cried despairingly. 'Those ships-that purple ray-it's neutralizing the vibrations of our generators-they led us over this sun and we're falling-'
Below yawned the fiery ocean of red flame that was Alto, stretching from horizon to horizon, its tongues and prominences licking hungrily up toward us. Even through the super-insulation of the cruiser's walls we felt the growing, stifling heat of the sun below. And then I cried out and pointed upward once more. A score of cruisers at the tail of our fleet had escaped the fate of the rest of us by swerving aside in time, and instantly they had turned and slanted upward, then circled once and plunged down toward the hovering ray-ships. They never even used the blue ray but made sure of their enemies by their own deaths, plunging into the enemy cruisers in a score of swift, shattering collisions, and then the purple rays around us had vanished, while the shattered wrecks above whirled down into the crimson sun beneath us. With the vanishing of the rays our generators took up again their familiar humming drone, and the ships of our fleet slanted sharply up, to escape the fiery doom below.
The remaining ships of the globe-men's fleet had disappeared, now, and glancing at our time-dials I gave an order through the telestereo. Our fleet, still over five hundred cruisers strong, sped away from the great sun toward the buff-colored little ball that was its inmost planet. Swiftly its color deepened again to crimson as we arrowed down toward it, and I glanced anxiously again at the time-dials, for less than a quarter-hour remained now in which to get the ray-tube in action on the whirling sun behind us. Meteorlike our ships split the air of the red planet as we shot across its surface, and in a moment we were slanting down toward the city of the globe-men, toward the massed black roofs and streets above which loomed the mighty tower.
As we dropped down toward it there rose to meet us fully fifty star-cruisers like our own, the last remnants of the globe-men's fleet which we had pursued in past their sun. With suicidal determination they flashed straight up toward us, and the next minute was one of swift, terrific battle, the air around us a hell of blue light and pink flame, leaping and burning from ship to ship, while scores of wrecks whirled down into the black city below. Five minutes after that fierce attack we had lost a full hundred of our ships, but we had accounted for the last cruiser of the globe-men, or so we thought.
And now my own flagship and the designated few agreed on were dipping swiftly toward the great tower- platform, where stood the ray-projector which we had fought our way from universe to universe to reach. We were dropping lower, gradually decreasing our speed as we neared the platform, lower, lower…
A cry of fierce rage rang through the hull beneath me, and at the same moment I was aware of a long, dark shape that suddenly flashed down past us from above, a last cruiser of the globe-men which must have hovered high above us until that moment. It dropped below us with lightning speed, then hovered ominously beside the tower-platform for a single moment. In that moment a hundred shafts of blue light from our own ships leapt down toward it, but even as they did so there spurted from its side globe after globe of the annihilating pink flame, striking the broad platform and the four mighty supporting columns of the tower in a score of places. The enemy cruiser itself flashed into nothingness beneath the rays of our ships, but a great cry went up from us as we saw that its work was done, for the fire-balls that struck the tower blazed fiercely up for a moment and then vanished; and then the mighty tower was swaying, falling, crumbling, crashing down to the ground in a mighty avalanche of broken wreckage, raining its mighty fragments upon the city far beneath. The tower was gone! The ray-projector was annihilated!
And now our ships hung motionless, stunned, even as I was stunned, gazing through the window stupidly at the wreckage far below. We had lost! For when I finally raised my eyes I saw that the pointer on the time-dial before me had passed the tenth hour. Even had we had another ray-projector of our own, it would have been too late. Nothing now could save the Eight Worlds, nothing could swerve the mighty sun aside in time to save our universe. We races of men had risked our lives, our universe, in one great cast of the dice, and-we had lost.
Suddenly Hal Kur seemed to go insane, there beside me in the conning-tower. He choked, uttered incoherent exclamations, pointed a trembling hand up through our telescopic window toward the thundering red sun above. I did not raise my eyes, and he clutched my arm, pulling me to the window, his upward-pointing hand trembling violently, his eyes staring.
