It was a bitter battle while it lasted. Hammond nearly made it. He saw Zuggoth rear back in alarm, half lift his electronic rifle—Then a clubbed weapon sank the fighting chemist to his knees, and a moment later he was smothered under a pile of bodies.
Chains were shackled about his wrists and ankles. He was jerked erect to face Zuggoth, who had relaxed again in his chair. The ball-like eyes of the Sediphron king glared at him.
"Take them to the dissecting rooms at once!" he ordered. "There shall I cut the wild life from them, slowly, with much pain!"
Hammond shook the hair from his eyes and met Storm's battered grin with one of his own. Then his gaze sought Gena's.
The girl's face was white, her lips trembling. Her thoughts reached him, heavy with regret. "Goodbye, Earthman!"
The chemist's lips went grim. "Goodbye, Gena," he answered. Then a Sediphron guard shoved him roughly toward the door, after Storm.
The dissecting room was high-walled, white, full of strange apparatus that only vaguely resembled similar machines of Earth. There was the Martian fluoroscope with which Storm and Hammond were minutely examined, and notes taken on a Martian "talkie"—evidently a highly advanced type camera with sound track arrangement which recorded that revealed by the fluoroscope and the comments of the observer.
The fluoroscope was a vast improvement over the earth type. Hammond, watching Storm being examined with it, saw that any part of his companion's internal anatomy could be brought into sharp focus on the screen. Heart, lungs, bone structure, arteries. Each was minutely examined, probed into—the while the Martian "talkie" hummed softly.
A number of strange drugs were needled into them as they stood behind the fluoroscope. Drugs that burned like fire, contorting their bodies with convulsions, and which were immediately eased by the introduction of a neutralizing drug. Others that paralyzed motor nerves, and that deadened the sensory cells. All was recorded by the laboratory scientists.