As I cried the words, Marlin was giving swift orders through the mouthpiece before him, and then, even as our own few hundred fliers suddenly slowed their speed and halted, the great swarm of dots ahead had rushed up beside and around us, had taken form around us as the thousands of space-fliers of our great fleet, falling instantly into their regular formation and confronting thus the Neptunian cylinders that had been so hotly pursuing us! Those Neptunians were too late to halt their cylinder-fliers as we faced them thus so suddenly in force, our five thousand fliers opposed to theirs, hardly half our number, but they swerved as they saw us, swerved upward and attempted to race above us, raking us with their weapon-rays of concentrated force! Before they could do so, however, Marlin had uttered another order and our fleet had shot up to meet them, so that in the next moment, Earth and Neptunian craft had rushed together in their two respective fleets, there beside mighty Saturn! As the two great fleets neared each other there crossed and flashed from one to the other innumerable slender rays of concentrated force, and space-flier and cylinder-flier were being clove through and annihilated by those slicing rays as they neared one another! Almost it seemed that we must crash straight into the oncoming Neptunian cylinders, the whole firmament for the moment ahead of us being full of their onrushing mass. I saw openings in those oncoming cylinders from which gleamed light, looked inside and there as one sees things in a dream were the many disk-bodied Neptunians calmly manipulating the controls as their great mass of cylinders shot toward our greater mass of space-fliers. Cylinders and space-fliers were being annihilated in that moment by scores by the slender rays that drove across the closing gap between the fleets, and then just as we seemed on the point of crashing dead into their oncoming cylinders they had shot their propulsion-rays sidewise, had swerved aside and were rushing with our own great fleet, which had instantly swerved with them, through the void!