The two paused a moment, then gripped the bar, braced themselves against the concrete wall, and put all the strength of their muscles into a great pull inward. Ralton heard the muscles of himself and his friend cracking beneath the strain, and closing his eyes with the agony of that effort, felt the bar stir a little in their grip. But when they straightened, inspected it quickly, they found that hardly had they loosened it. Again they gripped it, again threw all their strength into a mighty pull, and this time felt it give perceptibly in its socket. Neither could speak, for the moment, and Ralton saw his friend breathing in great gasps, as he was also; but only for a moment they paused, then gripped the bar again. Another tremendous effort—a giving of the bar—and then, with a harsh, shrill squealing of the iron against the cement, it had come out completely from its socket.
For the moment the two leaned motionless against the wall, breathless and exhausted but listening with pounding hearts to ascertain whether that last shrill squeal of the bar had given the alarm to Munson and the others. The faint voices from the laboratory, they noted, had apparently ceased, but there was no sound of alarm, and no one appeared in the clearing or within sight of their prison-room. Then, after that moment's pause, Mallett had pulled himself upward, was squeezing through the window between bar and wall, and in a moment Ralton had followed him. Crouched on the ground beneath the window, the gray light of dawn growing over the cone's summit, Mallett pointed across the open clearing to where stood the mighty globe-condenser and its unprotected switch control.
"The control!" Mallett was whispering thickly. "If we can get to it——!"
They stepped forward, stealthily, silently. No sound came from any part of the cone's summit, save for the great condenser's half-heard hum. Another step—another. Slowly, carefully they crept on, out from the shelter of their prison and the long building beside it, into the great circular clearing. Ralton's blood was pounding through his veins, for now the gleaming condenser lay but a few hundred feet ahead, at the clearing's center. Should he make a rush for it and trust to chance to get him to the condenser's control in time? He discarded the idea, even as Mallett and he crept forward; for within moments more their stealthy, silent progress would bring them to their goal. Within moments more——
"Your strategy, Mallett, is somewhat infantile, I fear!"
Munson's voice! Cool and mocking, it cut like a sword through their whirling thoughts and the two spun about, then recoiled. Out from the open door of one of the buildings behind them had stepped the massive, coldly smiling scientist, a heavy automatic in his grasp turned upon them. From between the other buildings, to right and to left of the clearing, had stepped the other three—Labreau, Kingsford, Krauner—their own pistols trained upon the two. Still hundreds of feet from the condenser, Ralton knew, with finality, in that moment, that never could they make it, never could they reach it with the steel-nosed bullets of four guns tearing through their bodies. That noise the bar had made had roused the four, had brought them pistols in hand to watch mockingly the two before them. The gray-haired, mocking-eyed Munson, the dark face of Labreau, contorted with insane rage; the gloating Kingsford, his strong, intellectual face twisted now as though by some devil's hand; the coldly indifferent countenance of the blond-haired Krauner, whose eyes yet burned madly behind his gleaming glasses—all these faces appeared to be slowly turning about Ralton in that seemingly eternal moment.
Munson's voice came to his ears again. "It has been something of a comedy to watch your clumsy progress," he mocked them, "though unfortunately we can not allow you, of course, to proceed any farther." His voice rose suddenly, the cords of his neck swelling with fury as all amusement left him. "You fools! You try to wreck the greatest scientific experiment ever conducted on this earth; try to save a humanity, a race, as trivial as yourselves from the doom which we, the masters of life, have decreed for them; try to make impossible the new races which we life-masters shall give earth when the protoplasm floods have swept all other life away!"
Then, as abruptly as that burst of insane fury had blazed up it calmed, and the mocking gleam returned to his eyes. "Humanity is passing, even now," he told them, "and as for you two—I think it best that you pass with it——"
Ralton saw his pistol raised a little to bear full upon them, saw in that infinitesimal instant the guns of the others upon them as their hands tensed about their grips, their fingers about the triggers. In that flashing instant it seemed to him that those black muzzles had become, somehow, mighty round dark doorways down which he and all the world were thundering to their doom. It was the end, for him as for the world. The whole scene seemed withdrawn suddenly to a great distance, made suddenly remote, in that instant before death leapt upon them. It was the——