The Hawk was at the switch, but his hand hesitated. In spite of the emergency at the doors, in spite of his innate promptness of action, he hesitated. This thing he was about to do--this awful human mechanism before him--they were so weird and unnatural.... Then he heard a faint click inside the laboratory--in a place where no one should be. Instinctively he whirled and crouched--and an orange ray streaked over his head with its wicked spit of death. At once his own ray-gun was up and answering to the spot where the other bolt had started, and then he was flat on the floor and ceiling toward the wall opposite. * * * * * A high wide panel in the wall had slid open, with only the faint noise Carse had heard to mark its movement. For just a few seconds it stayed open. The Hawk covered the last few feet in a desperate rush, but he reached it too late. It clicked shut in his face, and there was no hold for his hands when he tried to force it back. Only a voice showed that someone was on the other side. In familiar, suave tones it said: "Carse, I still will take you and Leithgow--alive. It would of course be idle to ask you to surrender, but that's not necessary, for you're trapped and can't possibly last another five minutes. I intrude only to warn you away from my synchronized brains. I will destroy without compunction anyone who meddles with them." Dr. Ku's voice dropped away; the last words seemed to have come from below. Apparently he was descending by a stairway or hidden elevator. "Without compunction!" Leithgow echoed with a bitter smile. Carse ordered Friday curtly to watch the panel, then returned to Leithgow. "Eliot," he said, "we've got to be quick." And with his words the delicate, overstrained filament in the tiny instrument bulb gave out, and the laboratory was plunged into ultimate blackness.... CHAPTER XII _Out Under the Dome_ Within the well of darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have come from the fantastic anvils of some giant, malevolent blacksmith. The Hawk's curt voice cut through imperatively: "Keep your heads. We'll have a light in a second. Light of a sort." He threw the switch by the side of the chamber of brains. Seconds passed, and where was darkness grew a faint glow. The switch had operated; the current, probably from the device's own batteries, was there! Quickly and steadily the liquid within the case took on its self-originating glow, until the midnight laboratory was faintly washed with the delicate rosy light. The wires emerged in their complexity as before, and then the brains, all gruesome and naked in their cradles of unnatural life.