the moment they fired I spoke a single word into the telestereo. Instantly our own cruiser and the whole vast fleet behind it slanted sharply upward, while the globe-men craft and their balls of fire passed harmlessly beneath us. And as we swept over them there burned down from our own cruisers the blue de-atomizing ray, striking more than a score of ships in the fleet below and annihilating them instantly. In a moment we had passed them and at once we circled, massed, and then sped back to strike another blow at the enemy fleet, which had also circled and was coming to meet us.

Again the two fleets were racing toward each other, and as they neared each other, rosy fire and blue ray crossed and clashed from fleet to fleet. I saw the flame-balls strike cruisers around and behind us, cruisers that vanished in whirling storms of fire, though fire it could not have been that raged so fiercely there in the airless void. In the other fleet, ship after ship was flashing into blinding blue light and disappearing, as our rays struck them. Then the two fleets had met, had mixed and mingled, so that the battle changed suddenly to myriad individual combats between cruisers, whirling and striking and falling there in the great gulf between the coldly smiling stars, flaring into pink flame or blue light and vanishing from sight.

"They whirled and struck and fell there in the great gulf between the coldly smiling stars."

Toward us flashed an enemy cruiser, but as its rosy flame leapt toward us we veered sharply to one side, while at the same moment there came from the hull beneath me the hiss of released rays. They struck the tail of the other, which had swerved a moment too late, and the next moment it flared a blue-lit wreck, then vanished. But now two enemy cruisers were swooping down on us from above, ramming headlong toward us. There was no time for us to twist aside from that fierce plunge, but before they could loose their flame upon us the blue ray of a ship beyond us stabbed across and struck one of the two, and in the moment that it hovered there, luminous with its own destruction, the other smashed squarely into it and then both had flared and vanished.

As they did so a racing cruiser struck us a glancing blow from beneath and our ship reeled and spun, throwing those of us in the conning-tower violently to one side. When Hal Kur and I scrambled to our feet the pilot lay motionless on the floor, stunned, and at once I leapt to the controls. That moment in which our ship had been pilotless had driven us up above the battle, which lay stretched below us as a mighty field of circling, striking ships, 

 Prev. P 37/43 next