Down and down--and then as I shot our space-flier down foremost of our mass of fliers through that wild tornado of deadly rays, I saw the great pit's opening looming full beneath us, the giant pale beam coming up from that opening, the twenty vital control-boxes set at equal intervals around its walls! Toward one of those control-boxes our own flier was whirling beneath my hands, and then Randall drove out like light our piercing weapon-rays toward that control-box, clove through and wrecked it instantly! But it was but one of twenty, and in the next instant our space-fliers, unable longer to withstand that terrific fire of rays from the gathering domed forts around the pit, were staggering upward, none other of our fliers having progressed as far down as ours, and none other of the twenty control-boxes being destroyed! And as our space-fliers reeled thus upward, unable to reach the control-boxes in the pit against the awful fire of the gathered domed forts about it, we saw that more than a hundred of our fliers had fallen beneath the terrific fire of rays from the forts in our mad rush downward! "Those twenty control-boxes!" Marlin was crying. "We've got to destroy every one before the sun-ray will halt!" "But we can't with these giant moving forts against us!" Whitely cried. "They're wiping us out--they will have destroyed us in minutes!" "We'll hold it to the end, then!" Marlin shouted. "We've fought our way out through the solar system to this great ray, and unless we halt it now it means death for the solar system in a score more days! Down again to the attack!" And down--down--down--like striking, rushing meteors our hundreds of space-fliers shot, to one side of the giant beam, down with the great domed forts beneath swiftly flashing over Triton's roof to mass beneath us at the pit's side. Through the little window-openings in those forts we saw the disk-bodied Neptunians inside, and knew that beneath the great roof of Triton also were swarming the millions upon countless millions of all the Neptunian races, all the disk-bodied monsters in their great compartment-city, who, with this great ray, were turning our sun faster and faster to divide in a score more days and doom the solar system! And with a desperation born of that thought we shot down once more, down with the hell of rays from the great domed forts again raging up around us and taking toll of our fliers as we shot over them, curving back upward once more, and stabbing again toward the control-boxes in the pit's wall our weapon-rays as we reached that curve's lowest point! But this time, though the great forts took toll again of scores of our fliers as we shot down over them and up again, over the pit and up again, our rays were so imperfectly aimed, that no control-box was destroyed this time!