rangely beautiful and strangely deadly.

"That's the thing," said Tommy dispassionately, "which made the flare
of light last night. It blew up the Tube. And Von Holtz told
me--hm--his friends, in the City...."

He sighted carefully. The wagon and its contents were surrounded by a
leaping, capering mob. They shook their fists in an insane hatred.

A storm of bullets burst upon them. Tommy was traversing the little
gun with the trigger pressed down. His lips were set tightly. And
suddenly it seemed as if the solid earth burst asunder! There had been
an instant in which the bullet-bursts were visible. They tore and
shattered the howling mob of Ragged Men. But then they struck the
golden weapon. A sheet of blue-white flame leaped skyward and round
about. A blast of blistering, horrible heat smote upon the beleaguered
pair. The moisture of the ooze between them and the jungle flashed
into steam. A section of the jungle itself, a hundred yards across,
shriveled and died.

* * * * *

Steam shot upward in a monstrous cloud--miles high, it seemed. Then,
almost instantly, there was nothing left of the Ragged Men about the
golden weapon, or of the weapon itself, but an unbearable blue-white
light which poured away and trickled here and there and seemed to grow
in volume as it flamed.

From the rest of the jungle a howl arose. It was a howl of such loss,
and of such unspeakable rage, that the hair at the back of Tommy's
neck lifted, as a dog's hackles lift at sight of an enemy.

"Keep your head down, Evelyn," said Tommy composedly. "I have an idea
that the burning stuff gives off a lot of ultra-violet. Von Holtz was
badly burned, you remember."

Naked figures flashed forward from the jungle beyond the burned area.
Tommy shot them down grimly. He discarded the sub-machine gun with its
explosive shells for the automatics. Some of his targets were only
wounded. Those wounded men dragged themselves forward, screaming their
rage. Tommy felt sickened, as if he were shooting down madmen. A voice
roared a rage-thickened order from the jungle. The assault slackened.

Five minutes later it began again, and this time the attackers waded
out into the softer ooze and flung themselves down, and then began a
half-swimming, half-crawling progress behind bits of tree-fern stump,
or merely pushing walls of the jellylike mud before them. The white
light expanded and grew huge--but it dulled as it expanded, and