Coming out of this mine, he led a small army, and felt like a conquering general already. In two hours he had invaded every shaft in the valley, and six hundred men less a score or so were at his back.
"How's this for a start?" he asked Nirea, meeting her walking her roan on the grass. She glanced at the mass of men, all those in the van carrying dead globes. "Not bad ... but have you seen the sky, Mink?"
He looked upward. From horizon to horizon the sky was ablaze with circles of light, red and green and violet, pure terrible white and flickering yellow. The buttons, murmured his men behind him. The buttons are awake!
"You couldn't expect to do it in secret, Revel," said John. The old man was as spry and eager as a boy, thought the Mink. "Now let's not waste time. I'm banking that the invaders, I mean the globes, won't blast this valley except as a last resort; if they read my mind, or if their science has gone far enough for 'em to recognize an anti-force-screen thrower when they see one, then we're practically atom soup now."
Revel, having understood at least one portion of the speech—"Let's not waste time"—waved his miners forward.
They filled the shaft and the tunnel, they thronged into the cave; when the Mink had shown them the machine to be moved, they fought one another for the honor of being first to touch it.
It stood solidly on the floor, ten feet high, twelve wide, square and black with twin coils and a thick projection like an enormous gun on the top. Men jammed around it, bent and gripped a ledge near the bottom, heaved up. Loath to move, it rocked a bit, then was hoisted off the ground. They staggered forward with it.
The hole in the wall was far too small.