way through the fringes of
the melee and move clear across the first room, before we were
recognized.

* * * * *

The alarm of our escape, though, spread into the next room almost as
soon as we reached it, and a foolish attempt we made to keep bunched
together and get through with a dash, betrayed us before we got well
started.

Now it was a case of being drowned again by a sheer deluge of men. While
the Orconites pawed me, tripped me, and otherwise discommoded me, I
broke necks, dug out eyes, tore quivering antennae from foreheads until
I felt as if I had been doing nothing else for hours. And those beside
me were doing the same. Yet always more bladder faces rose in front of
us, and more wings beat down from above. Not even our supreme strength
was great enough to stand it.

Out across the bleeding, crumpled bodies and the teeming swarms beyond,
I saw as through a red mist the glittering, whirling maze of Leider's
wondrous generators, and began to curse to myself.

For the steady pressure was forcing us slowly back toward the machines
and toward the rugged, high wall of the cavern beyond, and I knew that
once we reached the wall we could retreat no farther and must stand
there to fight until we were completely exhausted. I drew closer to
Virginia Crane and did what I could to help her with her main group of
assailants while still battling my own.

Oddly enough, I was remembering how, when she had been caught up by the
magnetic current that had brought us here, she had cried out to me,
calling me by my given name.... The recollection filled me with a queer
emotion, partly rebellion and partly--something else. In the crisis we
were facing now, I somehow lacked my wonted power to shun femininity.

* * * * *

Side by side we struggled against our enemies, tearing at them with our
whole strength, yet always we were driven closer to the wall which would
finally stop us.

"Oh," she finally gasped, "I--didn't want--to die!"

"No," I answered through set teeth as I hurled down an Orconite only to
be confronted by two more; "but I'm afraid--we must. Well, we've done
away with Leider, anyway."

"Yes," she choked. "That's--something."

Koto and LeConte were as hard pressed as we. Then, as we fell steadily
back into a passage between two of the vast generators, back toward the
solid wall of the cavern, a queer thing happened.

D