flier toward the Earth-sphere ahead, and as that ray struck and pushed us back with immense power, the space-flier's colossal speed was gradually decreasing.

Once more we felt terrific upward and forward pressure in our chairs as the flier's speed steadily slowed, dropped swiftly from eight million miles an hour to six and then to five and then to three. And as we shot in thus toward Earth, the millions of miles dropping slower behind as our flier's great faceted ball clicked through space at slower and slower speed, I knew the same question was in the minds of my three friends as in my own. It was reflected in the tensely anxious eyes of Marlin and the imperturbable eyes of Whitely and the unwontedly grave eyes of Randall as the three stared ahead with me. Would the space-fliers that the World President and the World Congress had promised to build be ready? If not, we knew we certainly could not venture out to Neptune and put an end to the great doom-ray that the Neptunians were stabbing toward the sun. So that it was in a growing suspense of spirit that we watched Earth's sphere, with its crescent of bluish-white light at one side, expanding before us.

At ever slower speed we were rushing in toward it, and at last, moving at but a few hundred thousand miles an hour by this time, were driving in out of the void and past Earth's shining moon, gleaming in space to our right, its great ranges and strange craters clear to our eyes from its airless surface. But now all our eyes were on Earth ahead, since now through the drifting cloud-masses that floated in its atmosphere we could make out the great bluish globe's surface features, could see that western Europe and North Africa lay in the sunlight in that crescent of light at Earth's side, but that the North and South Americas lay in the shade of Earth's outer side, in the darkness of night. It was toward the dark half-seen outline of North America that I was heading the flier, for by this time, traveling still more slowly, our velocity now being less than a thousand miles an hour, we were entering Earth's atmosphere, the rarefied air of its outer reaches roaring about the flier as it shot through it.

"Straight to New York—to the World Congress," Marlin was saying. "There's not a minute to lose."

I nodded silently, at the same time snapping out the front-ray of the flier that was slowing our speed as we shot toward Earth's surface, and as its gravitation gripped the flier we were turning until instead of rushing onward we were falling to its surface from high above, as it turned in space before us, falling down toward the surface of the North American continent, whose outline was visible from our great height through the shifting cloud-screen. I felt my heart beating rapidly as we shot thus downward, forgot almost the mighty import of the mission on which we were returning in the mere fact of our return; for we were first of all men to venture thus into the outer void and to return from that void to Earth! And as we shot downward I saw the same thought mirrored in the faces of the others, staring down with me.

Down—down—with an oblique ray I was making the space-flier fall slantingly, more and more slowly, toward the northeastern coast of the continent beneath, whose broad, brown surface stretched out greater and greater beneath us. Moments more and as the roar of air about us intensified, mingling with the throbbing of our generators, we shot down from the sun's light into the darkness of this dark side of Earth, this night of Earth's one side. But now its great surface was changing from convex to concave beneath us, and now as we shot lower still Randall pointed downward and northward with a low cry toward a spark of bright red light, the beam of the great air-beacon of the trans-Atlantic air-liners, at New York. Slower—slower—and in moments more the vast mass of its towering cylindrical buildings, ablaze with outlining lights, was coming into view, with midmost among them the greatest of all, the huge mass of the World Government building.

As our space-flier dropped slowly toward that mighty structure beneath my controlling hands, as it dropped toward the swarms of bright-lit aircraft that were moving to and fro over the great city, so familiar was the scene beneath to us four cosmic voyagers that almost did our great journey, our mighty flight out through the sun's planets through the countless leagues of space to great Neptune, and our grotesque and dream-like adventures upon Neptune and its moon, seem to us indeed no more than dreams. But as we shot lower we were startled from this strange state of mind by one of the aircraft beneath, showing the customary red and green position-lights along its hull, driving up through the darkness toward our smoothly falling space-flier. We saw the three men in the control-room of the craft gazing amazedly toward the gleaming, faceted metal ball of our flier as they circled us, and then from their craft had burst out a score of brilliant vari-colored signal-lights. And as these blazed out there came a moment later an answering blaze of lights from each of the swarming craft below, that shot up now in hundreds toward our falling flier, crowding crazily about it!

Down through the darkness we dropped still, those swarms of aircraft almost jostling us as they seethed thickly in terrific excitement about us. As we shot downward over New York's surface we saw that across all the vast city, and far across the great air-docks to the south even, signal-lights were blazing out, a wild panorama of bursting lights stretching out in all directions! From beneath, too, there came up to us now a terrific roar of mingled voices, the vast crowds in the streets of the huge city sending their cheering cries up to us in a great thunder-roll of sound as we fell toward them. And as I held the space-flier to its smooth drop downward amid the swarming aircraft, I saw that Marlin and Randall, and even Whitely, were gazing across those vast, shouting throngs and across the swarms of madly-darting aircraft that encircled us, with somber, thoughtful faces.

Now we were falling a few hundred feet above the roof of the World Government building, on which a little knot of figures awaited us, and as I gazed from it across the other roofs of the great city I uttered a low exclamation. "On the roofs—you see?" I asked. "Those things of metal—those space-fliers——!"

But they too were gazing toward the roofs, toward the innumerable crystal-like metal forms that we could half-recognize on those roofs in the darkness. But a glimpse only we had of them before the space-flier was sinking downward to the great roof itself, and as Marlin saw the knot of figures on that roof he half-turned. "The World President," he said, quietly, "waiting for us on the roof."

That roof's flat expanse was just beneath us, covered itself with other great crystal-like gleaming fliers, but with a clear space at its center where once had stood our space-flier's framework. There was no framework there now, but smoothly I brought the flier down upon that space, down to the roof, poised it a moment a foot above it, and then let it sink to the roof's surface and opened a half-dozen of the switches before me, the throbbing of the generators that had been enduring for so long ceasing and giving way to an unaccustomed silence that was strange to our ears. Then Marlin had turned, was opening the inner door, and in another moment the outer one had swung open also, a flood of cool, clean air rushing in upon us. Marlin leading, we stepped out, stood unsteadily for a moment on the great roof's surface beneath the brilliance of the lights that flared above it.

From beneath and above came still through the night the unceasing roar of the great crowds in the huge city's streets and the hum of its swarming, seething aircraft, and then we saw that the little group of men on the roof beside us were coming toward us, the World President at their head. His strong, keen eyes were steady upon us as he came forward, his hands outstretched, and then he had gripped our own hands, was holding them for a moment in silence. In that moment we were all four swaying a little as we stood there, gazing about us at the far-flung lights of the great city around us, at the men before us, at the strangely-dulled stars overhead, as though never had we seen them before. When the World President spoke, his human-sounding voice seemed strange even to our ears.

"Marlin—Randall—Whitely—Hunt—" he said. "You have come back then from your mission?"

"We've come back—from Neptune," Marlin said simply.

"The World Congress is already gathered—is waiting for you," said the other, as simply, and then with him and the officials about him we were walking toward the stair-opening in the great roof, were walking through ranks of the great looming faceted things of metal that I saw now clearly were replicas each of our own polyhedron-like space-flier!

Down through that opening we went, down stairs after stairs until we were emerging through a high door on the raised platform at the end of the great room in which the World Congress awaited us. Brilliant white light flooded that room and in it, in silent row upon row, were seated the twelve hundred members of the great Congress. As we four entered, with the World President and his officials, there was turned instantly toward us every eye, and a tense hush of utter silence settled in which our own steps seemed loud to our ears. There were no shouts or cheering cries from the Congress' members, in that moment, for all knew that what they were to hear now from us was the word of hope or hopelessness for Earth, the report of our great mission upon which rested Earth's single chance for life. And as I stared across the great, silent Congress in that moment, there flashed upon the screen of my mind, strangely enough, a picture of that other silent, solemn council before which Marlin and I had stood but a few days before, that Council of Thirty of the strange Neptunians whose great synthesizing globe-mechanism had spoken to us. Then, as we stood there, the World President was stepping forward to address the Congress.

