Page:Weird Tales Volume 14 Issue 2 (1929-08).djvu/98

were glimpsed, fleeing toward the landing-circle where lay the ships, other cries went up and after us leapt the serpent-things from all along the street, pouring into that street from its buildings and from adjacent streets and racing after us.

But a few hundred yards ahead lay the landing-circle, and as we ran on we could make out the gleaming, great shapes of the oval ships lying upon it, could discern the shape of our own awaiting ship, at the circle's edge, its door open before us. Toward that black opening, as toward some tremendous magnet, we stumbled on with the last of our strength, but close behind came the serpent-creatures in ever-increasing masses, the alarm spreading now over all the gigantic city about us, and there lay still a distance that seemed infinite between us and that open door. Then, when we were but a scant hundred feet from it, the serpent-creatures hardly more than that behind us, Korus Kan slipped, stumbled and went down.

We wheeled around, reaching down to help him up, but halted even as we did so. For the serpent-creatures behind us were within yards of us now, hissing cries of triumph rising from them as they writhed toward us. Then, in the next moment, from the great, looming bulk of our ship ahead there stabbed down and over us a shaft of blinding crimson light, a narrow, deadly ray that struck the writhing masses of our pursuers and swept through them in a great, slicing curve, sending them into annihilation in dazzling bursts of light as it touched them. Those farther behind came racing on, nevertheless, but before they could reach us we had stumbled on and into the ship, and with space-doors clanging and generators suddenly droning loud, our ship shot up into the darkness just in time to escape a dozen pale death-beams that sprang toward us from the mass of our pursuers.

Up into the darkness above the vast, blue-glowing city we flashed, Jhul Din and Korus Kan and I bursting up into the pilot room and replacing our follower there whose timely action had saved us. Beneath us the whole city was rising as the alarm spread, lights flashing out here and there among its buildings, serpent-hordes pouring into the streets, while from the landing-circle from which we had just risen there shot up after us a dozen long gleaming oval ships, in close pursuit. So swiftly wore they after us that before we had fully realized their nearness, their death-beams were sweeping and slicing through the darkness about us. I shouted a swift order, Korus Kan whirled the controls about and sent our ship flashing straight back into the mass of our dozen pursuers, and then we had leapt through them, our red rays striking right and left as we did so, and two of their great craft had flared there in the darkess above the great city in blinding crimson light, and we were racing up into the darkness again with the ten remaining ships farther behind, but still speeding on our track.

Upward we shot with terrific speed, and in a moment the vast, turning world beneath, covered with the masses of blue force-structures, had contracted and dwindled to a mere point beneath us as we fled up and outward into space. As we flashed up from it, though, I had glimpsed rising from it a full five himdred serpent-ships, with a score of the great disk attraction-ships, and as these lifted to follow the ten that leapt close behind us, I saw that the serpent-creatures were taking no slightest chance of our escape. I turned to Konis Kan, swiftly, as our craft leapt upward, shouting to him above the droning roar of the generators that filled our craft now.

"Head straight out toward the great vibration-wall—toward the opening in it!" I cried.

"We'll never get through that open-