er him.

His mind reconstructed the mine ahead. He recollected that when the
lead of this mine had petered out, the owners had begun to sink the
shaft deeper into the earth before abandoning the mine. This meant that
the foot of the shaft, with the addition of an encroaching twenty feet
of the southern gallery, was deeper by some several yards than the
floor of the tunnel in which he stood. Here was the logical place to
set the gas tube, nose pointed ahead.

With trembling fingers he loosened the screwed-in nose of the tube with
a wrench. A slight hiss told of the deadly gas's escape. It would
inevitably flow towards the shaft, drawn by the slight suction of
machinery, following the easiest direction of expansion. Now Talbot's
work was done, and if he had immediately retreated all would have been
well, but the weird light fascinated him. Here he was, one man in the
bowels of earth pitting his strength, his ingenuity against something
incredible, unbelievable. Beings from an atomic universe, from a world
buried within the atom; beings attacking his own earth with uncanny
methods of destruction. Oh, it was impossible, absurd, but he must look
at them, he must see.

Scarcely daring to breathe, he squirmed, he crawled, and suddenly he
saw. He was looking down into an underground crypt flooded with
brilliant light. That crypt had been altered out of all recognition,
its greater expanse of roof supported with massive pillars, the light
screened away from the shaft. But it was not all this which riveted his
staring eyes. No--it was the machines; strange, twisted things,
glowing, pulsing, and--in the light of his knowledge--menacing and
sinister.

Talbot gasped. Almost at once he observed the birds, twelve of them,
two standing in front of what appeared to be a great square of polished
crystal, wearing metal caps and goggles, heads cocked forward intently.
The others also perched in front of odd machines like graven images.
That was the uncanny thing about the birds: they appeared to be doing
nothing. Only the occasional jerk of a head, the filming of a hard
golden eye, gave them a semblance of life. But, none the less, there
could be no mistaking the fact that they were the guiding, the
directing geniuses back of all the pulsing, throbbing mechanisms.

Half mesmerized by the sight, forgetful of time and place, Talbot
leaned forward in awe. There was a great funnel, a shallow cabinet, and
out of the cabinet poured an in