Then I was aware that the aperture at our feet had closed. Over us, the barrage curtain was dissipating, sight and sound coming in to us. The huge ball-shaped conclave room again became visible, the audience crowding its entire inner surface. I suddenly felt Anita's fingers twitching at my sleeve. "Gregg, darling, can you hear me?" "Yes. Be careful." But Molo was gazing up over our heads. The crowd was shifting, bending so that they all seemed gazing at their feet. A dim white radiance, seeming to come from down here somewhere near us, lay in a splotch on a segment of the throng overhead. Molo was watching. I whispered, "All right, Anita. Quick, what is it?" "The great control station is not far from here. Venza and I have been trying to find out where it is exactly." She stopped, evidently fearful of Meka. Then she added: "Gregg, we haven't been guarded very closely; they're not suspicious of us." "Later, Anita. Can't talk now." "No. Watch our chance. Later." I turned toward Molo. "What's that up there?" "The transparent ray is opening the top of the globe." The clanging signal gong had stilled. The audience was hushed and expectant. The white patch of light overhead spread until it encompassed all the top of the globe. The whole area was glowing. The people were white, spectral shapes, transparent! And the top of the globe was transparent; I saw the night sky, with the gleaming reddish stars. It was, in a moment, as though we were staring up at a huge square window orifice cut in the top of the room. A broad vista of cloudless sky and stars was visible. Across it, like a shining sword, was a narrow, opalescent beam. "The Earth-beam which I planted," Molo whispered triumphantly. "Our control station will contact with it now. The first contact!" Earth was below our angle of vision, but the beam from Greater New York, sweeping the sky with the Earth's rotation, was passing now comparatively close to Wandl. There was an expectant moment. Then into the sky leaped another ray, narrow, luridly green. It swung up from Wandl and darted into space. The hissing, agonized electrical scream from it as it burst through the Wandl atmosphere was deafening. I saw it strike the Earth-beam, grip it with a blinding burst of radiance up there in the sky, clinging, pulling against the rotation of the Earth with a lever sixty million miles long. A moment of screaming sound in the atmosphere around us, and that conflict of light in the sky. Then the screaming suddenly stilled. The Wandl beam vanished. The Earth-beam still swept the heavens like a stiff, upstanding sword. But in that moment when Wandl gripped it, the axis of the Earth had been changed a little. The rotation was slowed. By a few minutes, the day and the night on Earth were lengthened. It was the beginning of Earth's desolation. 11 "But when do we eat?" Snap demanded. "Soon," said Molo. "I hope so."