h's ears so strongly that by now it seemed
almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches
tightened with hot insistency, lifting the rebellious offering into
Thag's monstrous, indescribable bulk.

But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuver
his hand into a position from which he could blast that undulant tree
trunk into nothingness. He knew intuitively the futility of firing up
into Thag's imponderable mass. Thag was not of the world he knew; the
flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the
twilight. But at the Tree's root, where Thag's essential being merged
from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, he
should be vulnerable if he were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the
tight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought
to free his hand.

The music that had rung so long in his ears was changing as the branches
lifted him higher, losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a
hum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in intensity as the limbs
drew him upward into Thag's monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing
mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force
thundering through every atom of his body, he twisted his hand in one
last, convulsive effort, and fired.

He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below.
It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunk
quiver convulsively from the very roots, and the whole fabulous Tree
shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver
up the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closing
round his body shrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thundering
silence.

Then without a moment's warning the world exploded. So instantaneously
did all this happen that the gun-blast's roar had not yet echoed into
silence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear exploded
outward from the very center of his own being. Before the awful power of
it everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself falling....

* * * * *

A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith by
degrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upward
into the unwinking eye of Mars' racing nearer moon. He lay there
blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse
him. Then he sat up