Still looking down, Turnbull lifted the chair an inch or two from the ground.  Then he suddenly swung it above his head and sent it at the inquiring doctor with an awful crash which sent one of its wooden legs loose along the floor and crammed the doctor gasping into a corner.  MacIan gave a great shout, snatched up the loose chair-leg, and, rushing on the other doctor, felled him with a blow.  Twenty attendants rushed to capture the rebels; MacIan flung back three of them and Turnbull went over on top of one, when from behind them all came a shriek as of something quite fresh and frightful.

Two of the three passages leading out of the hall were choked with blue smoke.  Another instant and the hall was full of the fog of it, and red sparks began to swarm like scarlet bees.

“The place is on fire!” cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror.  “Oh, who can have done it?  How can it have happened?”

A light had come into Turnbull’s eyes.  “How did the French Revolution happen?” he asked.

“Oh, how should I know!” wailed the other.

“Then I will tell you,” said Turnbull; “it happened because some people fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he looked.”

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand re-entered the smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum from his hands with a handkerchief.  He had set fire to the building in accordance with the strict principles of the social contract.

But MacIan had taken a stride forward and stood there shaken and terrible.  “Now,” he cried, panting, “now is the judgement of the world.  The doctors will leave this place; the keepers will leave this place.  They will leave us in charge of the machinery and the machine-guns at the windows.  But we, the lunatics, will wait to be burned alive if only we may see them go.”

“How do you know we shall go?” asked Hutton, fiercely.

“You believe nothing,” said MacIan, simply, “and you are insupportably afraid of death.”

“So this is suicide,” sneered the doctor; “a somewhat doubtful sign of sanity.”

“Not at all—­this is vengeance,” answered Turnbull, quite calmly; “a thing which is completely healthy.”

“You think the doctors will go,” said Hutton, savagely.

“The keepers have gone already,” said Turnbull.

Even as they spoke the main doors were burst open in mere brutal panic, and all the officers and subordinates of the asylum rushed away across the garden pursued by the smoke.  But among the ticketed maniacs not a man or woman moved.

“We hate dying,” said Turnbull, with composure, “but we hate you even more.  This is a successful revolution.”

In the roof above their heads a panel shot back, showing a strip of star-lit sky and a huge thing made of white metal, with the shape and fins of a fish, swinging as if at anchor.  At the same moment a steel ladder slid down from the opening and struck the floor, and the cleft chin of the mysterious Master was thrust into the opening.  “Quayle, Hutton,” he said, “you will escape with me.”  And they went up the ladder like automata of lead.