The enemy was twenty feet away; it seemed as many miles to Danny as he threw himself at the foe. He did not see the ray strike. He heard only the Infant's steady voice calling: "Remember Danny—the Sorenson machine—if you live."
Then a blast of reflected heat swept upon him, and he felt himself stifling. There was a pool of molten rock, white and glaring with heat ... and a puff of smoke, grayish black, and ashes that whirled in the wind that swept up from the pool....
Danny tried to raise himself from the hot stone where he had fallen, so near he was to the pool of death. He saw the grotesque figure of the giant move over toward the red ship, look at it, sneer contemptuously, and turn back to his own ship of doom. He saw the black entrance swallow the huge foe and he saw the door close, while the great ship, so innocently white in its sleek slender roundness, rose again in the air where the clouds took it up.
And Danny, resting on scorched but unfeeling hands, stared after him until he got the enemy's direction of flight as he entered the clouds, then he turned towards a place of glowing rock where the air rose in quivering waves.
"You said it, Infant," he whispered; "you knew I was just a fightin' fool that wouldn't think the way you would. You told me to get the Sorenson machine—" He brushed at his suddenly blinded eyes with one seared hand, then turned to stare grimly and appraisingly where the white ship had gone.
"And I'm thinkin'," he told the beastly occupant of that carrier of death, "that you didn't shoot your damned ray quite quick enough. The Infant beat you to it! He got his message to me first!"
How he got to the flat-roofed landing zone of the Consolidated Electric, Danny, doubtless, could never have told. Nor was he aware of the hand that set in the forward cabin of his ship a strange machine. But he growled his instructions:
"Set it goin'! 'Tis the Infant's orders—I mean Mr. Morgan's. What the devil it is I don't know, but 'Turn it on!' he told me—'Have them put it on full!'" And, though a man whom Danny knew only as Gimlet-eyes stared at him curiously, he reached down to the apparatus, set a dial, closed a switch here and there, then stepped back.
But Gimlet-eyes ventured one protest. "You're not grounding it!" he exclaimed, in a voice that was tinged with horror. "You'll get an accumulation on your ship that will shoot off like lightning—millions of volts!"