"Quite right," Harkness agreed. "I am satisfied that there is something there we can never combat. We don't know what it is, and God help anyone who ever finds out. How about it, Chet? And you, too, Kreiss? Do you agree that there is no use in staying here and trying to fight it out?"
"I do not agree," the scientist objected. "My work, my experiments I have collected! Would you have me abandon them? Must we run in fear because an anthropoid ape has come into this clearing? And, if there are more, we have our barricade; our weapons are crude, but effective, and I might add to them with some ideas of my own should occasion demand."
"Listen!" Chet commanded. "That anthropoid ape is nothing to be afraid of: you're right on that. But he came from the pyramid, Kreiss, and there's something there that knows every foot of ground that messenger went over. There's something in that pyramid that can send more ape-men, that can come itself, for all that I know, and that can knock us cold in half a second.
"It's found us. One arrow went straight, thank God! It has given us a stay of execution. But is that damnable thing in the pyramid going to let it go at that? You know the answer as well as I do. It has probably sent twenty more of those messengers who are on their way this minute, I am telling you; and we've got two days at the most before they get here."
Kreiss still protested. "But my work—"
"Is ended!" snapped Chet. "Stay if you want to; you'll never finish your work. The rest of us will leave in the morning. Towahg will be back here to-night.
"Nothing much to get together," he told Harkness. "I'll see to it; you stay with Diane."
Their bows, a store of extra bone-tipped arrows, and food: as Chet had said there was not much to prepare for their flight. They had spent many hours in arrow making: there were bundles of them stored away in readiness for an attack, and Chet looked at them with regret, but knew they must travel fast and light.
Out of his rocky "laboratory" Kreiss came at dusk to tramp slowly and moodily down to the shelters.