"There is no need for me to tell you who are the four men standing here before you," he said. "Marlin—Whitely—Randall—Hunt—these four who went out to Neptune on the Earth's behalf, and whom Earth has tensely awaited now for weeks. I do not know, any more than you, what they found there, what chance for Earth they found or failed to find. And it is that that we, the representatives of the world's peoples, now wait to hear from Marlin, the leader of this great expedition." Utter silence held all present.

And as the World President stepped back, Marlin, unsteady still from our unaccustomedness to Earth's gravitation, and with face drawn, but eyes steady and bright, was stepping forward. Facing the great rank on rank of members of the World Congress he stood, while we others slipped into the seats behind him, facing them for a moment in tense silence as he summoned his energies to speak. In that moment, as my eyes roved across the great hall, I made out the faces of many there known to me, the face, just beneath our platform, was that of my chief at the Intelligence Bureau, Markham, the faces of many others, strange and yet familiar, all turned now toward Marlin. And then, in a voice low at first but gaining in power as he went on, Marlin was speaking to them, his words sounding out through the great room in a hushed, unnatural silence.

He began by reviewing in a few sentences the colossal peril that had threatened and was threatening us, the increased spin of the sun beneath Neptune's mighty ray that soon must result in its division and the solar system's doom. Then, with a reference to that other gathering of the World Congress at which our venture out to Neptune had been decided upon, he came to the start of that venture. While they listened in utter tenseness he told of our start, of our going out from Earth first of all men into the outer void, out past the mysteries of Mars with greater and greater speed. Our onward flight through the terrible dangers of the great asteroidal belt and our narrow escapes in it, our outward rush past mighty Jupiter—these he described in his steady voice, and we felt the tenseness that held all in the great room in dead silence. He told them of what doom had nearly been ours at Saturn, of our fall toward its great rings of death and our narrow escape from them.

Then, with a little pause, he was going on, was telling of our onward flashing flight beyond Saturn out through the vast outer reaches of the solar system, out past the orbit of Uranus toward Neptune itself. In utmost suspense they listened as he told of our arrival at last at Neptune, of our amazement at finding that giant world shielded with an enclosing roof of metal, and of our greater amazement at finding that world, the colossal city that covered it, utterly dead and deserted. Low exclamations of surprise broke from his listeners then as he narrated how he and I had been surprised in the dead city of Neptune by the coming of the Neptunians in their cylinders, their attack upon and pursuit upward of Whitely and Randall in the space-flier, their capture of ourselves and their taking us from Neptune out to the moon-world of Triton. And a low wave of uncontrollable excitement swept across the great room as Marlin told those in it of the roofed and warmed world of Triton and the countless millions of Neptunians on it, and above all of the giant force-ray that was stabbing from Triton's sunward side toward the sun and loosing doom upon us!

And that excitement intensified when he told of what else we had found at Triton, of the other giant force-ray stabbing out from its other side toward a distant star of Sagittarius, of our captivity there and our learning of the Neptunian tongue, our being brought before the great Council of thirty of the Neptunian races. I saw the hundreds before us listening with abated breath as he told them that gigantic epic of the solar system's past that had been told us by the great globe-mechanism of the Council, that story of the Neptunians' past history and of the great doom of increasing cold that had driven them from Neptune to Triton and that now had caused them to seek to split the sun itself to thwart that doom. How they had sent out toward that star in Sagittarius another great force-ray years before, to brace Triton against the back-pressure of the sun-ray and to keep it from being hurled out into the great void, how they had finally sent out the great force-ray toward the sun also, turning the sun ever faster toward the doom of all the other planets, planning to wreck the universe to save their own race. These things he told them through the hushed silence that again had replaced their stir and murmur of excitement.

But excitement held them again when he told how he and I, desperate at the doom we saw hanging thus over Earth, had made our wild attempt to escape from Triton, had dared to cross its surface and had stolen a cylinder, crashing up through the great roof and out from Triton in that cylinder with their pursuit close behind us, how we had been saved from that pursuit by Whitely and Randall in the space-flier, who, although we had thought them dead, had managed to elude their own attackers by a ruse and had hovered near Triton in hopes of saving us; how in the space-flier we had fled back from Triton over Neptune and had smashed our pursuers, while we and they were over Neptune; these things, his voice deep now, he told to the hundreds of his listeners. And then, swaying a little from sheer utter weariness of body and spirit, Marlin told them how we, knowing that never alone could we halt or even reach that giant ray driving from Triton toward the sun, had headed back for Earth at the utmost speed of which we were capable, had flashed back like some great messenger-meteor through the solar system to Earth to carry to the peoples of Earth word of what we had found, to gather the forces of Earth and head back to Neptune with them for a last gallant attempt to halt that mighty ray of doom!

When Marlin's voice had ceased, when he had stepped unsteadily back from the platform's edge, his words seemed reverberating still through the hushed silence that prevailed among the twelve hundred massed members of the World Congress. Then again the World President, his own face as set and strange now as those of the massed members before him, was stepping forward to face them.

"You have heard the report of Dr. Marlin and his three companions," he said, quietly, "and you, and I, and the peoples of Earth listening now, know what situation faces us, what last necessity, even as was foreseen, has arisen before us. That giant force-ray of which Marlin told you, that colossal ray which these Neptunians are stabbing toward the sun's edge from their far moon-world of Triton, is turning the sun ever faster, as all of you know, is decreasing its rotatory period by four hours each passing day. Within hardly more than forty days it will have decreased the sun's rotatory period to that fatal period of one hour, will have increased its spin to that critical fatal speed, at which the sun must inevitably divide into a double sun, a double star, engulfing our planet, and almost all others, in fiery death in that cosmic cataclysm. This is known to you and you know, too, that it is only by halting that giant force-ray from Triton that we can save our sun, our world, from that tremendous cataclysm.

"This much we have known, indeed, and now with what knowledge these four men have brought back from their unparalleled venture out through the gulf of space to the solar system's edge, to Neptune itself, you know also what lies before us. We have, indeed, built during the absence of Marlin and his three friends that great fleet of space-fliers, which we had decided to build. Using the plans of their original space-flier and applying all our efforts toward achieving a quantity production of space-fliers on those plans, we have been able, as you know, to construct in their absence no less than five thousand space-fliers exactly like their own, space-fliers that rest now upon the roofs of New York's great buildings around us, complete now with trained crews and ready to start! The gathering of Earth's forces has thus already taken place!

"And upon this great fleet of space-fliers rests now the fate of the solar system! For that fleet must go out through the solar system now to Neptune and halt the giant ray radiating from Triton's sunward side toward the sun, if the solar system is to live. What perils, what opposition that fleet will meet, Marlin has made clear to you. These Neptunians, most ancient and mighty of the solar system's peoples, are of colossal powers, such powers that they are scrupling not at splitting the sun itself! They have thousands of their great space-cylinders that can whirl through space as swiftly and as well as our own space-fliers. They have as weapons their concentrated force-rays, which we must provide for the fliers of our own fleet before it leaves. They have an ancient science and might that can produce we know not what weapons against us, and they know that our four first venturers escaped back to Earth, and will be expecting now an attack from us, will resist that attack with all their powers, undoubtedly, since they are fighting for the existence of their races, their world, even as we are fighting for ours!

