Slender beams sprang quick to meet us from those ten great domed forts, but though those beams drove crashingly upward upon us in narrow rays of death, it was not toward the domed forts that we were rushing, but toward the twenty control-boxes set in the wall of the giant pit from which this other mighty ray issued! Through the wildly-whirling beams that sliced the air about us we flashed downward, and then as the pit's walls loomed close ahead, as beside us, almost thundered into by us, loomed the pale, gigantic beam, we saw the out-jutting control-boxes full before us, set around the pit's great wall, and the beams of our massed space-fliers were driving thick toward them! _Crash!_--_crash!_--_crash!_--and we were shouting crazily as we saw half the twenty control-boxes smashing inward, annihilated by our first wild rush! And then as we spun around there in the pit, around the giant beam to annihilate the other control-boxes, the rays of the ten domed forts sweeping insanely about us, Whitely cried out hoarsely and pointed away across Triton's metal roof-surface toward the hundred mighty shapes of the great domed forts rushing to the defense of this other ray, rushing to annihilate us! "_The control-boxes!_" Marlin cried. "_The last control-boxes!_" And even as he cried that, even as with their utmost immense speed the hundred colossal domed forts of metal rushed over Triton's metal roof to join with the outnumbered half-score beside us, to annihilate us with one combined mighty blast of their countless rays, our massed space-fliers had whirled around the great pit, around the mighty ray, and were driving toward the remaining control-boxes in its wall with all their weapon-rays stabbing ahead! _Crash!_--_crash!_--and those remaining control-boxes were crumpling, crashing, beneath our rays, with but a single control-box in the wall remaining intact in the next instant, a single one that sufficed still to keep the giant ray beside us going upward, outward, though! And even as we gathered, whirled to rush upon it also, the colossal rushing domed forts had appeared at the pit's edge around and above us, seeming to pause for a split-second before their combined countless rays came down to annihilate us! But in that instant, when the giant domed forts paused above us, Randall had whirled back the ray-switches in his hands, and from our space-flier and from a score more around us in the same instant there had flashed toward that last control-box a converging score or more of driving rays that instantly had crashed through and had annihilated that last control! And as that last control-box of all the giant ray's twenty was thus destroyed, there came what seemed a blinding flash of light at the great ray-mechanism far in the mighty pit beneath us, and then the giant pale force-ray that radiated upward and outward from that mechanism had abruptly snapped out beside us!