They pressed on along the gloomy gorge. In a few minutes they had rounded another turn in it, and stopped short, petrified by the astounding scene ahead.
A few hundred feet ahead in the chasm was gathered a mob of dozens of glowing men. Radioactive men like Nison and the Martian, garbed in ragged remnants of clothing that showed they were of every time in the last nine centuries, of every world. Glowing men who had come to Erebus in past centuries and had been trapped here, transmitted into radioactive beings!
This crowd of glowing men was wildly seeking to storm a narrow ledge that jutted from the chasm wall a dozen feet up from the floor. With shrill, raging cries, the radioactive mob would scramble up to win the ledge, but would be repelled by the rocks rolled down upon them by the defenders.
The defenders of the ledge were three men clad in asterium-coated space-suits like those of the Planeteers. Behind them was another figure in a coated space-suit, but with arms bound together. And also on the ledge was a rude sledge of black asterium, upon which was tied a small mass of something that had been carefully wrapped in thick sheets of asterium.
"It's Cheerly and his men, and the bound figure is Lana!” Thorn exclaimed hoarsely. “And that mass on the sledge—"
"Must be the radite!” Gunner Welk cried. “Cheerly got the stuff from the niche, but the radioactive men caught him taking it!"
CHAPTER XIX
Cheerly's Cunning
The scene was one out of nightmare. The gloomy chasm of shimmering blue haze, the shining cliff upon a ledge of which the three spacesuited men desperately defended themselves, and the insanely shouting, raging mob of weirdly glowing radioactive men who attacked them.
John Thorn, his heart hammering at having come within actual sight of both Lana Cain and the precious raw radite, leaped forward. But the upraised warning hand of Clymer Nison stopped him.