XIII
That smothering blackness was abruptly gone. Sensation came back, and I could move again. A faint crimson light filtered through the ports. But the silence remained. The engines were stopped. I knew that theBarihornwas motionless.
"Where—" Kel Aran was groping through the scarlet gloom. "What—"
Verel was a white wraith beside him.
"We're in the temple," came her hopeless whisper. "In the power of Malgarth!"
I stumbled toward the nearest port. Outside, in the dim red distance, I could make out great square black columns soaring upward—columns vast as mountains. Beyond them was a wall. Mile upon mile above was a domed black roof, pierced with a vast round orifice through which the dusky sky was visible like a dull-red, malignant sun.
In the immensity of that edifice I sensed the overwhelming might of the robots—this dread, mind-crushing power, born of man but now risen ruthlessly to destroy him.
"Power, Rogo," Jeron begged again. "Can't you give me power?"
The gaunt gigantic Saturnian still struggled vainly with the dead controls. Faintly, from the phone, I heard the nasal voice of Rogo Nug:
"By the steel skull of Malgarth, Jeron, I thought I'd had a stroke! One instant—"
Converters and generators throbbed suddenly to vibrant life. Jeron flung his weight on the power bar. The engines raced and coils hammered against a terrific overload. A tremendous river of energy, I knew, was running into the space-contractor coils.
But the Barihorn moved not one inch!
The tall pilot turned from the controls, bewildered.
"It's still holding us, Kel," he gasped. "Whatever dragged us down!"
The Earthman pushed long fingers decisively back through the thick tangle of his yellow hair.
"Then," he said, "we'll leave the ship, and go out on foot to seek the Stone."
"We may as well." The girl's whisper was thick with dread. "Beforetheytake us out."
She pointed to the ports. A white wing flashed past. A company of the New Robots, I saw, were wheeling through the blood-red gloom, close about the ship. Gleaming in stream-lined grace, they were beautiful as a flock of silver birds. But every one of them held, in slender argent tentacles, a massive cathode gun. However beautiful, they were deadly!
Testing his two thin-tubed disruptor guns, Kel Aran looked anxiously at the pale girl.
"The Stone?" he asked. "Where is it?"
"I don't know." Verel shook her haggard head. "We can only try to search. Unless the Shadow comes—"
"Search?" The fat flesh of Zerek Oom was a livid color beneath his bright tattooing. His thick white hands fumbled a disruptor gun as if it were something utterly strange. "We can't go out, Kel!" he protested hoarsely. "Not against those winged things."
"That's what we came to do," said the Earthman.
And he led the way back toward the valve.
I don't know why I had not lookeddown. I had seen the titanic walls that leapt above us, and the wheeling host of robots. But I had not looked down. And now, when I came to step from the valve in the side of the helpless ship, something caught my breath. Something filled me with a sickness of infinite alarm.
Beneath was a film of blackness. It was like a mirror. For deep, deep in it was a dim image of the red skylight that lit the temple. White phantoms of the winged robots flashed through it. It yielded a shimmering picture of Kel Aran, who had leapt out upon it before me.
It was a pool of darkness. The surface of it spun in a way that sickened me with giddy vertigo. I felt the thin-leashed might of unguessed, cataclysmic forces just beyond that film. It seemed to my reeling senses that that pool was deeper by far than the blood-red sun mirrored in it. It was an unknown gulf, extra-dimensional, deeper than the space between the stars!
I tried to put down that dizzy fear. I held my breath, and gripped the cold butt of my disruptor gun, and leapt out beside Kel Aran, upon that darkly shining film.
At first my feet slipped sickeningly, as if there had been no friction at all to hold them. And then they were anchored with a strange attraction, so that all my strength could not lift or slide them.
It was the power of that mirror-film, I knew, that had drawn down theBarihorn, and now held her.
Verel had followed me. Brown little Rogo Nug jumped after her, stolidly chewing hisgoona-roon, and spat a purple stream upon that black giddy mirror. Zerek Oom paused in the valve. He gulped and wheezed and mopped at his tattooed forehead, and then flung himself unsteadily forward. They all slipped and staggered upon that glassy film, as I had done, and were as suddenly held fast.
