Brave and Alan and Bill had now divested themselves of their shirts and were taking off their undershirts. They were still dancing their lilting small cakewalk.
"Nuts," said the soldier. "They're nuts. Musta caught some radiation from that buster." All the men on the ring of huge equipment beyond the fence were watching them too. It was amusing to see a really mad scientist, and three were delightful. They whooped and cheered and laughed.
Then the saucermen came over the hill.
It was as though they erupted from the ground, even to Alan and his henchmen who had been watching for them. And what a sight it was! Barbarians in every physical trait, from face to naked chest to ornate girdle and gold loincloth, armed with tiny tubes that hurled fireballs and with thin blowpipes that shot numbing darts over incredible distances, they might have been warriors from a forgotten land in a long-forgotten time. And they came silently, so that they seemed to approach through the noiseless depths of a dream. But the shriek of a soldier falling from a gun platform, his face in flames, was not out of a dream, but a hideous nightmare.
The three men pounced on their rifles, threw them up and were firing methodically even before they had regained the erect position. Alan and Brave, crack shots who had been used to practice every Sunday morning on the military range, shot for the heads; Bill, a less certain marksman, tried for the chests. The brain and heart were the only sure targets when you fought a man who could feel no pain and could keep going with half of his body shot away.
For a brief time it seemed to the soldiers that the scientists were shooting aliens; then the leader turned and saw where the muzzles pointed.
"Get 'em!" he bellowed, and sprayed a charge from a grenade pistol that went wide of its mark but fanned Bill's cheek with tiny scraps of hot breeze. Next instant he was down kicking from Bill's slug, and the guards of the gate were finished.
The vanguard of the outlanders swept in and across the grounds. They had concentrated on this single gate, as the others had too open approaches for safety. There were men from sixteen saucers, over four hundred of them, and they ran like deer, like cheetahs after deer, like winds after cheetahs. Mutely, with a kind of ferocious impersonality, they descended on the colony.
Men came running out with machine guns and feverishly began to load them. They were picked off by rifle bullets, by paralyzing ray tubes, and relays came and were picked off and more came. One gun stuttered into action momentarily, and the crew went twisting up in the air, their gun blown apart, their bodies rent by a weapon that even Alan had not known of. He spotted it finally, a blunderbuss-shaped thing of silver with a flaring mouth, fired like a bazooka. Another machine gun blew up.