the Earth. And faint golden
flashes came from the walls and pinnacles of that city. They were
reflections of this planet's monster sun, upon walls and roofs of
plated gold.

"The Golden City," said Tommy heavily. He looked at the horrible marsh
between. His heart sank.

And then there was a sudden screaming ululation nearby. A half-naked
man was running out of sight. Two others danced and capered and yelled
in insane glee, pointing at Tommy and at Evelyn. The running man's
outcry was echoed from far away. Then it was taken up and repeated
here and there in the jungle.

"They saw our tracks near the Tube," snapped Tommy bitterly. "Oh, what
a fool I am! Now they'll ring us in."

He seized Evelyn's hand and began to run. There was a little rise in
the ground a hundred yards away, with a clump of leafy ferns to shade
it. They reached it as other half-naked, wholly mad human forms burst
out of the jungle to yell and caper and make derisive and horrible
gestures at the fugitives.

"Here we fight," said Tommy grimly. "The ground's open, anyhow. We
fight here, and very probably we die here. But first...."

He knelt down and drew the finest of fine beads upon a bearded man who
carried a glittering truncheonlike club which, by the way it was
carried, was more than merely a bludgeon. He pulled the trigger for a
single shot.

The bullet struck the capering Ragged Man fairly in the chest. And it
exploded.

CHAPTER V

_The Fight in the Marsh_

Twice, within the next two hours, the Ragged Men mustered the courage
to charge. They came racing across the semi-solid ooze like the madmen
they were. Their yells and shouts were maniacal howls of blood-lust or
worse. And twice Tommy broke their rush with a savage ruthlessness.
The sub-machine-gun's first magazine was nearly empty. It was an
unhandy weapon for single-shot work but it was loaded with explosive
shells. The second rush he stopped with an automatic pistol. There
were half-naked bodies partly buried in the ooze all the way from the
jungle's edge to within ten yards of the hillock on which he and
Evelyn had taken refuge.

It was hot there, terribly hot. The air was stifling. It fairly reeked
of moisture and the smells from the swamp behind them were sickening.
Tommy began to transfer the shells from the spare bent magazine to the
one he had carried with the gun.

"We've a couple of reasons to be thankful," he observed. "One is that
there's a bit of shade ov