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“The plane!” Darl shouted. “Back to the plane, it’s our only chance.”

The gyrocopter that could carry them aloft, out of the rout, was fifty feet away. They fought through to it and reached it just as the last faint charge flashed from Mac’s tube. Jim was at the controls, Darl smashed his useless projector into the chattering face of a dwarf that had leaped on the Scot’s shoulders and dragged Angus into the cockpit.

The overloaded flier zoomed to the landing at the lofty air-lock’s manhole and hovered as Darl and Angus slipped home the hooks that held it to the platform. “The spy has the Dome,” Jim grunted, “but by God, he hasn’t got us. We’ll be safe in the lock up here, till help comes. And then–“

“Safe is it?” Angus broke in. “Mon, luik ye what those bairns fra hell are up to the noo.”

A yellow tide was rising about the base of each of the latticed steel arches that vaulted to the Earthmen’s refuge. On every side the dwarfs were climbing, were swarming up the walls in numbers so great that they concealed the metal beneath. Up, up they came, slowly but surely. And right in the center of the plain, ankle-deep in the torn fragments of the murdered Venusians, was the Martian, directing the attack.

* * * * *

Jim groaned. “I might’ve known he’d never let us get away. It’s slow bells for us, I guess. Hey, where’s Darl?”

“Gone weethin. No, guid losh, he’s here!”

Darl appeared, his features pale and drawn, carrying an armful of ray-guns. “Grab these,” he snapped. “We’re not licked yet.”

“Licked, hell!” Jim’s roar reverberated. “We’ve just begun to fight!” The Scot was silent, but the battle light shone in his eyes. In another moment the Terrestrians were kneeling, were raking the roof girders as the mounting Mercurians came within range. Each had two ray-guns in his hands, and a little pile of extra tubes beside him. They fought silently, wasting not a single blast.

Six white rays flamed through the misty, humid air, and striking the teeming girders, swept them clean. A greasy, horrible smoke cloud gathered along the shell and drifted slowly down, till the concrete blocks from which the steel framework sprang were hidden in a black pall. Fighters, these three, true ITA men who had left memories of their battle-prowess on more than one wild planet! Gaunt-bodied demi-gods of war, they hurled crackling bolts of destruction from their perch at the Dome top. By hundreds, by thousands, the Mercurian pigmies vanished in dark vapor, or plunged, blackened corpses, into the fog that billowed below.

One by one the tubes were discharged and tossed down at the seething mob. The heaped weapons dwindled, and still the climbing hordes renewed themselves, came on in endless mounting streams to sure destruction. The open tunnel vomited forth a torrent of gibbering dwarfs. From the uttermost burrows of the planet the pigmies were flooding in at the call of the Martian who stood scatheless beneath and lashed them on with the strange dominance he held over them. The Earthmen fought on, endlessly, till they were sick of killing, nauseated with slaughter. And still the snouted, red-eyed imps came on.

* * * * *

Jim snatched up his last two ray-guns. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that Darl was using but one, the other, his last, was thrust into the chief’s belt. He wondered at this, but a new spurt of yellow above the oily fog wiped the question from his lips. “Swallow that, you filthy lice! Hope you like the way it tastes!” His guns spouted death.