"Thus this great fleet of five thousand space-fliers of ours goes out to battle, to battle between the races of Neptune and Earth that must decide the fate of the solar system for all time. There can be but one fit to lead this fleet out to such battle, and that is Marlin himself, who was the first to discover this peril that hangs over us, who was one of the first to suggest a means of struggling against that peril, and who has led this first daring venture out through a thousand perils to Neptune, and back again to Earth with the knowledge without which we could not act. So that it is he, with these three companions of his, Whitely and Hunt and Randall, who dared all with him and who have done for Earth what he has done, as his three lieutenants, who must command this great expedition of ours which we are sending out to halt the oncoming doom, these gathered forces of all the Earth!

"For it is this great fleet of space-fliers, with Marlin at its head, which alone can halt that doom now! If that fleet can win safely out through the perils of the interplanetary void to Neptune, can win to Triton's sunward side against the opposition of the Neptunians and can destroy the controls and generators of their great sun-ray, can halt that ray, the sun's spin will cease to accelerate and our planet and the other planets will have been saved. But if our fleet cannot do this, if the Neptunians prevent it from reaching the great sun-ray's source, and from halting that ray, then the sun will spin on ever faster and within two-score more days will split at last and engulf in the diverging fires of its two new suns, all the planets save Neptune. For it is this great space-fleet of ours, heading out now toward the last great battle of Earth's and Neptune's races, which alone now can prevent the accelerating speed of the sun and the consequent wrecking of our universe!"

CHAPTER XIV

An Ambush in Space

"Mars ahead and to the left—once more!"

As I uttered the words Marlin and Randall and Whitely, beside me, were gazing to the left with me. "Strange," said Randall, "it all seems, almost, as when we first went out past Mars."

Strangely similar, indeed, did it seem to all of us, the panorama that now again stretched all about us, visible through the racing space-flier's windows, as we sat in the four control-chairs before them. For ahead and away to the left gleamed again the dull-red disk of Mars, farther now from us than on our first trip out but seeming almost the same. Ahead too, and close to the right, shone mighty Jupiter, and beyond it on the left the yellow spot of Saturn once more, with far beyond it and straight ahead again the green little spark of light that was Neptune. Behind, too, the bluish light-spot of Earth and the lessened fire-disk of the sun were as before, and as before the blazing stars that jeweled all the deep-black firmament about us. But behind our flier we could barely see innumerable tiny gleaming points moving forward at the same speed as ourselves through the void, keeping pace with us in regular formation, a great V-formation of which our flier was the point and that moved steadily on through space. For those tiny points, extending back and out of sight in the void behind us, were the space-fliers of that great fleet of five thousand space-fliers which our own, the flagship, was leading out through the solar system to Neptune!

For two days, now, we had been flashing with that great fleet behind us from Earth, out toward the solar system's edge on our mighty expedition, and five days had passed since we had stood before the World Congress with Marlin rendering to it our report. In those intervening three days on Earth we had been the center of such a whirl of hectic activity as the world had never known before—the whirl of preparations for the start of the colossal fleet. For in those three short days Marlin with the energies of a world at his bidding, had strained every nerve to complete the last preparations of the great armada of space-fliers which he, with us three as his lieutenants, was to lead out on its unprecedented flight to Neptune.

The most necessary preparation was the equipping of the five thousand space-fliers with the concentrated force-ray weapons used by the Neptunians in their space-cylinders, those concentrated rays which, instead of pushing against what they struck, tore through it with driving power. Fortunately, the production of these concentrated rays required only the addition of special smaller ray-openings beside the regular ray-openings in the sides of the space-fliers, but even so it strained the capacities of the world's workers to install in each of the space-fliers those smaller openings in the short time available.

Each of the five thousand space-fliers held a crew of eight, their operators having been trained during our absence as fast as the fliers themselves had been built. We four in our own space-flier, the flagship of the great fleet, had four additional crew-members now, four mechanic-operators who worked in shifts and tended ceaselessly the operation of the flier's various mechanisms, the great generators, and the other mechanical equipment, thus leaving Marlin and Randall and Whitely and myself free to devote all our attention to the command of the great fleet itself, though one of us retained the controls of the flier itself. Another preparation that had been made during our absence had been to equip each flier with space-walkers for its crew, and to equip each with efficient radiophone apparatus. This, while the Heaviside layer around Earth would prevent it functioning from Earth to space or from space to Earth, would allow free communication from space-flier to space-flier while in space itself, and thus would allow Marlin and us to control with spoken orders all the great fleet we led.

Thus the last preparations had been completed and three days after our arrival at Earth the great fleet of space-fliers had taken its departure, the five thousand faceted polyhedron-like fliers rising as one from the flat roofs of New York's countless gigantic buildings. Once more we had started at night, and it seemed that all of the peoples of Earth had assembled in and around New York that night to speed us farewell. The vast crowds that had watched our single space-flier start out on its first trip weeks before, were as nothing to those vaster crowds that had watched the great fleet leave, since all on Earth knew now what word we had brought back from Neptune and knew that in two-score more days, unless this fleet was successful in its tremendous task, unless it could win through the Neptunian opposition and halt the giant sun-ray, that all on Earth would perish in flaming death.

Thus surely there could have been no tenser moment in Earth's history than that, when, with the World President and the massed members of the World Congress watching again around us, our flagship had risen from the roof of the great World Government building into the night, flashing up and outward once more toward Sagittarius, toward unseen Neptune. And behind us almost instantly there had flashed up in regular timing and formation our five thousand following fliers, racing out and after us with colossal speed like ourselves and flying in that hollow triangle or V-formation behind us. That formation had been adopted so that the rays of the fliers of the fleet, driven back toward Earth to push them on, would not strike against other fliers behind them, as would have been the case had our fleet moved out in a compact mass. And now for forty-eight hours our five thousand space-fliers had been hurtling outward, with our own flagship still at the apex of their formation.

And as we four sat now again in the four control-chairs, two of our mechanic-operators watching over the generators behind us and the other two asleep in their bunks, we had a somewhat different array of controls before us. Before myself were the controls of the flier itself, unchanged, with the six switches that directed its propulsion force-rays from the six openings. Marlin, though, to my right, had before him now as well as his array of astronomical instruments, the black mouthpiece and speaker of the radiophone, as well as a compact array of switch-studs by which he could speak to and hear from the various squadron-leaders in the great fleet behind us. For convenience in giving orders, the five thousand fliers of the fleet had been divided into fifty squadrons of a hundred space-fliers each, and it was to the designated leader of each squadron that Marlin gave his orders, which were then transmitted by that leader to the hundred fliers of his squadron.

Before Randall, too, to my left, were new controls, the controls of the concentrated force-rays which were to be our fleet's weapons even as such rays were the Neptunians' also, and with which our flagship had of course been equipped. Those controls were two thick metal levers of no great size, with hand-grips at their end, one of which controlled by its position the side of the flier from which the concentrated cleaving ray was shot forth, the other controlling the slant or exact direction at which that ray was emitted. With Randall handling these, our weapons, Whitely had before him all the space-flier's remaining controls—those of the generators, air replenishers, the various recording dials that were vital to its operation, and other essential things. So that as our throbbing flier drove on now at the great fleet's head, with Marlin and Randall and Whitely and myself gazing to the left toward the nearing crimson shield of Mars, we had each before us some vital part of our great fleet's or our flier's control.

Gazing toward Mars' red disk, Marlin broke the silence. "We'll need no side-rays this time to hold us out from it," he said, and I nodded.

