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Our encampment was in a turmoil of confusion chaos, out of which very soon order came. The skeleton figures in the air I saw now that there were nearer two hundred than one hundred were perhaps two thousand feet away, and at an altitude of about the cliff-ledge where Elza and I were sitting. They swept forward, bathed in the Zed-ray with all our other search-beams darkened to give it full sway.
Its ray, following the search-beams upward, was aimed at the invaders, but they were beyond its effective range. Their weapons of attack? I knew now. "Suicides!" Whether Elza said it, or merely thought it I do not know. One of the figures came down as though falling. A few seconds only; but though our search-beam showed it, the smaller rays for those seconds missed it.
A ring of our tower vehicles, with their projectors mounted and ready, their colored search-beams slowly sweeping the white plain and the dead grey sky. Within their ring, the camp itself. Lighted by the blue-white tubes set upon quadrupeds at intervals; heated by strings of red-glowing wire and the red wire-balls used on Venus.
The sub-ray lights!" The search-beams from our towers were inordinately active. Sweeping the empty snow-plain and the empty sky. Empty? To my fevered imagination they were peopled with enemies. And then one of the towers flashed on a sub-ray the dull infra-red for envisaging the slow rays below the power of human sight. And another tower with its faint purple beam was using the ultra-violet.
Light-rockets sometimes mounting above them, to burst with a soundless glare of white light in the sky; and underneath, the spreading white search-beams, sweeping down to the dark forest that lay all about us. Soon, in the white glare of the bombs, we could distinguish the actual shapes of the vessels. Still Tarrano did not move from his place by the balcony rail.
We could see the metal portions of the trappings falling like plummets. The skeleton images faded; and then as our tower withdrew the Zed-ray and our search-beams picked them up, we saw our enemies as they really were. Men clothed in a casing of cylindrical garments with the flying mechanisms strapped to their chests; some with visors and headpieces, nearly all with small weapons in their hands.
As recruits poured in, we'd tell them off in hundreds, appoint officers, see that they had arms, or gave them directions where to find the old caches, and hustled them off. Had to shift our quarters continually, because Mercutian fliers would pick us up with their search-beams, and start raying. Had some close shaves.
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