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on the run! But one has got through and I'm going after him!"
He swung around to the pilot. The man had overheard and was already bringing the ship around fast. He
zigzagged it through the drift until they broke into Devil's Channel again.
Mason's eyes and Garr's clung to the radar screen. The channel was empty of blips.
"That cruiser's on its way to Ryll Emrys planet! Garr cried,  We've got to catch it."
The ship streaked down the Channel westward, building up to milli-light-speeds on the highest scale of
acceleration. But Mason knew that an Orionid navel cruiser was far faster, and it had a start, and had
Janissar of Orion and V'rann won after all?
They burst out of the Channel, and rushed through open space toward the dying red sun. The radar
showed no ship anywhere and the agony on Garr's face deepened. And then as they raced closer, old
Hoxie pointed a trembling hand and quavered,
"Good God, look at that! Look "
They were all looking, and a cold awe and dread fell upon Mason as he saw a thing no man had ever
seen before.
The dun-colored planet that had been the innermost world had moved out of its orbit during all this time.
It was riding majestically outward in a tangent, and would soon cut across the orbit of the second planet
a little ahead of that second dead world.
A secret of nature had been found by a questing mind, and a power had been unloosed, and now a man
was charioteering a planet. And in front of Mason loomed the terrible foreshadowing of the things to
come when that power should be loosed by the star-kings in galactic war.
"They've already landed! Garr was shouting.  Their ship will be near the tower all batteries ready but
for God's sake don't hit the tower!"
They swooped past the icy second world toward the dun planet that had gone rogue. With a scream the
atmosphere went past them as they decelerated, and then beneath them were the desert and the
crumbling stones and the looming cone with its uplifted metal arms spraying forth the eerie radiance that
controlled the movement of this world.
An Orionid ship was trying to get off the ground a mile from the tower, trying to avoid getting caught
flatfooted. It started to roll as it rose upward, to bring its missile-launching batteries into play in quick
rotation. But it was too late, Garr's ship had already loosed its missiles and the Orionid cruiser was
smothered in bursting flares. The flares died, and only bits of wreckage fell to the ground.
They dropped fast to a landing near the tower, and Mason followed Garr as the big Hydran ran down to
the airlock. He was shouting,
"They'll have men in the tower all hands out!"
They burst out into the cold, searing air, and ran toward the tower. Up there on the flat top of the cone,
in front of the glass-and-metal cube that was Ryll Emrys laboratory, uniformed men ran out and fired
down at them.
The small missiles burst amid them like brilliant, dancing will-of-the-wisps, and men went down in
scorched heaps. Mason had his own gun out and shot upward and so did others. And Orionids fell, up
there.
"No shooting! yelled Garr Atten, in an agony of apprehension.  If Ryll and his machines are destroyed,
we've lost everything!"
They went on up in a run. The airlock door of the cube-shaped laboratory had already been forced open
by the men of Orion and now they could not close it. Garr and Mason and their followers went in with a
rush.
* * * *
The great room was strewn with bodies. The men who had worked for Ryll Emrys here lay dead about
it, and they had not been killed by missiles but by the knives and metal bars that were held by the
uniformed Orionids in the room.
"No shooting! Garr shouted again as they closed in.
Mason had seen that in a far corner of the room an Orionid officer was stooping over Ryll Emrys, who
sat in a corner and did not move.
Trying to reach him, Mason slugged with the barrel of his gun, and felt the blade of a knife graze like hot
iron along his shoulder.
The room, the very focus and shrine of the most super-modern science of the galaxy, was being fought in
with the most primitive of weapons because neither outlaws nor Orionids dared take the chance of
destroying the things around them.
Mason glimpsed Garr going down as a metal bar cracked across the side of his head. The officer had left
Ryll Emrys and was running into the melee, shouting to his men, and without a leader the outlaws were
wavering.
Mason levelled his weapon. He was the one man of them who was not afraid of destroying the machines
around them, who wanted those machines destroyed before they tore the galaxy in twain. He shot, and
shot.
His tiny missiles sent dancing death-stars amid the Orionids, and the uniformed men, unable to stand
before the weapon and forbidden to reply to it in kind, broke and ran for the door.
Mason started out after them and then he saw the Orionids had their hands raised in surrender.
"Take them to the ship and tie them up, Mason told Garr's men.  There comes Hoxie he'll take
charge."
He ran back into the laboratory. He bent first over Garr Atten. The Hydran's skull was tough or he
would have been a dead man. He would be unconscious for a while, but Mason thought he would come
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