Twice,within the next two hours, the Ragged Men mustered the courage to charge. They came racing across the semi-solid ooze like the madmen they were. Their yells and shouts were maniacal howls of blood-lust or worse. And twice Tommy broke their rush with a savage ruthlessness. The sub-machine-gun’s first magazine was nearly empty. It was an unhandy weapon for single-shot work but it was loaded with explosive shells. The second rush he stopped with an automatic pistol. There were half-naked bodies partly buried in the ooze all the way from the jungle’s edge to within ten yards of the hillock on which he and Evelyn had taken refuge.
It was hot there, terribly hot. The air was stifling. It fairly reeked of moisture and the smells from the swamp behind them were sickening. Tommy began to transfer the shells from the spare bent magazine to the one he had carried with the gun.
“We’ve a couple of reasons to be thankful,” he observed. “One is that there’s a bit of shade overhead. The other is that we had the big magazines for this gun. We still have nearly ninety shells, besides the ones for the pistols.”
Evelyn said soberly:
“We’re going to be killed, don’t you think, Tommy?”
Tommy frowned.
“I’m rather afraid we are,” he said irritably. “Confound it, and I’d thought of such excellent arguments to use in the City back yonder! Smithers said the Death Mist was two miles across, to-day, and still growing. The people in the city are still pouring the stuff down through Jacaro’s Tube.”
Evelyn smiled faintly. She touched his hand.
“Trying to keep me from worrying? Tommy….” She hesitated until he growled a question. “Please—remember that when Daddy and I were in the jungle before, we saw what these Ragged Men do to prisoners they take. I just want you to promise that—well, you won’t wait too long, in hopes of somehow saving me.”
Tommy stared at her. Then he decisively reached forward and put his hand over her mouth.
“Keep quiet,” he said gently. “They shan’t capture you. I promise that. Now keep quiet.”
Therewas only silence for a long time. Now and again a hidden figure screamed in rage at them. Now and again some flapping thing sped toward the jungle’s edge. Once a naked arm thrust one of the golden truncheons from behind its cover, pointing at a flying thing a few yards overhead. The flying thing suddenly toppled, turning over and over before it crashed to the ground. There were howls of glee.
“They seem mad,” said Tommy meditatively, “and they act like lunatics, but I’ve got a hunch of some sort about them. But what?”
Sunlight gleamed on something golden beyond the jungle’s edge. Naked figures went running to the spot. An exultant tumult arose.
“Now they try another trick,” Tommy observed dispassionately. “I remember that at the Tube they had pushed something on wheels….”
The sub-machine gun was unhandy for accurate single shots, and no pistol can be used to effectat long ranges. To conserve ammunition, Tommy had been shooting only at relatively close targets, allowing the Ragged Men immunity at over two hundred yards. But now he flung over the continuous-fire stud. He watched grimly.
The foliage at the edge of the jungle parted. A crude wagon appeared. Its axles were lesser tree-trunks. Its wheels were clumsy and crude beyond belief. But mounted upon it there was a queer mass of golden metal which looked strangely beautiful and strangely deadly.
“That’s the thing,” said Tommy dispassionately, “which made the flare of light last night. It blew up the Tube. And Von Holtz told me—hm—his friends, in the City….”
He sighted carefully. The wagon and its contents were surrounded by a leaping, capering mob. They shook their fists in an insane hatred.
A storm of bullets burst upon them. Tommy was traversing the little gun with the trigger pressed down. His lips were set tightly. And suddenly it seemed as if the solid earth burst asunder! There had been an instant in which the bullet-bursts were visible. They tore and shattered the howling mob of Ragged Men. But then they struck the golden weapon. A sheet of blue-white flame leaped skyward and round about. A blast of blistering, horrible heat smote upon the beleaguered pair. The moisture of the ooze between them and the jungle flashed into steam. A section of the jungle itself, a hundred yards across, shriveled and died.
Steamshot upward in a monstrous cloud—miles high, it seemed. Then, almost instantly, there was nothing left of the Ragged Men about the golden weapon, or of the weapon itself, but an unbearable blue-white light which poured away and trickled here and there and seemed to grow in volume as it flamed.
From the rest of the jungle a howl arose. It was a howl of such loss, and of such unspeakable rage, that the hair at the back of Tommy’s neck lifted, as a dog’s hackles lift at sight of an enemy.
