Bob Star was about to let go the rail he held, to try to reach them, when a sudden, unendurable sickness seized him.
Here, near the planet’s heart, he had no weight.
Directions had no meaning.
His surroundings had begun to spin, dizzily.
At one moment, the blue shaft was horizontal.
The next, it was an inverted pit, and he was clinging precariously to the roof of a vertiginous abyss.
Giles Habibula, beside him, was doubled up again, his moon face greenish, sweat-beaded.
“Jay!” he gasped hoarsely.
“I’m sick—deathly ill!
The wine we found on that asteroid—I think it was poisoned!
I’m dying, Jay.
Dying—”
“Not yet, Giles,” Jay Kalam called.
“We all feel upset, from being without weight.
It is the same as the space-sickness they used to have on the old rocket fliers, before the invention of the gravity cell.
Some people are almost immune, as I am.
Others never become adjusted to it.
“Anyhow, Giles, you must open the lock.
All we have done is useless, unless we get through this door.”
“I can’t do it, Jay!”
The old man was swearing and panting.
“I’m too mortal ill.
The torture of a dying body destroys my concentration.
For life’s sake, Jay—” “You must, Giles. For the keeper of the peace!” Giles Habibula sighed, and bent again to his task. “Ah,” he sobbed, “genius draws a bitter lot—”
Kay Nymidee was still busy over the red metal case.
Now Bob Star heard her utter a little cry of satisfaction.
She held up a dark, opalescent prism, and swiftly explained something to Jay Kalam.
He nodded gravely, and rapidly they began to reassemble the mysterious device.
A dull, coughing explosion drew Bob Star’s eyes to the square mouth of the pit.
Pale smoke had puffed from Hal Samdu’s captured weapon.
Beyond, he saw a white globe approaching.
It came sailing through the air, black belt spinning, crystal eyes glittering, white tentacles sprawling.
In the midst of his consternation, Bob Star found time to wonder briefly if it were all machine, or if it contained a living brain.
He heard its abrupt, hoarse hoot of alarm, close on the explosion.
Hal Samdu fumbled a moment with the golden weapon.
Then he hurled it spinning toward the silver globe, and came plunging down the shaft, to sprawl against the bottom of it. /
“Aye, Jay!” he rumbled apprehensively. “We are discovered.
A horde of the monsters coming.
I destroyed one—but the golden gun would not work again—”
His voice stilled to a terrific vibration that thundered down the shaft.
It was the clang of a huge gong, deep as the note of a hammered planet.
And suddenly, beyond the silver sphere, an alien horde was following into the pit: huge green cones, and red, grotesque giants in golden harness.
Another globe brought up the rear.
They were swimming through the air.
Bob Star shivered to the uproar: the raucous howling of the spheres, the deep, incessant drumming of the cones.
And, above all, the thunder of the gong, like the sobbing in unison of all the bells ever cast, a soul-chilling throb of alarm.
“Hasten, Giles,” urged Jay Kalam.
“Ah, Jay!” begged the old man, frantically.
“Have mercy!”
“You must,” the commander told him soberly. “Or we shall die.”