--but also they had a reckoning to collect from the
thing if they could....

Denny glanced down at his hand, from which slow red drops still oozed.

At their approach, the guarding ring shifted so that the soldier whose
head was still bulging with the brown liquid, faced them. The two men
stopped, warily. They must draw the sting from that monster before they
dared try to come closer.

Jim feinted, leaping in and to one side. The guard turned with him,
moved forward a bit as though to discharge a brown stream at him--but
held its fire. Jim moved still closer, then leaped crabwise to one side
as the brain behind the guards telepathed in a panic for its blind
minion to release some of its ammunition. The flood missed Jim only by
inches.

Denny took his turn at gambling with death. He shouted ringingly, and
ran a dozen steps straight at the monster that was the principal menace.
At the last moment he flung himself aside as Jim had done--but this time
the stream was not to be drawn.

Still most of the deadly liquid was left; the thing's head bulged with
it. And no real move could be made till that head was somehow emptied.

"Your spear!" panted Denny, who was armed only with the three-foot club
which was all that was left of the spear that had entered the acid bag.

Jim nodded. As he had done under the acid vat, he drew it back for a
throw--and shot it forward with all the power of his magnificent
shoulders.

The glittering length of steel slashed into the flabby, living syringe.
A fountain of molasseslike liquid gushed out.

* * * * *

The move had not been elaborately reasoned out; it had been a natural;
almost instinctive one, simply a blow struck for the purpose of draining
the dread reservoir of its sticky contents. But the results--as logical
and inevitable as they were astounding and unforeseen--were such that
the move could not have been wiser had all the gods of war conspired to
help the two men with shrewd advice.

The searching spear-point had evidently found the brain behind the
syringe of the thing; for it reared in an agony that could only have
been that of approaching death, and ran amuck.

No longer did the ruling brain that crouched behind it have the power to
guide its movements, it seemed. The telepathic communications had been
snapped with that crashing spear-point. It charged blindly, undirected,
in havoc-wreaking circles. And in an instant the whole aspect o