In panic haste the last few disks sank down toward the pit and the lightning ceased abruptly. It was as though the desire of the attacking super-people was only to force the atomic invaders back down into their own universe. The last few disks dwindled, diminished, vanished into the pit, into the sand-grain, and the last humming sound ceased. The invaders had been swept from the Earth. Running out from the cabin, Hunter saw that the pit was empty of them, and he shouted aloud.

Abruptly the long narrow shapes of the hulls reappeared above, swooping swiftly down upon the hilltop. And with a sudden sense of nearing peril, Hunter fled down the hillside, sinking to the ground when his stiff limbs could carry him no farther. Above, the black hulls were clustered thickly around the hilltop, and the droning of a machine of some sort reached him, then a sudden sharp tapping of metal on metal.

Within a space of minutes, the hulls suddenly swung up from the summit and hovered momentarily, circling. And from one of their number, beneath the rest, swung suspended a glistening globe of shining metal, a ball some three feet in thickness. Even as the awed Hunter comprehended that the super-people had sealed the sand-grain within that shining metal sphere, from all the gathered hulls above, flash after flash of terrific lightning stabbed down toward the hilltop, with a splitting crash, and beneath Hunter the ground heaved and swayed. He staggered to his feet, glimpsed the edge of a narrow, deep abyss in the hilltop created by that blasting force, then saw the ball of metal whirling down into this abyss, holding within it the atomic world, forever. Again, flashed down the lightning, and beneath him was a gigantic rumbling, a grinding and crashing, as the abyss closed, prisoning the ball within its incalculable depths.

Hunter sank again to the ground, his brain turning dizzily. He saw vaguely the dark hulls sweeping back up toward the zenith, dimly saw one of them that swooped down close above him and hung for a moment as if in curiosity, and from the side of this a score of faces peered down at him, faces not unhuman in shape, but unhuman in the high and untroubled serenity that lay on them, faces that seemed to look down at him with a calm benevolence, an amused but kindly pity.

Then that last hull, too, drove up toward the zenith, and all gathered there, expanding, growing, darkening the skies once more, bringing twilight that deepened into blackness, a blackness that hung for a moment, then broke up, dimmed, vanished.

Standing there on the hillside, Hunter raised tremulous hands toward the sunlit sky, as if in gratitude, as if in prayer.

-8-