erally to bits
before the storm of bullets began to do real damage. The squabbling
group, casting lots for Evelyn, had a swathe of dead men in its midst
before snarls begun had been completed.

"Again," said Tommy coldly. "Again, Smithers, again!"

* * * * *

And again the little gun roared. The burly bearded man clutched at his
throat--and it was a gory horror. A Thing began to run insanely. It
did not even look human any longer. It stumbled over the leader of the
Ragged Men and died as he had done. The bullets came tumbling over
themselves erratically. They swooped and curved and dispersed
themselves crazily. Spinning as they were, at right angles to their
line of flight, their trajectories were incalculable and their impacts
were grisly.

The little gun fired ten several bursts, aimed in a desperate
cold-bloodedness, before the smell of burnt rubber became suddenly
overpowering and the rasping sound of an electric arc broke through
the rumbling of the crude-oil engine in the back.

Smithers sobbed.

"Burnt out!"

But Tommy waved his hand.

"I think," he said savagely, "that maybe a dozen of them got away.
Evelyn's staggering toward her father. She'll turn him loose. That
prisoner's dead, though. Didn't mean to shoot him, but those bullets
flew wild."

He gave Smithers the eye-piece. Sweat was rolling down his forehead in
great drops. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.

He paced shakenly up and down the laboratory, trying to shut out of
his own sight the things he had seen when the bullets of his own
aiming literally splashed into the living flesh of men. He had seen
Ragged Men disemboweled by those spinning, knifelike projectiles. He
had turned a part of the mad world of that other dimension into a
shambles, and he did not regret it because he had saved Evelyn, but he
wanted to shut out the horror of seeing what he had done.

"But now," he said uncertainly to himself, "they're no better off,
except they've got weapons.... If that man from the Golden City hadn't
been killed...."

* * * * *

He was looking at the magnetic catapult, burned out and useless. His
eyes swung suddenly to the other one. Just a little while since he had
made ready a missile to be thrown through into the other world by
that. It contained snapshots, and diagrams, and it was an attempt to
communicate with the men of the Golden City without any knowledge of
thei