"The wall?" Swede grunted. "Think that'll stop them long?"
"Long enough," promised Mac. "It's thirty times as high as they are, and three feet out of plumb-line with the bottom. Before they figure out how to get across, maybe Adonis City'll be able to send us a rocket. Get them on the radio, anyhow, Limpy. We're carrying the whole weight of the attack. They've got to give us a ship."
Limpy shuffled to the panel. He set the dials, then spoke mechanically into the microphone: "Adonis City. Limpy Austin calling Adonis City...." Several minutes went by. He looked up. "They don't answer."
"Keep trying," Mac said. "Everybody must be calling them from all the other mines."
"That's what I mean," Swede put in earnestly. "We fight; the other mines fight. Sometimes we win; sometimes the 'pedes do. Whatever happens, it's never finished. We spoil their old tricks, so they figure out new ones. They're devils, Mac. We can never lick them for good."
"Someday, somebody will," Mac said stubbornly.
He gripped the sill and stared out through the infra-red glass. In the outer compound was a black fester of centaurpedes, crawling like gigantic lice before the concrete barricade.
"Nothing can stop them," Swede said beside him. "They'll find a way of getting over. They always do. And then—"
Mac's skin began to creep. To be eaten, the flesh stripped off your bones while you're alive and screaming.... The fence had halted them, and they'd built pyramids. When flame-throwers cut down the pyramids, they used catapults. Now the wall was holding them back, but they'd work out some method of hurtling over.
Then those armored bodies would push back the defenders until they could retreat no farther. Before those steel-hard mandibles, one man after another would go down, a living skeleton, covered with black, crawling vermin....