All the horror of the fate intended for us burst across my brain in one flash of awful comprehension, then, and a strangled cry broke from me. "They're going to keep us here too." I cried, pointing with trembling hand. "Keep us here as strange beings-in living death in this museum of strange beings."
* * *
A moment we stood, in horror-stricken silence, and then as the full awfulness of the thing reserved for us penetrated the brains of my companions they uttered a medley of hoarse shouts of rage and horror and as one leapt forward upon the serpent-creatures with the fluid-tubes and upon our guards.
I think that we expected no better than death in that moment, for the death-beam tubes of the guards were full upon us, but I think too that we all preferred a swift, clean death to the horror of living death that awaited us in this museum of hell. But the very motive that made us desire death prevented the guards from loosing it upon us, preferring to follow their orders and place us in the collection about us rather than annihilate us. For instead of loosing the rays, as we sprang, they, leapt to meet us, at the same time giving utterance to loud, hissing cries of alarm.
Our guards outnumbered us, and though we leapt upon them with all the energy of horror and despair, striving to wrest the death-tubes from their grasp, they coiled about and held us, while into the great hall from the big corridor outside there rushed in answer to their alarm other scores of serpent-creatures, leaping likewise upon us. Wearied as we were and outnumbered by five to one, our struggle, though fierce, was of short duration, and then we were held completely by the creatures about us, while toward us again came the two serpent-creatures with the metal needle and two liquid-tubes. First toward me they came, dipping the needle into the green liquid and then stabbing it into my arm.
I shrank deeply as the sharp needle pierced my skin, but the next moment ceased to shrink, as through me there ran a wave of cold, a flood of utter iciness that held me motionless, unable to move. No muscle of mine, down to the smallest, could I control, lying there staring straight ahead, unmoving, unwinking, unbreathing even. My lungs, my heart, my blood, all had stopped moving in the instant that the poison flooded through me, yet my brain was as clear or clearer than ever, coldly clear, as though attached to it was no body whatever. My senses, though, still functioned, and though all power of motion had left me I could still see and hear as clearly as ever. It was as though my brain had been suddenly lifted from the mass of flesh that was my body, and endowed with a strange, lifeless life of its own.
Now the guards rose from me, leaving me lying motionless and rigid, and turned toward Korus Kan, who was being held down by others. His metal body seemed to puzzle them for an instant, and then they solved the problem by injecting the needle of green fluid into the nerve-tissues at the edge of his eyes, from which it would spread instantly to the other living organs cased by his metal body. Another moment and he too lay like me, rigid and powerless to move, our eyes meeting in an unchanging, stony stare. Within minutes more the green fluid had been injected into the last of our score of followers, and we had all become but rigid living statues, our consciousness and senses alone unaffected. Then by the serpent-creatures we were set into the transparent case from which the double-headed insect-thing had been moved to make way for us, were placed in a sitting position with backs against the case's sides, and then it was closed and the guards passed out of the big hall, leaving in it only the two serpent-creatures who were its custodians.
Rigid, unmoving, unbreathing, yet with consciousness, mind and senses as clear as ever, living brains cased in bodies that were helpless and motionless, I think that no position of any in all time could have been more terrible than ours. Had consciousness been suspended also, with the powers of our bodies, the captivity we suffered would have been but a dreamless sleep, at least; but to allow our consciousness and intelligence to remain, our bodies severed from our control-that was a torture that surely none other could ever equal. Statue-like we sat there, while hour followed hour, gazing always in the same direction with unmoving and unwinking eyes. Certainly no wonder would it have been had we gone mad in the first hours of that ghastly, terrible imprisonment. As the hours, the days, dragged past, though, I bent all my mental efforts toward the keeping of my sanity, and though at times my brain reeled beneath our terrible predicament, I desperately forced my thoughts into other channels. From where I sat I could gaze out into the great corridor outside the room, and that at least gave me something moving to contemplate, as through it swept the never-ceasing hordes of the serpent-people, a rush of activity that dwindled never until the rising of the darkest of the three suns marked the coming of the night, the sleep-period of the serpent-people. The light of that darker sun was so far dimmer than that of the other two that as this world turned between the three one-third of each day was spent in a dusky red darkness, a strange night in which all activity in the vast serpent-city about us seemed to cease, only our room's two serpent-guards and some others here and there outside remaining alert, our two room-guards being replaced at the beginning of each night by two others who alternated with them in their duties.
It was these things alone, though, the coming of night and the changing of our guards, the cessation and recommencement of the activity in the corridor outside, the waning and waxing of the crimson light that fell through the great building's flickering blue vibration-walls, that alone marked for us the passage of time. Day was following day while we sat on there in living death, unmoving as stones, and I knew that with each day the great fleet of the serpent-creatures I had glimpsed in the clearing would be approaching nearer to completion, as would the colossal death-beam cone with which they meant to wipe out all the races of all the galaxy's worlds. And we, on whom had rested the one chance of our universe, had failed-we were prisoners. I could not believe that Jhul Din, with his two or three followers, had managed to get through the great vibration-wall about this universe and speed to the Andromeda universe for help. Our last hope was gone, and the last hope of our galaxy with it, prisoned as we were in the helpless flesh of our own bodies, from which there could be no escape, lacking even the power to destroy ourselves and end our endless torture.