The interceptors were too small to mount the equipment for such defense tactics. Their only value lay in maneuverability. Slashing across the lanes of the battleships, their beams could cross the radiator pattern in unpredictable courses. The laws of chance were sometimes with them and their Atom Streams struck an opening directly. Regardless of the speed of closing the hiatus, such a coincidence was sufficient to destroy the ship. And so Underwood and his companions, watching, saw one of their great battleships explode in a nova of atomic fire as such a hit was scored upon it. * * * * * The interceptor itself was fired an instant later by the concentrated fire of the two adjacent battleships, but its loss was negligible to the enemy. The interceptors were expendable, expendable for now another score were seen leaving the rim of Earth and taking up the pursuit of the fleet. But it was not their approach that caused the hearts of the men aboard the _Lavoisier_ to quail. Behind them, slowly and ponderously, rose a terrible fleet of fifty dreadnaughts with vast firepower. "What's our orbital radius at present?" Underwood demanded abruptly of the navigator. "Sixty thousand." "Take it, Mason," Underwood said. "I'm going down." The impact of that moment hit them all, though they had been trying to anticipate it since they had first known that it would come. It was not their regard and friendship for Underwood, who might presently die before their eyes. It was not their own almost extinction before the fire of the invincible fleet rising to do battle. It was that this moment would decide the course of man's history. Everything depended upon a single strange weapon snatched from the hands of a forgotten people in a little eddy of civilization, whose sole purpose in existence might have been to carry this weapon through time to this moment. And only one of them could wield that weapon, while the others stood by, neither knowing the progress of that conflict nor able to assist. * * * * * Underwood sat down in the deep chair that would hold his body restfully while his _abasic_ senses swept Earthward to envelop and crush the anachronism that he had turned upon civilization. It was more than just, more than ironic, he thought. It was his high privilege to wipe out some of the guilt that he knew he could never smother or rationalize out of his mind--the guilt of having been the one to bring Demarzule back to life. Of them all in that control room, only Illia uttered a sound, and hers was a half audible cry choked back before it was fully spoken. He lay apparently relaxed with eyes closed in the huge chair in the control room of the _Lavoisier_, but the essence, the force that was Delmar Underwood, was sixty thousand miles away, hovering over the force shell dome that hid the Carlson Museum.