It was not human. No more than the first had been—but the Martian sounds had been merely alien and these were horrible.
It was like nothing so much as the croaking of some gigantic frog, risen bellowing from a bottomless primeval swamp. It bayed of stinking sunless pools and gurgled of black ooze. And its booming notes descended to subsonic throbbings that gripped and wrung the nerves to anguish.
Dalton was involuntarily on his feet, clawing for the switch. But he stopped, reeling. His head spun and he could not see. Through his dizzy brain the great voice roared and the mighty tones below hearing hammered at the inmost fortress of the man’s will.
On the heels of that deafening assault the voice began to change. The numbing thunder rumbled back, repeating the pain and the threat—but underneath something crooned and wheedled obscenely. It said, “Come … come … come….” And the stunned prey came on stumbling feet, shivering with a terror that could not break the spell. Where the squat black machine had been was something that was also squat and black and huge. It crouched motionless and blind in the mud and from its pulsing expanded throat vibrated the demonic croaking. As the victim swayed helplessly nearer the mouth opened wide upon long rows of frightful teeth….
The monstrous song stopped suddenly. Then still another voice cried briefly, thinly in agony and despair. That voice was human.
Each of the two men looked into a white strange face. They were standing on opposite sides of the table and between them the playback machine had fallen silent. Then it began to whir again in the locust speech of the Martian commentator, explaining rapidly, unintelligibly.
Thwaite found the switch with wooden fingers. As if with one accord they retreated from the black machine. Neither of them even tried to make a false show of self-possession. Each knew, from his first glimpse of the other’s dilated staring eyes, that both had experienced and seen the same.
Dalton sank shivering into a chair, the darkness still swirling threateningly in his brain. Presently he said, “The expression of a will—that much was true. But the will—was not of man.”
James Dalton took a vacation. After a few days he went to a psychiatrist, who observed the usual symptoms of overwork and worry and recommended a change of scene—a rest in the country.