And he fought them. There were no witnesses to that battle, none to see the black cruiser plunging on through the cloud of attackers, belching Jove’s lightning, shaking with the vibrations of its murder-madness. For the spaceship was mad, Duncan thought, a relentless, destroying avenger, a dark angel bringing the terror of Armageddon to the Varra. And the energy-beings never paused; their life and their future was in the scales. If Duncan broke through, they were doomed. He must be stopped.

They could not stop him! Almost blind with the agony burning within his brain, Saul Duncan nevertheless hunched over the controls, while the cannons thundered their demoniac message into space. By dozens and hundreds the Varra died, their energy-matrices wrenched and broken by the electronic bolts. Duncan and the ship were one—and both were mad.

He got through. He had to. Nothing could have stopped Saul Duncan, not even the Varra. In the end, the black cruiser raced Sunward, cannons silent, for the Varra were scattered.

Duncan got up wearily. He stood above Andrea’s body, watching the still features, the long lashes that would never rise.

“It’s done,” he said. “Finished. Earth will get the message—”

Earth would get the message. The Varra could not stop the cruiser now, and the radio would continue to send out its signal till the fires of the Sun swallowed the black ship.

Duncan knelt. His legs were weak. The radium, of course. His suit could not protect him from the fatal radiations of a pound of the pure ore. But the stuff had served its purpose. It had kept the Varra at a distance till Duncan could fulfill his vengeance.

And now it would kill him—unless he replaced it in the leaden casket. But even that might not work now.

Duncan shrugged. It was better to die of radium burns than by the power of the Varra.

He would be dead long before then.

But the Varra would be hunted down, ruthlessly slain, their power broken forever. Earth-science would destroy them, as they themselves had slain so many, as they had killed Andrea.

The bellow of the rockets died. The ship held true to its course, plunging on faster and faster toward the sunlit worlds where men knew joy and laughter and happiness. It would go on, to the funeral pyre of the Sun.

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