His eyes widened as he saw the second of the outlaws dragged from the little building, his face dripping with the fluid. And then a forgotten memory linked itself with what he saw. The liquid that had been poured on the Earthmen was Xtholla—Martian language for "bird-lure." It could be distilled from certain wasteland plants which the birds ate as a natural tonic and medicine. But the concentrate of these plants had no mild effect of stimulation. Birds went mad when they smelled its faint pungent odor. It had a tropic effect on their ganglia; they had to go to it, gobble it down and wallow in the stuff. They pecked savagely at anything that had on it the slightest trace of the distillate.
"The pit!" called the boy frantically. "Don't let them—" but one of his guards struck his mouth and he fell silent, knowing that there was nothing more he could do to avert the fate that was before the outlaw.
The man was wholly paralyzed with fear. The Martians laughed as they hurled him into the pit. Again the birds swooped, converging on the terror-stricken man from all points of the compass. They flung their soft bodies against him at murderous speed, sharp beaks stabbing till he bled from a myriad wounds.
When Don looked up again the birds were reeling back through the air. The boy could not bring himself to look at the thing in the arena. A sudden chill gripped him as his guards grimly took his arms. They were leading him to the little building from which had come the Earthmen, he thought swiftly, and he was to undergo a life-or-death test. He held himself tense as they passed through the ancient doors of the structure.
The walls, he saw, were studded with tubes that had not lit for untold millennia; machinery of bizarre design covered the floor. The boy jumped as a Martian touched his arm. The gangling travesty on humanity pointed grimly at a device that alone of the machinery seemed to have been dusted off and wiped with oil.
It was a small motor. The motionless belts and brushes seemed oddly familiar to the boy. Then he had it! He had seen pictures of just such motors in one of the old books of his father. But what did the Martians expect him to do? Obviously the natives wanted him to start their machine but how could he? He had none of the sources from which electricity was derived—no steam, no water-power, as they called it on his father's planet.
As Don glanced at the open door and saw the crowd of demoniac faces framed in its portals, he knew what fate awaited him if he failed. The same ruthless sentence that had been executed on the outlaw Earthmen would fall on him.
The eyes of his guard became dull and deadly as he saw Don did nothing to the motor.
Then the idea came. Feverishly the boy went to work, racking his brains for all the details in that old book, "Electricity for the Practical Miner." He remembered the title clearly, and ground his knuckles into his eyes to bring before them the simple diagrams that he once had learned.
Hesitantly he salvaged from a pile of scrap in one corner of the room two metal plates and lengths of wire. One, he fervently prayed, was copper and the other zinc. But he could not be sure. The boy clumsily connected the two terminal wires of the motor, one to each of the plates.