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Updated: May 28, 2025
I grabbed at the trigger just as a new surge of movement brought the flier perilously close to a great, inrushing wall of water which was not water. Koto's face was drawn, and Virginia Crane was staring in horrified fascination at the gun. Again came the faint trembling of the beautifully constructed mechanism. The green ray leaped out across the blinding whiteness of our light rays.
It was hideous that we could not wait for Koto in darkness, but the light was essential to Captain Crane's preparations, so there was nothing to be done. I felt that Koto's chances of getting back to us were one in a thousand. Yet suddenly, as I still clung to the foot of the gangway, LeConte thrust his head from the control room door and yelled at me to hang on tight.
Captain Crane went down under the onslaught of what must have been a hundred Orconites, and it took all the tearing strength of Koto's, LeConte's, and my hands combined to burrow through the piles of creatures who covered her, and get her out. By the time she was on her feet again, a new legion was at us. I had not, however, suggested hide-and-seek meaninglessly.
I knew that the worst had not happened and that I was not to be left alone. "Doctor Weeks!" It was Koto's voice, and it came from behind the abutment of rock toward which I was hurrying. "Koto!" I yelled and entered the next cavern and saw it all. He was lying stretched out on the rocky floor of an underground room as vast as the one I had left behind me. He was unhurt, and he was waving to me!
It was easy to see that the cable had been fastened there by the Orconites and that our ship and ourselves might be drawn to destruction. I flung myself over to Koto's side to help him with the gun. The howling wind which had been at a lull as we reached the deck, broke loose again, and, as a gust hit us, Koto, gun, and I were all but swept overboard.
And the story found its way to the local newspaper, which published it only as a strange example of popular credulity; and Jin said, 'Am I a teller of the truth? See, the paper has printed it! Wherefore crowds of curious people gathered before Koto's little house, and made her life such a burden to her that her husband had to watch her constantly to keep her from killing herself.
Koto cried, and I knew he had leaped to the same conclusion I had. Suddenly I brushed Koto's hands away from the gun, and myself directed it so that its ray cut straight across one whole group of the queer creatures on the beach. Then I cursed. Instead of being cut down, broken like so many blades of grass, not one of the creatures showed that the ray had touched them at all.
But her old rival, filled with jealous hate, invented a wicked story about Koto, and the story found root in the rich soil of old Izumo superstition, and grew fantastically. The idea of it had been suggested to Jin's cunning mind by those three soft lines about Koto's neck. She declared that Koto had a NUKE-KUBI. What is a nuke-kubi? 'Kubi' signifies either the neck or head.
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