The Neptunian's blade had disappeared, consumed in the incredible holocaust; only the neutralized hilt of Vulcanite remained in his palsied hand as they reeled aside, blinded and unnerved. Bill's blade swished through the air as he reversed it and struck the Neptunian on the left temple with the Vulcanite hilt. The man's knees went rubbery and without a sound he slumped to the floor.
"The screen ... throw on the Multi-Energon screen!" Bill bellowed. "This man was being directed, someone else may be next!" The powerful hum of the inner screen within the cruiser, that rendered everything within impervious to every known power, arose in the brief silence. And none too soon. Suddenly the cruiser lurched, and trembled like a great wounded stallion.
Bill had a confused picture of the addled members of several planets clinging to ultra-mullioned gravity seats as the ship began to spin. Every possible aid of science had been lavished on the cruiser, even to the most exacting provisions against physical injury, or the danger from an unexpected crash-landing in some far off world. But even their combined science, great as it was, had not foreseen the unpredictable enough to counteract this blow.
As if a cosmic hand had grasped the hurtling, spinning ship, it described an orbital parabola, flashing like a living thing through space, and headed at an unimaginable acceleration directly into the phantasmal light of the great winged world. Bill's dazzled eyes saw the tiny Panadur fight to strap himself to the acceleration seat on which he perched, while frantically he strove to retain consciousness. Everything seemed ringed with prismatic rainbows from the awful glare of the electronic flash, as Bill resolutely set his conscious and sub-conscious mind in alignment to fight off oblivion. But nothing human could withstand consciously the orbital fall of the great ship, as it dived into the fathomless abyss of night in a concentric spiral that narrowed tighter and tighter, wheeling in direct ratio with the rotation of the mammoth planet, at which it was aimed like the spear of a cosmic angel.
Bill's last comforting thought was the Multi-Energon screen. Nothing, his superb mind conceived, could possibly penetrate that. A crash was imminent, he knew, but against that they were prepared. He tried to contact whatever it was that had sent the polyglot vibrations and had managed to grip the Neptunian's brain, and only a confused disorder, as of many minds abandoning their temporary union came to him, and then ... the profound illimitable darkness of complete oblivion.
None aboard saw the fantastic scene as the cruiser neared Saturn and was trapped by the hungry pull of the planet. None witnessed the macabre sight of stupendous mountains rising to impale them as they struck its atmosphere. Uncannily, the cruiser began to decelerate as the robot control went into action, activated by the atmospheric pressure. In a great swinging arc, the super-spacer settled lower and lower, until at last, immense lateral fins shot out of its sides, and secondary rockets belched forth, braking the headlong rush.
Beneath them, a world of light and shadows shimmered under the unearthly loveliness of the great rings, as if illumined by a sidereal current of glowing jewels. Three of the nine moons were in transit, phantasmal in their silent loveliness as they hovered over the parent world. Beneath, the liquid sparkle of an unknown ocean undulated softly, twinkling with myriad star points as if spangled with stardust.
At last the inter-planetary cruiser came to rest, ploughing up immense furrows in the glittering sands of the shore, in a partial crash-landing. The robot controls, magnetically activated to decelerate in direct ratio with the proximity of land, had held true. The almost incandescent tertiary-outer hull of the ship, began to cool to a dull silvery hue. In the near distance, a glorious city of towering spires and prismatic domes, was like a fairy scene on a colossal scale. But no fingers of light issued from its towers and domes. No living beings issued from its portals to investigate the arrival of these voyagers of space.
Only the querulous susurration of the spumeless waves of the great shining sea disturbed the eternal silence of Saturn. The silence of a dead world had enveloped the Terran ship, even as within it, the unconscious members of its heterogeneous crew were wrapped in the silence of oblivion.