Down like light we flashed upon them through the black gloom of space, and a wild exhilaration thrilled me through in that moment, as we flew downward. The immense blackness of empty space around us, the far fiery disk of the sun and the bright sparks of Jupiter and Neptune burning inward and outward from us, the vast ringed sphere of Saturn behind us--these seemed to spin slowly around our flier as with its fellows it dove down through the sheer darkness of the void toward the unsuspecting Neptunian cylinders below. Marlin was gripping the control-board's edge, staring downward with the radiophone mouthpiece close before him, Whitely at the other side gazing down with his calm eyes ablaze for once, while Randall grasped tightly, with his face set and stone-like, the two levers of our concentrated force-ray weapon, and while with my own hands I held the controls of the flier's propulsion-rays, and sent it swooping down out of the upper void now upon the Neptunians, even as the hundreds of our fliers around us swooped. Then, as those cylinders loomed greater close beneath us Randall had swung sharply the levers in his hands and as he did so there had emerged from our space-flier, and from all those about us, ray upon ray of concentrated, terrible force, slender and pencil-like rays of pale force, that crashed down with awful cleaving power through the massed cylinders beneath! * * * * * I saw in that whirling instant score upon score of the cylinders below cloven through by those terrific slicing rays, saw a full half of the score of greater cylinders that had been our chief target break up into great fragments as our rays swept through them! For that moment it seemed that below us unharmed and wrecked cylinders were merged together in a wildly-confused mass, fragments of wreckage and disk-bodied Neptunians, slain instantly by the cold of space, and unharmed cylinders whirling together there in a great mass beneath us! In that instant we had stayed our downward rush, almost upon that great mass, had with a repelling ray shot our fliers over and beyond it, and then as we whirled upward once more, as Marlin again uttered a hoarse, swift command, we were leaping back toward the great mass of the Neptunians, leaping back with all in our flier shouting now as we drove toward the remaining greater cylinders to destroy them also!