CHAPTER XX

_In the Blood Light of Dawn_

Drake leaped to his feet. "But this must be stopped! Good God, this is madness!"

An hour or more had passed. The brief night was more than half over. Drake had sat in the palace with the harassed council. Night of turmoil! This brief night, preface to the end.

It seemed as though all the city sensed it. The crowds were in a wild chaos, surging everywhere throughout the city. Aimless, leaderless mobs.

The government, too, was in chaos, striving to do a multiplicity of abnormal things at once. A welter of official activities was around Drake. He sat watching and listening, waiting an opportunity to take his part in the one thing most vital to him--the expedition which soon was to start upon the rescue of the Princess Dianne, and the capture of the Togarites.

The whereabouts of the enemy was known now. The island at the near-by horizon held them. It was no more than three miles away across the water. A public garden and park occupied this small island. No one lived there, but pleasure parties often went to spend a few hours. The island had been searched many times and nothing found.

Yet it was Togaro's headquarters, quite evidently. His giant form had been seen wading out there. He was there now. Drake from the palace balcony had stood and seen the towering figure in the moonlight. And then it had dwindled. In smallness there, beyond doubt, the Togarite ship was hidden. He and his leaders were there.

Drake listened to the council making its plans. An expedition of young men who had been trained in the use of the drugs was now being assembled. They were coming into the palace now, in groups, as the messengers sought them out in the city and brought them.

There seemed only one way to get to the island unperceived by Togaro. The space-ship in which Drake had arrived was being hastily repaired. In an hour or two it would be ready. A hundred young men, and Drake with his automatics, would board it. The ship would then dwindle to a size very small. It would seem a flight of miles to the island--but the ship could do that in a brief time. And in such a small size could land unobserved.

The cause of the turmoil in the city was puzzling and disturbing to the council. The arrival of Togaro had created an excitement almost verging upon panic. But the excitement had started before Togaro's arrival. All during the three-hour daylight preceding, and the night before that, a strange air of unrest had been apparent among the people. There were fifty thousand of them here. The near-by rural districts held another fifty thousand. There was an influx from the country into the city. No one knew why. Whole families coming in their carts, then abandoning the carts, and mingling with the city crowds.

Messengers arriving from other cities reported the same conditions. The people everywhere were frightened, acting strangely. The small government flyer came on its four-hundred-mile voyage from the other side of the globe. It was mostly water in that hemisphere; but there was one island--one large city. It, too, was in a turmoil.

A strange restlessness, which the panic here in the Shore City over Togaro's arrival could not explain, pervaded Mita. To Drake it was as though by some occult force the knowledge was spreading throughout the world of impending doom. But he knew it was nothing occult. Might it not be that Togaro's followers were dispersed widely over this little globe, mingling with the people, spreading insidious, frightening propaganda?

The minutes passed while Drake sat watching the arriving men whom he was to lead. The council room was in the upper story. The men came up, were checked and given instructions, and then taken to the lower floor to be equipped with belts and the drugs.

Word came that the space-ship was not badly damaged. The repairs were progressing. It would be ready for the voyage by dawn.

All this time, in the garden of the palace the mob had stood unnaturally silent, watching the building as though trying to guess what activities were going on inside. Messengers were constantly arriving and departing. Police were bringing in the young men whom Drake was to take into smallness. The airship from the other hemisphere came and landed near by; its officials hurried in through the police cordon at the palace doorway.

As though nature were conspiring with a premonition of what the future might hold, a cloud lifted above the horizon across the city and passed near the moon; a cloud at a considerable altitude, tinged with red from the coming sunrise. It threw a red cast upon the moon. The moonlight suddenly seemed drenching all the scene with blood. An omen? Drake shuddered. He turned from the window. But the murmur down there grew to a shouting. It brought his gaze back. A rhythmic shouting--the repetition of a few words over and over. It may have started with a single voice, and the crowd took it up like a chant.

"Alt, what is that?"

Alt was near Drake. He listened. But Ahlma caught it first.

"They say, '_The world ends tonight! Give us the drugs!_'"

Like a chant the crowd was all shouting it now. "_The world ends tonight! We want the drugs!_"

The council heard it. A silence fell upon the room as they listened. Then from the palace doorway, the police began shouting. A new turmoil, then the sound of thuds upon the front palace walls--missiles were being thrown. A chunk of rock came hurtling through the window. It narrowly missed Drake and fell with a crash in the midst of the sitting councilmen.

It was then Drake leaped to his feet. "But this must be stopped! This is madness!"

The mob was attacking the palace doorway. It surged at the foot of the steps. A rain of rocks came hurtling upward.

Drake shouted, "Jain, tell the council I'm going to get large! I'll disperse this mob--Ahlma, you come with me! You can talk to them--try to calm them! Tell them you are speaking for your princess."

A turmoil almost equal to the confusion in the garden now broke out in the council room. The men were all on their feet, jabbering excitedly.

Jain shouted, "No! They say no, Drake--"

Drake was spurred by the feeling of helplessness that had made him stand by and watch Togaro escape with Dianne.

He handed Ahlma a pellet. Alt pleaded, "Let me come with you."

Before the council could move to stop them, all three had taken the drug. The room began dwindling. It struck a sudden calmness to Drake. He said:

"Alt, we must get out of here! Tell the council we will not get very large. Only enough to disperse this mob. That can do no harm. Togaro knows we are here--if he sees us, what matter? Tell them we'll be small again soon--I'll be ready to go when the flyer is ready."

Alt shouted his translation. The balcony doorway was already shrunk to Drake's waist. He pushed Ahlma through and squeezed through himself with Alt after them.

At sight of them the crowd gave a roar of mingled surprise and fear. The fighting at the palace steps was instantly checked. The crowd stood and gazed. Surprise; awe; terror. It froze them.

