That was enough for me.
“Men!” I spoke softly, but with an intensity that gave me their instant attention, “it’s going to be a fight for life. When I give the signal, make a rush for the entrance by which we came in. I’ll lead the way. Use your pistols, and your bombs if necessary. All right—forward!”
Correy’s great shout rang out after mine, and I flung my menore in the face of the nearest guard. It bounced off as though it had struck a rubber ball. Behind me, one of the men called out sharply; I heard a sharp crunch of bone, and with a pang realized that the Ertak’s log would have at least one death to record.
A dozen tentacles lashed out at me, and I sprayed their owners with pellets from my atomic pistol. The air was filled with the shouts of my men and the whispers of our enemies. All around me I could hear the screaming of ricochets from our pistols. Twice atomic bombs exploded not far away, and the solid rock shook beneath my feet. Something shot by close to my face; an instant later a limp bundle in the blue and silver uniform of our Service struck the rock wall of the cavern, thirty feet away. The strength in those rubbery tentacles was terrible.
The pistols seemed to have but little effect. They wounded, but they did not kill unless the pellet struck the head. Then the victim rolled over, rocking idiotically on its middle.
“In the head, men!” I shouted. “That downs them! And keep the bombs in action. Throw them against the walls of the cavern. Take a chance!”
A ragged cheer went up, and I heard Correy’s voice raised in angry conversation with the enemy:
“You will, eh? There!… Now!… Ah!—right—through—the—eye. That’s—the place!”
A score of times I was grasped and held by the writhing arms of the angry horde whispering all around me. Each time I literally shot the tentacle away with my atomic pistol, leaving the severed end to unwrap itself and drop from my struggling body. The things had no blood in them.
Steadily, we fought our way toward the doorway, out of the cavern, down the passageway, pressed into a compact, sweating mass by the pressure of the eager bodies around us. I have never heard any sound even remotely like the babel of angry, sibilant whispering that beat against the walls and roof of that cavern.
I had saved my own bombs for a specific purpose, and now I unslung them and managed to work them up above my shoulders, one in either hand.
“I’m going to try to blow the entrance clear, men,” I shouted. “The instant I fling the bombs, drop! The fragments will be stopped by the enemy crowding around us. One… two… three… drop!”
The two bombs exploded almost simultaneously. The ground shook, and all over the cavern masses of stone came crashing to the floor. Bits of rock hummed and shrieked over our heads. And—yes! There was a draft of cooler, purer air on our faces. The bombs had done their work.
“One more effort and we’re outside, men,” I called. “The passage is open, and there are only a few of the enemy before us. Ready?”
“Ready!” went up the hoarse shout.
“Then, forward!”
It was easy to give the command, but hard to execute it. We were pressed so hard that only the men on the outside of the group could use their weapons. And our captors were making a terrible, desperate effort to hold us.
Two more of our men were literally torn to pieces before my eyes, but I had the satisfaction of ripping holes in the heads of the creatures whose tentacles had done the beastly work. And in the meantime we were working our way slowly but surely to the entrance.
I glanced up as I dodged out into the open. That soft humming sound was familiar, and properly so. There, at an elevation of less than fifty feet, was the Ertak, with Hendricks standing in the exit, leaning forward at a perilous angle.
“Ahoy the Ertak!” I hailed. “Descend at once!”
“Right, sir!” Hendricks turned to relay the order, and, as the rest of the men burst forth from the cavern, the ship struck the ground before us.
“All hands board ship!” I ordered. “Lively, now.” As many years as I have commanded men, I have never seen an order obeyed with more alacrity.
I was the last man to enter, and as I did so, I turned for a last glance at the enemy.
They could not come through the small opening my bombs had driven in the rock, although they were working desperately to enlarge it. Leaping back and forth between me and the entrance I could see the vague, shadowy figures of the outside slaves, eagerly seeping up the life-giving fumes that escaped from the cavern.
“Your orders, sir?” asked Hendricks anxiously; he was a very young officer, and he had been through a very trying experience.
“Ascend five hundred feet, Mr. Hendricks,” I said thoughtfully. “Directly over this spot. Then I’ll take over.
“It isn’t often,” I added, “that the Service concerns itself with economic conditions. This, however, is one of the exceptions.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hendricks, for the very good reason, I suppose, that that was about all a third officer could say to his commander, under the circumstances.
“Five hundred feet, sir,” said Hendricks.
“Very well,” I nodded, and pressed the attention signal of the non-commissioned officer in charge of the big forward ray projector.
“Ott? Commander Hanson speaking. I have special orders for you.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Direct your ray, narrowed to normal beam and at full intensity, on the spot directly below. Keep the ray motionless, and carry on until further orders. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, sir.” The disintegrator ray generators deepened their purr as I turned away.
“I trust, sir, that I did the right thing in following you with the Ertak?” asked Hendricks. “I was absolutely without precedent, and the circumstances were so mysterious—”
“You handled the situation very well indeed,” I told him. “Had you not been waiting when we fought our way into the open, the nearly invisible things on the outside might have—but you don’t know about them yet.”
Picking up the microphone again, I ordered a pair of searchlights to follow the disintegrator ray, and made my way forward, where I could observe activities through a port.
The ray was boring straight down into a shoulder of a rocky hill, and the bright beams of the searchlights glowed redly with the dust of disintegration. Here and there I could see the shadowy, transparent forms of the creatures that the self-constituted rulers of this world had doomed to a demi-existence, and I smiled grimly to myself. The tables would soon be turned.
For perhaps an hour the ray melted its way into the solid rock, while I stood beside Ott and his crew, watching. Then, down below us, things began to happen.
Little fragments of rock flew up from the shaft the ray had drilled. Jets of black mud leaped into the air. There was a sudden blast from below that rocked the Ertak, and the shaft became a miniature volcano, throwing rocky fragments and mud high into the air.
“Very good, Ott,” I said triumphantly. “Cease action.” As I spoke, the first light of the dawn, unnoticed until now, spread itself over the scene, and we witnessed then one of the strangest scenes that the Universe has ever beheld.
Up to the very edge of that life-giving blast of mineral-laden gas the tenuous creatures came crowding. There were hundreds of them, thousands of them. And they were still coming, crowding closer and closer and closer, a mass of crawling, yellowish shadows against the sombre earth.
Slowly, they began to fill out and darken, as they drew in the fumes that were more than bread and meat and water to us. Where there had been formless shadows, rotund creatures such as we had met in the cavern stood and lashed their tentacles about in a sort of frenzied gladness, and fell back to make room for their brothers.
“It’s a sight to make a man doubt his own eyes, sir,” said Correy, who had come to stand beside me. “Look at
