As he spoke he was dropping to the floor, injecting swiftly into the bodies of the rest the red fluid, beginning with Korus Kan, and as he did so he explained to me swiftly how he and his three followers had managed to elude the ships that had pursued him by fleeing from them into a near-by cluster of dead and dying suns, and pretending to have perished by crashing into a great dark-star, landing his ship upon its barren, burned-out surface and escaping the scrutiny of the pursuing ships, who returned in the belief that he and his ship had met annihilation. In that hiding-place, upon that black and airless and lightless star, he had remained for days, not daring to venture forth amid the swarms of serpent-ships that filled the space-lanes about him, yet resolved to return and ascertain our fate. When at last, days later, he had been able to venture out, back to this vast world and down upon it through the dusky night, he had boldly landed the ship where it would excite no suspicion, in the landing-circle from which he had first escaped in it. Then, leaving his little crew of three in it and stealing through the shadows of the silent streets toward the great central building where he hoped against hope to find some trace of us, he had made his way through the darkened corridors of the huge structure until he had stumbled upon the strange museum of the serpent-people where we were prisoned.
While he swiftly explained this to me Korus Kan and our followers were staggering up beside me as the injections of red fluid revived them, one by one, and I turned toward the door, then uttered a horror-stricken exclamation. For in the corridor outside a single serpent-creature faced us, attracted perhaps by the sound of our voices, its glassy eyes full upon us! Even in the instant that I saw it, before ever I could leap upon it, it had turned with incredible quickness and was flashing back down the corridor, farther into the great building, uttering as it did so a high, hissing cry. And in an instant that cry was taken up and re-echoed in all the great structure about us, by the roused serpent-creatures who were rushing in answer to it!
"The alarm!" I cried. "Out of the building and to the ship!"
With lightning swiftness now Jhul Din was injecting in the last of our followers the restorative red fluid, and then as those last ones stumbled up into consciousness beside us, we raced toward the door, out into the corridor. There, abruptly, we stopped short, our last wild hopes of escape in that instant blasted. For less than a thousand feet down the great corridor from us, pouring out into it from every quarter of the vast building's interior in answer to the hissing cries of alarm, there was racing down upon us a great mass of hundreds upon hundreds of the writhing serpent-creatures!
9. A Dash for Freedom
Doom stared at us in that instant as the serpent-creatures rushed down the great corridor toward us, for well we knew that never could we win our way down the long street to our waiting ship with that pursuit behind us. For a flashing moment as we stood there, stunned, it seemed that recapture was inevitable, and then as a sudden thought flared across my brain I cried out to my companions.
"Get out of the building!" I cried. "I can hold them here——!"
They hesitated, and then sprang down the corridor toward the street, while at the same instant I leapt into the great museum-hall from which we had just emerged. With a single bound I had grasped the needle and tube of restorative red fluid and was at the great transparent cases, ripping the sides open frantically and stabbing the needle with lightning swiftness into their occupants. Those in a dozen or more cases I had swiftly treated thus before I dropped the tube and needle and leapt back to the door, into the corridor. As I did so I had seen the first of the strange, terrible shapes I had touched with the needle beginning to stir, to move from their cases.
As I sprang back out into the corridor, though, the racing masses of the serpent-creatures were but a scant hundred feet behind me, my own companions racing out of the building ahead of me, now. The serpent-things loosed no rays upon us, desiring, I knew, to return us to that hell of living death from which we had escaped, but as I sprang down the corridor they were so close behind that another moment, I knew, would see my capture and that of my friends ahead. Then, just as the serpent-creatures, racing behind me, reached the door of the museum, they halted, recoiled. For out into the corridor from that museum-hall had flopped a great, terrible shape, the mighty disk of pale flesh with a single central eye that my needle had been first to revive!