Earth tubelights, with batteries attached, were glowing now, mounted on the rocks. Their colored radiance illumined a small ledge of rock like a little natural dais which faced the glowing house of the monster. And now we saw a group of Earthmen gathered near the dais. Torkine's original band of criminals. Some had jugs in their hands from which occasionally they drank. Alcoholite, I had no doubt. There were some twenty of them, with others occasionally joining them. Their muttering laughter floated to us.
Johnny Blair bent toward me. "Something going on among those fellows—look at that."
A group of Earth-girls were passing the dais, herded toward its entrance steps by a line of Physicals. Some of the roistering men reached for the girls as they went by. The Physicals with popping anger checked them. The half-drunken men desisted. Some jibed at the girls with coarse comment; but others muttered to themselves—low, defiant curses. I felt myself shuddering. There was smoldering revolt out there. Torkine's men, inflamed now by the alcoholite so that what for a long time they and their leader might have been planning, they now forgot to disguise. It was as though here were a little spark trembling above a pit of horrible explosive—a spark which at any moment might hurl us all to death.
"They've never been like this before," Johnny muttered anxiously. "By Heaven, if the Physicals turn on them, and on us—"
"If only Bragg would come," Setta murmured.
A scream out in the night made her words die in her throat. A man's scream of agony, blood-curdling with its ghastly shrillness. And Setta, here in the dim room with us, echoed it.
"Bragg!"
It sounded again, mingled now with the hissing, popping little voices of the Physicals. Gruesome, ghastly tragedy being enacted now within the House of the Supreme One! Bragg's screams were horrible, but brief. All in a moment they were dying into terrible agonized moans—Bragg's tortured death in the grip of the angered multiple monster.
And suddenly the frenzied little Setta was rushing from us to the room-door.
"No!" Johnny shouted. "Come back!"