dwindled. They charged upon the
attacking robot things. They were unguided, of necessity, but the robot
bombs had to be equipped with proximity fuses. No remote control could
be so accurate as to determine the best moment for detonation at 4,000
miles' distance. So the war rockets had to be devised to explode when
near anything which reflected their probing radar waves. They had to be
designed to be triggered by anything in space.

And the loosed landing-rockets plunged among them.

They did not detonate all at once. That was mathematically impossible.
But no human eye could detect the delay. Four close-packed flares of
pure atomic fire sprang into being between the Platform and Earth. Each
was brighter than the sun. For the fraction of an instant there was no
night where night had fallen on the Earth. For thousands of miles the
Earth glowed brightly.

Then there was a twisting, coiling tumult of incandescent gases, which
were snatched away by nothingness and ceased to be.

Then there were just two things remaining in the void. One was the
great, clumsy, shining Platform, gigantic in size to anything close by.
The other was the small spaceship which had climbed to it and fought for
it and defended it against the bombs from Earth.

The little ship now had a slight motion away from the Platform, due to
the instant's tugging by its rockets before they were released.

It turned about in emptiness. Its steering-rockets spouted smoke. It
began to cancel out its velocity away from the Platform, and to swim
slowly and very carefully toward it.

3

Making actual contact with the platform was not a matter for instruments
and calculations. It had to be done directly--by hand, as it were. Joe
watched out the ports and played the controls of the steering jets with
a nerve-racked precision. His task was not easy.

Before he could return to the point of rendezvous, the blinding sunlight
on the Platform took on a tinge of red. It was the twilight-zone of the
satellite's orbit, when for a time the sunlight that reached it was
light which had passed through Earth's atmosphere and been bent by it
and colored crimson by the dust in Earth's air. It glowed a fiery red,
and the color deepened, and then there was darkness.

They were in Earth's shadow. There were stars to be seen, but no sun.
The Moon was hidden, too. And the Earth was a monstrous, incredible,
abysmal blackness which at this first experience of its appearanc