"For it is this great fleet of space-fliers, with Marlin at its head, which alone can halt that doom now! If that fleet can win safely out through the perils of the interplanetary void to Neptune, can win to Triton's sunward side against the opposition of the Neptunians and can destroy the controls and generators of their great sun-ray, can halt that ray, the sun's spin will cease to accelerate and our planet and the other planets will have been saved. But if our fleet cannot do this, if the Neptunians prevent it from reaching the great sun-ray's source, and from halting that ray, then the sun will spin on ever faster and within two-score more days will split at last and engulf in the diverging fires of its two new suns, all the planets save Neptune. For it is this great space-fleet of ours, heading out now toward the last great battle of Earth's and Neptune's races, which alone now can prevent the accelerating speed of the sun and the consequent wrecking of our universe!"
CHAPTER XIV
An Ambush in Space
"Mars ahead and to the left—once more!"
As I uttered the words Marlin and Randall and Whitely, beside me, were gazing to the left with me. "Strange," said Randall, "it all seems, almost, as when we first went out past Mars."
Strangely similar, indeed, did it seem to all of us, the panorama that now again stretched all about us, visible through the racing space-flier's windows, as we sat in the four control-chairs before them. For ahead and away to the left gleamed again the dull-red disk of Mars, farther now from us than on our first trip out but seeming almost the same. Ahead too, and close to the right, shone mighty Jupiter, and beyond it on the left the yellow spot of Saturn once more, with far beyond it and straight ahead again the green little spark of light that was Neptune. Behind, too, the bluish light-spot of Earth and the lessened fire-disk of the sun were as before, and as before the blazing stars that jeweled all the deep-black firmament about us. But behind our flier we could barely see innumerable tiny gleaming points moving forward at the same speed as ourselves through the void, keeping pace with us in regular formation, a great V-formation of which our flier was the point and that moved steadily on through space. For those tiny points, extending back and out of sight in the void behind us, were the space-fliers of that great fleet of five thousand space-fliers which our own, the flagship, was leading out through the solar system to Neptune!
For two days, now, we had been flashing with that great fleet behind us from Earth, out toward the solar system's edge on our mighty expedition, and five days had passed since we had stood before the World Congress with Marlin rendering to it our report. In those intervening three days on Earth we had been the center of such a whirl of hectic activity as the world had never known before—the whirl of preparations for the start of the colossal fleet. For in those three short days Marlin with the energies of a world at his bidding, had strained every nerve to complete the last preparations of the great armada of space-fliers which he, with us three as his lieutenants, was to lead out on its unprecedented flight to Neptune.
The most necessary preparation was the equipping of the five thousand space-fliers with the concentrated force-ray weapons used by the Neptunians in their space-cylinders, those concentrated rays which, instead of pushing against what they struck, tore through it with driving power. Fortunately, the production of these concentrated rays required only the addition of special smaller ray-openings beside the regular ray-openings in the sides of the space-fliers, but even so it strained the capacities of the world's workers to install in each of the space-fliers those smaller openings in the short time available.
Each of the five thousand space-fliers held a crew of eight, their operators having been trained during our absence as fast as the fliers themselves had been built. We four in our own space-flier, the flagship of the great fleet, had four additional crew-members now, four mechanic-operators who worked in shifts and tended ceaselessly the operation of the flier's various mechanisms, the great generators, and the other mechanical equipment, thus leaving Marlin and Randall and Whitely and myself free to devote all our attention to the command of the great fleet itself, though one of us retained the controls of the flier itself. Another preparation that had been made during our absence had been to equip each flier with space-walkers for its crew, and to equip each with efficient radiophone apparatus. This, while the Heaviside layer around Earth would prevent it functioning from Earth to space or from space to Earth, would allow free communication from space-flier to space-flier while in space itself, and thus would allow Marlin and us to control with spoken orders all the great fleet we led.