Then there was Jaska beside Sarka, her face fearful, as he pointed off across the gloomy expanse of the Moon.
From all sides, from all directions, from other craters which these two had not even seen, came scores and hundreds of the monster cars!
They had beaten Luar and Dalis but for a moment, then! Now, at her command, the countless other aircars were coming in to head them off, to fight them back to the surface of the Moon. It would be a race against time, and against death. But of at least a dozen of the aircars, Sarka was master, and he did not fear the issue. That strange exaltation which the white flames had given him filled him with a confidence that nothing could shake.
He shot a thought at the gleaming cube in the forepeak.
"Faster! Faster! There is no limit to your speed! Faster! Faster! Even faster!"
Instantly the Moon seemed literally to drop away beneath the dozen aircars which carried the Radiant People, while the aircars of Luar and of Dalis fell hopelessly behind.
Sure that they would win in this race now, since he was just beginning to realize the vastness of his power--the all-encompassing, all-mastering power of the human mind and will, which the white flames of the Moon had made almost god-like--Sarka turned his eyes toward a coldly gleaming sphere in the star-spangled heavens ahead.
It was the Earth, and it seemed ringed in flames! From its edges there seemed to shoot long streamers of yellow or golden flames, which broke into sunlike pinwheels of radiance at their tips. Something, there on the precious Earth, was decidedly wrong!
Instantly, telepathically, he sought to gain mental contact with his father.
"Father, we are coming!" he said, across those countless miles. "What is happening?"
For a full minute there was no answer. Then it came, feeble, broken, weighted with fear; but it was a thought-message, unmistakably, of Sarka the Second.
"Hurry, son! Hurry! For Dalis has indeed betrayed us! I could not maintain control of the Earth with the Beryls, for some strange catastrophe has destroyed all the Beryls in the area Dalis ruled! The shifting of positions of the Earth and the Moon has so altered the relative effects of the pull of gravity exerted by the planets that Mars has been brought into dangerous proximity to us and is already so close that her ether-lights are playing over us! Surely you must be able to see them! We have received messages, but as yet I have only been partially able to decode them! What I have decoded, however, presages catastrophe--for I am sure that Mars and the Moon are in confederation, and that the Moon-people have deliberately forced us into contact with her ally!"