y shore. It was still daylight. The blurred sun
was winging across the zenith so swiftly that its movement was
visible. Wandl had been suddenly endowed with axial rotation. Even in
these few minutes, the day was past its noon. On the distant mountain
peaks looming above the nearby horizon; it seemed that the sheen of
coming night was mingled with the red sunlight.

Anita and Snap laid Venza on the rocks. I suddenly remembered the two
blobs in the sky behind us, which had seemed to be following. I stood
gazing across the river. The red sky there seemed empty.

"Thank God, she's reviving!" Snap called at me and I joined them.
Venza was stirring. Color was coming into her cheeks. Her lips were
murmuring as though she were talking in her sleep.

Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze fixed on us as we bent over her.
"Why, what's the matter? Where are we? I thought we were in the
tree-tops. Snap, don't look at me like that, dear. I'm all right--only
confused."

She could remember nothing since that gruesome thing bit into her arm,
but the attack of its poison in her veins seemed definitely over. We
sat with her, soothing her, explaining what had happened. And she was
wholly rational. Her strength came back; her mind cleared.

The brief red day came to its close. The sun plunged below the
horizon; the stars winked into being. The red-purple Wandl night
again was here. And now we saw that the whole firmament was swinging,
the rotation made visible.

The darkness leaped around us. Shadows filled the rock hollows. The
caves and recesses of this rocky shore turned black with darkness. And
in the sky now we saw another of those familiar opalescent beams. This
was the one from Mars: we could identify the red disc of the planet.

And then, from the mountains ahead of us but still below our horizon,
the Wandl control station shot its attacking beam upward. Again there
was that conflict in the sky. The axis of Mars was being altered, its
rotation slowed.

We could see now that we were much nearer than before to the control
station. It seemed only about twenty miles ahead of us. The scream
from it was deafening.

The Wandl beam died presently. The electrical scream from the control
station was stilled.

The Earth's axis had been altered. Now Mars; and next would be Venus.
A few more of these gravitational attacks and then the helpless
planets, with rotation checked, would be towed away by Wandl, out into
the deadly cold of int