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.