"To the roof!" he cried.
"The roof-that cruiser on it is our one chance to get out of the cloud and warn the galaxy before the attack comes!"
Even as we cried out that, we were bounding up the curving stairs from floor to floor until in a moment more we were bursting out into the broad flat roof of the great building. In a single glance we took in the whole scene. At the roof's center rose a square block that was the center of innumerable branching electrical connections and that bore upon it a great lever-switch or control now open, the control Zat Zanat had described which made of this world a colossal-powered magnet when closed. To one side of the roof rested a long cruiser with no occupants, the ship that had been awaiting the half-dozen creatures who had tarried to slay the prisoners.
But as we burst out into the roof's violet light it was not at these things we were looking but at what was around and above us. The whole city, the whole world around us, were deserted! High above us we made out a tremendous swarm of black spots, which were rapidly diminishing in size as they moved away. They were the thousands of interstellar ships and they were going forth with all the eyeless hordes inside them to the conquest of the galaxy!
"They've started-started out of the cloud! We're too late!"
"Too late!"
The words seemed like tocsins of doom in our ears as we stood there motionless, Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat and I, gazing at the vast armada going out to spread death and destruction across our universe. Never could the galaxy's peoples of light stand against those dread peoples of darkness who would spread darkness before them. Never could we outdistance them even to warn the galaxy of the coming attack. As though petrified we stared after those receding swarms of ships. Too late!
Abruptly our dazed brains became conscious of a strange sound beside us. Zat Zanat was laughing. High and mirthless and hysterical laughter it was; half choking and with his whole body trembling he reeled sidewise across the roof toward the great block at its center. And in the next moment, with the same strange high laughter upon his lips, he had reached up to the big control-switch on the block and with a single motion had closed it, a deep throbbing coming from beneath somewhere as he did so.
We stared at Zat Zanat in frozen silence, saw him swaying toward us, saw him pointing upward with face suddenly twisted, intense. We looked up. The great swarms of diminishing black dots that were the space-ships were still above but they were receding no longer! They seemed growing larger! Something, memory or thought, crashed like thunder through my brain. The control that Zat Zanat had closed! The control that made of this world a magnet of colossal power, and that the creatures of darkness had used to draw into the cloud those thousands of ships! And it was closed now!
"The ships!" Jhul Din cried madly. "They're being drawn back to this world!"