"No, it's far enough from us now, and the speed of our fliers will take them safely past—is taking them past now. But it's the asteroids ahead that I've been thinking of."

Marlin somberly shook his head. "There's no help for it, Hunt," he said. "We'll have to lead the fleet straight through the asteroidal belt and trust to chance that as few of our fliers as possible will be struck."

The following hours, therefore, were perhaps the most tense and terrible that ever we had experienced. For as we shot on past Mars and through the great belt of whirling asteroids, it was not possible for the five thousand space-fliers of our fleet to maneuver to avoid those asteroids. We must hold straight on in our regular formation, we knew, lest all our fliers crash one into the other, so in that formation we went steadily on through that great zone of death. And hardly had we entered it, Marlin and Randall and Whitely gazing forth as intensely as myself, than an expanding dark globe loomed suddenly before us, sweeping past us with terrifying closeness, and then as it shot past there came suddenly in the blackness of space behind us a soundless flash of fiery light, that flared for a moment and faded. The asteroid, we knew, had struck a flier close behind us!

From ahead and from either side still, as we sped on, other asteroids were rushing, following their complicated orbits as our great fleet's open triangle of space-fliers moved through them, and now again and again still behind us came other fiery flashes in quick succession, flashes of flame which each marked the instant destruction of a space-flier and all its occupants! Yet there came no word, no protest, from any of the space-fliers behind us, all were going steadily forward at unaltered speed and in unaltered formation through the great belt of whirling death. And though, within a few hours more than a score of our space-fliers had been annihilated in white-hot and soundless flashes of fire as they were struck by the hurtling asteroids, the rest had escaped unscathed, and Marlin was giving to them the cheering knowledge that we had won through the asteroidal belt and were out of its whirling death.

Thus again Jupiter loomed ahead and to our right, though closer now and greater in apparent size, and again we four were staring toward it in almost as great a wonder as formerly, as its mighty cloud-wrapped disk and attendant four big moons loomed closer. By this time, Marlin had transmitted to all the fliers behind us a brief order, and already from each of them and from our own a side force-ray was shooting toward the gigantic planet to hold us out from its terrific attraction. The V-formation in which our five thousand space-fliers flew was so slightly tilted sidewise as to allow the use of side-rays by all our fliers, and a side-ray of immense power it required indeed to hold each of us out from the mighty monarch of the solar system's planets as we sped past its huge and enigmatic sphere.

But still on and on through the void our mighty armada of space-fliers was racing, on toward the green spark of Neptune that slowly waxed brighter far ahead of us. That little green spot of light held our eyes, even to the exclusion of Saturn's yellow disk, expanding again to the left before us as we shot toward it also, for all our minds were centered upon Neptune and what mighty task it was that awaited us at that great world and its moon, what mighty struggle would be ours. So that it was not until Saturn's disk had expanded almost to moon-size before us, surrounded by the great rings and by its whirling moons, that we gave that planet any attention. By this time, for more than seven days our huge fleet had been speeding out through the boundless void, out through the solar system, and so it was as a certain landmark to us that Saturn appeared as we neared it, the last planet between us and our goal of Neptune. With our great fleet close behind, as we drew abreast of the huge planet's mighty sphere and colossal rings, it was intently enough that we four, gathered again in the control-chairs of our flier, and gazed toward it.

"The most dangerous planet in the solar system—Saturn," said Marlin, as we looked toward the huge world from which our side-rays now were holding us. "It was death almost for us before when we ventured too close in passing it."

"Well, we're safe enough from it this time," Whitely commented, "for since then it's moved farther to the left—is farther away from us with no danger to us now of chance meteors from its rings."

"Yes, we're safe enough from it now," Marlin admitted, "yet at the same time——"

Before Marlin could finish the words they were interrupted by a thing that chills my blood to remember even now. One moment he was speaking beside us, our space-flier flashing steadily on at its tremendous speed at the head of its great triangle-fleet, past huge Saturn to the left. The next moment there was a terrific whirling around us of our space-flier's walls, it spun for an instant with tremendous speed in space, and at the same moment then was being driven with colossal speed in a direction at right angles to that in which we had been moving, was being shot through the void toward the mighty sphere and rings and moons of huge Saturn! And even as in that awful moment it drove with sickening speed, with an acceleration terrible, toward Saturn, all its forward progress suddenly halted, reeling blindly and at unthinkable velocity toward the huge planet, I looked through the windows, and saw whirling about us, the thousands of space-fliers of our mighty fleet bunched in a great, irregular mass with us, and hurtling through the void at the same tremendous speed toward great Saturn as ourselves!

"Saturn!" cried Randall hoarsely as we whirled in that mad moment. "The controls, Hunt!—we're being shot in toward it!"

"The controls don't answer!" I shouted, my hands frantically flashing over them. "Something's driving us into Saturn—our rays can't hold us out——"

"The Neptunians! There behind us—those great cylinders—they're pushing all our fleet into Saturn to death!"

As Whitely voiced that last mad cry we glanced back through the windows of the flier even as they whirled about us, even as our flier and all the thousands of space-fliers of our great fleet whirled madly in toward huge Saturn looming ahead, and we saw that even as he had cried out, there, behind us, hanging motionless in space and only visible to us for a moment, hung a great mass of cylinder-fliers! Half our own great fleet in number they seemed, those massed Neptunian cylinders, and midmost among them were a score of greater cylinders of immense size, far larger than any of the others, that were grouped closely together and from openings in which there was coming toward us a pale force-ray of immense size, visible only as it issued from those greater cylinders! And that ray it was, as was plain even in that instant, that was pushing our fleet with colossal power in toward its death in great Saturn's maze of rings and moons! The Neptunians had come out with those great ray-generators, those greater cylinders, and with a portion of their thousands of cylinder-fliers, and had waited for us in space to the right of Saturn, knowing well that our own escape meant a great attack upon them, an effort to halt their great doom-ray! They had awaited us there and when we had come between them and Saturn, never suspecting their presence, they had loosed upon us this forceful ray that was now driving us swiftly in to death!

"An ambush!" I cried. "An ambush in space—the Neptunians are pushing us in to Saturn—our fleet can't live for minutes then!"

An ambush in space! They were being pushed into Saturn.

"Try to bring our flier out of it—up out of their ray's push, Hunt!" Marlin shouted to me, and for a moment I worked frenziedly at the controls before me, but the rays I shot forward to push against Saturn, to hold us back or push us to either side were powerless against the vast pushing ray from behind! Larger and larger great ringed Saturn loomed ahead as our disorganized fleet shot on at awful speed toward it, pushed by the vast ray, and but minutes remained before we would have crashed to death in all our fliers against the mighty planet and its whirling rings and moons! The end of our fleet and the end of Earth's hope, crashed to annihilation by the Neptunian ambush that had been laid for us here in space!

The thought maddened me, and with a sudden desperate inspiration I ceased to direct our flier's rays ahead against Saturn in vain attempt to halt our reeling flash forward, but instead suddenly shot a ray back against the mass of Neptunian cylinders no longer visible in space far behind. As that powerful propelling ray struck their cylinders' mass, our reeling flier leaped forward with even greater speed toward Saturn, and as it shot forward thus faster than even the huge ray from behind alone could push it, it was slightly freed from that vast ray's pressure, and I could edge it upward a little from that great ray's path! Up—up—while Marlin and Whitely and Randall watched with white faces beside me, while our space-fliers and all the fleet's around and behind us came on at terrible velocity toward mighty Saturn that now filled the firmament before us. Up—up—and as I saw that we were winning gradually up from the great ray's path, I shouted to Marlin, heard him with his radiophone apparatus quickly order all the fleet's fliers to follow my example in an effort to win up from the great ray's pressure. Only the fliers uppermost in that ray's path, though, like our own, could hope to get clear in this way, but as we swept on, gradually our own flier and perhaps four or five hundred others out of our great mass of five thousand won thus upward until at last we burst up out of the vast ray's path and were out of its pushing pressure!

