'They've started-started out of the cloud! We're too late!'
'Too late!'
The words seemed like tocsins of doom in our ears as we stood there motionless, Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat and I, gazing at the vast armada going out to spread death and destruction across our universe. Never could the galaxy's peoples of light stand against those dread peoples of darkness who would spread darkness before them. Never could we outdistance them even to warn the galaxy of the coming attack. As though petrified we stared after those receding swarms of ships. Too late!
Abruptly our dazed brains became conscious of a strange sound beside us. Zat Zanat was laughing. High and mirthless and hysterical laughter it was; half choking and with his whole body trembling he reeled sidewise across the roof toward the great block at its center. And in the next moment, with the same strange high laughter upon his lips, he had reached up to the big control-switch on the block and with a single motion had closed it, a deep throbbing coming from beneath somewhere as he did so.
We stared at Zat Zanat in frozen silence, saw him swaying toward us, saw him pointing upward with face suddenly twisted, intense. We looked up. The great swarms of diminishing black dots that were the space-ships were still above but they were receding no longer! They seemed growing larger! Something, memory or thought, crashed like thunder through my brain. The control that Zat Zanat had closed! The control that made of this world a magnet of colossal power, and that the creatures of darkness had used to draw into the cloud those thousands of ships! And it was closed now!
'The ships!' Jhul Din cried madly. 'They're being drawn back to this world!'
'Drawn back-and they're crashing-crashing!'
For we but glimpsed the thousands of mighty ships growing greater above us with terrific speed, whirling back broadside in utter confusion and broken masses, when with a prolonged roar of thundering crashes they were smashing into the surface of the mighty magnet-world that had drawn them back! The planet's surface shook and rolled beneath the gigantic simultaneous concussion of those vast swarms of vessels that it had drawn back with awful force toward it, and as we were flung from our feet the world seemed riven by the vast metal masses crashing at terrible speed into it, none striking the roof on which we were only by grace of the fact that none had been directly over us.
For a terrible moment the giant thunder-roll of the crashing ships split the air about us, and then as it lessened, the swaying of the building beneath us subsided and we staggered to our feet.
Around us lay a world of annihilation and death, its surface, save for an unharmed building here and there like our own, but one vast plain of wreckage! The wreckage of the thousands of ships that would have spread horror and death over all the galaxy; the wreckage that held the dead and broken hordes of all the eyeless creatures; the wreckage that marked the annihilation of their race and of all their tremendous plans! And that annihilation had been brought on them at the last by their own work, by the control that made of their world a colossal magnet to draw all ships toward it. They had used it to draw the galaxy's ships into the cloud, into their world's atmosphere to be captured, but at the last it had been used to draw those ships with all their hordes inside them back to this world, to crash into it and into annihilation!
For moments Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat and I stared at that scene of terrific death, and then, flinging open the great magnet-control again, we were climbing into the waiting cruiser, slamming its space-door shut. As we gained its pilot room I grasped the wheel and controls, and as the generators throbbed beneath my touch I shot the ship upward from that world of awful death and into the violet glow over it, heading at mounting speed out and toward the violet light-points that were the galaxy's stars. The glasses fell from our tired eyes as we swayed there, and again the absolute darkness of the great cloud was upon us; but I did not stop to replace them but held the racing cruiser steady on its course at a speed terrific.
Out through the darkness of the cloud we were rushing almost in moments, so great was our speed; for soon we shot abruptly out of its Stygian lightlessness into clear space once more, into clear view of the galaxy's familiar stars. Even then, though, I did not slow our racing ship, but with Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat slumped beside me kept the cruiser racing straight onward-straight away from the vast blackness diminishing in the heavens behind us, straight away from the cosmic cloud which its people of darkness had thought to leave but which would hold them now in silence and in death forever.
