"You probably won't like the idea so much, Lieutenant," Captain Brooke said quietly, shifting the weight of his atom-blast on his hip. He smiled thinly, "We're going to investigate some of those playmates of yours—the spheres!"
Randall's face tightened with a peculiar expression. He started to speak, then noting Dallas' sardonic smile, he stopped.
"Just before we landed," the Captain continued, "I saw a large pit filled with the globes up in the plateau just ahead. I want to try an experiment. From what I saw happened with you Dallas, when you tried to blast that globe and then threw rocks at it and it went away, and yet, it pursued Randall ... well, I have a theory that I want to test. If it works, we may yet turn the tables on Koerber."
With perfect confidence, Captain Dennis turned and began to stride toward the plateau in the near distance. Without hesitation Dallas strode behind him, followed by Scotty and Jeffery, and a few other lesser members of the crew. Only Randall hesitated as if an awful premonition paralyzed his steps. He seemed to make an heroic effort, and hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence he began to follow the leaders.
At last they were standing at the rim of the vast pit; looking down, Dennis realized it must be all of a mile in width. It seemed filled with clusters of the globes which vibrated gently at the bottom.
"Millions of the damned things!" Dallas exclaimed.
The pit sloped down to a point at the center of the bottom, and there was the immense cluster of globes that Dennis had seen. From small ones, the size of thermo-bulbs, to gigantic spheres fully six feet in diameter, it was a pulsating, shimmering mass of changing opalescences, a seething cauldron of prismatic hues, dormant now, but ready to flame into living light.
Randall, the last to arrive, approached the edge and gazed down. The ethereal, ghostly seeming spheres with their pulsating auras sent an icy shiver of dread along his taut nerves. He shuddered and turned to the others. "Let's go," he said hoarsely. "Those demons might come floating up here!" There was a hysterical quality to his voice that did not pass unnoticed to Captain Dennis, who was observing him closely. "Let's go!" Randall cried again, his face contorted.
Suddenly there was a stream of movement below; from the central mass of globes, several detached themselves and floated silently upwards in swirls of living light.