achery was something
inconceivable by either. So long as the Federation remained, so long
as man moved in an organized society, he was bound to his fellows, to
fight, suffer, and die with them.

"Stand by me, Ruth. We're going down fighting."

They moved back toward the throng, which, momentarily stirred to hope
by Kay's appearance, had fallen into the former apathy of despair. And
now the monsters were beginning to enter the electrified zone at one
point. As they passed the line of posts, the high tension current made
their bodies luminous, but it had no appreciable effect upon them.
They moved on, inevitably.

A score or so of semi-human forms, agglutinated into a mass, and yet
individually discernible. They bore down slowly upon the crowd of
victims, who pressed backward as they advanced. On the other sides,
though they almost encircled the field of death, the monsters were
making no maneuvers to entrap their prey. Their sluggish minds were
incapable of conceiving anything of the kind. But for the electrified
zone, the great majority of the victims could have effected their
escape. The monsters were simply pressing forward to their meal; they
did not interpret its capture in terms of strategy at all.

* * * * *

A new frenzy of horror seized the crowd. They fled, struggling back
until the foremost in flight reached the other side of Golgotha, to be
repulsed by the electrified zone there. They fell in tumbled heaps.
Appalling shrieks rang through the air.

Another line of the monsters was seeping forward, converging toward
the first. As the two lines met, they coalesced into a wall of
protoplasm, a thousand feet in length by a hundred high. A wall out of
which leered phantasmal faces, like those in a frieze.

Kay stood alone, his arm around Ruth. To follow the flying mob would
but prolong the agony. He raised the ax. He looked into the girl's
eyes. She understood, and nodded.

One last embrace, one kiss, and Kay placed her behind him. He sprang
forward, shouting, and plunged into the very heart of the wall.

And Ruth, watching with eyes dilated with horror, saw it yield with a
sucking sound, and saw Kay disappear within it.

* * * * *

She saw the hideous mass fold itself upon him, and a hundred extruded
tentacles wave in the air as they blindly grappled for him. And then
Kay had broken through, and was hewing madly with great sweeps of the
ax