He left the explanation to Zingar, back in headquarters, and continued to report the dawn approach. Overhead, almost a hundred ships hovered close above the seething flow of animal and reptile life. Several were near the entrance, and the defenders experimentally tried out their weapons.
The first barrage was from old explosive shell weapons. But as each shell flashed and roared toward the ships it seemed to hit an invisible wall of force about fifty feet from the hull where it exploded in empty air. The ships were not even rocked, but the Magnadons squealed in terror. Vibrations of the explosions jarred the door frame, even the cliff itself.
The disintegrator artillery scarred the thick hulls slightly but the invisible rays failed to penetrate far, even in a direct hit, and the weaving ships took most of these shots at glancing angles with no damage.
The defenders tried their thunder-spreading atomic cannon once. Its lightning flash struck one of the tiny ships full center and a gaping hole burst inward and out the rear section of the hull, so that the morning sky showed through. The defenders cheered when this was reported. The little ship lurched up into the air, and others drew near, grappling it with more tractor rays. John, could see the unconscious forms of old men carried past the ragged hole by helmeted figures and into another ship, through joined hulls. When the crippled craft was released it crashed quickly on the still frozen desert sand. Then it rolled over and lay still. But one shot from the atomic cannon took the force of one power jacket—and there were only nine jackets left!
Dr. Henderson ordered the atomic cannon withdrawn to the central defense area, against that time when the Martian ships would be flying down the high corridors, directing a river of snakes and flying lizards.
The battle went on with disintegrator rays dropping scores of the air-screaming, twisting Mars snakes, and one or two of the smaller group of Magnadons. But the Martian ships, finding that the atomic cannon was no longer in operation shielded one of the Magnadons with their hulls as the great beast approached and put its shoulders against the copper door. The locks held until the doors buckled in the center, as if hit by a giant battering ram. Air hissed out, and a moment later the gigantic beast burst through, only to fall trumpeting to the ground under a disintegrator ray. In thirty seconds it was dead.
But behind it slithered and ran the great snakes, with their gaping jaws and long dripping fangs. They seemed as numerous as the white flashing waves of an angry ocean shore. Overhead, the roof was black with flying lizards, bumping and crowding in the dim shadows, with ridiculous faint mewing sounds. Stone throwers dropped hundreds of these, and disintegrators stopped dozens more of the running snakes, until a wall of dead flesh protected the second defensive barrier.
Major Mattson gave the order, and a flash and roar of blasting powder dropped a great boulder into place. The corridor seemed almost still, shut off from the jungle sounds of their inhuman enemies. The men retreated in good order to the next defense wall. They realized that their ammunition must be conserved against the real menace, the thundering herd of Magnadons, with their guiding, sheltering ships....
The first corridor entrance was burst through after ten minutes by one of the great beasts, which fell in the gap and had to be pulled back by the ships. Boulders rolled out like pebbles from further blows, until the opening was wide enough for a protecting ship to fly through, low over the sandy floor, with a Magnadon nosing behind it. The great feet thumped deliberately down toward the Earthmen, plunging ten inch tracks into the packed sand, each as large as a small round table. Shooting the apes from their backs did not stop them.
John had withdrawn from the lookout post just as the first entrance door crashed. He then operated one of the disintegrator batteries, until recalled to the council chamber. From there he learned that the same battle scene was being repeated at each barrier. Sometimes a Magnadon was killed before it broke through, sometimes after. The Martians protected the great beasts as well as they could, hoarding their supply. Zingar said it would take two months to bring a new herd from the swamp lands, as there was no way to transport them except on slow surface sleds.
Because of the strange nature of this combat the defenders suffered no casualties. The snakes and flying lizards were killed and piled up in front of each barrier. After each firing slit was sealed there was a brief rest.
At last the defenders attempted strategy. Seeing that under the present conditions it was only a matter of time, Major Mattson called for volunteers to attempt the capture of a shipload of the Martians to hold as hostages. About a dozen men made a sortie against the snakes, knowing it was futile, but succeeding in drawing the ship down over them. They were sucked up by the tractor rays, and pulled into the little hull but every man's pockets had been filled with gas capsules, and, as they fell unconscious under the paralysis mirrors, yellow clouds of gas filled the ship's cabin until the white bearded old Martians were unconscious too.
The battle had proceeded nearly to the central defense area, and now the atomic cannon flashed a hole through the Mars ship, high up in the hull, causing it to crash. A desperate charge of all the defenders kept the Mars snakes back long enough to allow the unconscious enemies and volunteers to be brought back behind the last and strongest barrier. They made it just before the first of the rescuing ships reached the spot. Several of the battered and atom shocked men never recovered consciousness. All were carried to the hospital behind the fighting front.
Then came a lull in the battle. The Magnadons and ships withdrew, leaving only the hissing and twisting snakes in the corridor, and a small observation ship down the tunnel out of range. The flying lizards took this opportunity to escape. A few snakes that had crawled through were disintegrated. This was the situation faced by the council of war, at noon.
Dr. Henderson's white coat was now spattered with blood, where he had carried and treated some of the wounded. His face seemed old and drawn, as he addressed the Council.