“Keep your head down, Evelyn,” said Tommy composedly. “I have an idea that the burning stuff gives off a lot of ultra-violet. Von Holtz was badly burned, you remember.”
Naked figures flashed forward from the jungle beyond the burned area. Tommy shot them down grimly. He discarded the sub-machine gun with its explosive shells for the automatics. Some of his targets were only wounded. Those wounded men dragged themselves forward, screaming their rage. Tommy felt sickened, as if he were shooting down madmen. A voice roared a rage-thickened order from the jungle. The assault slackened.
Five minutes later it began again, and this time the attackers waded out into the softer ooze and flung themselves down, and then began a half-swimming, half-crawling progress behind bits of tree-fern stump, or merely pushing walls of the jellylike mud before them. The white light expanded and grew huge—but it dulled as it expanded, and presently seemed no hotter than molten steel, and later still it was no more than a dull-red heat, and later yet….
Tommy shot savagely. Some of the Ragged Men died. More did not.
“I’m afraid,” he said coolly, “they’re going to get us. It seems rather purposeless, but I’m afraid they’re going to win.”
Evelyn thrust a shaking hand skyward. “There, Tommy!”
A strange,angular flying thing was moving steadily across the marsh, barely above the steamlike haze that hung in thinning layers about its foulness. The flying thing moved with a machinelike steadiness, and the sun twinkled upon something bright and shining before it.
“A flying machine,” said Tommy shortly. His mind leaped ahead and his lips parted in a mirthless smile. “Get your gas mask ready, Evelyn. The explosion of that thermit-thrower made them curious in the City. They sent a ship to see.”
The flying thing grew closer, grew distinct. A wail arose from the Ragged Men. Some of them leaped to their feet and fled. A man came out into the open and shook his fists at the angular thing in the air. He screamed at it, and such ghastly hatred was in the sound that Evelyn shuddered.
Tommy could see it plainly, now. Its single wing was thick and queerly unlike the air-foils of Earth. A framework hung below it, but it had no balancing tail. And there was a glittering something before it that obviously was its propelling mechanism, but as obviously was not a screw propeller. It swept overhead, with a man in it looking downward. Tommy watched coolly. It was past him, sweeping toward the jungle. It swung sharply to the right, banking steeply. Smoking things dropped from it, which expanded into columns of swiftly-descending vapor. They reached the jungle and blotted it out. The flying machine swung again and swept back to the left. More smoking things dropped. Ragged Men erupted from the jungle’s edge in screaming groups, only to writhe and fall and lie still. But a group of five of them sped toward Tommy, shrieking their rage upon him as the cause of disaster. Tommy held his fire, looking upward. A hundred yards, fifty yards, twenty-five….
Theflying machine soared in easy, effortless circles. The man in it was watching, making no effort to interfere.
Tommy shot down the five men, one after the other, with a curiously detached feeling that their vice-brutalized faces would haunt him forever. Then he stood up.
The flying machine banked, turned, and swept toward him, and a smoking thing dropped toward the earth. It was a gas bomb like those that had wiped out the Ragged Men. It would strike not ten yards away.
“Your mask!” snapped Tommy.
He helped Evelyn adjust it. The billowing white cloud rolled around him. He held his breath, clapped on his mask, exhaled until his lungs ached, and was breathing comfortably. The mask was effective protection. And then he held Evelyn comfortably close.
For what seemed a long, long while they were surrounded by the white mist. The cloud was so dense, indeed, that the light about them faded to a gray twilight. But gradually, bit by bit, the mist grew thinner. Then it moved aside. It drifted before the wind toward the tree-fern forest and was lost to sight.
The flying machine was circling and soaring silently overhead. As the mist drew aside, the pilot dived down and down. And Tommy emptied his automatic at the glittering thing which drew it. There was a crashing bolt of blue light. The machine canted, spun about with one wing almost vertical, that wing-tip struck the marsh, and it settled with a monstrous splashing of mud. All was still.
Tommy reloaded, watching it keenly.
“The framework isn’t smashed up, anyhow,” he observed grimly.“The pilot thinks we’re some of Jacaro’s gang. My guns were proof, to him. So, since the Ragged Men didn’t get us, he gassed us.” He watched again, his eyes narrow. The pilot was utterly still. “He may be knocked out. I hope so! I’m going to see.”
