In numbers enough to take a whole planet, the Loard-vogh landed on Umbriel and overran it in an hour. Inward they swept to Titan and the Saturnian colonies. Inward they came to overrun Callisto and Ganymede. Downward they dropped to Phobos and Deimos, where they set up vast projectors and hurled the attack upon Mars. Simultaneously they fell upon Venus--a monstrous horde of ships. Systematically they went through the Evening Star taking area after area, and they held Mars in their grip at the same time that Venus fell to their hordes. "God--their numbers," groaned Cliff Lane. "I'd hoped that they might find it tough to hold everything and still hurl fresh equipment into Sol." "They are numberless," said Hotang Lu. The Loard-vogh swept into Terra. Terra, the home of man. Terra, the mighty. Terra, defended as few planets were defended against the legions of Vorgan, Lord of All. Despite the humans on Venus and Mars, they were still colonies compared to the home planet. Knowing that massed energy might hold out, all Solar defenses had been moved to Terra. Let Terra hold out and eventually mankind would recover, expand, and then drive the enemy back. And when the Loard-vogh came to Terra, they found it defended against them. Nowhere on Terra was there a place to land in safety. They took dead Luna easily and hurried to set up a long-range beam. Atomic spheres of unheard-of size reached upward from Terra and Luna sparkled with mighty atomic storms. Whole detachments of the Loard-vogh flamed into incandescence as the super-atomics bit fifty-foot spheres out of the face of Luna, compressed the matter itself, and let it explode. They made a landing in Siberia and the encampment burst with a roar that shook the earth. Overhead they roared, raining down energy that never reached through the upthrust beams. The cities were fortresses that hurled power into the sky, and though the shattered wrecks of the Loard-vogh dropped like rain, none of them reached Earth in large enough pieces to do any damage. The air took on a metallic smell, and ozone fixed out as the stratosphere shimmered in the grip of a torrent of energy beams that crossed and nullified one another. * * * * * Across the face of Terra, the high-power transmission beams hurled energy back and forth. Energy to feed the projectors that fenced with the ships of the Loard-vogh. Beams that ran on sublevel energy and could not be cut.