"Just a minute, folks!" Seaton listened intently and stared upward. "We'll have to let the explanations ride a while longer. I thought they wouldn't give up that easy--here they come! I don't know how long we were gone--it seemed like a darn long time--but it was long enough so that I learned how to mop up on these folks, believe me! You take that sword and buckler of Peg's, Mart. They don't look so hot, but they're big medicine in these parts. All we've got to do is swing them fast enough to keep those stingaroos of theirs out of our gizzards and we're all set. Be careful not to hit too hard, though, or you'll bust that grating into forty pieces--it's hyperstuff, nowhere near as solid as anything we're used to. All it'll stand is about a normal fly-swatting stroke, but that's enough to knock any of these fan-tailed humming birds into an outside loop. Ah, they've got guns or something! Duck down, girls, so we can cover you with these shields; and, Shiro, you might pull that piece of chain apart and throw the links at them--that'll be good for what ails them!" The hypermen appeared in the control room, and battle again was joined. This time, however, the natives did not rush to the attack with their tridents; nor did they employ their futile rays of death. They had guns, shooting pellets of metal; they had improvised crossbowlike slings and catapults; they had spears and javelins made of their densest materials, which their strongest men threw with all their power. But pellets and spears alike thudded harmlessly against four-dimensional shields--shields once the impenetrable, unbreakable doors of their mightiest prison--and the masses of metal and stone vomited forth by the catapults were caught by Seaton and Crane and hurled back through the ranks of the attackers with devastating effect. Shiro also was doing untold damage with his bits of chain and with such other items of four-dimensional matter as came to hand. Still the hypermen came pressing in, closer and closer. Soon the three men were standing in a triangle, in the center of which were the women, their flying weapons defining a volume of space to enter which meant hideous dismemberment and death to any hypercreature. But on they came, willing, it seemed, to spend any number of lives to regain their lost control over the Terrestrials; realizing, it seemed, that even those supernaturally powerful beings must in time weaken. * * * * * While the conflict was at its height, however, it seemed to Seaton that the already tenuous hypermen were growing even more wraithlike; and at the same time he found himself fighting with greater and greater difficulty. The lethal grating, which he had been driving with such speed that it had been visible only as a solid barrier, moved more and ever more slowly, to come finally to a halt in spite of his every effort.