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Evidently the huge serpent considered them succulent tidbits, and made it its business to wait near the cave and avail itself of just such rash chance-taking as this. While we watched the nightmare scene, a Quabo disengaged itself from the parent mass and floated upward into the clear, giving us a chance to see more distinctly what the creatures looked like.
"Professor Martin," he cried, pointing to the tunnel mouth. "Look!" Like twin snakes crawling up to sun themselves, two tentacles had appeared over the rock rim. They hooked over the edge; and leisurely, with grim surety of invulnerability, the barrel-like head of a Quabo balanced itself on the ledge and glared at us. For a moment we stared, paralyzed, at the Thing.
She had dragged a heavy metal bar out to the fray and was trying to get some fighter's attention and give it to him. I seized the formidable weapon and jumped at the nearest Quabo, a ten-foot giant whose eyes were glinting gigantically at me through the distorting curve of the glass. Disregarding the clutching tentacles entirely, I swung the bar against the helmet. It cracked.
Down a side street we raced, and along a parallel avenue toward the tunnel. As we went I prayed that all the Quabos had centered their attention on the palace and left their vulnerable water-hoses unguarded. They had! When we stole up the last block toward the break we found the nearest Quabo was a hundred yards down the street and working further away with every move.
The Professor was almost buried by a Quabo that had all four of its tentacles wound about him. As methodically as though he were in a laboratory dissecting room, he was cutting the slippery lengths away, one by one, till the fourth parted and left him free. A giant Zyobite was struggling with two of the monsters.
A tall Zyobite and an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water and were swirled away.
Our little army with about a fourth of its number gone had only to guard the ditch and see that none of the Quabos caught the edges as they hurtled out of their passage. For perhaps ten minutes longer the water poured from the break in the wall, with now and then a doomed Quabo that goggled horribly at us as it was dashed down the hole in the floor to whatever awesome depths were beneath.
Man after man closed with the monstrous, armored Things only to be seized and crushed by the weaving tentacles. Occasionally a terrific blow with an ax would crack one of the glass helmets. Then the denuded Quabo would flounder convulsively in the air till it drowned. But there were all too few of these individual victories.
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