Frederix was blasted end over end, his bones snapping like matchwood, intolerable pain crushing in on him-- Vibration upon mad vibration. Reverberation of hell thunder. Pain--unutterable, endless voids of swimming pain-- Consciousness remained. Sound--crushing sound. And, at length, silence. * * * * * The man tried to drag his broken, throbbing, bleeding body from beneath the debris of the hangars against which he had been thrown, which had sheltered him from the highest fury of that unleashed cargo of _seedrona_, set aspark by the short circuit caused by the disrupting blast of unnatural lightning, radium transformed into flame. Frederix looked up into the blackness and strained to see beyond it. A faint, almost ironic smile crossed his pain wracked, bleeding lips. Gone, the minions of those who sought to subjugate a system--gone, the deadly cargo which, treated and compressed, would have destroyed the spacestations and laid the World bare to conquest. And, Oh God! at what price to him? _What price, indeed?_ But he, what did he matter? He was only a means to the end. The plot was known now. Back on Earth, here on Mars, in all the other solarian havens of life, the Vrons of Centauri would meet defeat; for Solarians would believe him now with Del Andres by his side. Andres who knew the Vrons of Centauri for the strange, changeable, domineering creatures that they were, Andres who called him friend and in whose great heart only friendship was left--aye, they would believe him well! When he heard the murmuring of rockets out of Kaa, he was thinking many things: of what the strange life form he had come to know by the lowly name of "Monk" had done--truly the workings of something far greater than man striving for universal betterment. He thought of the earnestness, the striving, the sense of honor and glory and all that is good. In essence, what had it been? A consciousness born of the basic fabric of the universe, electricity however strange the form. Something come out of seemingly nowhere to aid a race in its moment of greatest blindness, of greatest need. Come to render a queer, heroic, supernal sacrifice. And now, despite the living, shuddering pain within him, a smile twisted his lips. He was thinking of a little voice whispering a very virile tune as it went down into death. He was thinking that even something akin to a god, in its most serious workings for good, might find time to know laughter. And he was wishing that that intelligence had not been consumed by the blessed flame of martyrdom. He was wondering what aid it might have given in those moments not far hence when the Armada would come blasting out of the void between the stars.