There was a total silence. Drake gazed down, and then with a moment of dizziness looked away. The palace was shrinking. He presently reached up and gripped its spire at the peak of the roof. With his other hand drew from his belt pellets of the other drug.

Drake had had much experience with the drugs, each an antidote to the other; he knew how to check his growth at any point. He checked it now, and Ahlma and Alt did the same.

They stood precariously upon a tiny balcony of a toy house whose spire was not much taller than their heads. A few feet beneath them, hardly more than a comfortable step down, was the miniature garden. Little trees, bathed in the blood-light of the moon, and small human figures.

The balcony strained and swayed beneath the weight. Drake said, "We must step down. Alt, call down to them, tell them to give us room."

Alt's voice spurred the crowd to action. The spell which had struck them motionless was broken. A woman screamed. The crowd took it up--frenzied screams. In panic, they turned and shoved, fought, screaming to get away.

But the adjacent streets were packed with people. The crowd from the garden pressed at them.

The balcony was breaking. This toy house; these toy people!

Drake said, "Step down, Ahlma."

There was room beneath them now: They stepped from the balcony, and stood together beside the little palace, with the garden down at their shoe-tops. The crowd in a frenzy was fighting its way back through the trees. There were open spaces in the garden now. Patches of open, blood-red moonlight. But in all of these, motionless tiny figures were lying where they had been trampled.

Contrition swept Drake. It seemed that everything he attempted was doomed to disaster. Ahlma was gripping him.

"Drake, look--off there!"

They could see behind them over the palace roof; the shining lake; the island at the horizon where the Togarites were hiding.

Alt cried out, stricken with horror. And then Drake saw it.

They stood, Drake, Ahlma and Alt, three giants, gazing out over the lake. The dawn was nearer than Drake had realized. The sky above the island was turning red. A bank of clouds off there was reddening. The swift-coming dawn was at hand. The moon was fading. The scene everywhere was brightening.

Upon the island, where a green hill showed dark against the lightening sky, something abnormal showed. A dark shape, growing, expanding. It spread, sidewise and upward; not a human shape, not a giant, but something far more ominous. It was rounded and oblong; and to be visible at this distance it must be already a hundred feet long.

Then in a moment it was twice that. It seemed shoving at the hill with its growth--shoving itself toward the water.

The Togaro space-ship! It had come now suddenly from its hiding place. Realization swept Drake with a surge of horror. Togaro's departure was at hand!

The ship was expanding with tremendous rapidity. It soon had shoved itself off the island with its growth. It lifted slightly and then settled upon the water, floating on a raft-like hull of pontoons.

Another minute. It lay off there as though moored to the tiny island. It was still growing, a monstrous thing now. Most of it was below the curve of the horizon, but its stern loomed up beside the island. A ship a mile long now. In another minute it might be twice that.

Drake's thoughts were whirling. This monstrous thing--why didn't it rise and be gone?

As though to answer his thoughts he became aware that Ahlma and Alt had turned and were gazing again over the city. Then Drake knew why the Togaro vehicle was lingering.

From everywhere about the distant landscape, from a hundred points in the spread of the city, giants were rising! The dawn--this dawn now beginning--was the signal. Giants, widely scattered at various points, appearing now out of smallness!

There was a giant whose head and shoulders rose from one of the city streets quite near at hand. The sight of him caught Drake's fascinated attention. He grew with amazing swiftness to a height of perhaps two hundred feet. Then his growth suddenly stopped. He stood gazing about him. In the faint light of the dawn Drake could see him plainly--a Togarite, stocky, wide-shouldered, bullet-headed. He wore, upon his chest and waist a series of belts. And about his throat a leather necklace, with pads out over his shoulders.

His torso, shoulders and neck were black with clinging tiny human figures! They hung upon his straps like clustering insects. They were in their normal size, Drake judged. They had climbed upon him when he was small. He seemed to be carrying a hundred or more. He stood a moment, then stepped cautiously up to the flat roof of a near-by house. It cracked with his weight. He leaped over it, into another street. He may have crushed scores of people who were gathered there. Drake could hear faint screams. The giant leaped again, found a broader street, ran down it toward the lake, and waded into the water.

A hundred such incidents. A hundred such giants simultaneously appearing at the signal of the dawn. They were carrying ten thousand people at the least. They appeared from everywhere, laden with the tiny clinging figures.

From the distant hills of the open country still more of them came running, dashing through the city, wrecking its houses, trampling the crowds in the streets; heading for the lake.

The water was soon lashed into a turmoil. The giants were all a prearranged height. The water rose only to their hips. It beat white against them as they forced their way through it toward the island where the monstrous vehicle was waiting to receive them.

Drake understood it now. In smallness the Togarites had been secretly working; gathering their followers from among the people. It was an exodus now to the island where the expedition to conquer the earth was ready to depart.

There were giants rising from the island now. More of Togaro's followers, gathered there in smallness, growing now to join this arriving throng of their fellows. One giant, taller than all the others, loomed into the sky, black against the blood-red dawn. He was standing in the lake, far away, so that only his head and shoulders were above the horizon. It may have been Togaro, directing the embarkation. He was monstrous; and the vehicle on the water, lying quiescent now with its stern looming on the curve of the little globe, was monstrous.

The giants were clustered out there, climbing with their human freight into the doorway of the ship. And they were still arriving. The city was wrecked with their passage. The broken streets were littered with mangled forms of the trampled crowds.

The sunrise came. The blurred little sun was red. It bathed the shattered, screaming city with crimson; it painted the running giants; it turned the foaming waters of the lake to blood.

When the turmoil was over and the littered giants had all embarked, off there against the red morning sky the monstrous vehicle was again expanding.