Tom-Tom gave a prolonged yell, and threw up the gun to fire. The explosions rattled and rolled in the narrow confinement of the room. Bullets spattered the armor-plated breast of the oncoming giant. One knocked away a gleaming eye. The towering thing did not falter in its dash. Tom-Tom tried to spring down too late. The big hands flashed out, and had him. Gascon, now daring to move, dragged the bench across the doorway. From a corner he caught up a heavy wrought-iron socket lever, as long as a walking stick and nearly as thick as his wrist. All the while he watched, over his shoulder, a battle that was not all one-sided. After his final effort to command the newly animated giant, Tom-Tom had not made a sound. He concentrated on freeing himself from the grip that had fastened upon him. Both his wooden hands clutched a single finger, strained against it. Gascon saw, almost as in a ridiculous dream, that immense finger bending backward, backward, and tearing from its socket. But the other fingers kept their hold. They laid Tom-Tom on the floor, a great slab of a foot pinned him there. The two metal hands began to pluck him to pieces, and to throw the pieces away. First an arm in a plaid sleeve flew across the room--an arm ripped from Tom-Tom's little sleeve, an arm that still writhed and wriggled, its fingers opening and closing. It fell among the wheels that still turned, jamming them. Sparks sprang up with a grating rattle. Then a flame of blueness. Gascon turned his back toward the doorway that he had blocked with the bench, to see the thing out. With a wanton fury, the victorious ogre of metal had shredded Tom-Tom's body, hurling the pieces in all directions. To one side, the machinery was putting forth more flame and more. The blaze licked up the wall. The giant straightened his body at last, holding in one paw the detached head of its victim. The jaws of Tom-Tom snapped and moved, as though he was trying to speak. "Look this way!" roared Gascon at the top of his voice. The creature heard him. Its head swiveled doorward. It stared with one gleaming eye and one empty black socket. Gascon brandished the socket lever over his head, as though in challenge, then turned and sprang over the bench into the dark corridor. A jangling din as the thing rushed after him. Hands shot out to clutch. Its shins struck the bench violently, the feet lost their grip of the floor, and the clumsy structure plunged forward and down, with a noise like an automobile striking a stone wall. For a moment the huge head was just at Gascon's knee. He struck. The solder-fastened patch flew away under the impact of his clubbed lever-bar like a driven golf ball. The cranium yawned open, and he jabbed the bar in. Something squashed and yielded before his prodding--the delicate artificial brain. Then the struggling shape at his feet subsided. From one relaxing hand rolled something round--the head of Tom-Tom.