Part 12

Behind me I heard the hiss and roar as the great wind projector got into action, a stream of expanding, heat-yielding electrons flung in a path over the channel surface. A roar, the hot air rising, the cold wind sweeping in; the channel was soon lashed with angry waves.

It had grown very dark. Black clouds edged with lightning were coming down from the north. The thunder claps were louder. I swept low over Talon’s lines. Groups of head clustered on the ground, some mounted on the brutemen.

A crowd moved about a huge black muzzle pointed diagonally upward toward Kalima.

I passed close over it, a hundred feet up, but I hoped that for a moment I would not be seen in the darkness.

To my right was the yellow barrage radiance along the shore. Large, bowl-like wire cages set at intervals of a hundred feet. They glowed yellow, huge pots of the spreading barrage light. Mounted heads were attending them.

I dashed at one. I shouted, stood up on my swaying platform and screamed with menacing words. The heads looked up, surprised. The Frazier projector spat its intensified ray.

Woodenly, the heads and the brutemen stood stricken; the pot of light went out. I passed within fifty feet of it; my fire-flash, effective at this short range, spat its tongue of blue flame. The brutemen and the heads, the pot of barrage light itself, shriveled under the blast.

I swept along the barrage line, the Frazier beam preceding me. From the other side, and from below, yellow rings of fire darted up. They struck my upraised side-shield, and the bottom of the platform. I could hear the crack of the reports as they struck.

The encampment was in confusion, thousands of dark, surging figures. Small, black beams swung at me, mingled with the fire-rings. A light-flare burst over my head. Shouts, a rush of dim figures to avoid me; one of my birds was struck. I cut it loose. It fell.

But I was not halted; a minute or two of swift flight, the barrage went dark as I sprayed it with the Frazier beam and the blue fire. I came to the giant projector of the black ray; it shriveled, fused. Its gunners vanished under my blast.

The air was acrid with metallic gases and the smell of burning human flesh. But Talon’s shoreline was dark, devastated. Another of my birds wavered; I urged them all upward. Fire-rings rocked my platform with their detonations. But I was rising. They fell away. The shouts of confusion lessened, melted beneath me.

I was over the water again, safe beyond the lines. The barrage was gone. The giant black beam was destroyed. I tried to tune in for Maxite, could not get him. But I got Jim.

“Forward! Attack now! Swiftly, Jim, with all you’ve got!”

Then I got Maxite. “Order the attack!”

I could not get his image. My controls were disabled, or the atmosphere was overcharged. But I heard his triumphant voice. “We’ll get them, Leonard, get them now!”

The storm from the north broke with fury; no rain, but a blast of wind, sizzling lightning bolts, and the roar of thunder.

Jim had evidently abandoned his windblast. His forces were dashing forward. A spray of the violet needle beams curved up before him.

Talon’s line was answering. Fire-rings were floating up. Black rays were waving. The two lines, came together as Jim’s army rushed forward; the rolling hills off there were a confusion of darting lights and crossing rays, myriad mid-air explosions.

Then it seemed that Talon’s line was drawing back, a retreat northward. A yellow barrage went up to cover it. But Jim rushed it; the barrage vanished. With some great projector, Talon’s heads made a stand.

A great ball of fire rose into the heavens, a tremendous arc over Jim’s army, until it fell at the horizon. Fell on Kalima? I thought so; There was a glare against the sky over there. At five-minute intervals these fire-balls went up, bombarding the distant city.

Sonya was fifteen thousand feet over the channel when our second attack began. The storm was driving the girls back; the birds could barely hold against the wind. The sea far below was a turmoil of lashing waves.

Our boats in the east channel started forward to try and reach Talon’s rafts. But the rafts had blown ashore, were wrecked on the north rocky beach of the island.

Angry waves dashed over them. The heads and the brute-bodies were washed ashore with each white surge of the water.

Our boats saw it. They dropped back into the lee of the island, in the East Channel. The water was a little calmer there.

Close along shore they hovered, and began raking the island with their needle beams, a steady outpour of violet streams, and blasts from the blue fire-guns.

The island’s verdure shriveled, all along the east shore. Then Maxite ordered Jim to set a projector on the west bluff. It soon was sending a blue stream across the channel. The west side of the island was raked from end to end.

Sonya’s girls were scattered by the wind. But she saw some of them poised over the north end of the island where Talon’s men were trying to land from the rafts. The girls dropped a bomb, then another. The bombs were finding their marks.

Sonya urged her bird in that direction. But abruptly the thought of Altho came clear and vivid to her mind. She had long since given Altho up for dead, killed by our own weapons. But he was not dead. His thoughts came to her with sudden clearness.

I saw the bombardment of Kalima finally halted. Jim, victorious, was sweeping everything before him. His projector still raked the island. The island’s vegetation was burning now from end to end. On the north beach the huddled figures were nearly gone; bodies were everywhere. The water was dotted with them.

Along the main shore now, in advance of Jim, Talon’s army was in utter rout. Frantic brutemen with mounted heads rushed to the beach, plunged in. The heads were torn away; floating like balloons on the white lashing waves. Back along the shore, Jim’s men were lined. Needle beams darted out at the floating heads.

Everywhere we were winning. Far back in the country I could see Jim’s triumphant lights, spreading everywhere.

From the turmoil of water beneath me, a boat rose up, a long, narrow black boat. Its cover slid back. It was heading northward, away from Kalima, speeding swiftly, with a line of bubbles in its wake.

