I had to slow it up, however, near the head of the shaft to take my bearings; and a sea of evil faces, contorted with livid terror, looked at me from my viewplate. But not even the terror could conceal the hate in those faces, and there arose in my mind the picture of their long centuries of ruthless cruelty to my race, and the hopelessness of changing the tigerish nature of these Hans. So I steeled myself, and drove the ball again and again into that sea of faces, until I had cleared the station platform of any living enemy, and sent the survivors crushing their way madly along the corridors away from it. There was blinding flash or two on my viewplate as some Han officer tried his ray pistol on my projectile, but that was all, except that he must have disintegrated many of his fellows, for our balls were sheathed in inertron, and suffered no damage themselves. * * * * * Cautioning my unit to follow carefully, I pushed my control lever all the way forward until my "eye" pointed down, and there appeared on my viewplate the smooth cylindrical interior of the shaft, fading down toward the base of the mountain, and like a tiny speck, far, far down, was the car, descending with its last load. I dropped my ball on it, battering it down to the bottom of the shaft, and with hammer-like blows flattening the wreckage, that I might squeeze the ball out of the shaft at the lower station. It emerged into the great vaulted excavation, capable of holding a thousand or more persons, from which the various escape tunnels radiated. Down these tunnels the last remnants of a crowd of fugitives were disappearing, while red-coated soldiers guided the traffic and suppressed disorder with the threat of their spears, and the occasional flourish of a ray pistol. As I floated my ball out into the middle of the artificial cavern I could see them stagger back in terror. Again the blinding flashes of a few ray pistols, and instantaneous borings of the rays into the walls. The red coats nearest the escape tunnels fled down them in panic. Those whose escape I blocked dropped their weapons and shrank back against the smooth, iridescent green walls. I marshalled the rest of my string carefully into the cavern, and counted the tunnel entrances, slowly swinging my "eye" around the semicircle of them. There were 26 corridors diverging to the north and west. I decided to send three balls down each, leave 12 in the cavern, then detonate them all at once. Assigning my operators to their corridors, I ordered intervals of five miles between them, and taking the lead down the first corridor, I ordered "go." Soon my ball overtook the stream of fugitives, smashing them down despite ray pistols and even rockets that were shot against it. On and on I drove it, time and again battering it through detachments of fleeing Hans, while the distance register on my board climbed to ten, twenty, fifty miles.