A strange dumbness held us, as we sank slowly downward with our massed space-fliers. Then, as a great whirling light-beam from beneath caught our fliers' descending mass, held us in its glare, other beams were swinging toward us, holding us bathed in a white flood of light as we sank downward. And as we were discovered thus to the vast thronged city beneath, the swarming aircraft above it abruptly shot downward from about us, while the great roaring voice of the city's crowds abruptly ceased as the city saw us. Down through a great silence, the most tense and utter silence surely ever to reign in the mighty city beneath, we dropped, our fliers separating and falling smoothly over the crowds, over the seas of white, upturned faces, falling through that hushed silence toward the roofs of the great buildings beneath, our own toward the roof of the great World Government building. As we shot downward we saw that upon that roof waited now for us a massed and silent crowd, as in the streets below, that had given back to the roof's edges to make way for our own space-flier and those with us to descend. Smoothly I lessened the power of our lower ray, and smoothly we sank downward through the brilliant lights above that roof, until at last our own and the fliers about us had come gently to rest upon it, the throb of our generators ceasing. Then, with the same dense silence reigning outside, Marlin slowly was opening our space-flier's doors, and with Whitely and Randall and me behind him was stepping forth upon the great roof's surface, into the white brilliance of its lights. Hesitatingly, weariedly, with the men of our other fliers gathered now about us, we looked around. Beside us there stood, and around us, the massed members of the World Congress, with the World President with them. Over these silent figures we looked, a little dazedly, and out over the superhumanly brilliant, superhumanly silent city that stretched about us, and then up toward the great constellations as though in reassurance. For they stretched above us as before, as always, Capricorn and Sagittarius and Scorpio and the rest, with Jupiter and Saturn and Mars shining there, and with great Neptune, invisible here to our eyes, and farther still than Neptune its moon-world of Triton hurtling on toward those distant stars. Dazedly, slowly, we looked, up and around us, while still around us that hushed, thick silence held, and then saw that the World President was coming toward us. Across the roof he came toward us from those silent crowds about us, his hands outstretched, his voice unsteady. "Marlin--Randall--Hunt--Whitely!" he said. And then--"You have come back once more--back to the Earth that you and your forces have saved." "We have come back," said Marlin, his voice low, strange. "Have come back with what remains of those forces."