A little green cloud came up into view, above the dark rim of the cliff. A little spinning wisp of greenish vapor. A tiny sphere of swirling radiance. It shone with the clear lucent green of spring, of all verdure, of life itself. It spun, and it shone with live green light.
With inconceivable speed, it darted upward. It struck one of the blue globes. A sparkling mist of dancing emerald atoms flowed over the azure sphere, dissolved it, melted it away.
Bill rubbed his eyes. Where the sapphire ship had been was now only a swirling mass of green mist, a cloud of twinkling emerald particles, shining with a supernal viridescent radiance that somehow suggested life.
Abruptly as the first tiny wisp of green luminescence had appeared, this whirling cloud exploded. It burst into scores of tiny globes of sparkling, vibrant atoms. The green cloud had eaten and grown. Now it was reproducing itself like a living thing that feeds and grows and sends off spores.
And each of the little blobs of viridity flew to an azure sphere. It seemed to Bill as if the blue ships drew them—or as if the green globules of swirling mist were alive, seeking food.
In an instant, each swirling spiral of emerald mist had struck a blue globe. Vibrant green haze spread over every sphere. And the spheres melted, faded, vanished in clouds of swirling viridescent vapor.
It all happened very suddenly. It was hardly a second, Bill thought, after the first of the swirling green blobs had appeared, before the last of the Martian fliers had become a mass of incandescent mist. Then, suddenly as they had come, the green spirals vanished. They were blotted out.
The stars shone cold and brilliant, in many-colored splendor, above the dark line of the cliffs. The Martian ships were gone.
"The vitomaton!" Bill muttered, "The Prince said something about the vitomaton. A new weapon, using the force of life. And the green was like a living thing, consuming the spheres!"
Suddenly he felt the bitter cold again. He moved, and his garments were stiff with frost. The cold had numbed his limbs—most of the pain had gone. He felt a curious lightness, an odd sense of relief, of freedom—and a delicious, alarming desire for sleep. But leaden pain of cold still lurked underneath, dull, throbbing.