, despite its struggles and bleatings, the tapir was drawn into
the substance of the monsters, which seemed to fuse together and form
a solid wall of protoplasm in all respects like the agglutination of
bacteria under certain conditions.

Then the beast vanished in the wall, whose agitated churnings alone
gave proof of its existence.

For perhaps ten minutes longer Kay remained hovering above the
clearing. Then the bodies divided, resuming their separate shapes. And
the white bones of the tapir lay in a huddled mass in the open.

Kay went mad. Deliberately he set down his plane, and, hatchet in
hand, advanced upon the sluggish monsters. Shouting wildly, he leaped
into their midst.

The fight that followed was like a nightmare fight. He lopped off the
slow tentacles that sought to envelop him, he slashed the devils into
long ribbons of writhing jelly, slashed until the substance blunted
the ax; wiped it clean and leaped into their midst again, hewing until
he could no longer raise his arm. Then he drew back and surveyed the
scene before him.

It was dreadful enough to drive the last remnants of sanity from his
brain. For every piece that he had cut from the monsters, every
protoplasmic ribbon was reorganizing before his eyes into the
semblance of a new creature. Where there had been a score, there were
now five hundred!

Kay ran back to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face
was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries rang out through the
ether.

* * * * *

The victims were no longer chained to stakes. The Federation, which
always acted with complete secrecy, had gone one better. It had
engaged electrical engineers, kept them housed in secret places,
transported them to Golgotha; and there a vast electrified field had
been established, an open space whose boundaries were marked out by
pillars of electron steel.

Between these pillars ran lines of electric force. To attempt to pass
them meant--not death, for dead boys and girls were spurned by the
devils--but a violent shock that hurled one backward.

On this great plain the hundred thousand victims sat huddled in the
open. Food they had none, for no purpose was to be served by
mitigating their last agonies. No shelter either, for the sight of
buildings might delay the final phase. But high above the doomed there
floated the flag of the Federation, on a lofty pole, a touch of ironic
sentimentality that had comm