ked over his head with its wicked spit of death. At once his own
ray-gun was up and answering to the spot where the other bolt had
started, and then he was flat on the floor and ceiling toward the wall
opposite.

* * * * *

A high wide panel in the wall had slid open, with only the faint noise
Carse had heard to mark its movement. For just a few seconds it stayed
open. The Hawk covered the last few feet in a desperate rush, but he
reached it too late. It clicked shut in his face, and there was no hold
for his hands when he tried to force it back.

Only a voice showed that someone was on the other side. In familiar,
suave tones it said:

"Carse, I still will take you and Leithgow--alive. It would of course be
idle to ask you to surrender, but that's not necessary, for you're
trapped and can't possibly last another five minutes. I intrude only to
warn you away from my synchronized brains. I will destroy without
compunction anyone who meddles with them."

Dr. Ku's voice dropped away; the last words seemed to have come from
below. Apparently he was descending by a stairway or hidden elevator.

"Without compunction!" Leithgow echoed with a bitter smile.

Carse ordered Friday curtly to watch the panel, then returned to
Leithgow.

"Eliot," he said, "we've got to be quick."

And with his words the delicate, overstrained filament in the tiny
instrument bulb gave out, and the laboratory was plunged into ultimate
blackness....

CHAPTER XII

_Out Under the Dome_

Within the well of darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the
battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a
place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have
come from the fantastic anvils of some giant, malevolent blacksmith.

The Hawk's curt voice cut through imperatively:

"Keep your heads. We'll have a light in a second. Light of a sort."

He threw the switch by the side of the chamber of brains.

Seconds passed, and where was darkness grew a faint glow. The switch had
operated; the current, probably from the device's own batteries, was
there! Quickly and steadily the liquid within the case took on its
self-originating glow, until the midnight laboratory was faintly washed
with the delicate rosy light. The wires emerged in their complexity as
before, and then the brains, all gruesome and naked in their cradles of
unnatural life.

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