d
other and larger receivers, and through them within days all our
Martian hordes shall have been flashed to earth! Shall have poured out
over it and conquered with our weapons your weak races of
Earth-beings, who cannot stand before us, and whose world you have
delivered at last into our hands!"

For a moment, when the great monster's hissing voice had ceased,
Milton and Randall and Lanier gazed toward it as though petrified, the
whole unearthly scene spinning about them. And then, through the thick
silence, the thin sound of Milton's voice:

"Our world--our earth--delivered to the Martians, and by us! God--no!"

With that last cry of agonized comprehension and horror, Milton did
what surely had never any in the great hall expected, leaped onto the
dais with a single spring toward the Martian Master! Randall heard a
hundred wild hissing cries break from about him, saw the crocodilian
forms of guards and council rushing forward even as he and Lanier
sprang after Milton, and then glimpsed shining tubes levelled from
which brilliant shafts of dazzling crimson light or force were
stabbing toward them!

* * * * *

To Randall the moment that followed was but a split-second flash and
whirl of action. As his earthly muscles took him forward with Lanier
after Milton in a great leap to the dais, he was aware of the
brilliant red rays stabbing behind him closely, and knew that only the
tremendous size of his leap had taken him past them. In the succeeding
instant he was made aware of what he had escaped, for the
hastily-loosed rays struck squarely a group of three or four Martian
guards rushing to the dais from the opposite side, and they vanished
from view with a sharp detonation as though clicked out of existence!

Randall was not to know then, that the red rays were ones that
annihilated matter by neutralizing or damping the matter-vibrations in
the ether. But he did know that no more rays were loosed, for by then
he and Milton and Lanier were on the dais and were wrapped in a
hurricane combat with the guards that had rushed between them and the
Martian Master.

Gleaming fangs--great scaled forms--reaching talons--it was all a wild
phantasmagoria of grotesque forms spinning around him as he struck
with all the power of his earthly muscles and felt crocodilian forms
staggering and going down beneath his frenzied blows. He heard the
roar of an automatic close beside him in the melee as Mil