"It looks bad—If we had a hundred atomic power jackets left, instead of eight, we might make it. I wonder if they know how limited our supply is."
Under the emotional situation, Zingar's accent was more pronounced but intelligible, "Every word we speak is amplified by their distance receivers. A race that can faintly hear train whistles on earth, and can see the surface of your planet as if with a large telescope from the moon, doesn't have much trouble to know what our situation is. But we have one bargaining point. Old Senegar was in that first ship, and his intelligence is in ratio to that of the other Martians as one hundred to one. They would concede almost anything to preserve his safety."
"But how can we bargain, since we have no way to escape the planet?" asked John.
"We might hold the old man as a permanent hostage until the time when Mars is in proximity to Earth again, a year from next August, and the colony supply ship comes," suggested Mark Hemingway.
"The old man wouldn't live that long," said Zingar quietly. "This atmosphere would be fatal to him—Let me talk to my father."
"Your father!" cried Mary. Quickly adjusting the headphone of the Mind Sounder she poured out her unconscious sympathy to her lover's receiving mind. He drew her to him gently, and then turned and faced the others, still holding her.
"Let me talk to him," he said, "I think I have an idea."
The group walked hurriedly behind Zingar and Dr. Henderson toward the field hospital area.
There was a silent drama of sympathy in the expression of these two Martians, as Zingar stood near his father's hospital cot. They spoke rapidly but quietly in their own language.
"What's he sayin'?" growled Jake. "Can we trust the young squirt?"
"I don't understand," said John. "I only know a few of their words. But they keep repeating one word which means 'cripples,' or 'sick'."
At last the young Martian turned and spoke to them, but mostly to Mary—"How much do you love your native planet? Would you be willing to stay with us—all of you to be healed and made well, and serve to invigorate the stock of the Mars men?"
There was a buzz of excitement and argument. Most of the Earthmen who had not seen the hidden Martian city were violently opposed, but a few were too sick to care—and many remembered that they were lost anyway, when the atomic power jackets should be exhausted. John stood close to Molaee and looked at her questioningly.
"Don't stay for my sake, John," she said sadly, "our instincts draw us to each other, but our minds are a whole generation apart. We would have constant misunderstandings. Remember, I am as old as Zingar."
He hesitated a moment, then wrote, "But Mary and Zingar are planning to be married."
"That is their business," she replied looking at Mary. "Perhaps it is a reasonable chance to take when the husband is the older mentality, but I don't want a mental child for a husband. Besides I—I have been remembering Nogar, my former lover—before I saw you."
Their isolated dialogue was only a small murmur in the vocal excitement of the throng of Earth people, which suddenly quieted as Major Mattson boomed over the crowd with his megaphone—"Well, shall we vote on it?"
But Zingar raised his hand and cried, "Wait!—My father should speak first."
The old man sat painfully up in his bed and spoke into the microphone of the old amplifying set so that his sibilant whispering voice echoed the broken accents down the high vaulted ceilings of the great cave space.
"Listen to me well, O selected people of a youthful race—This violence has been a vast folly. I should have realized before.... My sense of the aesthetic was offended by your ugliness, especially by the sick and crippled among you, so that I did not realize your one great virtue which cancels all the rest. I have observed the co-operative efficiency of your defenses, especially the strange spirit of sacrifice in the little band who came out to trick us. We were not ready for that, for we have no such spirit of unselfishness among us. It is a virtue that Mars needs. Your very handicaps have taught you a lesson of group action—a lesson of inestimable worth. We need every one of your unique personalities in our community life. It will be a simple thing to heal you of your diseases, and to prolong your lives. The memory of your sufferings will give new youth and a new spirit to Mars—life, perhaps even prove a biological salvation. Stay with us—we wish you well...."
The old man fell back exhausted—and closed his eyes. John leaped to the platform, and cried to the several hundred men and women before him, "That settles it! I'm for staying...."
He made an impassioned speech and stepped down. Others followed, but he was not very attentive to their words. Hilda crept to him, unobserved in the excitement. She said, "Oh, John, my hand can be healed—Now I will be proud to marry you—as you asked me three years ago, if you still want me...."
"Why, you dumb Bunny! As if a bum flipper had anything to do with that...." He took her in his arms. They did not even vote when the hands were called for—or know that the decision had been made....
When the supply ship arrived, a year and a half later, there were no signs of the colony left. Spread around on the sand were various artificial limbs, crutches, spectacles, hearing devices, and bits of clothing, scattered in between many bleached and weather beaten bones....
The ship's crew gathered up these medical relics as proof and sadly turned away. The captain thought it rather a pity since the ship had been sent to bring the sick ones home, in response to a wave of indignation aroused two years before by Hilda's broadcast from the District Hospital.
They carried a few of the bones back, carelessly scooped up by the electric shovel that gathered the crutches and other paraphernalia.
An obscure scientist's assistant at Johns Hopkins tried to arouse excitement by claiming that these were not human bones, but from anthropoid apes—However, there was another war brewing, and nobody would listen to him.