As Whitely voiced that last mad cry we glanced back through the windows of the flier even as they whirled about us, even as our flier and all the thousands of space-fliers of our great fleet whirled madly in toward huge Saturn looming ahead, and we saw that even as he had cried out, there, behind us, hanging motionless in space and only visible to us for a moment, hung a great mass of cylinder-fliers! Half our own great fleet in number they seemed, those massed Neptunian cylinders, and midmost among them were a score of greater cylinders of immense size, far larger than any of the others, that were grouped closely together and from openings in which there was coming toward us a pale force-ray of immense size, visible only as it issued from those greater cylinders! And that ray it was, as was plain even in that instant, that was pushing our fleet with colossal power in toward its death in great Saturn's maze of rings and moons! The Neptunians had come out with those great ray-generators, those greater cylinders, and with a portion of their thousands of cylinder-fliers, and had waited for us in space to the right of Saturn, knowing well that our own escape meant a great attack upon them, an effort to halt their great doom-ray! They had awaited us there and when we had come between them and Saturn, never suspecting their presence, they had loosed upon us this forceful ray that was now driving us swiftly in to death! "An ambush!" I cried. "An ambush in space--the Neptunians are pushing us in to Saturn--our fleet can't live for minutes then!" [Illustration: _An ambush in space! They were being pushed into Saturn._] "Try to bring our flier out of it--up out of their ray's push, Hunt!" Marlin shouted to me, and for a moment I worked frenziedly at the controls before me, but the rays I shot forward to push against Saturn, to hold us back or push us to either side were powerless against the vast pushing ray from behind! Larger and larger great ringed Saturn loomed ahead as our disorganized fleet shot on at awful speed toward it, pushed by the vast ray, and but minutes remained before we would have crashed to death in all our fliers against the mighty planet and its whirling rings and moons! The end of our fleet and the end of Earth's hope, crashed to annihilation by the Neptunian ambush that had been laid for us here in space!