There was, at last, a louder click.
He sighed again and raised his face against the bars.
Then he shook his head and whispered hastily:
“Life’s sake—let me down!”
“You can’t open it?” asked John Star, anxiously.
“Ah, lad, so still you doubt?” he breathed, sadly.
“The price a man must pay for a precious spark of genius!
There was never a lock designed that Giles Habibula couldn’t open.
Though many an ambitious locksmith has tried, life knows!”
“Then it is open?”
“Ah, yes.
The bolts just went back.
The grate is unlocked.
But I didn’t open it.”
“Why———”
“Because that fearful flying monster is waiting up there in the hall.
Hanging still over a mortal queer contraption on a tripod of black metal.
Its evil purple eyes would see any move we make.”
“Tripod?” shrilled Eric Ulnar, voice edged with a new panic of hysteria.
“Tripod?
That’s the machine they use for communication.
They’ve brought it again, to make me get the secret from Aladoree.
They’ll kill us all when she tells!”
21 The Horror in the Hall
“Lift me,” said John Star, and Hal Samdu’s great hands swung him up.
Through the square metal bars of the grating, he could see the walls and ceiling of the vast hall, too wide and too high for the scale of human needs.
Made all of the dead-black alloy, it was illuminated by little green, shining spheres strung along the middle of the ceiling.
The Medusa was in view, hanging over the cell and a little to one side.
A bulging, enormous hemisphere of greenish flesh, slimy, half transparent, slowly throbbing.
Ovoid, foot-long purple eyes, protruding a little—hypnotic and evil.
Black tentacles dangling, like the Gorgon’s serpent-locks.
Beside it was the tripod mechanism.
Three heavy, spike-pointed legs, supporting a small cabinet, from which hung cables fastened to little objects that must have been electrodes and microphone, for picking up Eric’s voice and the telepathic vibrations of the Medusae.
At a sign, the giant lowered him.
“There’s a chance,” he whispered. “If there are no others in sight —and if we’re quick enough.”
He told what he had seen, outlined his plan.
Jay Kalam nodded grave approval.
In quick, breathless whispers, they discussed the details, down to the smallest movement.
Then Jay Kalam gave the word, and Hal Samdu swung John Star up again.
This time he seized the grating, slid it swiftly and noiselessly back, hi a moment was on his feet in the hall above.
Without the loss of an instant he leaped toward the tripod.
Jay Kalam meanwhile came through the opening after him, catapulted by the arms of the giant, and helped Hal Samdu to follow.
An instant after the grating opened, the three stood beside it, working with savage haste to dismember the tripod.
Even so, the guarding Medusa had already moved.
The green dome of it swept swiftly toward them, thin black appendages whipping out like angry snakes.
Hal Samdu wrenched apart the communicator.
One heavy, sharp-pointed leg he thrust to John Star, another to Jay Kalam.
The third, with the heavy black case still fastened to it, he brandished like a great metal mace.
Holding the pointed leg like a pike, John Star lunged at a purple eye.
Instinctive terror smote him, the same numbing fear that had struck him twice before from the luminous Gorgon-eyes, the touching off of an age-old response to elemental horror.