Time passed as we found our seats. Immobile we sat; and for me at least, time ceased to exist.
Then Ala's father spoke. "My people—danger has come to a strange race of friendly neighboring beings. And it brings a danger also to us all—to you, to me——"
He stopped abruptly. I felt a sound; a myriad of sounds everywhere about us. Shouts of menace; a swishing, queerly aerial sound as of many rapidly moving bodies.
Through all the aisles of the globe, from outside, the shapes of men were bursting. Swishing through the opaque surface of the globe, entering among us, whirling inward. Like storm-tossed feathers they whirled, end over end, uncontrolled with the power of their rush. A cloud of hostile grey shapes in the fashion of menacing men come to attack us!
CHAPTER X
CAPTURED BY THOUGHTS MALEVOLENT
As the followers of Brutar burst into the globular amphitheatre with shouts of menace, a confusion—a chaos—a panic descended upon the gathering. Everywhere the people were rising to flight; struggling to escape, struggling with each other, aimlessly, unreasonably, with scarce the steady thought to distinguish friend from foe. The stools upon which we had been sitting were overturned; the floor around me, and above me was grey with its surging occupants; they were floating inward, struggling groups of them; the air soon was full of them, like feathers tossed in a breeze. I could feel the breeze now—a turgid motion of that imponderable, invisible fluid for which I have no other name save air; a breeze caused by the fluttering things which were ourselves.
It seemed—as the idea came to me from some dim recess of that other mind which had been mine—it seemed an aimless struggle. I was clutched by a dozen groping hands—pressed by half as many bodies. I saw them—indistinguishable as they rocked against me; and felt them dimly. I fought back, clutched at emptiness; or caught something solid. Pushed it violently away, to see it float off, and feel myself drift backward from the recoil of my blow, the physical futilely struggling with its own tangibility.
A whirling gray shape, definitely outlined in the fashion of a burly man, bore down upon me. It halted, gathered its poise and confronted me. A length away, with empty space between us, it stood motionless. Brutar! Recognition came to me; and I knew then that this was the shape they had termed the first of the ghosts—that spectre we had seen on the bank of the little creek in Vermont. Brutar—he who was leader of these invaders we had come to check. The desire shot through me to attack him now; to kill him.
I plunged; but as though I had leaped into some unseen entangling veil I was halted; pushed backward until again I found myself facing him. He had not moved. With folded arms he stood regarding me. I stared into his eyes. They were glowing, smouldering torches. A wave of something almost tangible was coming from them; and abruptly I knew that it was his thoughts in a wave so ponderable I could not force my body against it. I could feel it, this wave; feel these thoughts, malevolent, commanding, compelling, as they beat against me.