There were scenes down there in the burning town--where half an hour before more than fifteen thousand people had been living--scenes which now I do not like to remember. They filled us at the time only with triumph--for the memory of the Red Madness was too vivid upon us. No quarter to be given here! We had determined upon it--all four hundred of us--when we had planned our desperate assault which was to win salvation for our world, or bring death to all of us. No quarter here! A nest of vermin and we were stamping it out. But Freddie suddenly flung off his glasses; with his hood pushed back, I saw that his face was pallid, and wet with sweat. "Peter, fly higher! I'm done--I can't do it any more! By God, there are women and children down there! I've been--shooting them down--" I headed into a climb. Dan tried to use his phone to order the others to stop. But the phone seemed permanently dead. And then Davis and Robinson's plane abruptly appeared below us. Its red beam sprang downward! Under its crimson light the ground was turning blank! The burning village; the wrecked and burning vehicles; the panic-stricken people left still alive; the dead bodies now strewn everywhere about--all melting, vanishing into nothingness. Dan with a growling curse had fumbled with his phone and then cast it aside. Perhaps Davis and Robinson, sitting grimly behind their crimson projector, steeling their hearts with memory of the Red Madness, with memory, too, of their fathers, and with no desire save to protect their world--perhaps they were right in doing what they did. It is not for me to judge. We climbed, and for a long time I did not again look down. When I did, the yellow-red glare of the conflagration had vanished. A circular ten-mile spread of blank, dead-gray ground lay beneath us. Over it, some of our planes were circling low, with white searchlights examining it. Vacancy complete--where so short a time before had been the most diabolical enemy, the greatest menace which ever had assailed our earth! CHAPTER XXII PEACE ON EARTH It is common knowledge now how the great purple star departed as inscrutably as it had come. Throughout those concluding months of 1957, it steadily faded until at last it was gone. The Wanderer! It is out there now, wandering somewhere among the stars. With our imaginations we may follow it, but no way else. It has left the name we gave it written large across the most tragic pages of our history--but itself is only a memory. It would be superfluous for me to recount familiar world events as the old order of day and night, the old progression of the seasons gradually returned. By September, 1957, astronomers had announced that the earth's axis was swinging back to its normal inclination. It reached there, they told us, in June, '58.