"We found tridium," said Dynamon, "tons of it. We had an opportunity to test it, and it proved to be a complete defense against the Ray."
"How difficult is it to get at?"
"Not difficult at all," said Dynamon, "we brought back enough to equip nearly ten thousand men."
"Heaven be praised!" said Argallum fervently, "We might pull out of this situation yet. Those devils have been sweeping everything before them. We cut off their communications with our air power but that didn't stop them. They've been living off the land, and they're so powerful that they've been able to overrun territory at will."
Dynamon glanced at his watch. "It is almost noon," he said, "It will take just one counter-attack to break through their line and roll it up in both directions. If you throw attack-units forward as fast as they can be equipped with tridium, you will have the Martians in a rout before sundown."
And it was so.
Dynamon stood beside Argallum two hours later, on a little knoll sixty miles out of Copia. A wide plain stretched before their eyes and across its width, a beaten, discouraged army of humans gave ground slowly before hordes of tiny, malevolent creatures from another planet. As the two men watched, a fresh column of Earth-soldiers issued forth from a woods in the center of the plain. There was a curious greenish shimmer surrounding this new column—a will-o'-the-wisp, mirage-like quality—and it advanced without hesitation straight into the serried ranks of the terrible Martians.
"Great Heavens!" cried Argallum, "They're walking right up to them! And not a man is down! Look! The Martians are reeling back! Our voltage bombs are killing them like flies!"
Dynamon turned away from the scene of carnage with a curious smile. He knew that Argallum in his gratitude would probably want to throw every conceivable honor and promotion at him. For bringing three Carrier loads of tridium back from Saturn, he, Dynamon, would very likely become a World-wide hero. And yet, he reflected, it was a feat which could never have been accomplished if it hadn't been for a series of unrelated incidents. If Keltry hadn't stowed away, she couldn't have fallen down the pit, thus leading to the discovery of Queen Diana's Nether World. If Mortoch had not rebelled and tried to kill him with a voltage bomb—. If he hadn't happened to touch the rock with his back—.
Dynamon turned and looked out on to the battle field where the victorious Earth-soldiers in their tridium-auras were vengefully slaughtering the hideous Martians. And he thought of the incident which had to precede all the other incidents so that he could bring back the tridium. That was the incident which had occurred hundreds of years before, when a man named Leonard Bolton had built a "space ship" and had traveled to Saturn in it, breaking through the burnt-out crust into the Nether World, boring the long hole with his clumsy medieval Carrier. That was the hole that Keltry had fallen into.