streets
black with staring people, a radiance whose grandeur and terrific
implication of cosmic power brought beauty and the fear of doom into the
heavens!

* * * * *

Those paths could not be explained by all the physicists and all the
astronomers in the Five World Federation. They possessed the properties
of light, but they were rigid bands like a tube or a solid pillar from
which only the faintest of rays escaped; and they completely shut off
the heavens behind them. They had, moreover, singular properties which
could not be described, as if a new force were embodied in them.

Hour after hour humanity watched the spectacular progress of the dark
star, watched those mysterious and threatening paths of light that
flowed from the invader. When dawn came, it brought only a great fear
and the oppression of impending disaster.

In the early morning, Phobar slept. When he awoke, he felt refreshed and
decided to take a short walk in the familiar and peaceful light of day.
He never took that walk. He opened the door on a kind of dim and reddish
twilight. Not a cloud hung in the sky, but the sun shone feebly with a
dull red glow, and the skies were dull and somber, as if the sun were
dying as scientists had predicted it eventually would.

Phobar stared at the dull heavens in a daze, at the foreboding
atmosphere and the livid sun that burned faintly as through a smoke
curtain. Then the truth flashed on him--it was the terrible path of fire
from the dark star! By what means he could not guess, by what appalling
control of immense and inconceivable forces he could not even imagine,
the dark star was sucking light and perhaps more than light from the
sun!

* * * * *

Phobar turned and shut the door. The world had seen its last dawn. If
the purpose of the dark star was destruction, none of the planets could
offer much opposition, for no weapon of theirs was effective beyond a
few thousand miles range at most--and the dark star could span millions.
If the invader passed on, its havoc would be only a trifle smaller, for
it had already destroyed two members of the solar system and was now
striking at its most vital part. Without the sun, life would die, but
even with the sun the planets must rearrange themselves because of the
destruction of balance.

Even he could hardly grasp the vast and abysmal catastrophe that without
warning had swept from space. How could