Part 8

Calmly I advanced, and before me now a lane opened in the crowd. For all my outward calmness, my heart was pounding. The pulse-motor at my wrist was throbbing. I had not used my weapon yet. But it would be effective.

“Sonya! Come here! Hurry! Sonya!”

My words, strange of language, awed the crowd further. The men parted before Sonya’s running figure. She came up panting, white-faced.

“Len!”

“Sonya, you are going to obey me! You understand? You . . . everyone—obey me.”

She stared. I was speaking swiftly, grimly, imperatively. “You stay at my side. I’ll want you to translate when I give orders. Was that siren to announce the king’s death?”

“Yes, he . . . Leonard, what are you doing? That thing in your hand—”

I silenced her. And then, fearing perhaps that she might not follow me, I gripped her hand, jerked her forward as I ran with rapid strides toward the crowd of girls at the foot of the stairway.

I think that Sonya believed at that moment that I had lost my reason. Her face stared up at me with terror in her eyes—a frightened child beside my bulk, whom I was dragging forward so swiftly that she could hardly keep her feet.

A few men near us shouted at me, but when I turned ferociously on them, they ran. Someone threw a missile at me, then another—stones which they were picking up from the flower beds. One struck my back; and one struck Sonya.

The crowd was beginning to take courage; a wave of it surged at me. Struggling men shoving one another, shouted menacingly at me; but the men in the front rank, shoved forward by the press behind them, were pushing back, away from me.

Another stone hit me. I stopped short. I did not want to use the Frazier beam yet—time enough for that.

“Sonya, tell them to stop!” I dropped her hand, stood away from her. “Tell them that I won’t hurt you! Tell them to stop . . . or I’ll kill them! All of them!”

The missiles stopped at the first sound of her voice. From the stairway top a guard was shouting up to one of the old men on the roof; at Sonya’s voice they both were silent to listen.

I added swiftly, “Sonya, you follow me! I don’t want to drag you! Will you come?”

“Yes. I . . . I’ll come.”

I took her at her word and ran on. I had overawed an unarmed crowd of spectators. But the girls were still ahead of me, a thousand or more of them, jammed near the foot of the great stairway, and a hundred or two more upon it.

I reached the first of them, with Sonya running fleet as a faun behind me. The girls, unarmed, scattered to give us room. We dashed through to the foot of the stairway, began mounting it.

The girls on it made way for me. But, halfway up, I saw above me, three girls with swords. They stood their ground, and whirled to oppose me.

Others with swords were near them and turned at me also, and above them, I was aware that the guards were coming down from the top to attack them from behind.

I stopped, and thrust Sonya in front of me. “You tell your girls to get out of the way!”

She screamed it.

“Again, Sonya! Tell them to get off the stairway! Fools! Can’t they understand I’m for them! Get them off here, I tell you! I’ll handle those guards up there!”

It stung Sonya into action. She shouted my commands, rushed up a few steps, waving the girls aside. Behind me, they were retreating, clearing the stairway. Above they stood undecided, with awkwardly brandished swords, undecided whether to oppose me or to turn to defend themselves from the guards coming down from above.

Then one girl came, passing me hurriedly along the edge of the broad steps, then another. Then they all came with a rush.

And presently the stairs above me were empty, up to near the top where the guards had retreated and now stood with drawn swords gazing down at me. Empty steps, save for a girl’s white body lying head down in a crimson pool.

I started slowly up. “Keep behind me, Sonya—careful! You’ll be safe enough.”

In silence I mounted toward that line of swords. The guards stood a moment in doubt. Then from the castle roof one of the old men screamed a command. The guards answered it. With a leap they came surging down the top steps to rush me.

I raised the Frazier muzzle, pressed its trigger. Its pale-green beam sprang out through the moonlight. I waved it lightly, and it spread, painting the oncoming guards with its thin, lurid color.

The first of them fell; his sword clattered; his body came hurtling down. I swept Sonya aside to avoid it. Another fell, but held to a step, lying huddled. Two others sank to their hands and knees, stiffened, awkwardly propped against the steps.

A dozen more were standing frozen of movement, with swords held stiffly outstretched. And a few retreated woodenly to the top level where they stood swaying drunkenly, stupidly regarding me, hypnotized by the power of my will which the Frazier beam had intensified and thrown at them.

I snapped off the beam. Its effect, with my flashing glance to aid it, would last five minutes or more. Hypnotized in the modern sense, very much as the ancients claimed they could do it with the eyes alone, and mysterious passes of the hands, these men here now, to some extent, would do my bidding. Certainly, they were powerless to move, save as I might direct them.

I swung on Sonya. “They’re not hurt! Not injured! Tell the crowd; tell everyone it’s an evidence of power.”

