ded. The air was thick with the odor of raw blood and pungent with
ozone. They had fought their way down perhaps two hundred feet of the
stairway, and due to its curve they could see neither top nor bottom.

"I'm stuck!" Tolto muttered.

"Bad?" Sime edged to his side, stepping, in the darkness, on the body
of the man who had succeeded in delivering that sword-stroke before
Tolto's own blade had cleft him. He felt the edges of the wound, but
in the darkness could not tell how serious it was.

"Feel sick? Any retching?" he croaked anxiously.

"Tolto's all right," the giant assured him. "I just said I was stuck."

Sime managed to make a hurried bandage out of the slashed fragment of
Tolto's blouse, and again they resumed their descent. Strangely, their
enemies further up made no move to attack, although there were many
left alive.

Sime laid his hand on Tolto's arm.

"Something wrong here. There's somebody at the bottom of the steps,
and the fellows above want to give him elbow room. Well, we'll soon
see!"

* * * * *

They crawled up a short distance, began to haul inert bodies down,
dragging them as far as the last curve, until they had formed a
barricade of nineteen or twenty of their late enemies. It was
unpleasant work, but justified by following events.

"Can you just see the loom of it?" Sime asked.

"Yes."

"Watch!"

Sime felt about until he found a small fragment broken from the stone
steps. Keeping well within the shelter of the convex wall, he crept
toward the bend.

"Dig your fingers into a joint and hold on," he instructed Tolto,
locating a crack for himself. Then he tossed the fragment gently over
the barricade of bodies.

There was the click of its fall, and a moment later things seemed to
turn around. Clinging like leeches to the wall, the two men resisted
the warped gravitational drag that would have flung them down upon
their waiting enemies below. They seemed to be hanging in a well.
Sime had a confused impression of piled-up bodies hurtling down--down.

Thereafter everything was normal again, and they were running down the
normal steps. Both had swords in their hands now, and within a hundred
feet they were upon the "gravitorser" gun. It was a rather cumbersome
weapon, comprising a great deal of electrical apparatus, with a
D-solenoid surmounting, whose object was to twist the normal lines of
gravitation. It was intended for large-scale operations in th