In the roaring chaos of pyrotechnic glare what was left of our Midges swooped to the attack. With the rocket-streams at last righting my whirling body, head down I plummeted. The glare from above revealed Curtmann's men far more plainly now. Everywhere the men were staggering. In the cart some of them had fallen, but others were still erect, frantically working the projectors and stabbing with the hand heat-flashes. Our Midges were among them now, desperate fluttering little figures, stabbing at their faces. On the ground some of the staggering men were trying to get into the forest underbrush. I plummeted toward a group of them. I hit the ground in the midst of a staggering group, with a thump that all but knocked the breath from me. Two of the men staggered at me. I was unarmed. My fist knocked one down, and I gripped the other as he half fell upon me. He was still clutching his flash-gun. I seized it, knocked him away and rose again into the roaring tumult of the air. "Art! You got a gun? So did I." Jim was here with me; side by side we rose. I saw the cart directly underneath me. His figure painted lurid, the desperate Curtmann was still erect. Almost the last one now. And I saw that he was struggling with a projector which had not yet been in use. A tiny figure flapped against my face. Little Meeta. She gripped my shoulder, clung, and her tiny voice gasped in my ear. "That weapon Curtmann has--the big molecule-melter--very long-range--the Forest City." With a burst of numbing horror I understood it. This projector would cut the forest and the ground into a leprous molten swath, out to the Forest City itself. I plummeted down, with Meeta still clinging desperately to my neck. Curtmann saw me coming. With a wild oath he dropped the projector and fired at me with a hand-flash. It missed. There was just a second when I leveled off, heading horizontally at him. The glare was on his sweat-bathed face, contorted with his lust; but I saw a look of despairing terror there as my flash drilled him and he fell as I swooped close over him. We rose at last, high into the starlight. So pitifully few of us, gathering in a little broken, circling group. Beneath us now there was only a lurid red-yellow fire-pit of molten bubbling rocks where the forest glade had been. Then the heavy turgid smoke and gas-fumes settled upon it like a shroud. Almost silently we struggled back through the starlight to the Forest City. Jim and Venta and little Meeta were here with me, but our little Midges were struggling to keep aloft. Dozens of them were clustering upon Jim and Venta and me. Their tiny, gasping voices were horrible. And we were the victors! It came to me then that surely whatever has been said and written of the futility of human killing, can never adequately picture it. * * * * *