Down in the garden the throng was pouring out the gates in a panic, hundreds milling at the gates, trying to escape. They quieted somewhat at the sound of Sonya’s shrill voice.

We mounted past the stricken guards. They moved slightly; they were recovering. At the top, I stood, and with vehement thoughts commanded them to move aside. They swayed, moved a few steps, like sleep-walkers.

“Hurry, Sonya! They’re recovering! Tell your girls to stay where they are, down there! If they move, I’ll strike them as I struck the guards. Tell them that!”

A lone hand! But I was winning. We came to the front of the balcony stairway. The guards up there had vanished in fright. I mounted the steep stairs, with Sonya close under me. Down on the terrace top, the guards had recovered, but they were too frightened to do anything but stare up at me.

I reached the balcony, moved to where there was no door behind me, where I could not be attacked unawares. And I drew Sonya to the balcony rail. Beneath us in the yellow moonlight the great throng of men, the girls, and the vanquished guards stood silently gazing up at me.

“Now, Sonya, I’ll talk to them! Tell them I am Leonard Gray, the Earthman. Remind them that their king is dead; their prince is captured by a horrible unknown enemy that menaces us all! Tell your girls that they shall have justice. Tell the men that we are going to rescue our prince! All of us united, not fighting one another.

“Tell them they have seen a little of my power. I want to use it for them, for you all, not against you! All of us united to rescue our prince. And until that is done—Leonard the Earthman is their ruler!”

XII THE PRISONER IN THE CAVE

Jim had been received by the dying king. For what seemed hours he sat with Ren in a castle room waiting to be admitted to the royal bedside. To Jim it was irksome. He was afraid the king would die, afraid something would go wrong, and we would all be held as prisoners again.

But he finally saw the king. Jim took the oath of allegiance, swore he would do what he could to rescue the prince.

They started back through the city streets. At this time I was with the girls on the Island of the Virgins. The moon had just risen.

They were in the main lower street before our house. The moon was still low at the horizon; its light was cut off by the houses. The street lamp shone full on the railed flower bed, but close to the buildings, under the pedestrian levels, the shadows were black. Jim suddenly became aware of peering green eyes, a black shape that leaped at him. Other shapes, with great wobbling heads.

A giant shape of human form had knocked Ren down. Another struck Jim, bore him with its weight to the pavement. His senses faded from a blow on the head, and blackness, smothered by clanging gongs in his ears as he lost consciousness.

For a moment, after an interval of what length he never knew, knowledge that he was still alive came to him. He seemed to remember that a giant manlike shape with a bullet head had leaped upon him. It had another head, huge, wobbling like a balloon. But the large head had fallen off it; the large head lay on the ground, with tiny arms supporting it.

The phantasmagoria of a dream. But Jim’s head was clearing now, just a little. Something was holding him, and he could feel movement—a rhythmic jogging. He opened his eyes. A city street was passing. A great hairy arm was about his middle; he was being carried by something that walked; being held horizontal, his head, arms and legs dangling.

A giant, brown, hairy shoulder was over him; and above that, the great bulge of a head—a smooth, dead-white inflated membrane—a head that bounced and wobbled as the thing strode forward.

A brief consciousness, a vague, dreamlike impression, scarcely strong enough to make a memory, and Jim’s senses again faded into a black void of silence.

When Jim came fully to himself he was lying in a glow of yellow moonlight. Beneath him was a smooth, curving metal surface. His head ached horribly; a lump was upon it, and there was matted blood in his hair.

He was sore, bruised all over, but with returning strength he realized that he was not seriously injured.

He lay a moment, trying to remember what had happened, and the memory came, distorted and vague. Over him spread the canopy of stars, with a great yellow moon rising. The curving metal surface beneath him was gently swaying. Was he on a boat? He was still no more than half conscious. He murmured, “Ren! Ren!”

“Yes, Jim? Jim, is that you?”

Jim struggled up on one elbow. Ren was sitting hunched beside him. Ren—alive, seemingly uninjured.

They were on a boat, lying in its bottom, a small, narrow metal boat, six feet wide perhaps, and perhaps five or six times as long. Its gunwale curved up two or three feet over Jim’s head. They were lying in the narrowing of its bow.

Farther astern, in the yellow moonlight, were figures, brown, hairy bodies—men; or were they giant gorillas? They had small bullet-like heads, faces flat-nosed, with receding forehead and receding chin, and two small eyes that blazed green.

Jim very slowly sank back, but in a posture where he could see the length of the boat. The figures there were not animals; they were men of brute force and brute intelligence. Four of them, with powerful, hairy bodies, wide-shouldered, deep-chested, with short, thick legs and very long arms.

