Uprushing rocks, the Apennines to one side; the dark yawning maw of Archimedes on the other. We were diving parallel with the gravity-ray now, hardly a mile from it, diving for the mechanisms of its source. Twenty thousand feet of altitude. I bent our rocket-streams up for the start of our turning. Bow-hull gravity-plates next. Ten thousand feet. Five thousand.
How close we went I never knew. It was seconds now, not minutes. I shifted all the controls. Our bow lifted as we straightened. The whole spreading lunar surface tilted and dipped. Snap fired. I saw the bolt flash at the tilting landscape and a puff of light down there on the rocks. And an instant later there were vacant rocks where the little cluster of men and mechanisms had been. And the upflung gravity-beam was gone!
The giant towering cliffs of the mountain of Archimedes seemed to rush at our upturning bow. The great dark crater-mouth slid under our hull. But we cleared it; the maw of blackness slid down and away; the whole lunar world tilted down and dwindled as we mounted again into the starlight.
Minutes passed while we mounted. Above our upstanding bow was a new drama. The suddenly-released Grantline ships, almost level with the ten Wandl vessels when the ray vanished, turned sidewise. The poised Wandl craft, devoid of velocity, could not pick up the ray to escape now. Grantline, for those minutes, ignored the frantically flung discs; it was a desperate encounter, all at close quarters. We saw the spitting, puffing lights and the silent turmoil, hidden presently by the spreading clouds of luminous fog.
Then out of it came drifting the wreckage. We plunged through an end of the glowing fog, encountered nothing but two triumphant Venus vessels. With them we mounted into the upper starlight.
This was the end of the battle. The victorious Grantline ships one by one came lunging up: only twelve of them now. No Wandl vessels were left.
The great spreading cloud drifted down like a shroud to hide the wreckage, drifted and settled to the lunar surface, a great, radiant area of fog, gleaming in the Earthlight.
20
There is very little more, pertinent to this narrative, that I need add of the events on Earth, Venus, and Mars during this momentous summer. The main facts are history now: the wild storms, the damage done by outraged nature and the panic among the people—all of it has been detailed as public news. The strange light-beams planted by Wandl in Greater New York, Grebhar, and Ferrok-Shahn have not yet burned themselves away. But they are lessening and scientists say that they will soon be gone.