Up to now, in these tentative exchanges, Curtmann and his men doubtless had contemptuously figured that this engagement was harassing, but certainly nothing worse. Some of his men had been stabbed by little thorns. What of it? But down there now a new confusion was apparent. One of his men on the ground beside the cart suddenly staggered and fell. Then another. In the cart a group of them called with startled questions. Two of them by the big projector abruptly slumped in their seats with their fellows bending anxiously over them. A moment of startled confusion. A dozen stricken men. And then others. What was happening must have dawned on Curtmann. In the starlit dimness down there on the cart we saw the blob of his figure leap erect. And then Curtmann, at last realizing the deadliness of this menace, went into action! From the cart there was a little puff, with the hissing, popping sound of it coming up to us a few seconds later. A small round blob rose toward us, went harmlessly through us and burst up in the starlight. An electrolite-flare. It glared with a lurid, prismatic splash of color in the sky, illumined brightly the tiny flying dots of our Midges. Just that few seconds and then the great projector hurled its missile at us--a blob coming slowly up in an arc. The blob burst. It seemed as though suddenly there was an earthquake in the air-split columns of air rushing together with a deafening thunderclap. The air rocked me, hurled me sidewise; the brief roar was deafening. "A thunder-thrower!" Venta gasped as she clung to me. In the cataclysm of air the cloud of Midges was hurled into chaos, their bodies knocked together, whirling end over end, some of them dropping with broken wings. Just a few seconds, and now the blue-white starlit night had been transformed into a chaos of glaring light and roaring, clapping sound. Flares were bursting everywhere; the cracking thunderclaps came one upon the other in a chaos of prismatic horror. Curtmann's hand-flashes were stabbing recklessly up through it. One of longer range burned a wide swath with the bodies of Midges bursting into a myriad pin-points of light. In the rocking turmoil I heard Jim shouting, "Good God, we can't stay up here!" * * * * * Half our Midges already were gone! Everywhere little broken dots were drifting or falling down. "Down!" I shouted. "Venta--Meeta--tell them! Everyone down. Don't come back up--everyone for himself, now!" [Illustration: _Downward plunged the weird armada._]