“Of all the pickles!” exclaimed Roverton. “Are we going to submit to this?”

“No.” said Volmar quietly, as he drew his automatic, and motioned the others to follow suit. All of them obeyed; and each man covered one of the surgeons with the muzzle of his gun. The Tloongs had seen these weapons before, but had given them only a cursory and perhaps rather contemptuous inspection; and Volmar and his crew had carried them at all times.

As the surgeons paused, doubtful of the meaning of this action and uncertain of the course of action to take, the Koum entered with a body-guard of cyclopean-headed beings chosen from among the most renowned savants of the red world. At the sight of the levelled automatics, and the hesitating surgeons, he uttered a few words of inquiry. Then, learning of the earthlings’ refusal, he eyed Volmar and the others with a contemplative stare such as a god might turn upon a group of rebellious insects.

“Proceed,” he commanded the surgeons.

Bearing in their metal members fuming censer-like vessels filled with a powerful anesthetic drug, the surgeons approached the earth-men. Their cold, mechanical movements, their two sets of eyes that were all burning with a fiery phosphorescence, betrayed no emotion whatever. One of them stepped up to Volmar, and holding his vaporing vessel close to the Captain’s face, reached for the fastenings of the respirative mask.

A moment more, and the mask would have been torn away, and Volmar would have been forced to inhale the anesthetic fumes of censer. But thrusting his automatic into one of the surgeon’s glowing eyes, Volmar pulled the trigger. There was a crash as of splintered crystal, louder and higher than the weapon’s report, and the surgeon staggered back and fell motionless to the floor. A red fluid, brighter and thinner than blood, oozed from his shattered eye, bearing fragments of mineral together with clotted shreds of a greyish-green substance that must have been his brain.

The other surgeons hesitated when they saw their companion fall. The Koum, however, strode forward with no sign or fear of dubiety, lifting a long tubular instrument with three mouths, which he aimed at Volmar, who, in turn, had covered the great diamond eye of the Koum with his automatic. What would have happened next is doubtful; but at this moment there occurred a singular interruption, in the form of a high, strident, ever-mounting clangor which seemed to come from all sides and to fill the whole edifice with its disquieting vibration. It came from certain gongs at the heart of the building, which were operable from any planetary distance by force-waves. At this sound, which was clearly an alarm, and had a plainly understood import, the Koum and all the other Tloongs appeared to forget their designs on the earthlings, and rushed toward the outer galleries and balconies, uttering a babel of shrill, disordered cries. From certain words that they were able to distinguish, Volmar and his men inferred that a tremendous outbreak of the subterranean organisms had taken place, and that there had been more than one serious cataclysm due to the continued underground erosion.

Unheeded by any of the Tloongs, who had been thrown into a veritable pandemonium, the earth-men sought their way toward the terrace-like balcony on which they had alighted from the air-platform.

“If we can seize the platform,” said Volmar, “we may have a chance of ultimate escape. By the way, who knows anything about the mechanism of the platform?”

“Lead me to it,” returned Jasper. “I’ve seen how they run those vessels; and I’m sure I could operate one of them.”

VII

The corridors through which they passed were interminable; and a wild and swiftly-growing confusion prevailed everywhere. The whole building was full of dissonant clangors and outcries. The gongs of alarm continued to ring, punctuating the pandemonium with their intolerable stridors; and ever and anon, above the voices of the Tloongs, there was the crash of some falling table or overturned retort or other chemical vessel. Some of the glowing air-suspended spheres by which the rooms and corridors were lit had gone out, or had fallen to the floor, where they burned fiercely, and seemed to ignite the very stone with a gradually spreading flame. The Tloongs were seemingly paralyzed by panic; and they ran to and fro in an aimless, frenzied manner, as if they had forgotten all the lore and wisdom of aeonian life.

As the earthlings neared the balcony, they heard a roar that drowned all other noises—a roar that was like the continual detonation of inestimable tons of some high explosive. It came from the direction of the purple sea. The building began to tremble with the vibration of the sound, and also with what was unmistakably a terrific earthquake. Rents appeared in the floors and ceilings, the pillars twisted like reeds, the walls reeled in a convulsion that never ceased but became more and more violent. The floor of the last corridors was pitching downward at a perilous degree, when Volmar and his men rushed through them and reached the balcony.

Here they beheld an appalling sight. The sea below had disappeared, leaving a rent and fissured bottom of bare, slimy stone at a vertiginous depth. And all the cliffs were riven in tremendous chasms extending through the landscape as far as the eye could see, to the very horizon; and from out the chasms a horde of monsters was pouring endlessly, bubbling up from the depths of the planet in noisome and irrepressible ebullition, to overflow the sea-bottom, to climb up the cliffs, to inundate the plain and to surround the laboratory and the other edifices of the red world. As Volmar and his men looked down from the slanting verge, they saw the seething of the loathly shapeless organisms far below, where they had formed a solid mass about the base of the huge tower.

Many of the Tloongs were rushing up and down; and only a small minority seemed to have enough presence of mind to man the various air-platforms that stood about the balcony. The others were gazing stupidly, or with loud violin-like wails, on the ruin of their world. Luckily the platform used by the earth-men and their conductors was still in its place. Unhindered by any of the Tloongs, the men ran toward it, mounted it, and Jasper seized the lever by which the mechanism worked.

Even as he pulled the lever, another throng of the metal beings entered the balcony, pursued by a horde of swarming monsters, some of which must have penetrated the building from caverns below its nether vaults. The Koum was among the throng, and was grappling in a death-struggle with three of the organisms, who had fastened upon him with their multiple mouths. Others of the Tloongs went down beneath similar assaults as they reached the open air; and a medley of metallic moans and shrieks from inner rooms and hallways testified to the downfall of hundreds more.

One of the monsters had wrapped itself around the Koum’s enormous head, and had muffled his whole face from sight. He staggered blindly, and fell in a mad convulsion of clattering limbs; and his fall loosened one of the monster’s folds for an instant, revealing a large irregular hole that had been eaten in his forehead. A rill of ruby liquid was gushing forth and a mass of bluish and deeply convoluted brain-matter was projecting from the hole beneath the suction of the organism, whose multiple mouths were dripping with dissolved metal as well as the sustenance it had drawn from within. Then, as the Koum lay still, the fold returned, covering his entire head like a massive caul, and was re-applied to its frightful labor.

All this had happened in a few moments, while the platform was rising from the balcony. The helpless disorder of the Tloongs, and the diabolical speed and expedition shown by their assailants, were like something beheld in an evil delirium, and were strangely unreal at the time. Afterwards, the men were to recall the sight with profound terror, and were often to awake sweating from dreams in which its unexampled horrors were repeated.