she was a shambles where the
cutting beam from the ground had torn part of her heart out. Still I
fought her. There was no retreat from this last raid, nor did I wish
any. There was a madness in us--a blood-lust as hot and demanding as
ever our lust for gold and treasure might have been.

I lashed the face of the fortress with the _Hound's_ forward tubes,
frantically, filled with a hateful anguish. I felt my ship losing way,
twisting and seeking rest on the jagged ground below, and thinking he
had deserted us, I cursed Merril in an ecstasy of blind fury.

Again and again the _Hound_ was hit. I knew then that Merril's plan had
been madness, a last gesture of defiance to the new age of unity among
men. The _Hound_ fell at last, spitting fire and gall in a futile dance
of death.

She struck on a high plateau, grinding into the pumice, rolling with
macabre abandon across the face of the high tableland. Then at last she
was still, hissing and groaning fitfully as she died, her buccaneering
days gone forever.

I donned a suit and staggered, half dazed, out into the lunar night. A
half-dozen men and women from the crew had survived the impact and they
stood by the wreckage, faces under the plastic helmets turned skyward.
They were one and all stunned and bleeding from the violence of the
_Hound's_ end, but they looked neither back nor around them. Their eyes
were filled with the insane glory of the drama being enacted in the sky.

The _Arrow_ had returned. She lanced down out of the night like a spear
of flame, vengeful and deadly. Straight into the mouth of the screaming
guns she dove, death spilling from her tubes. She bathed the Moon Base
in fire, searing the men within--Russian and American alike--into the
brotherhood of death.

Miraculously, she pulled up out of her encircling net of flame. We
watched in openmouthed wonder as she reached with sobbing heart for the
sky just once again--and then, failing, crippled and dying, she hung
above the crater's rim, framed with deadly beams from below, but radiant
in her own right--gleaming in the light of the sun.

This was defeat. We knew it as we stood by the tangled pile of steelite
that had been the _Hound_ and watched the _Arrow_ die. But nothing in
this life that I have lived ever told me so grandly that the Wall Decade
was ended--and our life of buccaneering with it--as the thing that
happened next.

The _Arrow's_ valve opened and a tiny figure stepped out--into spa