ssed no power to harm him. The tentacle swept aside, and did not
try to bar him, while he sent his will crashing against that brightly
gleaming cube. "Into the aircar! We enter with you!"

The cube vanished instantly, and it seemed to Sarka that invisible
hands caught at his feet, lifting him up through the trap-door in the
belly of the aircar, up and inside. The door swung shut, and in the
forward end of the vast aircar gleamed the cube which had obeyed his
command!

* * * * *

Sarka sent one thought careening outward from the aircar, a command to
the cubes which stood watch beneath the other aircars.

"Obey the Radiant People, and through them, _me_!"

The light of the cube made the interior of the aircar as light as day,
and Sarka was struck at once with another phenomenon. He could see
through the sides of the car in any direction.

And what he saw filled him with a sudden fear!

Out of the crater poured myriads of the Gnomes, and up the sides of it
came myriads of the gleaming cubes, all racing toward the cars.

"Get back! Get back!" he commanded the Gnomes and the cubes.

At the same time he issued his commands to the cube within his own
car, and to the cubes which by now were inside the other aircars,
realizing that the cubes themselves were the motive power of the
aircars--and that his will was the will of these individual cubes.

"Fly at once! Fly outward at top speed toward the Earth!"

Instantly, as though a single signal had started all the cars, a dozen
aircars rose majestically from the crater, while Sarka studied the
Gnomes and the cubes in turmoil on the rim. He noted then, a strange
circumstance: that when he commanded the Gnomes and the pursuing cubes
to keep back, they hesitated, dazedly, as though they did not know
whether to advance or to retreat; that when he merely watched them,
they came on.

He laughed aloud at this measuring of mental swords with Luar, and
with Dalis. For he could sense the conflict very plainly. She
commanded the Gnomes and the cubes to attack, he commanded them to
retreat, and they remained undecided, like people drawn between two
extremities, and uncertain which direction to take.

Upward, side by side now, floated the aircars of the Moon, and in the
forepeak of each, one of the gleaming cubes, like--like
anti-gravitational ovoids of the Moon! At the fast falling rim of the
crater boiled the Gnomes and the cubes, stirring and tum