Marlin's eyes were gleaming with excitement as we saw the Neptunians thus falling beside us under our concentrated fire of rays, and Randall and Whitely and I were almost beside ourselves with exultation. Faster were falling the Neptunian cylinders beneath our rain of rays, the rays of their farther cylinders being held from us by their own cylinders in their fatal formation. Already, as we thundered through the mists of mighty Neptune and low over its gleaming surface, we saw that the Neptunian cylinders had been reduced by that deadly fire of ours to hardly more than three thousand, to hardly more than our own fleet of fliers, which had itself lost its hundreds in that vast running battle. As our rays tore into and through their shaken mass hundreds upon hundreds of their cylinders had been cloven through, had been reduced to whirling wreckage, and we had evened the odds in our raging battle at last! Even as we cried out in triumph, the Neptunians must have seen that to continue in that running fight longer was suicidal for them. They could not change formation during that flight without exposing themselves to worse peril, so in desperation they did a completely unexpected thing. Their enormous mass of cylinders, battered out of its half-circle formation by our terrific fire of rays, suddenly swerved in toward our own fleet as the two great armadas rushed forward above Neptune, and then that Neptunian fleet of cylinders had crashed obliquely with immense power into our own space-flier fleet! The next instant it had so merged with it that the two fleets ceased instantly to exist as such and for the moment became one colossal, swaying, reeling mass of cylinders and space-fliers in utter merged confusion, striking and soaring and smashing each other! As that great cylinder-armada crashed thus into our own it had seemed to me that the air all around us was filled in that instant with colliding space-fliers and cylinders, and with a hell of slender pale and deadly concentrated rays that raged thick in whirling death about us! I saw before us two onrushing cylinders, whirled the flier up to avoid that imminent collision, and then as they passed beneath us, saw Randall send our rays driving down and cleaving through them, saw them whirl in wreckage into which a battling cylinder and faceted space-flier had crashed themselves in the next instant! I heard Whitely's shout of alarm in the next split-second, instinctively flung the flier sidewise through the boiling ruck of the battle, just in time to escape a pair of stabbing rays from a cylinder beneath, and then saw those rays stab on up and strike another cylinder and destroy it! And even as I whirled the flier sidewise, Randall was driving our rays to right and left against other cylinders rushing upon us! * * * * *