"Look out!" shrieked Jackson. He was staring straight into the now
unhooded eyes of the giant. He backed away, stumbled against a stool,
and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Smith fumbled impotently with a
hammer. The doctor was shaking like a leaf.

But Van Emmon stood still in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the Goliath;
his fingernails gashed the palms of his hands but he would not budge.
And as he stared he saw, from first to last, the whole ghastly change
that came, after billions of years of waiting, to the sole survivor of
Mercury.

A glaze swept over the huge figure. Next instant every line in that
adamant frame lost its strength; the hardness left the eyes and mouth.
The head seemed to sink lower into the massive shoulders, and the
irresistible hands relaxed. In another second the thing that had once
been as iron had become as rubber.

But only for an instant. Second by second that huge mountain of muscle
slipped and jellied and actually melted before the eyes of the humans.
At the same time a curious acrid odor arose; Smith fell to coughing. The
doctor turned on more oxygen.

In less than half a minute the man who had once conquered a planet was
reduced to a steaming mound of brownish paste. As it sank to the floor
of the case, it touched a layer of coarse yellow powder sprinkled there;
and it was this that caused the vapor. In a moment the room was filled
with the haze of it; luckily, the doctor's apparatus worked well.

And thus it came about that, within five minutes from being exposed to
the air of the sky-car, that whole immense bulk, chair and all, had