I looked up. There, beside the very rim of the mighty sun, was a tiny black spot, a long, dark speck that hung steady, playing a beam of brilliant light upon Alto. For a moment I did not understand, but gazed dazedly, trying to comprehend what I saw. That little black spot, that long, black shape-
'Look!' Hal Kur was screaming, like one gone mad. 'It's'-he choked, staggered- 'It's our old cruiser! It's Sarto Sen!'
Sarto Sen! The name seared across my brain like living fire. That ray-he was playing it upon the edge of Alto even as the globe-men had done-was spinning the great sun faster, faster-
'But it's too late!' I cried, throwing an anguished hand out toward the time-dial.
Too late! Nothing could swerve the sun aside in time to save the Eight Worlds, now. Too-
I stopped, a thick silence settling over us. And in that silence Hal Kur and I gazed up together, awe falling upon our faces, such awe as had never been felt by man before. For there, across the face of the mighty crimson sun, had appeared a thin black line, a line that thickened, widened, with every second. And now it was a gap, a narrow gap between the two cleft halves of the great red star, a gap that swiftly was widening. Alto was splitting! Splitting into two great halves, into two masses of crimson flame which swept ever wider from each other. Splitting like a great flywheel, when the ray of Sarto Sen increased its spinning to such a rate that it could no longer hold together. Beside it, its brilliant ray playing upon the dividing sun until the last moment, hung the little cruiser, and then it had vanished from sight as the right half of the sun, an ocean of raging fires, swept over it.
But Sarto Sen had won! Farther and farther apart swept the two halves of the divided sun, diverging each to follow its separate course, moving away on either side, slowly, majestically. Between them, now, there shone forth the yellow star that was our own sun, the doom that had threatened it vanishing now as the two halves of Alto moved away from each other, each receding farther and farther from each other and from our own sun. And below us, now, the red planet that had been Alto's was moving away also, hurtling toward the right half of the cleft sun and disappearing inside it with a great burst of flame. Planet after planet was vanishing in right sun or left, until at last our cruisers hovered alone in the void between the two receding suns.
In our own cruiser, now, and in all the ships around me, I knew, was rising a babel of hoarse shouts of joy, of insane, frenzied gladness, and Hal Kur beside me was shouting like a madman. The races of man had won, had conquered the greatest menace that had ever threatened them, had split a sun and wrecked a universe to save their own.
But for myself, in that moment, I knew only that my friend was dead.
It was night when the last of our fleet came to Earth once more. We had sped in from the long days of our homeward flight, pausing at each planet to allow the cruisers from that planet to leave us. And few enough were the ships that returned to each world, of the hundreds that had gone out, yet they were welcomed by such mighty, shouting crowds as no man had seen before. For the Eight Worlds had gone mad with joy.
So, at last, the dozen battered cruisers which were all that survived of Earth's contingent were dropping down again toward the Hall of Planets. Brilliant lights flared around it, and beneath them, it seemed, was collected half the population of Earth, a mighty, shouting throng. Slowly our ships slanted down over them, sinking down into the inner landing-court of the great building, and there it was that we were met by Mur Dak and the members of the Council.
The chairman was the first to wring my hand, and it was from him that I learned first how Sarto Sen had planned to save us, duplicating in his own laboratories the force-ray of the globe-men and speeding out with it in our old cruiser to Alto, accompanied only by Nar Lon and his devoted assistants. He carried out his plan under the imputation of cowardice, as Mur Dak told me with working face, because he knew that that plan meant death for himself and knew that I would have insisted on sharing that death.
But now the shouting of the great throng outside the Hall of Planets was becoming insistent, and they were calling for Jan Tor. Already the Council members were passing out of the landing-court with the crews of the surviving cruisers, passing through the building to the crowd outside, which greeted them with a mighty roar of applause. Mur Dak alone remained, with Hal Kur and me, and in a moment he left us also, with our promise to follow in a few minutes. I could not, just then, face those rejoicing, welcoming masses. Beside me, I knew, there would have stood, invisible to them, the shade of another, the shadow of a thin, spectacled youth to whom all this was due. So I stood in the quiet landing-court, gazing up into the jeweled skies once more-gazing up toward two