"Back to the Neptunian cylinders!" Marlin shouted into the mouthpiece before him. "Unless we can destroy the greater cylinders whose ray is pushing the rest of our fleet into Saturn, we're lost!"

And back now our flier and the five hundred others that were clear of the ray like it, were rushing, back away from Saturn, while the remaining thousands of space-fliers of our fleet, unable to get clear in that way of the vast ray's pressure, were being driven on by it with terrific speed and power toward annihilation against Saturn! We must destroy the greater cylinders that were sending forth that ray, we knew, before the mass of our fleet crashed into Saturn, and so our five hundred space-fliers, our own flagship at their head, went fast almost as light through the black gloom of space, back toward the two thousand or more Neptunian cylinder-fliers that were massed around those greater cylinders that were our object! Upward and backward we flashed, until in another moment it seemed that great mass of cylinder-fliers loomed before and beneath us in space, the score or more of greater cylinders that were pushing with their huge ray our fleet to doom. Before ever the Neptunians in those cylinders could see us we had rushed back high above them, and then, as Marlin gave a single order through the mouthpiece before him, our five hundred faceted space-fliers were diving through space upon that Neptunian mass of motionless cylinders!

Down like light we flashed upon them through the black gloom of space, and a wild exhilaration thrilled me through in that moment, as we flew downward. The immense blackness of empty space around us, the far fiery disk of the sun and the bright sparks of Jupiter and Neptune burning inward and outward from us, the vast ringed sphere of Saturn behind us—these seemed to spin slowly around our flier as with its fellows it dove down through the sheer darkness of the void toward the unsuspecting Neptunian cylinders below. Marlin was gripping the control-board's edge, staring downward with the radiophone mouthpiece close before him, Whitely at the other side gazing down with his calm eyes ablaze for once, while Randall grasped tightly, with his face set and stone-like, the two levers of our concentrated force-ray weapon, and while with my own hands I held the controls of the flier's propulsion-rays, and sent it swooping down out of the upper void now upon the Neptunians, even as the hundreds of our fliers around us swooped. Then, as those cylinders loomed greater close beneath us Randall had swung sharply the levers in his hands and as he did so there had emerged from our space-flier, and from all those about us, ray upon ray of concentrated, terrible force, slender and pencil-like rays of pale force, that crashed down with awful cleaving power through the massed cylinders beneath!

I saw in that whirling instant score upon score of the cylinders below cloven through by those terrific slicing rays, saw a full half of the score of greater cylinders that had been our chief target break up into great fragments as our rays swept through them! For that moment it seemed that below us unharmed and wrecked cylinders were merged together in a wildly-confused mass, fragments of wreckage and disk-bodied Neptunians, slain instantly by the cold of space, and unharmed cylinders whirling together there in a great mass beneath us! In that instant we had stayed our downward rush, almost upon that great mass, had with a repelling ray shot our fliers over and beyond it, and then as we whirled upward once more, as Marlin again uttered a hoarse, swift command, we were leaping back toward the great mass of the Neptunians, leaping back with all in our flier shouting now as we drove toward the remaining greater cylinders to destroy them also!

But now, as we shot toward them, the Neptunians had rallied from the first surprise of our crashing attack down upon them, and before we could again swoop down upon them, their unharmed cylinder-fliers, still more than two thousand in number, had separated themselves from the confused wreckage of those we had destroyed and were driving boldly up toward us, to meet us! In another instant they would have overwhelmed us, would have wiped us from the void with their great mass crashing over our own, their concentrated rays directed toward us, but before they could come closer Marlin had given an order and from our own racing fliers there had shot out toward the onracing Neptunian cylinder-fliers propulsion-rays that in an instant had pushed us back from their onrushing fleet, back through a great gulf of space in an instant! Before they could comprehend the maneuver, another order had sounded, and we were again leaping forward, this time on a lower level, leaping toward the half-score greater cylinders that still remained motionless where first they had been, their combined great ray still pushing our fleet on to Saturn! The cylinder-fliers above, their occupants seeing our object, darted down like falling meteors to prevent us, but were an instant too late. Before they could do so, our concentrated rays had cloven through the half-score greater cylinders and had annihilated them, their combined great ray ceasing instantly!

"The greater cylinders are all destroyed!" Whitely was saying. "We've saved our fleet from death against Saturn, at least!"

"Back toward Saturn—toward the fleet!" Marlin shouted. "We're outnumbered five to one by these Neptunian cylinders!"

For even as he cried out, the two thousand or more Neptunian cylinder-fliers, too late to save their greater cylinders, but made more fierce by the sight of their destruction, were diving down from above, with all their concentrated weapon-rays toward us! Against those outnumbering cylinders our own few hundred fliers had no chance, and even as the Neptunians whirled down on us, as Marlin shouted his order, our space-fliers were going on toward Saturn, the Neptunians leveling out instantly and raging through the void after us in close pursuit. On we shot, their questing weapon-rays taking toll now of our rearmost fliers, and though Saturn was again filling the firmament before us with his mighty cloudy-yellow disk, his colossal whirling rings and circling maze of moons, there was no sign of our fleet's main body ahead. Had we destroyed the greater cylinders too late? Had their combined great ray pushed our fleet in to death against Saturn before we could save it? It seemed so in that tense moment and then, close ahead, there loomed in black relief against Saturn's mighty heaven-filling disk, a great swarm of black dots that were whirling toward us.

"The fleet!"

As I cried the words, Marlin was giving swift orders through the mouthpiece before him, and then, even as our own few hundred fliers suddenly slowed their speed and halted, the great swarm of dots ahead had rushed up beside and around us, had taken form around us as the thousands of space-fliers of our great fleet, falling instantly into their regular formation and confronting thus the Neptunian cylinders that had been so hotly pursuing us! Those Neptunians were too late to halt their cylinder-fliers as we faced them thus so suddenly in force, our five thousand fliers opposed to theirs, hardly half our number, but they swerved as they saw us, swerved upward and attempted to race above us, raking us with their weapon-rays of concentrated force! Before they could do so, however, Marlin had uttered another order and our fleet had shot up to meet them, so that in the next moment, Earth and Neptunian craft had rushed together in their two respective fleets, there beside mighty Saturn!

As the two great fleets neared each other there crossed and flashed from one to the other innumerable slender rays of concentrated force, and space-flier and cylinder-flier were being clove through and annihilated by those slicing rays as they neared one another! Almost it seemed that we must crash straight into the oncoming Neptunian cylinders, the whole firmament for the moment ahead of us being full of their onrushing mass. I saw openings in those oncoming cylinders from which gleamed light, looked inside and there as one sees things in a dream were the many disk-bodied Neptunians calmly manipulating the controls as their great mass of cylinders shot toward our greater mass of space-fliers. Cylinders and space-fliers were being annihilated in that moment by scores by the slender rays that drove across the closing gap between the fleets, and then just as we seemed on the point of crashing dead into their oncoming cylinders they had shot their propulsion-rays sidewise, had swerved aside and were rushing with our own great fleet, which had instantly swerved with them, through the void!

