“Missed it!” he groaned. “If I only had my right arm to use now, I might--”
Far below, down there a hundred feet beneath them and out a long way from the tower base, night yawned wide in a burst of hellish glare.
A vast conical hole of flame was gouged in the dark. For a fraction of a second every tree, limb, twig stood out in vivid detail, as that blue-white glory shot aloft.
All up through the forest the girl and Stern got a momentary glimpse of little, clinging Things, crouching misshapen, hideous.
Then, as a riven and distorted whirl burst upward in a huge geyser of annihilation, came a detonation that ripped, stunned, shattered; that sent both the defenders staggering backward from the window.
Darkness closed again, like a gaping mouth that shuts. And all about the building, through the trees, and down again in a titanic, slashing rain fell the wreckage of things that had been stone, and earth, and root, and tree, and living creatures--that had been--that now were but one indistinguishable mass of ruin and of death.
After that, here and there, small dark objects came dropping, thudding, crashing down. You might have thought some cosmic gardener had shaken his orchard, his orchard where the plums and pears were rotten-ripe.
“One!” cried the engineer, in a strange, wild, exultant voice.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE BATTLE ON THE STAIRS
Almost like the echo of his shout, a faint snarling cry rose from the corridor, outside. They heard a clicking, sliding, ominous sound; and, with instant comprehension, knew the truth.