agged Men had built a fire some
days now past. A fleeing furry thing sped across his feet, running....

* * * * *

Denham looked up. And Evelyn was staring now. She was staring in the
direction of the Golden City. And now what was almost a wave of
animals, all wild and all fleeing, swept across the field of vision of
the dimensoscope. There were gazelles, it seemed--slender-limbed,
graceful animals, at any rate--and there were tiny hoofed things which
might have been eohippi, and then a monstrous armadillo clanked and
rattled past....

Tommy swung the dimensoscope. He gasped. All the animal world was in
flight. The insects had taken to wing. Flying creatures were soaring
upward and streaking through the clear blue sky, and all in the one
direction. And then out of the morass came monstrous shapes;
misshapen, unbelievable reptilian shapes, which fled bellowing
thunderously for the tree-fern forest. They were gigantic, those
things from the morass. They were hideous. They were things out of
nightmares, made into flabby flesh. There were lizards and what might
have been gigantic frogs, save that frogs possess no tails. And there
were long and snaky necks terminating in infinitesimal heads, and vast
palpitating bodies following those impossible small brain-cases, and
long tapering tails that thrashed mightily as the ghastly things fled
bellowing....

And the cause of the mad panic was a slowly moving white curtain of
mist. It was flowing over the marsh, moving with apparent
deliberation, but, as Tommy saw, actually very swiftly. It shimmered
and quivered and moved onward steadily. Its upper surface gleamed with
elusive prismatic colors. It had blotted out the horizon and the
Golden City, and it came onward....

* * * * *

Denham made frantic, despairing gestures toward the dimensoscope. The
thing was coming too fast. There was no time to write. Denham held
high the cord that trailed from the message-bearing missile. He
gesticulated frantically, and raced to the gutted steel globe and
heaved mightily upon it and swung it about so that Tommy saw a great
steel ring set in its side, which had been hidden before. He made more
gestures, urgently, and motioned Evelyn inside.

Tommy struck at his forehead.

"It's poison gas," he muttered. "Revenge for the smashed-up
vehicle.... They knew it by an automatic radio signal, maybe. This is
their way of wiping out t