Side by side for the moment the Neptunian and Earth fleets flew, countless weapon-rays stabbing across the gap between them as at dizzying speed they shot through the void, and I kept our space-flier at our fleet's head, as Marlin gave his orders to the fliers behind us, Whitely swiftly opening and closing the controls of our generators to keep constant the flier's power and speed, Randall was sending our own slender and deadly rays shooting toward the opposite Neptunian cylinders like bolts of straight and half-seen lightning! For but instants it could have been that the two great fleets, our own of space-fliers and the smaller Neptunian one, whirled through the void, but eternities it seemed to me, so tense and timeless was that whirl of awful action. Soon I became aware of a mighty yellow disk that filled the firmament from top to bottom before us, toward which our racing, struggling fleets were flashing, and then I saw Whitely bending across me and shouting to Marlin through the wild whirl of this terrific battle:

"We're heading with the Neptunian fleet in to Saturn!" he was shouting. "What this battle will mean in those rings and moons——!"

"We'll keep straight with them!" Marlin cried. "They are trying to escape from us in Saturn's rings and moons, and get back to Neptune to rejoin the main Neptunian body!"

So that now as fleet and fleet rushed forward I held our own flier at our own fleet's head, racing forward with the vast whirling system of Saturn's rings and moons stretching dangerously before us. Full before us was looming greater each instant the spinning dark globe of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and now as our two fleets rushed side by side toward it at terrific speed, stabbing still at each other from space-flier to cylinder with the concentrated weapon-rays, it seemed that inevitably in the next moment we must crash against the big moon! Seeing this, though, Marlin shouted a swift order into the mouthpiece before him, and instantly in answer to it our great fleet's mass bore sidewise against the racing mass of the Neptunian cylinders! For an instant it seemed that the two fleets were merging into each other, space-flier crashing into cylinder and slender rays coming thick, and then the smaller Neptunian fleet had given way beneath the pressure of ours, had veered sidewise so that in the following moment the two fleets were rushing past Titan's whirling sphere!

And now we were inside Titan's orbit, and as we whirled farther in just across the path of another and smaller whirling moon, I saw that Saturn's colossal rings lay edge-on close before our racing masses of craft, gigantic spinning rings of mighty meteor-masses, countless great meteor-swarms whirling there about the vast yellow planet whose sphere now was stupendous in the heavens before us. In another few moments Neptunian cylinders and space-fliers of Earth would have rushed alike into those thundering swarms of meteors, in which no craft could live for a moment. Already chance meteors were whirling through space about us as we shot on, cylinder or space-flier here and there in the two racing, grappling fleets vanishing in white-hot flashes of heat and fire as a meteor struck them. But other and more cylinders and space-fliers were vanishing in wreckage beneath the cleaving rays from either fleet, and both were racing on so intent upon our terrific struggle as to notice hardly at all the vast whirling rings before us! I heard Whitely utter a hoarse cry to Marlin as we flashed forward, heard Marlin swiftly utter an order in the mouthpiece before him, and then our fleet, and the Neptunian cylinders at almost the same instant, had shot diagonally upward and instead of crashing into the great rings' edge were slanting swiftly up over them!

And now, as Neptunians and Earth fliers drove together up over Saturn's colossal rings, the intensity of the struggle seemed to deepen to a fierceness as yet unknown. For the moment it was sheer blind battle without need of reason or command, sheer awful combat there in space above Saturn's whirling rings, with beside us the vast cloud-screened yellow sphere of Saturn itself looming gigantic, and with outside the great rings its whirling maze of moons! Cylinders and space-fliers grappled in that moment with mindless fury, and with a swiftness and skill of which I had not dreamed myself capable, I whirled our space-flier this way and that amid the swarming, boiling ruck of the giant battle, amid the grappling hordes of space-fliers and cylinders that filled the air before us, their cleaving concentrated rays slicing this way and that in swift circles of death about us! I heard Whitely laughing a little from excitement beside me as the battle reached this terrific pitch, saw Randall sending our own weapon-rays this way and that with lightning-swiftness, Marlin gazing out tensely into that hell of battle that filled space about us. Struggling there above Saturn's colossal rings, ever and again Neptunian cylinder or space-flier of Earth shot too low and was caught by the whirling meteor-swarms of those giant rings, annihilated instantly by them! Hundreds of cylinders and space-fliers had gone to death already, but so far the battle had been almost even despite our greater force, and seeing this Marlin cried quickly into the order-mouthpiece before him.

Instantly our whirling space-fliers shot back suddenly from the wild ruck of the battle, formed instantly into a long double column of fliers with our own flier at the head, and then before the surprised Neptunians could reform their own spread-out and disorganized mass, our compact column had leaped forward and had crashed through their formless mass with a great shock, fliers and cylinders perishing in scores in that reeling crash! And then our double column had divided, pushing out to either side and thus splitting and separating the Neptunian mass of cylinders, and thus separated and inferior to us in numbers we were in the next moment leaping upon them there above Saturn's rings and sending their cylinders into wrecked fragments by the hundreds with our whirling rays! Fiercely their own rays came back upon us, as they faced us, and then they seemed to waver, to hesitate. And before we could sense their intention their remaining cylinders, depleted by scores each moment now and numbering no more than fifteen hundred, had dropped downward almost to the giant whirling rings, had formed into a swift massed formation there, and then with all the power of their propulsion-rays were speeding away, away from Saturn, out through the void toward the calm green distant spot of light that was Neptune!

"They're fleeing!" I cried, as our own space-flier whirled around in that moment. "We've beaten these, at least—they're fleeing back to Neptune!"

"Regular formation—all squadrons!" Marlin was shouting into the mouthpiece before him. "Full speed out from Saturn—after the Neptunians!"

And as our space-fliers, still over four thousand in number despite the losses of that wild combat, massed swiftly together in their V-formation and then were hurtling out from Saturn through the gulf after the fleeing cylinders, I was crying to him over the sudden waxing throb of our generators: "There's far more Neptunian cylinders than these that waited for us at Saturn here—the rest must be waiting at Neptune itself!"

He nodded, grim-faced. "The main Neptune fleet is probably waiting there for us—and must outnumber us by almost two to one. But if we can overtake these fifteen hundred cylinders before us we'll keep them, at least, from rejoining their main fleet!"

Now Saturn and its rings and moons was dwindling swiftly behind us as our great fleet shot forward again from it, out toward Neptune's steady, pale-green little light-spot, and after the hundreds of cylinders fleeing before us toward it. With an acceleration that never before had we dared to risk did we leap forward through the void now, and so awful was the pressure of that acceleration upon us that even with our shock-absorbing apparatus we were crushed almost into unconsciousness by it. Steadily, though, with the last of my consciousness and strength, I held the space-flier's speed and course onward, while close behind us there shot after us with the same terrific acceleration, the fliers of our own fleet. We knew, though, that the Neptunians were fleeing toward their great world at a speed and acceleration as great as ours, for we were not gaining upon them. Their massed hundreds of cylinders, indeed, were not visible to us in the great void ahead except by means of our telescope, but with it we could keep them in view and could check their progress and ours out through the great gulf toward the solar system's edge.

Out—out—for hour upon hour we throbbed through the void after those fleeing Neptunian cylinders, out once again toward great Neptune and toward the last mighty battle that was to be ours there. For well we knew that the two thousand and more Neptunian cylinders that had waited for us there at Saturn, that had laid that great ambush in space for us there and then had battled us so fiercely over Saturn, were but a portion of the Neptunian main fleet of cylinders, sent out to delay, and if possible, to destroy us. That great main body of their cylinders, we knew, must number almost double as many craft as our own, and undoubtedly was aware of our coming and was waiting for us at Neptune or near it. And it was the great main body of the Neptunian cylinders that we must overcome, I knew, before ever we could hope to get to Triton and halt there the giant force-ray that was turning the sun on toward the doom of the solar system. And well we knew, too, that in the interval the Neptunians had had time to build many more cylinders, to make their great fleet even greater, and that whatever mighty weapons they had devised in that time we now must face.

