The engineer died without awakening.
Another shot rang out as another man went to sleep, then continued on to join his fathers.
The technician busy filling the fuel tanks of the rocket was the third man to go. He managed to finish closing the filler cap and to lay down his flexible line before the urge to sleep overcame him.
By this time the guards knew that something was wrong.
Silence came over the cavern. In the stillness, the note of the violin flickering up and down the scale could be heard. Men looked at each other in growing apprehension. Looking, some of them lay down and went to sleep.
"Sleep gas!" an officer bawled. "Shoot all foreigners on sight!"
The officer suspected that some spy had slipped into the underground cavern and had released gas there. His command was intended to enable his men to find and eliminate this alien. As such, from a military standpoint, it was a good command. It had this deficiency: when his men did not find any aliens, but their own people continued going to sleep on them, they began imagining foreigners. The guards began to shoot their own technicians and engineers.
As panic swept through the cavern, guards began to shoot other guards. Soon the people in this huge underground chamber were tearing and destroying each other. And one other thing: they were also going to sleep.
The panic grew to hurricane proportions.
When Kurt Zen appeared inside the cavern the whole vast place was as still as a tomb. Smoke from the rifles hung in the air, the cavern stank of death and fear. But the bomb still rested in its launching cradle.