Off to one side three of our dark stars had seized another double star, this one of huge dimensions, and were dragging it toward a great green sun. And further in, one of our forces had got hold of an aged red sun that was almost too big for it to handle, and was tugging it slowly toward its doom. All around us this stupendous process of wreckage was going on and we were part of it. Space inside that galaxy seemed filled with booming dark stars and suns being dragged to flaming death. I glimpsed some of the thirty-nine of our force assigned to that duty seizing our stolen suns and towing them toward outer space. From the worlds of the suns we were destroying came clouds of flying-mechanisms rushing to attack us. But the giant beam-batteries installed on our dark stars blasted them out of space as they came near. And still our smashing of suns went on. Jhul Din and Korus Kan yelled with exultation as we towed still another sun to collision and doom. I saw Lacq Larus' dark star some distance away rapidly stripping the worlds from a sun and towing them into another sun. Then Korus Kan cried out, pointed. "Look--the dark stars of the machines!" I made out dim, huge shapes rushing toward us across that galaxy. "The machines' dark stars!" Through the wild wreckage of crashing and flaring suns and worlds, nineteen dark stars were bearing down on us. They were the dark stars with which the machines had gone across space to steal our suns. Now they were rushing to battle us! The scene that followed was beyond description. The machines meant to stop our wrecking activities at any cost to themselves and they drove their dark stars straight toward our own. A half-dozen of them crashed into that many of our dark stars in the first rush. As they collided, dark star and dark star blazed up in hot new life. Again and again they rushed at us headlong, as we dragged and wrecked their suns. They never hesitated to collide with us. They fought with magnificent, mindless courage to stop our wrecking activities. But at last the last of them was gone, though more than twenty of our own dark stars had been destroyed in the collisions that had ensued when the machines rammed them. All space around us now seemed filled with the wild flare of collided suns. "All dark stars retreat back into space!" came Lacq Larus' order. "Our work here is finished." "Are all our own suns retrieved?" I asked him on the space-phone. "Yes, our other dark stars towed them out into space and they're all clear." Quickly I turned my dark star and sent it booming with the others after Lacq Larus, out of that ravaged galaxy. Outside in space waited the thirty-nine dark stars that had retrieved our thirty-nine stolen suns. "We got them all back!" cried Jhul Din. "Didn't I tell you that we would, that nothing could beat the Patrol?" "Head toward our own galaxy," Lacq Larus ordered. "Keep at half-speed, as those of us towing suns can't go so fast."