So that as our great fleet of space-fliers, holding to its regular formation, flashed on and on and on through the great gulf of space, on out through the outer vast reaches of the solar system toward its outermost planet, our every effort was bent upon overtaking the fleeing Neptunians before us and annihilating them before they could rejoin the main body. At the same colossal speed as ourselves they were fleeing from before us, on toward Neptune's tiny green disk far ahead, and though we held steady in our pursuit after them, we could not lessen the gap between us. Hour passed into hour and day into changeless day thus as we throbbed on in that tremendous pursuit, hours and days that we could not measure, all things seeming timeless now as our great fleet flashed on in this terrific pursuit. At maximum speed, at millions of miles an hour, the Neptunians and ourselves were hurtling on, yet they kept out of reach ahead of us, as Neptune grew larger ahead. And now that mighty pursuit of ours had become so strange and unreal and dream-like that it was as men in a dream that we watched and slept and watched in our space-fliers as Earth's brave fleet shot on through the last reaches of the solar system toward its edge.

Timeless indeed seemed the day on day, the hour on hour, of that daring pursuit of our fleeing enemies out from Saturn toward great Neptune, but now we knew that that pursuit had begun to draw to an end, since Neptune's disk was steadily enlarging before us and we had begun slowly to draw closer to the fleeing cylinders! Closer and closer our fleet, our own foremost space-flier, was coming to those fleeing fifteen hundred cylinders, and the interval of hours and days of pursuit out from the wild combat at Saturn seemed as though it had not existed, so tense once more we became as we drew nearer to the Neptunians before us. At last, with Neptune's pale-green disk and the bright little spot of Triton above and behind it within hours of us, we had come so close to the fleeing cylinders that their mass, hurtling on in a cone-like formation, was clearly visible to our unaided eyes in the void ahead. And by this time, in every space-flier of our onrushing fleet, its occupants were waiting impatiently for the moment when we would be near enough to loose our concentrated weapon-rays on the fleeing craft ahead.

"We'll overtake them before they reach Neptune!" Marlin declared, gazing intently ahead toward the gleaming points that were the fleeing cylinders far ahead. "Within hours now we'll be up to them!"

"Well enough for us that we can do so, too!" Whitely commented. "For if they rejoined their main body, the odds against us might be overpowering!"

And now as pursuers and pursued rushed nearer and nearer toward mighty Neptune's great pale-green sphere, they were also nearing each other, our onleaping four thousand space-fliers drawing closer and closer toward those fleeing fifteen hundred cylinders, though they were a great distance from us. Beside me Randall's hands were resting on the weapon-ray controls, and as we came closer still to the fleeing Neptunians, I saw Marlin leaning toward the mouthpiece, preparing to give his order to the great fleet behind us. Closer—closer—we could clearly make out now the massed fleeing cylinders far in the void ahead—already almost within accurate ray-range, a swarm of black dots against Neptune's cloudy green disk ahead. And as we came thus close Marlin leaned to voice his order, to spread the space-fliers of our fleet into a broad firing-formation and send their rays stabbing ahead. But that order was never uttered, for at that moment Whitely uttered a sharp cry, and we saw that the racing mass of cylinders ahead was suddenly slowing!

With unprecedented quickness its speed was decreasing before us and in moments more we would have crashed into those slowing cylinders had not Marlin's voice snapped a quick order that slowed instantly all the fliers of our fleet likewise. Fearful of some trick, slowing thus, we gazed intently ahead in that moment and then all of us had cried out together as we saw, beyond that swarm of black dots that were the slowing fifteen hundred Neptunian cylinders before us, other black dots that showed against great Neptune's disk also, which loomed great now in the heavens ahead! Other black dots, an immense swarm of them, that we knew were other cylinders, an immense fleet of them, rushing out from Neptune toward the fifteen hundred before us and toward ourselves! And then as in moments more the fifteen hundred cylinders before us slowed and stopped in space even as we had slowed, we saw sweeping from behind them, from great Neptune, those other cylinders, forming with them, there in space, a colossal semi-circular mass of fully eight thousand Neptunian cylinders in all, that faced our own four thousand or more space-fliers there in the void! It was the giant assembled Neptunian fleet, gathered here outside their world to face our own fleet, in that great struggle in which Earth and Neptune were to come now at last to death-grips for the life or death of the solar system!

CHAPTER XV

"You of Neptune or We of Earth!"

"Column formation—all squadrons full speed ahead!"

It was Marlin's voice that shouted that swift order in the next instant, and then, even as the gigantic semi-circle of the Neptunian fleet was leaping through the void toward us, our four thousand and odd space-fliers, outnumbered almost by two to one by the cylinders massed ahead, had shifted like lightning from their great V-formation to one of a long double column once more, and no sooner had its squadrons taken that new formation than the column slanted slightly to allow the free use of their propulsion-rays. They were flashing forward now like an enormous spear cast toward the curving front of the giant Neptunian fleet! For it was Marlin's intention to meet that outnumbering mass of cylinders by splitting it with a column as we had done over Saturn to our enemies, and then engaging separately the parts of the disorganized mass. So that now, even as the great half-circle of the Neptunian cylinders whirled through the void to overwhelm us, we had formed that long, double column and were dashing straight at them!

Holding the controls of our space-flier steady in that moment, I was aware for an instant of a sense of the utter strangeness of all the wild scene about me—of our space-flier's interior with Marlin and Randall and Whitely crouched in their chairs beside me, of the great column of polyhedron-like, gleaming, faceted space-fliers that came forward through the black gulf of star-sown space behind us, of the oncoming giant line of the Neptunian cylinders flashing toward us in turn, and of the immense green disk of mighty Neptune looming in the black vault behind them. All seemed for the moment the panorama of some strange nightmare stretched about me, but that momentary sensation that had gripped me so often in our wild rush through the solar system vanished in the next instant as stern reality loomed before us. There were the mighty curving line of gleaming Neptunian cylinders through which in the next split-second our great column must crash! I braced myself mentally for that vast crash that must almost inevitably mean death for the foremost of our space-fliers; I was aware as we drove upon the onrushing Neptunian line, that now unthinkable storms of deadly concentrated rays were raging from fleet to fleet; and then suddenly, at the very instant that we thought to crash into their great approaching line, that line opened swiftly before us to allow our great column to rush unharmed through it!

So astounded were we by that unlooked-for maneuver on the part of the Neptunians, that before we could check our speed, we were through, had shot in our entire column through that opening in their semi-circle, which instantly closed again behind us. And as it did so, there rushed toward each other the open ends of their semi-circle, thus closing that circle even as we rushed into it. Our fleet was held enclosed within the circle of their own! And then, from all those thousands of Neptunian cylinders that surrounded us, there were stabbing at us in countless number slender shafts of concentrated force, countless pencil-like weapon-rays that instantly clove through hundreds of our gathered space-fliers and that strewed space thick about us with their wreckage, even as we sought in vain to answer that terrible rain of deadly rays!

"Trapped!" Whitely was shouting. "They've trapped us inside their circle—are destroying us!"

For, though our own rays were fiercely springing forth and striking cylinder after cylinder of the vast fleet that had gathered about us, that fleet so outnumbered us and had such advantage of position, that it was decimating us in short order. Our space-fliers had broken from their column-formation now, and in a loose, disorganized mass were drifting at the center of that great ring of death which the Neptunians had formed about us. Swiftly our fliers were going into wreckage and death beneath the terrific storm of rays from all around us, and then Marlin's voice was flaring as he shouted an order into his mouthpiece.

