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"Not too fast, Your Highness," interrupted the Professor with his frosty smile. "I shall be much surprised if this little scheme actually saves the city. We may find the rock so thick there that our task is hopeless though I imagine the Quabos picked a thin section for help in their own plans." A vague look came into his eyes.
The Professor's scheme had been to cut a long slot down through the rock floor of the city to the roof of the vast, mysterious body of water below. This slot was placed directly in front of the spot in the city wall where the Quabos were about to emerge. As they forced through the last shell of rock, the deluge of water, instead of drowning the city, was supposed to drain down the oblong vent.
If they grip too hard you can always play the torch on their tentacles till they think better of it." The Quabos' front line humped grimly toward us, unblinking eyes glaring, tentacles writhing warily, little spurts of used water trickling from their helmets. "Keep together," warned Stanley, "so that if any one of us loses his light he can get it from the hose of one of the other two.
A block from the palace we bunched together and, by sheer mass and ferocity, actually stopped the machinelike advance for a few moments. Miscellaneous weapons had been brought from the houses sledges, stone benches, anything that might break the Quabos' helmets and handed to us in silence by the noncombatants. Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Looking down I saw a little girl.
We shall belong each to the other only a little while. Then shall we belong to death! And I when I knew the time was to be so brief " And I listened with growing horror to her account of the enemy that was advancing toward us with every passing moment. About twenty miles away, in the lowest depression of Penguin Deep, lived a race of monsters which the people of Aga's city called Quabos.
"But, Professor," I argued, "it's all over, isn't it? The tunnel is emptied, and all the Quabos are " "The tunnel isn't emptied. It's only half emptied! I'll show you." He called Stanley; and the three of us went to the break. "See," the Professor pointed out to us as we approached the jagged hole, "the Quabos only drilled through the top half of their tunnel ending.
And Here they come!" There was no more time for commands. The Quabos in front, supplied with slack in their hoses by those behind, leaped at us with incredible agility. We fell back a step so that none should get at our backs. The last stand was begun. It was not a battle so much as a series of fierce duels.
He drew from his pocket a sheet of parchment and the stub of his last remaining pencil. His fingers busied themselves apparently idly in the tracing of geometric lines. "Looking ahead to the exact details of our destruction," he mused coolly, "we see that our most direct and ominous enemy is the sea itself. When the city is flooded, we drown and later the Quabos can enter at will."
Every soul in Zyobor moved in a daze, with strained face and fear haunted eyes. Their proficiency in mental telepathy was a curse to them now: every one carried constantly, transmitted from the brains of the servant-fish outposts, a thought picture of that outer cavern in the murky depths of which writhed the thousands of crowding Quabos. Each mind in Zyobor was in continual torment.
Before the Quabos had reached us we had rigged six fire-hoses and had cut through forty or fifty more water-lines. The end was certain and not long in coming. We sprayed the monsters with fire as workmen spray fruit trees with insect poison. Stanley, the Professor and a Zyobite came up in the rear with their three hoses.
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