In another second he had plunged, unhurt, into a black passage, and
incontinently someone, coming, it may be, in a transverse direction,
blundered violently into him. He was hurling down a staircase in absolute
darkness. He reeled, and was struck again, and came against a wall with
his hands. He was crushed by a weight of struggling bodies, whirled
round, and thrust to the right. A vast pressure pinned him. He could not
breathe, his ribs seemed cracking. He felt a momentary relaxation, and
then the whole mass of people moving together, bore him back towards the
great theatre from which he had so recently come. There were moments when
his feet did not touch the ground. Then he was staggering and shoving. He
heard shouts of "They are coming!" and a muffled cry close to him. His
foot blundered against something soft, he heard a hoarse scream under
foot. He heard shouts of "The Sleeper!" but he was too confused to speak.
He heard the green weapons crackling. For a space he lost his individual
will, became an atom in a panic, blind, unthinking, mechanical. He thrust
and pressed back and writhed in the pressure, kicked presently against a
step, and found himself ascending a slope. And abruptly the faces all
about him leapt out of the black, visible, ghastly-white and astonished,
terrified, perspiring, in a livid glare. One face, a young man's, was
very near to him, not twenty inches away. At the time it was but a
passing incident of no emotional value, but afterwards it came back to
him in his dreams. For this young man, wedged upright in the crowd for a
time, had been shot and was already dead.

A fourth white star must have been lit by the man on the cable. Its
light came glaring in through vast windows and arches and showed Graham
that he was now one of a dense mass of flying black figures pressed back
across the lower area of the great theatre. This time the picture was
livid and fragmentary, slashed and barred with black shadows. He saw