"All space-fliers mass together," he cried, "and turn all your propulsion-rays outward!"

"You're going to—" Whitely began, but Marlin cut him short.

"We're going to break up the Neptunians' circle in the only way it can be broken up!" he cried.

As his order sounded the thousands of our space-fliers were obeying it, were massing compactly together at the center of the Neptunians' mighty circle. Thus massed, they presented for the moment a perfect target for our enemies' rays, and for a moment those rays stabbed thick toward us from all sides. In the next moment our massed space-fliers were shooting their great propulsion-rays outward, outward in all directions around us, outward toward the Neptunians' encircling ring! As those rays shot out, they pressed with terrific power against that ring of cylinders about us, and since our own fliers were massed together and thus braced against each other, it was not they that moved but the cylinders, their great ring instantly broken up, disintegrated, as those cylinders were hurled out into the void from us by the pushing power of our great propulsion-rays! For the moment they were broken up completely, their formation entirely shattered, and before they could reform, there had come another order from Marlin and in a compact formation ourselves, our space-fliers were leaping upon their shattered masses!

To right and left, like light, drove the deadly weapon-rays of our massed space-fliers as we seized the opportunity and leaped upon the Neptunians. Ample was the revenge we had upon them in that moment, since the concentrated rays tore through and wrecked hundreds of their own cylinders as we sprang upon them! Fleeing from before us for the moment, flashing away toward giant Neptune's tremendous green disk ahead, they strove to reform while we leaped after them and harried them with every weapon-ray which our space-fliers could emit. Swiftly, though, even as they rushed onward before us, the Neptunian cylinders were drawing together into a great mass again, into a great column-like formation, and as our own column-mass drove beside and after them with weapon-rays stabbing, their resistance abruptly stiffened, and they were racing in close formation once more beside our own mighty fleet, grappling once more with it in space as both rushed toward great Neptune. But we had struck a mighty blow at their disorganized masses in the moment of our opportunity. Fully two thousand of their cylinders had been swept to death by our rays before they had been able to mass again, and now but six thousand or less cylinders remained, racing ahead with our own four thousand or less fliers!

The great green sphere of Neptune was looming colossal ahead and slightly beneath our two oncoming fleets, with behind and above it the bright little disk of Triton. It was toward Triton even in that wild moment that all of us were gazing, toward the source of the giant sun-ray that we must, somehow, halt. But now the battle around us had become so furious that we could spare no thought to aught else, since the two mighty fleets, stabbing ceaselessly at each other with their slender rays as they slowed their flashing progress forward, were rushing into the outer reaches of the atmosphere of huge Neptune! Its air was roaring about our whirling space-fliers as we shot through it, but as we shot on we saw that the Neptunian cylinders were going into annihilation swifter far than were our fliers! For they had formed and were racing beside us in their half-circle formation, while our own fliers at Marlin's command had leaped forward in a long column that could concentrate all its fire of rays upon the side of the Neptunian formation nearest us! And though slender rays tore lightning-like through fliers here and there across our own column, we saw that their cylinders beneath our fire were being wrecked in scores, in hundreds! In that vast running fight we were fast evening the odds against us!

Marlin's eyes were gleaming with excitement as we saw the Neptunians thus falling beside us under our concentrated fire of rays, and Randall and Whitely and I were almost beside ourselves with exultation. Faster were falling the Neptunian cylinders beneath our rain of rays, the rays of their farther cylinders being held from us by their own cylinders in their fatal formation. Already, as we thundered through the mists of mighty Neptune and low over its gleaming surface, we saw that the Neptunian cylinders had been reduced by that deadly fire of ours to hardly more than three thousand, to hardly more than our own fleet of fliers, which had itself lost its hundreds in that vast running battle. As our rays tore into and through their shaken mass hundreds upon hundreds of their cylinders had been cloven through, had been reduced to whirling wreckage, and we had evened the odds in our raging battle at last!

Even as we cried out in triumph, the Neptunians must have seen that to continue in that running fight longer was suicidal for them. They could not change formation during that flight without exposing themselves to worse peril, so in desperation they did a completely unexpected thing. Their enormous mass of cylinders, battered out of its half-circle formation by our terrific fire of rays, suddenly swerved in toward our own fleet as the two great armadas rushed forward above Neptune, and then that Neptunian fleet of cylinders had crashed obliquely with immense power into our own space-flier fleet! The next instant it had so merged with it that the two fleets ceased instantly to exist as such and for the moment became one colossal, swaying, reeling mass of cylinders and space-fliers in utter merged confusion, striking and soaring and smashing each other!

As that great cylinder-armada crashed thus into our own it had seemed to me that the air all around us was filled in that instant with colliding space-fliers and cylinders, and with a hell of slender pale and deadly concentrated rays that raged thick in whirling death about us! I saw before us two onrushing cylinders, whirled the flier up to avoid that imminent collision, and then as they passed beneath us, saw Randall send our rays driving down and cleaving through them, saw them whirl in wreckage into which a battling cylinder and faceted space-flier had crashed themselves in the next instant! I heard Whitely's shout of alarm in the next split-second, instinctively flung the flier sidewise through the boiling ruck of the battle, just in time to escape a pair of stabbing rays from a cylinder beneath, and then saw those rays stab on up and strike another cylinder and destroy it! And even as I whirled the flier sidewise, Randall was driving our rays to right and left against other cylinders rushing upon us!

The air about us seemed filled in that moment with a single wildly-swirling mass of cylinders and space-fliers, grappling with each other there in countless individual combats inextricably intermixed, their weapon-rays going out in destruction through the craft that whirled upon them, their propulsion-rays driving the ships about them crazily to right and left! With inconceivable fury cylinders and fliers soared and fought and fell above great Neptune's roof, the air filled with falling wreckage, our great battle reaching now an undreamed-of phase of intensity, as gleaming cylinders and faceted ball-like space-fliers were annihilated alike by hundreds! That giant merged combat of the two fleets had in minutes taken toll of half the force of each, and I wondered dimly even as I whirled the flier up and back through the wild, annihilating battle how either men of Earth or disk-bodied Neptunians could cling to a battle of such suicidal nature! Then suddenly from Marlin had come a hoarse exclamation, and I saw in that instant all the Neptunian cylinders intermixed with our space-fliers rising upward, as though in answer to a single command!

"Up!" cried Marlin. "The Neptunians are over us! They're going to——!"

But before he could finish the sentence, before our space-fliers could whirl upward in answer to his command, from the Neptunian cylinders massed above us had shot down upon us innumerable powerful propulsion-rays, rays that struck scores, hundreds, of our space-fliers and drove them down with terrific force to crash against the metal roof of Neptune beneath us! They were repeating the maneuver by which we four had escaped from our pursuers over Neptune weeks before, were driving our fliers down to crashing death in hordes! Instantly as Marlin shouted into the order-mouthpiece, our fliers leaped forward, to escape from that death that smote us from above, but as we drove forward in our column formations again, they went on above us, were with their powerful propulsion-rays driving us down to death in scores even as with those rays they prevented us from rising to meet them! We were being quickly destroyed now, and as we saw it, as our column flashed on with the Neptunian cylinders massing in another column above and driving our fliers down by scores, we saw that not much longer could that unequal battle continue! Then abruptly Marlin pointed ahead and downward to Neptune's mighty roof beneath us, was crying an order to us and the fliers behind and about us.