Then Mita was rushing. Drake thinks he remembers seeing a tail streaming out behind it. A tail, like a comet, as though by its fall it were turning incandescent and leaving a stream of glowing star-dust. Or perhaps with its rapid fall, its atmosphere was leaving it--dust-laden air streaming off into space where the dust caught the sunlight and glowed. There is no one to say. A fall of millions of miles. It was that far, to Mita. I can fancy, in those last hours, the blazing heat withering everything upon the planet's surface. Its ten million inhabitants--save those few Drake had helped to rescue--I can think that long before the end, they were dead; shriveled, fallen in the heat. Smothered, choked by the gasses which must have polluted what little atmosphere was left. Drake saw the end. The planet plunged. Fell like a plummet at the last and struck the blazing surface of its sun. There was a flash; a leaping, extra spurt of flame for just a moment in the sun's corona. Then the sun blazed alone. What had been Mita was fused and gone. Non-existent! From the window Drake turned shudderingly away. He had seen the end of a world. CHAPTER XXV _In the Campfire Light_ There were some forty thousand people on the Togarite ship, adventuring out upon the conquest of the earth. A few hundred men, who were the Togarite leaders. I think there were perhaps six or eight hundred of these in all. They were experienced with the drugs, and constituted Togaro's active army. Not very many for the conquest of all the nations of our earth. Yet enough! I realized it as I contemplated what they could do. Togaro was planning carefully. There were thousands of other men on this ship--Mitans who had joined his cause. He could easily have trained them. But he was wise enough to realize that the diabolical power of the drugs needed always to be kept under his close control. He could handle his six or eight hundred trusted men; a larger army might have been awkward. There were several hundred giants aboard the ship now. The rest of the horde was in a tiny size. They had no drugs. They were men--but there were women and children also. I could imagine that all the renegades of Togaro's world were assembled here, eager with the lust of conquest of an earth they had never seen. They swarmed the vehicle now. They were as small as I. Fortunately none came to this cabin where Dianne was closely watched, and where I was lurking. If they had come, being so small, they would doubtless have discovered me. I did not dare leave the cabin; nor did I find, during all the voyage which lasted what seemed twenty-four hours perhaps, an opportunity of again communicating with Dianne. I need not detail this outward voyage. I saw many strange things through that cabin window. The reverse of the inward trip. Diminishing, shrinking space. The stars becoming so small that they flared about us like a rain of sparks.