XVIITHE BATTLE
The Warm Sea was a body of water some one hundred miles long by ten miles wide at most places. It lay in a bowl-like depression of rolling country. Bays and caves indented its shores in some places; in others cliffs came sheer to the water.
Kalima lay at what I might term its southern end. The sea broadened here into a sheet of water nearly twenty miles wide, which I had learned to call Kalima Bay. To the north it narrowed. The Virgins’ Island divided it, with a narrow channel on each side, beyond which it opened again.
To the left along the west side of the sea, the road from Kalima wound northward. The west channel of the Virgins’ Island was very narrow—two thousand feet at the utmost—but it was deep, with a sandy strip of beach on the mainland, a bluff of fifty feet, with the road on top. It was along the west side that Talon’s land forces were coming. And on the same road from Kalima Jim’s force was marching to oppose them.
Our water division of ten boats headed into the center of Kalima Bay, and there I halted them. They lay drawn in a black ring on the placid water. To one side of me, the squadron of girls flew now in a circle at about the threshold foot level. The platforms hovered near them.
Along the shore I could see the slow-moving line of Jim’s army, crawling like a black snake over the winding, moonlit road. I had hoped that the head of it would be approaching the bluff near the west channel of the Virgins’ Island. But it was not that far as yet.
I spoke into my aerial. “Make it faster, Jim!” The image of him showed his smiling face. Good old Jim, always smiling. “Right,” he said.
From this height there was no sign of Talon. Behind me, from Kalima, Maxite had sent out an aerial image-finder. Its pink whirling ball came sailing past me overhead.
I sat enshrouded in my black insulated suit. I switched the current into it; I could hear the current hum; smell its faint acrid odor. The apparatus of the Frazier projector was already assembled. The pulse-motor was on my wrist; the head-band I now adjusted on my forehead. I made all the connections, but I did not turn on the current.
Before me were my smaller instruments. A bank of image-grids was lashed here; voice receivers were at my ears, my speaker aerial was on my shoulder. I caught the rays from the image lens mounted in Maxite’s castle room. I tuned into it, saw his pale, intent face, heard his grave voice.
“No sign of Talon, Leonard?”
“No. I’m holding the girls and the boats ready. I’ll go higher myself—your lens just passed me.”
“Yes. But it shows nothing yet.”
“I’ll send one beyond it.”
“Good luck, Leonard.”
I nodded and disconnected. Sonya was calling me.
“Can’t we go forward?”
“No.”
From the boats down there I caught Alice’s voice, but her image did not register; it was dark in the boat behind the black shields which enshrouded it.
“Len, have you seen Talon’s rafts yet? Mett says he wants to know what our boats are to do?”
“Nothing. Stay as you are.”
“Be . . . very careful of yourself, Leonard.”
“Yes,” I said. I cut off, urged my birds upward. At nearly ten thousand feet I hung poised. Far up the Warm Sea, on the west road Talon’s approaching force was visible. And on the water, I saw the black blobs of his rafts, four of them, evidently huge affairs, crowded with men and apparatus. One of them was in the yellow moonlit path. I could see the swimming figures in the water, harnessed, drawing the raft slowly forward.
The pink ball I had sent out passed Maxite’s. It sped toward Talon’s rafts. On my grid I caught a glimpse of the wooden raft, with dead black beams standing up from it vertically in the air. Hundreds of figures crowded there. A black beam caught my whirling lens, burned it. The grid went dark.
Talon’s land force was almost to the Virgins’ Island channel to the north. The rafts were over near that shore. It was what I wanted to know. Talon would use the west channel.
I dropped my platform downward, and adjusted my helmet, though I kept its visor open. Talon’s land force would reach the channel before mine could get there. I had hoped that Jim would be able to set up our wind projector on the bluff there to command the narrow water. But Talon would be there first unless I could halt him.
I turned to my aerial and gave the order for a general attack.
I rose again, high in the air, and urged my birds forward. Beneath me, the scene of battle spread out like a map of three dimensions. Far down, our boats showed as tiny blobs speeding through the west channel.