"By Malgarth's brazen bowels," gasped Rogo Nug, "we're stuck like flies in syrup!"
He swung up his bright disruptor tube, toward the white-winged robots dropping upon us.
"For Barihorn and Man!" The Earthman's battle cry pealed out. "Strike for the Stone!" He began to chant his song of Barihorn, and white destroying rays lanced from the guns in his hands.
That desperate sortie, however, had been hopeless from the first. We could hardly have fought a way through that winged horde, even if the unknown energies of the thing I have called a mirror had not gripped our feet.
The robots did not even use the cathode guns in their talons. They dropped thick about us, a wall of flashing silver. They dived on argent wings. White twisting ropes snatched at our weapons. The guns of Kel Aran must have destroyed a dozen; the rest of us perhaps accounted for as many more—but they were nothing against the hundreds that survived.
One fell upon me, terrible in that bloody light, mysterious in its quick counterfeit of life, beautiful in its silver grace. A white tentacle whipped away my weapon. Argent snakes swiftly wrapped my arms, my ankles, my waist, my throat.
I fought those coiling arms. They contracted ruthlessly, more cruel than fetters of steel. My breath sighed out, and my lungs labored in vain. Blood hammered in my brain. My eyes dimmed, swelled in their sockets.
Alertly, the eyes of the monster were watching me. Bright and hard as some blue crystal, they yet looked oddly alive. In that white, clean-molded, bird-like head, they were clear and beautiful. Perhaps, the vagrant thought crossed my reeling mind, such a machine, in cosmic justice, had as much right as man to survive...
"Kel!" Verel's thin, tortured cry cut through the roaring in my ears. "Kel—the ship!"
I twisted my head, against the smooth deadly coils of cold metal about my throat. They seemed to relax a little. My eyes cleared. I looked for the littleBarihorn, behind us. And it was gone! That dark-shining surface, where it had been, was empty!
Helpless in the tentacles of another robot, the Earth girl was staring down into that black mirror.
"The ship!" she was sobbing. "It—it fell!"
I saw it, then, beneath us—fast-dropping into that depthless pool of darkness. It wassuckeddown, spinning end over end, far faster than it should have fallen. It became the merest whirling sliver, and was lost in the dull round reflection of the crimson sky.
I shuddered, in the metal arms that held me. That black mirror-film was as mysteriously deadly as it had seemed. Which one of us might drop through it next?
All my four companions were helpless as myself. The lean face of Kel Aran was very white. A scarlet stain crept from the corner of his mouth, and I saw that his lip was bitten through.
"Farewell, Vere!" I heard his hopeless whisper. "We've fought in vain. Barihorn, farewell!"
Strange words, from the Falcon of Earth. But his voice choked. His gasping breath stopped. His unkempt yellow head dropped limply forward, and his lean body collapsed in the silver tentacles.
"Kel, Kel!" Agonized, the girl fought the silver ropes that bound her. They sank resistlessly into her white flesh. And the silver being spoke, in a clear, melodious voice.
"Be still. You can accomplish nothing."
That grave calm speech, from the oddly bird-like robot, was somehow a thing eerie beyond expression. And it carried a certainty of victory—of man's extinction—that chilled my heart.
The white tentacles about the Earthman must have relaxed a little. Abruptly, now, he was transformed from apparent death to lightning action. He twisted and surged against the robot that held him, snatching for its unused cathode gun.
His ruse came very near success. His hands found the clumsy weapon, and dragged it from its sling. But the metal coils constricted on his body. His breath came out, in an involuntary scream. His body made snapping noises, beneath that pitiless pressure. His face turned purple. Blood rushed from his lungs. He slumped again, unconscious in reality.
The cathode gun fell out of his hands—
And straight through the dark-shimmering film upon which we stood, as if it had encountered no resistance whatever! It was lost in the red-mirrored disk of sky.
The last trick of the Falcon had failed.