died," he went on through clenched teeth, "but they are still here, in spirit, brooding, gloating, like these infernal balls, over the death that is their power to call down. But they won't succeed in their damned plan! No, by God, they won't!"
He stared about, a bit wildly.
"Somewhere among all these damned machines must be one that can be turned against that ball; one that'll open it. . . . Funny if their great science didn't have that power. They hollowed out the balls in the first place, moulded others. Maybe. . . ."
Grimly he searched, prying about in the debris that lay upon the floor, examining each ball that he found, pushing and shoving at each machine he encountered.
But nowhere did he find anything that resembled a tool or weapon or force that would answer his purpose. All of it, it seemed, was for one purpose—to guard the great ball against harm, rather than to destroy it, and to kill all who entered the cavern.
AS he stumbled on in growing terror and realization of his utter helplessness to stop the diabolic swing of that giant pendulum, no sudden death lashed out at him.
He shook a fist into the emptiness.
"At least we did that!" he shouted. "We wrecked your infernal control apparatus that operated these murdering rays and traps!"
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. TICK-TOCK.
Cliff's brain seemed to pulsate in rhythm with the booming noise of the pendulum. It began to permeate his whole body, become the beat of his very heart superseding its natural rhythm, slowing his very life processes to its own deadly pace.
He stumbled on.
Then, suddenly, he came to a rigid halt, his eyes fixed on a looming figure in the gloom. A human form it seemed—a living form.
"Who's that?" Cliff croaked. "Who's there . . . ?"
Suddenly he rushed forward, incredulous hope flooding into his icy brain.
"Val!" he shouted. "You escaped the landslide . . ."
His voice froze in his throat.
It wasn't Val. It was a statue; a metal figure, tall as a man, but not like a man. It wasn't a human figure at all.
He stared with amazement and a growing sense of eerie horror at it.
"My God!" he gasped. "It's a statue of a Martian!"
He approached gingerly, and looked at it closely.
The figure was that of a spindly-legged, pipestem-armed, and barrel-torsoed creature, with a large head and popping eyes. It stood with one large splay hand over what was evidently a three-dimensional representation of the solar system. Cliff recognized the planets, and even saw a tenth planet where he knew the asteroid belt now to be.[1]
From the small ball that indicated Mars, a thin band of gray anilum ran to the tenth planet. And from Mars another ran to Earth.
Cliff's face suffused suddenly with rage.
"So that's it!" he shouted. "You murdering devils have done this damned trick once before. You've already smashed up one planet, and now, even after you're dead, you plan to smash up another—out of a long-forgotten revenge!"
- ↑ Science has long held that a planet once existed between the orbits of Mars and Saturn, where now there is only a belt of asteroids and small bits of rock and metal. By some mysterious catastrophe, it exploded, or was shattered, and through the ages, its bulk spread out thinly until now it forms a vast ring of fragments about the sun in the orbit of the former planet.—Ed.
