But I could feel my fingers loosening their grip. The muzzle was swaying. Everything seemed blurring before me, swimming into a phantasmagoria of horror.... It was all in a second or two. I heard Shorty mutter a startled oath beside me. But it was Taro, despite that he must have been unutterably frightened, who kept his wits. He uttered a grim shout, jumped to his feet, sidewise away from me.
It did what Taro had hoped. For just an instant that baleful gaze left me, fastened on Taro. Then it swung back—but in that instant I had recovered myself, leveled the gun and fired.
New horror! The Radak leader's gaze, again on me, seemed to meet the flash of my gun in mid-air between us. I could imagine there must have been a conflict there—a little almost soundless, almost invisible puff of deranged vibrations. And the derangement must have been forced backward to me. All in the flash of a thought. To my conscious mind there was only my pressing the gun-lever, and then a bursting explosion at my hand as the Radak-gun flew into fragments! One of them struck my forehead; I staggered back, went down. But I was aware that Shorty, with Taro close after him, had leaped—Shorty, with knife upraised, his catapulting body hitting the crouching, ghoul-like figure.
Shorty thinks now his knife never reached its mark. There was just the impact of his body, knocking the weazened figure backward. The Radak screamed a shrill, weirdly horrible cry. But it ended in a gurgle—just for an instant, a gruesome, liquid gurgle. Then there was only Shorty's gasp of horror.
I was scrambling to my feet. I crouched, stricken, staring. Shorty had drawn back, standing staring. And Taro too had checked his rush. All three of us, frozen with revulsion. On the floor, weird in a green-red glow from a nearby machine, the weazened, mummy body of the Radak lay huddled. A thing which had been nearly all of mental quality. And now it had encountered a physical blow, to which every atom of its weird makeup was foreign.
And what a second before had been living, solid substance now was dissolving! The clothes sagged, deflated. A bubbling ooze was where the face had been. Just a brief moment, and then before us the Radak's garments lay crumpled and flat in a little pool of stenching putrescence!
I turned away, sickened. Then Shorty recovered himself. "It—that damned thing screamed! Others will come—"
"Hurry now! Smash the machines! It is what we came for—" Taro gasped.
I made a leap for the control panels; then stopped, whirled around. There was a cry from behind and above me. On a narrow, railed little balcony which connected with the ramp down which we had come, the figure of a Radak was standing! A tall grey shape! It was Ratan, though I did not know who it was then. He had a knife in his hand, and he was in the act of leaping over the rail to land upon me! I had no time to avoid him. His body came sprawling, landed on my shoulders, bore me down.