The air about us seemed filled in that moment with a single wildly-swirling mass of cylinders and space-fliers, grappling with each other there in countless individual combats inextricably intermixed, their weapon-rays going out in destruction through the craft that whirled upon them, their propulsion-rays driving the ships about them crazily to right and left! With inconceivable fury cylinders and fliers soared and fought and fell above great Neptune's roof, the air filled with falling wreckage, our great battle reaching now an undreamed-of phase of intensity, as gleaming cylinders and faceted ball-like space-fliers were annihilated alike by hundreds! That giant merged combat of the two fleets had in minutes taken toll of half the force of each, and I wondered dimly even as I whirled the flier up and back through the wild, annihilating battle how either men of Earth or disk-bodied Neptunians could cling to a battle of such suicidal nature! Then suddenly from Marlin had come a hoarse exclamation, and I saw in that instant all the Neptunian cylinders intermixed with our space-fliers rising upward, as though in answer to a single command! "Up!" cried Marlin. "The Neptunians are over us! They're going to----!" But before he could finish the sentence, before our space-fliers could whirl upward in answer to his command, from the Neptunian cylinders massed above us had shot down upon us innumerable powerful propulsion-rays, rays that struck scores, hundreds, of our space-fliers and drove them down with terrific force to crash against the metal roof of Neptune beneath us! They were repeating the maneuver by which we four had escaped from our pursuers over Neptune weeks before, were driving our fliers down to crashing death in hordes! Instantly as Marlin shouted into the order-mouthpiece, our fliers leaped forward, to escape from that death that smote us from above, but as we drove forward in our column formations again, they went on above us, were with their powerful propulsion-rays driving us down to death in scores even as with those rays they prevented us from rising to meet them! We were being quickly destroyed now, and as we saw it, as our column flashed on with the Neptunian cylinders massing in another column above and driving our fliers down by scores, we saw that not much longer could that unequal battle continue! Then abruptly Marlin pointed ahead and downward to Neptune's mighty roof beneath us, was crying an order to us and the fliers behind and about us. "That opening!" he cried. "Down through it--down beneath the roof! It's our one chance to escape them!"