In the depths of the cavern at Anglese City, Fahn sat in his room of mirrors. A metal band about his head held a receiver to his ear. A black mouthpiece hung against his chest and by lowering his head he could bring his lips to it. Rogers was at his side. The mirrors in every part of the room were lighted, giving the viewpoints of the coast towers near the mouth of the channel. In several of the mirrored scenes, over the distant water and in the air, black specks were visible; the enemy and Fahn's army above them. But these were not the vital crystal mirrors. A small one--a foot square perhaps--stood on the table before Fahn. He and Rogers were gazing into it intently. The mirror was connected with a tiny lens strapped to Loto's forehead; it gave Loto's viewpoint of the battle, showed the scene exactly as Loto saw it. Fahn was silent; a stern, anxious old man, with all his science around him, sitting in seclusion to direct this warfare upon which the fate of his people depended. Occasionally he would murmur something to Rogers, and the other man would speak into a mouthpiece--an order for the operator of the broadcasted aerial voices, controlled from another part of the cavern. Then throughout the island, cheering words to the Bas would resound, news of the progress of the battle. But Fahn's gaze never wavered from the little mirror. George's and Mogruud's divisions descended upon the leading barge. The barge spat forth its bolts, but it could discharge only one or two against a hundred of the tiny ones from its attackers. Looking down, from Loto's viewpoint overhead, the barge was assailed on every side by the pencils of electrical flame. Figures dropped, inert, into the water; others, wounded, wavered upward. The wire cage over the barge was sizzling and crackling; the swimming dogs, a dozen or more of them, crumpled in the water and were dragged forward in their harness by the others. The engagement had lasted no more than a minute when the air about the barge was suddenly plunged into blackness. Everything down there was blotted out--a patch of solid ink on the sea. The Noth vessel had exploded a bomb whose etheric vibration absorbed all light over a radius of five hundred feet. Fahn smiled grimly. The darkness there would pass presently. His own leaders, Loto, George, Mogruud and the two girls, had the same equipment. Each of them could discharge such a bomb; a puff of darkness, cloaking everything around them in temporary invisibility. Fahn heard his own orders roared by Loto. The attacking figures came up. But there were not two hundred of them now: about twenty lay down there in the water; a dozen more were wounded; a few were moving slowly homeward through the air.