When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

The lights from the dormitories were holding up the advance of the attackers. They could not shoot out hundreds of globes so simply as they had smashed the searchlights. And they could not advance into that illuminated area, under the machine-guns and rifles of the laboratories. They had first to take the deserted dormitories and darken them.

They were doing this; but it delayed them. It held them up a few minutes. Here and there a few, drunker or more reckless than the rest, charged in between the buildings, but they dropped to the ground dead or wounded—or waiting for the support that was soon to come.

Room by room, dormitory windows went black. The lights were not being turned out; they were being smashed and the window-panes were crashing. Yells celebrated the smashing, and shots.

The yells ceased; and the defenders knew that some sort of assault was being reorganized.

Tony moved in the dark, recognized by his voice, and knowing others in the same way.

“Keep down—down—down,” he was crying. “Below the window-line. Down!” For bullets from machine-guns, evidently aimed from the dormitory windows, were striking in.

Many did not obey him; he did not expect them to. They had to fight back, firing from the windows. Yells at the farther end of the main laboratory told that it was hand-to-hand there, in the dark. A charge—a rush had been pushed home.

Tony found Taylor beside him; they had stuck together in the dark; and a dozen others rose and ran with them into the mêlée.

Men of science, Tony was realizing even as he stumbled in the dark, the best brains of the modern world, fighting hand to hand with savages! Shoot and stab and club, wildly, desperately in the dark!

Your comrade went down; you stepped back over him, and shot and stabbed again; yelling, groaning, slipping, struggling up again. But many did not get up. More and more lay where they fell. Tony, stumbling and slipping on the stickily wet floor, realized that this rush was stopped. There was nobody left in the room to fight—nobody but two or three distinguished as friends by the spots of the arm bands.

“Jack?” gasped Tony; and Taylor’s voice answered him. They were staggering and bleeding, both of them; but they had survived the fight together.

“Who was here!” Tony asked. Who of their comrades and friends were dead and dying at their feet, he meant. Tony found the flash-light which, all through the fight, he had in his pocket, and he bent to the floor and held it close to the faces.

He caught breath, bitterly. Bronson was there. Bronson, the discoverer of the two stranger planets whose passing had loosed this savagery; Dr. Sven Bronson, the first scientist of the Southern Hemisphere, lay there in his blood, a bayonet through his throat! Beside him Dodson was dying, his right arm hacked almost off. He recognized Tony, spoke two words which Tony could not hear, and lost consciousness.

A few of those less hurt were rising.

“To the ship! Into the ship!” Tony cried to them. “Everybody into the ship! Spread the word! Jack!… Everybody, everybody into the ship!” There was no alternative.

Three-fourths of the camp was in the hands of the horde; and the laboratories could not possibly beat off another rush. They could not have beaten back this, if it had been more organized.

Bullets flew through the dark.

“To the ship! To the ship!”

Creeping on hands and knees, from wounds or from caution, and dragging the wounded with them, the men started the retreat to the ship. Women were helping them.

Yells and whistles warned that another rush was gathering; and this would be from all sides; the laboratories and the ship were completely surrounded.

Tony caught up in his arms a young man who was barely breathing. He had a bullet through him; but he lived. Tony staggered with him into the ship.

Hendron was there at the portal of the great metal rocket. He was cooler than any one else. “Inside, inside,” he was saying confidently.

“Where’s Eve?” Tony gasped at him.

“I saw her—a moment ago.”

“Safe?”

Her father nodded.

Tony bore in his burden, laid it down. Ransdell confronted him. From head to foot, the South African was dabbled and clotted with blood. He was three-quarters naked; a bullet had creased his forehead; a bayonet had slashed his shoulder. His lips were set back from his teeth. His eyes, the only portion of him not crimson, gazed from the pit of his face, and a voice that croaked out of his wheezing lungs said: “Seen Eve?”

“Her father has, Dave. She’s all right,” replied Tony.

Ransdell pitched head foremost toward the floor as Tony caught him.

The second rush was coming. No doubt of it, and it would be utterly overwhelming. There would be no sur