"Yup."
"And they'll—they'll—?"
"They'll? You mean we'll. Yes. We'll die. But we're not going to die; the Guardians never die...."
The sphere of roaring energy closed down on the last avenue of escape. Outside was sheer hell. Below them was the stellar furnace called Sanaron, giver of life and death. Above them was a completed sphere of raw hell trying to drop down and add its raw mass-energy to Sanaron.
Somewhere outside raced and circled the rest of the Guardians, swamping the fires of exploding space and trimming down the depth of the energy bit by bit.
But doggedly they held, and an hour passed before there came a shout over the radio, a shout barely heard through the overwhelming roar of cosmic static. The sphere had thinned!
From that moment on it was certain. Once mankind got the upper hand over his foe, aided and augmented by beings from far across the galaxy devoted to the same program, the horror-fires were due to die swiftly. The flaming skies opened, spread, became isolated bits of intolerable light, and then winked out as sheer mass of numbers hit them from all sides with swamping volumes and rayed cones. Planers swept bits together into a larger flame and called for swampers to come and chill it.
Then, once more plate to plate, the planers formed into a mighty single plane and swept space like a cosmic dragnet, forcing the danger out into deep space where there was no danger.
Then came the final signal; the Black Alarm was finished.