Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 10.djvu/85

Rh drifted into the city, one by one, through the gates. Sentries on the wall, smitten mysteriously, stiffened abruptly and fell.

Suddenly, it was open war. Rays flashed. Men and apes died soundlessly. The main body of the apemen surged forward towards the gates their comrades had captured. Deathrays from uncaptured parts of the wall played havoc with their packed masses.

In the general darkness, relieved only by a few roving searchlights, it was impossible to form any estimate as to how many got through and how many were killed. The impatience of the apemen, causing them to attack too soon, cost them many hundreds of lives. But a large number got through.

"Come!" said Don to Wimpolo. "Let us join in the attack."

"Where you lead I follow," she said. "Death before capture."

ON'S nerves were quivering with excitement, but she was as calm as ice. Her courage was amazing to Don. He wondered how many high-born ladies of Earth would have behaved as well as she was doing if they had suddenly been plunged into such terrible experiences as the gigantic Martian Princess had been. With long ages of peace and advanced civilization the emotion of anger had almost died out among the highest races of Mars, and with it had gone fear, which is always the power behind anger.

Don expected trouble at the gate, but he, Wimpolo and the zekola went openly and unchallenged into Bommelsmeth's city. Wimpolo was in the uniform of a soldier of Bommelsmeth, and Don had also adopted a badge or two. In the confusion there was a good chance of their being able to get about unnoticed.

Inside the city was a wild confusion.

The deaths of so many of the apemen made no difference to the spirits of the rest. They scattered in all directions, their deathrays now flickering everywhere. Every apeman seemed to have a deathray now. Those who had not soon picked one up from a soldier slain by one of the others, or from a dead comrade.

Several times Don saw an apeman fingering one of the little pistols that produced the red threadray that, with its effect of intense fire, had so often scorched and tortured them in the past. But the apemen could not understand the working of these weapons. Bommelsmeth had taken great care that these pistols should be too complicated to be understood by ape brains and too delicate to be operated by ape fingers. The fire that was not fire was not for apemen to use.

In any case, in confused street fighting, where there were no fortifications and no armor to be attacked, deathrays were, a much more suitable weapon than the threadrays.

Throughout a wide section of the city sounded a curious sound. It was the apemen drumming on their chests. At the same time they were roaring their deep-throated war cry, "Death to all humans!"

The apemen in the city, submissively carrying out their tasks, heard the blood-curdling war-cry. It stirred their blood with dim ancestral memories of forest, of battle, of blood. It set their huge adrenal glands pouring the hormones of battle fury into their bloodstreams. A red haze of rage floated before their eyes. They turned on their task-masters. They leaped blindly at the nearest of Bommelsmeth's men.

Most of them died, but many survived. For apes outnumbered men here many times to one. And one man cannot defend himself against the sudden,