e
to meet.

"Our munitions factories may build larger guns, but can they reach the
heights at which these monster ships of space will lie, with any faint
probability of inflicting damage? It is doubtful.

"Our aircraft is less than useless; its very name condemns it as
inept. Craft of the air!--and we have to war against space ships which
can rise beyond the thin envelope of gas that encircles the earth.

"The world is doomed--utterly and finally doomed; it is the end of
humankind; slavery to a conquering race at the very best, unless--

"Let us face the facts fairly. It is war--war to the death--between
the inhabitants of this world and of that other. We are men. What they
are God alone can say. But they are creatures of mind as are we; what
they have done, we may do.

"There is our only hope. It is vain, perhaps--preposterous in its
assumption--but our sole and only hope. We must meet the enemy and
defeat him, and we must do it on his own ground. To destroy their
fleet we must penetrate space; to silence their deadly bombardment we
must go out into space as they have done, reach their distant world
as they have reached ours, and conquer as we would have been
conquered.

"It is a tenuous hope, but our only one. Let our men of mundane
warfare do their best--it will be useless. But if there be one spark
of God-given genius in the world that can point the way to victory,
let those in authority turn no deaf ear.

"It is a battle now of minds, and the best minds will win. Humanity--all
humankind--is facing the end. In less than one year and a half we must
succeed--or perish. And unless we conquer finally and decisively, the story
of man in the history of the universe will be a tale that is told, a record
of life in a book that is ended--closed--and forgotten through all
eternity."

CHAPTER VII

A breath of a lethal gas shot from the flying ship had made Captain
Blake as helpless as if every muscle were frozen hard, and he had got
it only lightly, mixed with the saving blast of oxygen. His heart had
gone on, and his breathing, though it became shallow, did not cease;
he was even able to turn his eyes. But to the men in the observatory
room the gas from the weapons of the attacking force came as a
devastating, choking cloud that struck them senseless as if with a
blow. Lieutenant McGuire hardly heard the sound of his own pistol
before unconsciousness took him.

It was death for the men who were left--for them