Turret-mounted AutoMacs vomited energy into the vortex--and back-thrusting power burned out the feedlines. Torpedoes entered the flaming mass and just disappeared. Tractor beams slid from the coruscating surface and pressor beams found nothing against which to push. A sub-ship plunged against the vortex. It was stripped of its barrier and it floated down, inert, and started the long fall to the hard ground below. Fighting against the vortex with weapons that did no good, and cursing the foul thing all the way, Maynard and the _Orionad_ followed its ponderous course out and out and out to Mephisto III. It spread as it went, and by the time it wrapped its tenuousness about the tiny moon, it was almost gone. But it contained strength enough to blow out the barrier-generator that held Mephisto III invisible from without. The toroid disappeared, and Guy, with misgivings, made inward to land at the base. His fears grew as time went on, for he was not challenged. A swift report gave him some hope, but it came from Mephisto itself, telling him that resistance was at an end in the sector he had just left, and that the fleet, victorious and supreme on Mephisto, was returning to the outer moon. Guy worried. Returning to what? Inspection showed that nothing was harmed--save life. Dead men sat in their places operating instruments, dead men patrolled unseen areas, dead men manned the landing ports. It was a moon of the dead--with every instrument operable. Not a machine was damaged--but no living things remained on Mephisto III. * * * * * Broken with grief, Guy Maynard looked down on the silent face of Senior Aide Joan Forbes. He felt wooden, and it all seemed dreamlike and unreal, but he knew that this was no dream, but cruel reality. Hat in hand, he stood there as if frozen and searched the girl's face as though expecting the closed lips to part in a smile, and the closed eyelids to open before a pair of twinkling eyes. His men knew of the affection there, and they pitied him silently. In neat, geometrically precise rows; seven billion, four hundred million miles from home; on a tiny, almost airless moonlet of an alien planet the hundreds upon hundreds of physically perfect bodies were buried. Not a scar or burn marred them, yet-- The chaplain said: "--from the earth thou camest, and to the earth thou hast returned. And though this earth is far removed from the earth which bore thee and thine, it is thy resting place and home, for in the eyes of God Almighty all places and all planets are His Domain. And though ye travel to the farthest star, yet you will find Him there before thee, and this we know and believe for His Only Begotten Son hath said: 'My Father hath other worlds beside thine.' "And so we consign these erstwhile friends of ours to the depths of the earth, knowing that time and space knows no deterrent to Our Father Almighty; We shall all meet again some day--"