* * * * *
Lundy didn't have breath enough left to curse. He turned and ran, and
the kelp-beasts gave a lazy flirt of their tails and caught up with him
in the first thirty feet. They almost laughed in his face.
The only thing that saved Lundy was that when they opened their
leaf-wings to take him they interfered with each other. It slowed
them, just for a moment. Just long enough for Lundy to see the door.
A little door of black stone with no carving on it, standing half-open
on a golden pivot, about ten feet away.
Lundy made for it. He dodged out from under one huge swooping wing,
made a wild leap that almost tore him apart, and grabbed the edge of
the door with his hands, doubling up and pulling.
A tentacle tip struck his feet. His lead boots hit the floor, and for a
minute he thought his legs were broken. But the surge of water the blow
made helped to carry him in through the narrow opening.
Half a dozen blunt red-brown heads tried to come through after him, and
were stopped. Lundy was down on his hands and knees. He was trying to
breathe, but somebody had put a heavy building on his chest. Also, it
was getting hard to see anything.
He crawled over and put his shoulder against the door and pushed. It
wouldn't budge. The building had settled and jammed the pivot for
keeps. Even the butting kelp-things couldn't jar it.
But they kept on trying. Lundy crawled away. After a while some of the
weight went off his chest and he could see better.
A shaft of fitful golden light shot in through a crack about ten feet
above him. A small crack, not even big enough to let a baby in and out.
It was the only opening other than the door.
The room was small, too. The stone walls were dead black, without
ornament or carving, except on the rear wall.
There was a square block of jet there, about eight feet long by four
wide, hollowed in a peculiar and unpleasantly suggestive fashion. Above
it there was a single huge ruby set in the stone, burning red like a
foretaste of hell fire.
Lundy had seen similar small chambers in old cities still on dry land.
They were where men had gone to die for crimes against society and the
gods.
Lundy looked at the hungry monsters pushing at the immovable door and
laughed. There was no particular humor in it. He fired his last shot,
and sat down.
[Illustration: _Lundy fired the last shot in his gun._]
The brutes might go away sometime, maybe. But unless they went within
a very few minutes, it wasn't going to matter. Lundy's oxygen was
getting low, and it was still a long way to the coast.