They were fast, but not so fast as the squadron of flying girls.
Sonya came leading them upward. They passed me, a giant flying wedge heading over Talon’s rafts. There were four rafts, three close to the shore, perhaps for protection of the land force. But one of the rafts was farther out, separated from the others. It was still several miles beyond the north tip of Virgins’ Island.
Sonya’s squadron was the first to make contact with the enemy. The girls headed for this isolated raft. They were ten thousand feet or more above it. My heart was heavy with apprehension. I could see the black rays from the raft standing up into the air. Would they reach that high?
It seemed not. The girls went safely over them, wheeled, and came back. They had dropped a bomb. I saw a glowing spot of light as it fell. It struck the water, wide of the raft. A surge of water mounted upward, with a spot of red light where the bomb had burst, then another, a score of them. I began to hear their sharp reports.
The raft was lashed by the waves, but still unhit. But the brutemen pulling it were disorganized, many of them killed, no doubt. The raft stopped its forward progress. Its black beam wavered, then seemed to connect into one narrow black ray.
It shot up through the girls, cut a wide swath through them. Some wavered, came fluttering down, falling, recovering, limping slowly back toward Kalima, struggling to keep above the water. Others fell like plumets into the sea. Half our girls, undoubtedly, were killed or wounded by that single black blast.
Our boats swept through the channel. Three stopped in midstream; seven surged on. Lights flared, our lurid but penetrating red flare of light went up in an arc from one of our halted boats, and burst over Talon’s land force. It seemed that thousands of figures were there on the land. They had spread out from the road; over by the bluff, just beyond the north end of the channel, they were erecting a huge piece of apparatus.
The light flares died. But the gunners on our three boats which had stopped in the channel had the range. I could see the streams of their electronic needles, straight paths to the shore. Dim violet beams, with white radiance where the great metallic needles were striking Talon’s army.
There must have been a chaos on shore. Then from a projector there in the darkness, a great hissing rose. A yellow glow, almost like the moonlight, became visible. It waved, fanshaped from its source: a light that lingered, persisted in the darkness, spread until all along that section of the shore it hung like hovering yellow smoke, a barrage against which our electronic needles launched harmlessly. I could see them materialized into white solidity as they struck it, then flaring red, and yellow as they fused and burned.
The gunners on our boats tried curving their beams. Some were effective, curving in a great violet arc, up over the barrage, or sidewise around its edges. I judged that some were finding their mark, though the barrage was constantly shifted to check them.
The scene everywhere was now a chaos of flashing colored lights. The girls who had escaped the black blast had wavered, gone higher. Their bombs were falling wide; the sea everywhere here was lashed into foam where the bombs were bursting. A chaos of light, sound and smell: mingled electrical hums, the pungent, acrid electronic odors, the hiss of the flares, the sharp crack of the exploding bombs.
The girls for a moment withdrew, off to one side, very high up. They could not hit their marks; the black beams from the rafts, now spread purely for defense, rose cone-shaped, a cone extending widely over them to protect their swimmers. The bombs, those few that were accurately aimed, exploded in mid-air, as they struck the cone.
A chaos of swift, simultaneous action was everywhere taking place. Our great projectors on the flying platforms opened fire, downward at the rafts. But now from shore a solid black beam suddenly came sweeping out. It caught one of our platforms. The birds fell. The platform, its insulation inadequate, shriveled on the colorless blast, and went down, a tangled mass of birds and struggling human figures.
The beam swung. It caught another platform, and another. All six—the only six we had—were surprised by it, caught there, low over the channel, before they could escape. One by one they were crashing down into the water. The last one tried to dive; it was struck just as it neared the water level.
This black beam from Talon’s shore projector was raking the channel from end to end. It seemed to have a range of several miles—a longer range than any of our weapons. It destroyed our six platforms, and then swung upward at our girls. But they were just beyond it. They wavered as they felt its effect, and then went higher and farther away.
Talon’s white light flares were now continuous from shore. The scene was a dazzling glare of white, with alternating periods of blackness. The black beam, guided by the white flares, sought other victims. It swung on our boats, three of which were bombarding the shore, the other seven heading for Talon’s rafts.
