abruptly slowed, stopped, as they rushed into Triton's atmosphere, and had turned desperately to face us! * * * * * It was a wild, fierce attempt on their part to hold us even to the last from their great ray, and as their three or four hundred cylinders massed so suddenly before us and faced us, our own column was leaping upon them with all the impetus of our thousand and more space-fliers! The next moment cylinder and space-flier were reeling in a wild last struggle there high in Triton's atmosphere, high above the pit of the giant sun-ray, with the mighty pale beam of that ray passing up and out toward the sun and still beside us! Like demons the Neptunians were fighting now, but we were wrought up to the fiercest pitch of battle ourselves, and as Marlin gave his orders, we were swooping upon them with insensate fury, cylinder and space-flier crashing together there above Triton or falling beneath the slicing sweeps of the weapon-rays that again raged thick around us! Faster, ever faster, fell the outnumbered cylinders before our wild attack, until at last but a score were left--a dozen--a half-dozen--and then those, too, were gone, the last of the Neptunians' mighty fleet of cylinders annihilated! And now as from our hovering space-fliers, still over a thousand in number, there came muffled, wild cheers, our eyes were shifting downward, down to the great pit from which the sun-ray sprang, down to the twenty control-boxes in the sides of that pit! "Down to the pit--down to the controls!" Marlin was shouting over the wild uproar in our and the other fliers. "Every one of those control-boxes must be destroyed before we can halt the ray!" "We'll halt the great ray now!" I cried to him, as our space-fliers swooped downward now toward the giant pit of the ray. "We've wiped out their last forces and we can----" "But look--those great domes around the pit below!" It was Whitely's hoarse shout that broke in upon me. "They're great domed forts--_great domed forts guarding the giant sun-ray's pit and controls_!"