I remembered it; the boat Jim had described. Talon’s boat! Talon, who had been lurking beneath the surface of the sea, waiting in safety for victory, so that he might rush for Kalima. Now, with defeat, he was escaping. Altho, perhaps, was with him.

I turned my aerial, trying to pick up Maxite. But I could not get him. Then I tried one of our nearest boats raking the island, ordered it to follow Talon. Behind me, far down, I saw it turn and start.

I drove my birds downward in a swoop for Talon’s boat. Beneath me, close to the water I seemed to see the shadow of a flying bird, but in a moment I had forgotten it.

A breathless swoop and I was close upon the boat. From the dim glow of its engines, I saw it held only four figures, three mounted heads. Two were controlling the boat. The other was Talon. I could see him moving about giving commands. And Altho lay in the boat’s bottom, Altho, his body lashed and bound into an inert bundle.

My Frazier beam struck the boat’s interior. The two mounted heads controlling it stiffened and fell. But Talon was untouched. I was close over the stern of the boat, holding my projector downward. Talon’s face glared up at me, untouched. His brute-body stiffened and slumped, but Talon disconnected from it.

His head dropped to the deck upon his hands. His eyes glared up at me. A flash of black spat from his hand-projector. At this close range my platform crumpled. It fell, struck the boat’s stern, and toppled half into the water. I had leaped. I fell into the boat.

But another figure had landed there before me, a giant, fluttering bird. Sonya jumped from it, seized Altho’s bound body. Talon’s small flash darted at her, but missed.

My wrecked platform, half on the boat’s stern, weighed it down. The boat began to fill with water.

I saw vaguely as I leaped at Talon, that Sonya was dragging Altho’s inert form to the gunwale. They went overboard together. My hurtling body struck the head of Talon. It cracked, smashed under my weight. I climbed from its noisome, sticky mass.

The boat was filling, sinking stern first. I dove over its side, into the wave-whipped sea.

The sinking boat sucked me under. But I came up. Around me was a white, tumultuous darkness. Overhead the storm clouds had broken into a rift; the yellow moonlight came through. Something was floating near me, some wreckage from the boat, a gas-filled pontoon. I seized it.

Behind me, our boat from the island was approaching. Then I saw, upraised near me by a surging wave-crest, a human figure struggling. Sonya, struggling to keep Altho above the water. I reached them.

“Sonya! Here, hold to this! I’ve got him!”

A sea animal went by us with a rush. Our pursuing boat drew up; its black side was a wall above us. The insulating side-shield rolled back. Anxious men’s faces stared down at us over the gunwale. Arms came down and hauled us up.

I heard Alice’s voice; and Dolores’s, “Len! And Sonya . . . and the prince! Thank God you’re all safe!”

And from far over the land came the scream of Jim’s siren, the signal of victory there.

XVIII THE GREAT RIDDLE

The homecoming! The return of our war-racked forces to the city, with half its suburbs burned, and a thousand of its people killed by Talon’s bombardment! I shall not describe the cheers, the laughter, the sobbing. Victory in war can seem to be so little better than defeat! All the paeans of triumph cannot heal the maimed, or bring back the dead.

I was king no longer, for our prince now was ruler, with Sonya for his queen. I was glad to be released. There is a very false, a pseudo-glory, in ruling a nation.

But Altho would not have me wholly resign. My promised reforms, my earthly ideas of government, were needed here. And so they called me premier, and thrived upon a crude but humane version of what we on earth would call a civilized government: a veneration of the aged, a new idea of infant welfare, a monogamy of marriage with the surplus women doing their rational work in art and industry.

Of Talon’s thousands, fully half of them escaped back into the mountains. They are there now. They will always be a menace. But there is not a race of humans in all the universe unmenaced by something. The very essence of human existence is struggle. We do not think of Talon’s brutes now as the Nameless Horror, and we are always prepared.

It was shortly after my marriage to Alice, that one evening I came upon Jim and Dolores in each other’s arms.

“Well!” I said. “What’s this?”

He kissed her again. “I loved her right from the beginning,” he declared.

Which was not exactly true, but I knew he thought so.

I had never seen little Dolores so radiant. “And I always loved him, Len. You know that.”

I did indeed. And she had never wavered in that love, from the days when he had seized the little blind child and whirled her in the air.

Our return to earth? We never made it. With Dr. Weatherby’s death, the grave held the vital knowledge we needed for such a journey. Nor did we desire it. Our lives were cast here.

Often now, from earth, thought-waves reach me, tiny earth, rolling on with a speeding time so much faster than ours of this outer realm! Centuries have passed on earth. Of what use for me to return—a primitive, savage being of their past ages?

Civilizations have risen, held their peak, and declined. Great cities have come and gone. Ice has been again where once I saw the jungles of the tropics. And the ice has melted again through countless ages.

The new humans of earth often communicate with me. Their thoughts are amazed at what I have to tell them. It is all amazing to me, the great riddle of the universe. And I think sometimes of that ancient earth-astronomer, groping with the riddle, writing in his ancient book:

Man, the little god of this earth, tied down to the small star which infinite Nature gave him for an abode, storms forth into immeasurable stellar space with his thoughts.

From that little earth I stormed forth in body, beyond the stars!

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Numerous mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed, only these were perhaps not completely obvious:

pg 21: illuminued -> illumined pg 44: rehemence -> vehemence pg 94: enscrouded -> enshrouded pg 38: incrusted -> encrusted

pg 152: _The rafts were heading slowly for the north tip of the in the other channel._ An unknown word has clearly been omitted by the printer.

Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.