From behind him came sounds of a renewed attack. He heard Harkness: "Shoot, Diane! Nail 'em, Towahg! There's a hundred of them!" And the wind that came with the lightning flash, though it brought no rain, whipped the black water of the lake to waves that drove the raft and the swimming savages closer—closer—
Chet glanced above him. "Come down, Kreiss!" he ordered. "Get down here, quick! This is the finish. We could have licked them on land, but these others will get us." He stood, dumb with amazement, as he saw the thin figure of Kreiss leap excitedly from his rocky perch and vanish like a terrified rabbit into the cave in the rocks.
"I didn't think—" he was telling himself in wondering disbelief at this cowardice, when Kreiss reappeared. His one hand was white with a rubbery coating that Chet vaguely knew for latex. He was holding a gray, earthy mass, and he threw himself forward to the catapult where it stood idly erect in the wind that beat and whipped at it.
"Help me!" It was Kreiss who ordered, and once more he spoke as if he were conducting only an interesting experiment. "Pull here! Bend it—bend it! Now hold steady; this is metallic sodium, a deposit I found deep in the earth."
The gray mass was in the crude bucket of the machine. Kreiss' knife was ready. He slashed at the vine that he'd the bent sapling, and a gray mass whirled out into the dark; out and down—and the inky waters were in that instant ablaze with fire.
