be exactly as before. The cleared-away
underbrush was replaced. Nothing was in any way changed from the
normal in that space upon a mad world. But there was a tiny movement
and Tommy saw a Ragged Man. He was lying prone upon the earth. He
seemed either to hear or see something, because his lips moved as he
spoke to another invisible man beside him, and his expression of
malevolent joy was horrible.

Tommy swung the tube about. Nothing.... But suddenly he saw
swiftly-moving winkings of sunlight from the edge of the tree-fern
forest. Something was moving in there, moving with lightning swiftness
along the fifteen-foot roadway of solid aluminum. It drew nearer, and
more near....

* * * * *

The carefully camouflaged ambuscade was fully focussed and Tommy was
watching tensely when the thing happened.

He saw glitterings through the tree-fronds come to a smoothly
decelerated stop. There was a pause; and suddenly the underbrush fell
flat. As if a single hand had smitten it, it wavered, drooped, and lay
prone. The golden weapon was exposed, with its brawny and horribly
grinning attendant. For one-half a split second Tommy saw the wheeled
thing in which half a dozen men of the Golden City were riding. It was
graceful and stream-lined and glittering. There was a platform on
which the steel sphere would have been mounted for carrying away.

But then there was a sudden intolerable light as the men of the Golden
City reached swiftly for peculiar weapons beside them. The light came
from the crudely mounted weapon of the Ragged Men, and it was an
unbearable actinic glare. For half a second, perhaps, it persisted,
and died away to a red flame which leaped upward and was not.

Then the vehicle from the Golden City was a smoking, twisted ruin.
Four of the six men in it were blasted, blackened crisps. Another
staggered to his feet, struggled to reach a weapon and could not lift
it, and twitched a dagger from his belt and fell forward; and Tommy
could see that his suicide was deliberate.

The last man, alone, was comparatively unharmed by the blast of light.
He swept a pistol-like contrivance into sight. It bore swiftly upon
the now surging, yelling horde of Ragged Men. And one--two--three of
them seemed to scream convulsively before they were trampled under by
the rest.

But suddenly there were a myriad little specks of red all over the
body of the man at bay. The pistol-like thing dropped from h