Suddenly Powell laughed, and at the unexpected sound Hunter stopped short, on hands and knees. A bitter, mocking laughter it was, that sickened the listening student. As it ceased, the man at the hill’s edge raised a clenched fist and shook it at the distant lights. And his voice rang out over the silent hilltop like the note of a warning bell.

“O man, take heed!”

Even while Powell voiced that cry of hate and menace, Hunter moved forward again. And at his first movement, his knee pressed down on a small stick that broke with the sound of a pistol-shot.

Instantly Powell turned, his hand flashing down to his pocket and emerging with a small object in its grasp. As Hunter gathered himself for a swift, desperate spring, that object glowed out, a tiny circle of luminous green, and the young student sank back to the ground, deprived of all power of motion by the paralyzing cone. Powell advanced toward him, holding the cone outstretched.

“So you escaped, Marlowe,” he said, and Hunter realized that in the darkness the man had mistaken him for his former prisoner. Powell was speaking on. “I think that I’ll stop your interference now, for good. Not that I have any personal animus against you, I assure you, but I can’t allow you to disrupt the plans I have made.” As he said this, mockingly, he carefully placed the cone on a small mound of earth, so that its rays still held Hunter paralyzed. Then he straightened and was reaching for the pistol at his belt when a dark figure sprang from behind, dashing him to earth. Marlowe!

The thought beat through Hunter’s brain as he lay, unable to twitch a muscle, watching the combat of those two figures that reeled about, striking, kicking, twisting. But what was that? What? That thin humming that suddenly made itself heard, that grew to a droning, to a rumbling, reverberating thunder. Out of the pit a dark shape was drifting up, a black disk that grew, grew, grew.