Automaticheld ready, Tommy moved toward the crashed machine. It had splashed into the ooze less than a hundred yards away. Tommy moved cautiously. Twenty yards away, the pilot moved feebly. He had knocked his head against some part of his machine. A moment later he opened his eyes and stared about. The next instant he had seen Tommy and moved convulsively. A glittering thing appeared in his hand—and Tommy fired. The glittering thing flew to one side and the pilot clapped his hand to a punctured forearm. He went white, but his jaw set. He stared at Tommy, waiting for death.
“For the love of Pete,” said Tommy irritably, “I’m not going to kill you! You tried to kill me, and it was very annoying, but I have some things I want to tell you.”
He stopped and felt foolish because his words were, of course, unintelligible. The pilot was staring amazedly at him. Tommy’s tone had been irritated, certainly, but there was neither hatred nor triumph in it. He waved his hand.
“Come on and I’ll bandage you up and see if we can make you understand a few things.”
Evelyn came running through the muck.
“He didn’t hurt you, Tommy?” she gasped. “I saw you shoot—”
The pilot fairly jumped. At first glance he had recognized her as a woman. Tommy growled that he’d had to “shoot the damn fool through the arm.” The pilot spoke, curiously. Evelyn looked at his arm and exclaimed. He was holding it above the wound to stop the bleeding. Evelyn looked about helplessly for something with which to bandage it.
“Make pads with your handkerchief,” grunted Tommy. “Take my tie to hold them in place.”
The prisoner looked curiously from one to the other. His color was returning. As Evelyn worked on his arm he seemed to grow excited at some inner thought. He spoke again, and looked at once puzzled and confirmed in some conviction when they were unable to comprehend. When Evelyn finished her first-aid task he smiled suddenly, flashing white teeth at them. He even made a little speech which was humorously apologetic, to judge by its tone. When they turned to go back to their fortress he went with them without a trace of hesitation.
“Now what?” asked Evelyn.
“They’ll be looking for him in a little while,” said Tommy curtly. “If we can convince him we’re not enemies, he’ll keep them from giving us more gas.”
Thepilot was fumbling at a belt about the curious tunic he wore. Tommy watched him warily. But a pad of what seemed to be black metal came out, with a silvery-white stylus attached to it. The pilot sat down the instant they stopped and began to draw in white lines on the black surface. He drew a picture of a man and an angular flying machine, and then a sketchy, impressionistic outline of a city’s towers. He drew a circle to enclose all three drawings and indicated himself, the machine, and the distant city. Tommy nodded comprehension as the pilot looked up. Then came a picture of a half-naked man shaking his fists at the three encircled sketches. The half-nakedman stood beneath a roughly indicated tree-fern.
“Clever,” said Tommy, as a larger circle enclosed that with the city and the machine. “He’s identifying himself, and saying the Ragged Men are enemies of himself and his Golden City, too. That much is not hard to get.”
He nodded vigorously as the pilot looked up again. And then he watched as a lively, tiny sketch grew on the black slab, showing half a dozen men, garbed almost as Tommy was, using weapons which could only be sub-machine guns and automatic pistols. They were obviously Jacaro’s gangsters. The pilot handed over the plate and watched absorbedly as Tommy fumbled with the stylus. He drew, not well but well enough, an outline of the towers of New York. The difference in architecture was striking. There followed tiny figures of himself and Evelyn—with a drily murmured, “This isn’t a flattering portrait of you, Evelyn!”—and a circle enclosing them with the towers of New York.
The pilot nodded in his turn. And then Tommy encircled the previously drawn figures of the gangsters with New York, just as the Ragged Men had been linked with the other city. And a second circle linked gangsters and Ragged Men together.
“I’msaying,” observed Tommy, “that Jacaro and his mob are the Ragged Men of our world, which may not be wrong, at that.”
There was no question but that the pilot took his meaning. He grinned in a friendly fashion, and winced as his wounded arm hurt him. Ruefully, he looked down at his bandage. Then he pressed a tiny stud at the top of the black-metal pad and all the white lines vanished instantly. He drew a new circle, with tree-ferns scattered about its upper third—a tiny sketch of a city’s towers. He pointed to that and to the city visible through the mist—a second city, and a third, in other places. He waved his hand vaguely about, then impatiently scribbled over the middle third of the circle and handed it back to Tommy.
