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“Of course! You should be in command, Inverness, instead of myself.” His was the obvious solution to our difficulty; once proposed, I felt amazingly stupid that the thought had not occurred to me.

I gave the necessary orders to the ray men, and they started immediately, boring in steadily at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

The reddish dust came back to us in choking clouds, and the Aranians, perhaps guessing what we were doing—at least one of their number had seen how the ray could tunnel in the ground—started working around the angle of the passage.

A

Correy and I, shoulder to shoulder, fired at the least sign of movement in the cloud of dust. A score of times the rushes of the Aranians brought a few of them scuttling almost to our feet; inside of a few minutes the passage was choked, waist high, with the riddled bodies—and still they came!

“We’re through, sir!” shouted one of the ray operators. “If you can hold them off another fifteen minutes, we’ll have the hole large enough to crawl through.”