He felt tingling chills where hair sought to rise, the ice of sudden sweat.
Something checked his heart and breath; something froze his muscles.
Immobility of instinctive terror—old inheritance from some primeval progenitor, which had found safety in keeping quiet.
Useful, perhaps, to a creature too small to do battle and too slow to run away.
But now—deadly!
He had known it was coming.
He had braced himself to meet it.
He would be ruled by his brain, not by age-old instinct-patterns!
A moment it checked him—just a moment.
Then his numbed body responded to desperately urging nerves.
He went on, metal point swinging up before him.
The Medusa had taken full advantage of that small delay.
The black whip of a tentacle, small as his finger, but cruelly hard, pitilessly strong, snapped around his neck; it constricted with merciless, suffocating force.
In spite of it, he carried out the lunge.
Fighting down the blinding agony from his throat, he completed, with every atom of weight and strength behind it, the forward rush, the upward swing.
The point reached the eye, ripped through its transparent outer coat, plunged deep into the sinister purple well of it, between the fringes of black membrane.
A pendulous blob of clear jelly burst out, a quick rush of purple-black blood; and the great socket was sunken, sightless, more than ever hideous.
Abruptly increasing its fearful pressure on his larynx, the choking tentacle hurled him forward with a violence that almost snapped his vertebrae, flung him dazed and blind against the metal floor.
With a dogged will that ignored danger and physical pain, he clung to consciousness; he clung to his weapon.
Even before he could see he was scrambling back to his feet, dimly aware of the blows of Hal Samdu’s club—great soft thuds against boneless, palpitating flesh.
His sight came back.
He saw the giant, head and shoulders towering from a very mass of black and angry serpents, shining bronze with sweat of agony and effort, muscles knotting as he swung the metal mace.
He saw Jay Kalam lunge, as he had lunged, to drive his point deep into a purple eye.
Saw him instantly wrapped in ferocious black whips, that squeezed his body and twisted it and flung it savagely against the floor.
Then he staggered forward again.
Black ropes caught his knees before he came in thrusting distance, tripped him.
They snatched him aloft with resistless strength, whirled him up to dash him down again.
A huge, malevolent purple eye came before him, as he was flung up—one of the two that remained to the creature.
It was too far to reach with a lunge.
But he threw his weapon, hurled it deep into the shining target with a twisting swing of his whole body, a long sweep of his free arm.
The serpent dropped him to tug at the spear.
On hands and knees he sprawled beside Jay Kalam, who was still motionless, groaning, weapon at his side.
John Star snatched it as he got to his feet, straightening fairly underneath the creature, surrounded by agonized appendages.
On the under surface of the hemisphere, a circle of green quivering flesh, he saw a curious organ.
A circular area three feet wide, slightly bulging, that glowed with soft golden iridescence.
The light wavered, pulsed rhythmically, with the regular palpitations of the slimy flesh.
With the quick intuition that it must be vital, he thrust at it.
Sensing his attack, the creature fought to avoid it.
Hal Samdu, dazed, was flung down at his feet.
Black serpents struck.
A rope whipped about his waist, tightened fiercely.
The same weapon that he had flung into the great eye was now grasped in thin coils; it flailed at him, struck his head with a blinding agony.
He drove on; his point pierced the golden, shimmering circle. The yellow light went out of it at once. And the Medusa fell, a soft mountain of quaking flesh.
Only by a desperate, sidewise fling did he get his body from beneath it hi time; even so it caught his legs.
The glowing organ, he was later sure, must have been the agency of its remarkable locomotion, perhaps emitting some radiant force that lifted and propelled it; perhaps giving it a grasp, hi some manner yet inexplicable, upon the curvature of space itself.
Half under it he lay for a while, unable to extricate himself.
Still the creature was not completely dead; the dying serpents writhed about him in aimless agony.
It was Hal Samdu who reeled back to his feet to end the battle with a few mighty blows of his club, and then dragged John Star from beneath.
A moment they stood gazing at that quivering mound of slimy greenish protoplasm, tall as Hal Samdu’s head, the yet-twitching tentacles sprawling away from the edge of it, three sightless eyes staring horribly.
Utterly hideous as it was, both of them were moved by a contrary impulse of pity for its manifest agony.