They were clothed in what seemed trunks of animal skin, and a skin fastened over the bulging chest to one shoulder. And each had a broad, tightly drawn belt at his waist.

To Jim came the memory of his capture. It was no fantasy, his memory of a hairy body, with a balloonlike, wobbling head. The four huge heads were here now, in a group near the center of the boat. Each was about four feet in diameter. A dead-white membrane, with bulging, distended veins on a forehead, over a grotesque flat face.

Heads, belonging to these four bodies? Jim realized it was not that. These were separate living entities, which had been riding astride the shoulders of the four.

Intelligent, reasoning beings—it seemed monstrous to call them men—beings which were nearly all brain, just as the others were nearly all body, heads so distended that they sagged of their own weight.

As he regarded them, Jim became aware that to each of the great heads a shrunken semblance of body was attached. Two tiny arms, which came out directly from the sides of the head, and were now turned down, with hands pressing the boat to give balance.

From the wide, convex face, beneath what might have been a bloated chin, a shriveled body dangled: a trunk and legs some two feet long. They lay shriveled beneath the heads. Useless appendage! But all of these shrunken, dangling bodies were clothed with colored fabric, and upon the breast of one was an ornate metal ornament.

Jim whispered: “Ren?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Something struck me. Then somebody, something was carrying me. Men! I heard their voices. I tried to scream; a hand went over my mouth. I knew we were captured. I thought—”

“Hush! Not so loud! They’re here . . . with us now.”

“I know. They were talking a while ago. They—hear them now, Jim?”

Low, gutteral voices sounded back there—the brute men. The brains, the balloon heads, were talking also, low, suave voices in a foreign tongue.

“Jim! Jim, one of these men here in the boat with us—” Ren’s voice held a quiver of fear. “He’s, Jim, I can receive thoughts now . . . like Dolores did from a distance. It seemed, just a little while ago, that I was getting Len’s thoughts. He was triumphant, exulting over something. But it was gone. Then I—”

“You get the thoughts of someone here in the boat?”

“Yes. I guess so. Someone . . . the thought came to me that he called himself Talon. I just now got it again. Talon. He’s been studying thoughts from me. Putting them into my language. He’s doing it now. It’s very easy for him, studying my thoughts, our words . . . my words to you now. He can understand them.”

“Hear us now?”

“Yes. Or hear the thought of our words. We can’t escape! Can’t do anything secretly! He’s laughing at us. He—”

Jim saw one of the heads raise itself up on its hands. Its shriveled body hung limp, the body with the ornate cross on its breast. The arms bent, then straightened with a snap; the head bounded a foot or two in the air, landed again on its hands, and again leaped.

It was hitching itself the length of the boat, its shriveled body trailing after it. One of the giant, hairy brutes of men moved aside to let it pass.

Jim whispered, “It’s coming!”

A revulsion of horror swept him—a repugnance to have this great bloated head come near him. He strove to master the horror. This was a man. Strange of form, but a living, mortal being. A man—an enemy. Nothing supernatural, not gruesome, merely strange, an enemy with whom he had to cope.

Jim sat up abruptly. His shoulder touched Ren’s. From down the boat the bloated head came hitchingly forward. A few feet from Jim and Ren it stopped, rested with a slight swaying upon the tiny body hunched under it.

Jim stared into a huge, convex face: round green eyes, holes, a circular rim of them, for nostrils, a wide mouth, thin-lipped. The mouth seemed almost a human feature; it was smiling. A soft, suave voice said,

“I . . . Talon.” And corrected itself, “I mean . . . I am Talon.”

It seemed to Jim in that instant that with those few spoken words the thing itself had removed most of the horror with which its outward aspect invested it.

A sense of relief swept over Jim. His tenseness relaxed. He said slowly: “What do you want of us, Talon?”

“Yes . . . Talon.” His arm had a hand, with a sheaf of broad, flat fingers. He pointed to the ornament hanging on the chest of his shrunken body. “Talon . . . leader of my people.” He spoke haltingly, groping with the unfamiliar words, and carefully, as though to avoid error. “Called Talon. You . . . lie quiet and soon my words are more. I study. Lie quiet . . . until I speak again.” He gestured. “Lie quiet, or—”

Another more vehement gesture. It embraced Jim and Ren. Jim understood the threat. The voice repeated very calmly, “You had better lie down . . . _now_!”

The eyes seemed leaping pools of green fire.

They sank back. With his elbows slightly raising him, Jim watched the head of Talon hitching itself to the stern of the boat.

The moon had risen high above the horizon. From where Jim lay he could see its yellow, horn-shaped disk. That, and a narrow segment of the star-strewn sky, was all that showed above the gunwales of the boat. The stars rolled with a lazy swing; the boat was throbbing, propelled evidently, by some invisible engine, over a calm, rolling sea, and in the silence Jim could hear the water slipping past the boat’s smooth sides.

