blast of fire and the fragments of the Russian gunboat raining down lazily, seeking their eternal rest in the pumice of Luna's hidden face.

But they had been warned at the UN Base. The monitor had left one dying shriek in the ether, and the waiting garrison had heard. Merril knew it, and so did I. We moved forward calmly, into the jaws of hell.

The Arrow attacked from ten o'clock, low on the horizon, the Hound from twelve o'clock high. We swept in over the batteries of pulsating projectors, raining down our bombs. The ground shuddered and shook with the fury of exploding uranium and the sky was laced with a net of fiery death. The Hound shrieked her protest as I swung her about for another attack.

There was a sickening swerve and the smell of ozone in my ship. Somewhere, deep within her, a woman screamed and I felt the deck under me give as one of the questing beams from the fortress below cut into the hull. Airtight doors slammed throughout the wounded vessel, and I drove her to the attack again, hard. The last of the bombs clattered out of the vents, sending mushrooms of pumice miles into the black sky. One battery of guns below fell silent.

The Arrow vanished into the night above and as suddenly reappeared, her forward tubes spewing red fire onto the Base below. Then Merril pulled her up again and disappeared among the pale stars.

The Hound's hurt was mortal, I could feel her dying under my hands, and tears streaked my face. Below decks, 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 space. I