Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 10.djvu/131

Rh For a moment Cliff went berserk, and he charged upon the ugly figure of the Martian and hurled it to the metal floor with almost superhuman effort.

The statue fell with a crash, and to Cliff's utter amazement, it shattered into bits.

"It's not anilum!" he muttered in an awed voice. "It smashed like like—"

He knelt and examined the shattered figure, and from the debris of it picked up a small whitish piece of bone. As he fingered it wonderingly, it crumbled in his hand, becoming a fine, whitish powder that drifted to the floor.

"Bone!" he exclaimed. "This wasn't a statue, it was the last Martian himself, perfectly preserved here in his own death-trap! And he was standing there, gloating, even as death came to him, over the vengeance that he had planned for a race that was not yet born!"

LIFF kicked out suddenly with his foot, sending the fragments of the mummy skittering along the floor in all directions. He was sobbing with pure fury after a moment, and then he turned and stumbled away from the horror that he had discovered.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. TICK-TOCK. TICK-TOCK!

Interminably, on and on, the horrible ticking reverberated through the cavern, and Cliff fled from it, his hands over his ears.

"I can't stop it!" he moaned. "Not a thing I can do. Here I am, helpless, while that awful voltage prepares to launch itself at the Earth."

He sat down suddenly on a jagged piece of rock and sobbed like a baby, the reaction of his fear and terror and horror had finally set in. For some moments his frame shook with emotion, then gradually he quieted, and a grim look came to his face.

He sat for some time staring into the darkness, then he rose once more to his feet and strode determinedly back toward the big ball and the invulnerably protected pendulum.

"There must be a way," he whispered. "No science can be absolutely fool-proof. There's a way that any slightly clever engineer ought to be able to stop a simple pendulum from swinging. And I'll find that way! I'll find it before it's too late "

But as he stared at the huge ball, he knew that he was indulging in wishful thinking. Perhaps there was a way, but it would take more than the few hours he had left to find it.

Just how much time did he have? He glanced at his watch and cursed. He had smashed it sometime during his wanderings through the cavern. As its hands stood now, he had only seven hours left when the watch was broken. He had somewhere between two and five hours left.

"That's too indefinite," he muttered apprehensively. "Even if I do find a way, maybe I won't have time to finish doing it."

He began a careful search over every inch of the ball, even piling up debris so he could get on top of it. Once he fell, sliding from the smooth ball, but he was able to rise once more to his feet, although he could scarcely stand on a twisted ankle. After that he crawled about on his hands and knees, inspecting the base of the ball, and trying to find an inlet cable that he could short-circuit.

There was nothing.

Despair seized him once more and he sat thinking.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock

E began to fancy that he heard whispering in the darkness about him and started and peered around search-