Day after day passed. Their larder was full, the receptor was finished, and the beam transmitter was almost ready to attach to the turbo-alternator before the calm was broken.
"Steve!" Nadia shrieked. Glancing idly into the communicator plate, she had been perfunctorily surveying the surrounding territory. "They're coming! Thousands of them! They're all over the bench up there, and just simply pouring down the hills and up the valley!"
"Wish they'd waited a few hours longer—we'd have been gone. However, we're just about ready for them," he commented grimly, as he stared over her shoulder into the communicator plate. "We'll make a lot of those Indians wish that they had stayed at home with their papooses."
"Have you got all those rays and things fixed up?"
"Not as many as I'd like to have. You see, I don't know the composition of the I-P ray, since it is outlawed to everybody except the police. Of course I could have found out from Brandon, but never paid any attention to it. I've got some nice ultra-violet, though, and a short-wave oscillatory that'll cook an elephant to a cinder in about eight seconds. We'll keep them amused, no fooling! Glad we had time to cover our open sides, and it looks as though that meteorite armor we put over the projectors may be mighty useful, too."
On and on the savages came, massed in formations showing some signs of rude discipline. This time there was neither shrieking nor yelling; the weird creatures advanced silently and methodically. Here and there were massed groups of hundreds, dragging behind them engines which Stevens studied with interest.
"Hm ... m ... m. Catapults," he mused. "You were right, girl of my dreams—armor and bows and arrows wouldn't help us much right now. They're going to throw rocks at us that'll have both mass and momentum. With those things they can cave in our side-armor, and might even dent our roof. When one of those projectiles hits, we want to know where it ain't, that's all."
Stevens cast off the heavily-insulated plug connecting the power plant leads to his now almost fully charged accumulators, strapped himself and Nadia into place at the controls, and waited, staring into the plate. Catapult after catapult was dragged to the lip of the little canyon, until six of them bore upon the target. The huge stranded springs of hair, fiber, and sinew were wound up to the limit, and enormous masses of rock were toilsomely rolled upon the platforms. Each "gunner" seized his trip, and as the leader shrieked his signal the six ponderous masses of metalliferous rock heaved into the air as one. But they did not strike their objective, for as the signal was given, Stevens shot power into his projectors. The "Forlorn Hope" leaped out of the canyon and high into the air over the open meadow, just as the six great projectiles crashed into the ground upon the spot which, an instant before, she had occupied.
Rudimentary discipline forgotten, the horde rushed down into the canyon and the valley, in full clamor of their barbaric urgings. Horns and arms tossed fiercely, savage noises rent the air, and arrows splintered harmlessly upon steel plate as the mystified and maddened warriors upon the plain below gave vent to their outraged feelings.
"Look, Nadia! A whole gang of them are smelling around that power plug. Pretty soon somebody's going to touch a hot spot, and when he does, we'll cut loose on the rest of them."