The three closest ones caught the black blast full. It burned through their insulating shields, as it had burned the platforms. One boat sank like a stone. Another up-ended; the third tried to retreat.
But its animals evidently were caught at the water surface and destroyed. It lay there, its needle-beam wavering. Then it, also, was hit full by the black beam. It shriveled, disappeared. The water down there was gruesome with black struggling figures.
The beam swung after our other seven boats. They were headed to attack the rafts. They felt the beam but they were farther away, and their side insulation withstood it. I roared orders at them, and by some miracle my voice got through. Alice answered me.
“Head back!” I commanded. “Around the island. Into the east channel.”
It was all very swift. I had been fairly high and about a mile away when the black beam began its deadly work. It flashed by me several times, but my lone platform, with its six birds, was a small, inconspicuous object. The beam missed me; its handlers were evidently after bigger game.
In my ear Maxite’s voice sounded, “Keep the girls away, Leonard! Retreat! Our land forces are too close!”
I gave the orders. Maxite’s pink blobs of fire were constantly arriving from Kalima. He had seen our disaster. The black beam mounted on the shore seemed impregnable, unless perhaps from the rear I could assault its gunners with the Frazier thought-beam. I told Maxite my plan and he approved.
I swept back toward the Virgins’ Island. I would go back and come up over the west mainland, flying low. I could make such speed that in a few minutes I would be behind Talon’s barrage. Talon’s rafts were all well out from shore now, gathered in a group.
I swung within a mile of them. Their black, cone-shaped barrage was over them. They had made no attack, except the one upward blast at the girls, and no attack now was being made on them.
During those brief moments when we had bombed them, their swimming brutemen must have suffered severe loss. Many dove, and climbed to the rafts. But some were still swimming.
The rafts were heading slowly for the north tip of the in the other channel.
My birds were flying with tremendous speed. Occasionally I passed wounded birds, and wounded girl riders clinging desperately to them, trying to get back to Kalima.
I sailed over the island, toward Kalima, and then turned and passed inland above the road. Jim’s forces were drawn up in an arc, extending from the sea, back inland some half mile.
The heavy insulating shields were erected at intervals. The projectors were ready, and our wind projector was erected at the shore. It seemed a safe condition. Five miles or more of open country was between this line and Talon’s black beam. I could not see the beam from here.
But Talon’s yellow shore-barrage glowed clearly. Save for that radiance, the scene up there was now dark. A lull had come to the battle. The first engagement in which we had been so decisively worsted, was over. A momentary lull it was, while Talon seemed waiting to see what we would do next.
The scene was dark and silent. The night was darker now as well. Black clouds obscured the moon and all the stars to the north. And in the silence I heard a low muttering thunder.
I passed over our line, ordering Jim to remain inactive.
“Why?” he protested. “Don’t I get in this at all, Len?”
But I kept him there. It was no time for us to plunge recklessly at Talon. He had surprised our first attack and worsted us in the conflict. I was not willing to try that again.
Flying low, I headed over the rolling hills for Talon’s present land base. I put on my helmet, drew up the insulating shields that lined the sides of the platform. At my wrist the pulse-motor was throbbing.
I switched on the Frazier current, gripped the controls of the huge projector. If I could concentrate my thoughts enough . . . with intensity enough. I was letting them rove now, gathering strength. If I could halt that devastating black beam, and then order another attack, all our remaining forces attacking at once—
In my ears suddenly was Maxite’s voice, “I’m ordering Jim to use the wind projector. Talon’s forces are making for the island. We may be able to blow them away, toward the East Channel, where our boats can get at them.”
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.
XVIIITHE 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.
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 -> illuminedpg 44: rehemence -> vehemencepg 94: enscrouded -> enshroudedpg 38: incrusted -> encrusted
pg 21: illuminued -> illuminedpg 44: rehemence -> vehemencepg 94: enscrouded -> enshroudedpg 38: incrusted -> encrusted
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.