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"The whites of their eyes, heh, only closer yet?" Pauncho said.
Some of the dogs slipped in the mud and slid into them. The others turned away just before the final leaps and went crashing into or over the bushes and down the hill.
Three dogs hurtled in, sidewise or fangs first, and Pauncho and Barney slammed one each over the head or the back and then kicked them on down the hill. Cobbs and Villiers hit a dog at the same time with the barrel of their rifles, breaking its ribs.
Doc said, "It ought to be over soon, one way or the other."
"What makes them voiceless?" Pauncho said. "I looked in the neck of a bird with its throat cut open back at the house on the mountain, and its vocal cords were all there."
"I saw you," Doc said. "But I supposed you'd guessed the answer. There are a number of electrodes at various areas of the brain. During the time that the animal is released for attack, its voice centers are inhibited."
"I wondered about that," Cobbs said. "But things have been happening so fast, I didn't have time to ask about it.
"I just supposed their vocal cords had been cut," Barbara said.
The others did not comment. Pauncho had asked Doc about the lack of voice after the attack by the wolves in the castle and Doc had given his opinion. But after the attack of the birds at the house on the mountain, he had told his colleagues not to mention anything about the characteristics of the animals. He had wanted to determine if the English couple would be curious about the strange lack of cries from the animals. If they did not comment, they might refrain because they knew the reason.
On the other hand, it was true that events had come one after the other and might have distracted them. But Barbara seemed to be a very stable and self-possessed person, and Cobbs, though he showed some apprehension, was far from hysterical.
The birds came first and the surviving dogs, going much slower because they had to climb uphill in muddy earth, attacked simultaneously. This time the wings of the eagles beat so close that the tips of some touched their faces. But the birds swerved again and shot back overhead. The dogs turned tail when they were still a few feet from closing with the party.
"I'd think they'd go crazy," Barney said. "They're being pulled apart by the opposing drives."
"They may yet," Doc answered.
About two minutes later the birds came in again, and this time Caliban turned off the sound generator for a few seconds after they had wheeled around to go in the other direction. The dogs then had nothing to stop them except the weapons of the party. While the others knocked the dogs on the head as they struggled uphill to get at them, Doc Caliban pressed a button on the other box, which had been on the ground by him. He had rearranged its circuits so that the aggressive areas of the brains would be stimulated.
The others did not notice what he was doing, since they were concentrating on smashing in the dogs' skulls or backbones and doing a good job of it. He had not told them his plan, since he never confided to anyone unless he needed cooperation.
There were yells and screams to the right up the mountain, and then rifles and pistols banged away. Doc indulged himself with a broad smile. The others had their backs turned and would not be able to see him.
He switched off the aggression transmitter and turned on the sound generator. The two surviving dogs leaped backward down the hill as if, they had stepped on a red-hot plate. One turned over and kept on sliding. The other regained his feet and fled.
"What's going on, Doc?" Pauncho said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the gunfire.
"As soon as the birds were deflected again, and presumably heading back toward the men who'd launched them, I switched off the noise generator and turned the aggression stimulation on. The birds, of course, attacked the first living things they saw, which were our enemies."
"Fabulous!" Pauncho rumbled. "I wish I had one of those hemispheres stuck on Barney's head. Then I could keep him from making a monkey of himself."
"Since when does a monkey's uncle know anything about proper behavior?" Barney said.
"The conflict of noise generator versus aggression stimulation might have driven them mad, anyway," Doc said. He led the way toward the groanings and whimperings drifting ghostily through the bushes. Approaching cautiously, they found six men on the ground, all alive but three totally unconscious and the other semiconscious. The birds were all dead, since they had not ceased to attack until killed. The onslaught had been so unexpected that none of the men had had time, or opportunity, to turn off the aggression stimulator. The birds had tried for the face and the throat and had blinded four. One man died of a ripped jugular vein while Doc was examining him.
After giving the survivors a shot to ensure that they would be unconscious for a long time, the party picked up some more magazines for their rifles and stuffed them in their capacious pockets. Pauncho and Barney threw the extra rifles down the mountain, and they continued climbing. They did not have far to go. Cobbs stopped suddenly, grunted, and said, “There it is.”
In the blacklight of their projectors they could see the trenches that the two archeologists had dug.
"Where's the cave-in?" Pauncho said.
"It's not there any more," Barbara Villiers said.
Doc began to poke his alpenstock into the bottoms of the trenches but stopped. He had heard the far-off chutter of helicopter vanes. He resumed probing and then said, "It's been walled up
"Where'd those men come from?" Villiers said.
Doc did not reply. He took from a side pocket of his vest a tiny instrument and, holding it in his hand, began to walk back and forth for twenty yards each way. He worked his way up the mountain while she wondered aloud what he was doing. Since neither of his colleagues were sure, they did not answer her.
Ten minutes later, Caliban reappeared so suddenly from behind a tree that Barbara jumped and Cobbs wheeled around swiftly, bringing his rifle up.
Doc stepped back behind the tree and said, "Don't shoot."
"Doc, you shouldn't do that," Cobbs said. "You're likely to get shot."
Caliban said, "Follow me."
He led them upward to the right for about twenty yards and stopped. They were facing a fairly smooth outcropping of rock. Doc Caliban walked forward on the apron of the rock extending from its base and pushed on a small boulder at one side. The boulder rocked; there was a grinding noise and a section of the outcropping slid to one side.
"How'd you find it, Doc?" Pauncho said.
Doc tapped at the pocket which now held the small device he had used when casting back and forth. "It indicates small changes in the local magnetic fields. It detected the hollow behind that rock, and so I looked for something that would be the entrance activator."
They went into the chamber which had been cut out of the solid granite. Doc pulled a lever sticking out of a box in a corner, and the ponderous section of rock slid back into place. Immediately after, electric light bulbs fixed to brackets about four feet from the floor, and about thirty feet from each other, lit up. These were co
Each one in the party held his rifle across his belly. Doc held his with one hand while the other was extended with the magnetic-field discriminator.