He wondered how far from shore they were? If he and Ren, with a leap, could plunge overboard, a mad, fool-hardy attempt, of course, but still he must see where they were, try and plan something.

“Ren?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Move over a little. I’m going to get behind you and sit up, see where we are, how far from shore.”

Jim cautiously raised his head. He half expected a command from the rear of the boat. But none came.

They were on a broad expanse of calm water. The moon made a yellow shimmering path into which they were heading. Jim sank back. It would have been folly to have attempted an escape. For a long time he and Ren lay quiet. An hour, perhaps, or more. The boat sped rapidly on.

Its invisible engine made a hiss, and a line of bubbles rose from its sides. Jim had noticed them when he sat up; the boat seemed traveling on a continuous, rising mass of bubbles. There was a queer acrid smell in the air from the gas of them.

Jim learned later from Talon the details of this boat. It was built of metal which, with its load, would barely float. Beneath its hull was a chamber through which the water circulated. A grid of wires was there; a current heated the wires, decomposed the water into its two component gases, hydrogen and oxygen.

The bubbles were buoyant. The rising flow of them lifted the boat, so that in truth it skimmed forward upon the gas bubbles beneath it. The generation of gases was controlled, so that the boat floated high or low at will. The engine was similar. The forcible ejection of gases from a tube extending under water from its stern propelled it forward. The tube was movable, like a rudder, to give direction.

An hour passed. Then the hairy brutemen who had been sitting quiet got to their feet, fumbled at the gunwales. An oval metal cover rolled from beneath the gunwales up like a canopy to enclose the boat overhead.

Jim had taken a last swift look outside, before the arched metal cover rolled and closed them in. The boat was now making for a sheer wall of cliff that lay directly ahead.

But in one place, for which they were steering, the cliff dropped sheer, unbroken into the water. Above the cliff, behind it, a jagged mountain range stood yellow in the moonlight, tumultuous, naked crags.

The cover closed overhead. A tiny green light winked on. Within the boat, lurid in the green glow, the four brutemen moved about with swift activity; the soft voice of Talon was directing them; his great head was raised on his hands as he followed their movements.

They bolted the metal over, adjusted other mechanisms which now came into use at the stern. A lessening of the flow of gas from beneath the hull; the water filled the chamber there. The rear power tube now pointed downward, to dip the bow. Other tubes, one on each side below the water line, pointed upward, with powerfully ejected streams of gas.

The bow of the boat dipped; it sank beneath the surface. Jim had no idea then of the mechanisms, but he knew the boat was under water. One of the great heads was busily adjusting a mechanism to purify the air they were breathing. Another was seated at what seemed a mirror; gazing ahead through the water, steering the boat with his fingers on a row of buttons which governed the controls.

Another hour. Jim and Ren whispered occasionally. The boat was speeding uninterruptedly beneath the surface. At last Jim called,

“Talon?”

“Yes. What is it?” the head of Talon answered him.

“Come here. You can talk better now, can’t you?”

Talon evidently was amused at the imperative tone. “Yes. I can talk better now.”

He came hitching forward; his great face was broken by a grotesque grin. “What is it?”

“Who are you?” Jim demanded. “What do you want of us? Where are you taking us?”

Talon was willing to talk. He sat, his fingers toying with the metal ornament, his head resting against the side of the boat for support. He and his fellows were of a race which he called the Intellect. They came from a distant world in the sky, a dark planet, satellite of one of the remote suns up there.

Five thousand or more of them, adventurous Intelligences like himself, had built a great ship and come to this foreign world. They had landed in mountains, a wild, desolate country. Their ship had been destroyed, irreparably broken in landing. They could not get back.

There were, he explained, in this distant world two distinct races of beings, those like himself, for countless ages bred to develop the intellect so that their bodies shriveled and dwindled from disuse, all their physical powers nearly gone. And another, quite opposite race, bred for physical strength and power, the brutemen, of slight mental capacity but powerful of body.

He gestured. “You see four of them? They do our bidding unquestioned. They supply the body for us; we are the mind.”

“You ride on their shoulders,” said Jim.

Talon’s eyes gleamed. “We more than ride on them.” He showed Jim where from beneath his head a ropelike sinew depended. “This we fasten upon a nerve-center of their backs. Their little brain is dulled, unconscious then of existence. Our brains take command.

“The body is ours, for the time! We can feel its physical power; our brain animates it. We are one being. One entity when that connection is made.”

Ren spoke up softly, “Why did you go to that city where you captured us? Those people there haven’t harmed you. But you captured their prince and princess.”