Then, as abruptly as the passing of an ocean wave, the roaring furnace in space was passed. The swampers and coners that fought the rear guard of the flaming death appeared in the tortured sky, scurrying around to wipe out the isolated trailers that the passage of the holocaust had left behind. Another squadron came out of the blackness, a group from a distant sector that plunged past the planet and hit the flame from the rear. Steve circled the field of horror again and Wrightwood, his face pressed against the viewplate, watched the arrival of three more squadrons that hit Sanaron, formed a plate-to-plate shield while fighting for position, and established their protection for the next planet with a matter of seconds to spare. One streamer leaked through a crevasse in the hastily-made shield, and the inside of the paraboloid was filled with swampers that fought the flame right to the atmosphere of the planet before it died. And as the sun itself came under attack, the bulk of the racing squadrons came circling in from distant sectors. Men and sentient beings coming prepared to fight a supernova, to stand in there while a sun explodes, fighting space to hold a tenuous barrier in place to save the fragments of humanity that lived on the eight planets of Sanaron. But Sanaron the Sun had mass, and the flaming particles of the erupting space had mass but were discrete. There was a turning in the flame, a coalescence that centered, radially inward, upon the sun that waited for it and attracted it. With stellar mass behind, the flung planes of warped space held well, but the mass of energy, as its volume was, and the gouts and streamers of raw flaming space flattened against the plates and curled along them, creeping around and around. And around and around. "Hold 'em," cried Steve. Wrightwood turned anxiously. "What are they trying to do?" Steve smiled wearily. "We're going to establish a complete globe around Sanaron and hold that raving horror out of the stellar mass." "But--" "The rest--on the outside--will fight it." "And if they fail?" Steve's expression told him. "But Steve--there's ten thousand ships trapped inside of that sphere of raving energy." "Yup." "And they'll--they'll--?" "_They'll?_ You mean _we'll_. Yes. We'll die. But we're not going to die; the Guardians never die...." The sphere of roaring energy closed down on the last avenue of escape. Outside was sheer hell. Below them was the stellar furnace called Sanaron, giver of life and death. Above them was a completed sphere of raw hell trying to drop down and add its raw mass-energy to Sanaron. Somewhere outside raced and circled the rest of the Guardians, swamping the fires of exploding space and trimming down the depth of the energy bit by bit. But doggedly they held, and an hour passed before there came a shout over the radio, a shout barely heard through the overwhelming roar of cosmic static. The sphere had thinned!