Tommy grinned ruefully.
“A map,” he said amusedly. “He’s pointed out his own city and a couple of others, and he wants us to tell him where we come from. Evelyn—er—how are we going to explain a trip through five dimensions in a sketch?”
Evelyn shook her head. But a shadow passed over their heads. The pilot leaped to his feet and shouted. There were three planes soaring above them, and the pilot in the first was in the act of releasing a smoking object over the side. At the grounded pilot’s shout, he flung his ship into a frantic dive, while behind him the smoking thing billowed out a thicker and thicker cloud. His plane was nearly hidden by the vapor when he released it. It fell two hundred yards and more away, and the white mist spread and spread. But it fell short of the little hillock.
“Quickthinking,” said Tommy coolly. “He thought we had this man a prisoner, and he’d be better off dead. But—”
Their captive was shouting again. His head thrown back, he called sentence after sentence aloft while the three ships soared back and forth above their heads, soundless as bats. One of the three rose steeply and soared away toward the city. Their captive, grinning, turned and nodded his head satisfiedly. Then he sat down to wait.
Twenty minutes later a monstrous machine with ungainly flapping wings came heavily over the swamp.It checked and settled with a terrific flapping and an even more terrific din. Half a dozen armed men waited warily for the three to approach. The golden weapons lifted alertly as they drew near. The wounded man explained at some length. His explanation was dismissed brusquely. A man advanced and held out his hands for Tommy’s weapons.
“I don’t like it,” growled Tommy, “but we’ve got to think of Earth. If you get a chance hide your gun, Evelyn.”
He pushed on the safety catches and passed over his guns. The pilot he had shot down led them onto the fenced-in deck of the monstrous ornithopter. Machinery roared. The wings began to beat. They were nearly invisible from the speed of their flapping when the ship lifted vertically from the ground. It rose straight up for fifty feet, the motion of the wings changed subtly, and it swept forward.
It swung in a vast half circle and headed back across the marsh for the Golden City. Five minutes of noisy flight during which the machine flapped its way higher and higher above the marsh—which seemed more noisome and horrible still from above—and then the golden towers of the city were below. Strange and tapering and beautiful, they were. No single line was perfectly straight, nor was any form ungraceful. These towers sprang upward in clean-soaring curves toward the sky. Bridges between them were gossamerlike things that seemed lace spun out in metal. And as Tommy looked keenly and saw the jungle crowding close against the city’s metal walls, the flapping of the ornithopter’s wings changed again and it seemed to plunge downward like a stone toward a narrow landing place amid the great city’s towering buildings.
Thething that struck Tommy first of all was the scarcity of men in the city, compared to its size. The next thing was the entire absence of women. The roar of machines smote upon his consciousness as a bad third, though they made din enough. Perhaps he ignored the machine noises because the ornithopter on which they had arrived made such a racket itself.
They landed on a paved space perhaps a hundred yards by two hundred, three sides of which were walled off by soaring towers. The fourth gave off on empty space, and he realized that he was still at least a hundred feet above the ground. The ornithopter landed with a certain skilful precision and its wings ceased to beat. Behind it, the two fixed-wing machines soared down, leveled, hovered, and settled upon amazingly inadequate wheels. Their pilots got out and began to push them toward one side of the landing area. Tommy noticed it, of course. He was noticing everything, just now. He said amazedly:
“Evelyn! They launch these planes with catapults like those our battleships use! They don’t take off under their own power!”
The six men on the ornithopter put their shoulders to their machine and trundled it out of the way. Tommy blinked at the sight.
“No field attendants!” He gazed out across the open portion of the land area and saw an elevated thoroughfare below. Some sort of vehicle, gleaming like gold, moved swiftly on two wheels. There was a walkway in the center of the street with room for a multitude. But only two men were in sight upon it. “Lord!” said Tommy. “Where are the people?”
There was brief talk among the crew of the ornithopter. Two ofthem picked up Tommy’s weapons, and the pilot he had wounded made a gesture indicating that he should follow. He led the way to an arched door in the nearest tower. A little two-wheeled car was waiting. They got into it and the pilot fumbled with the controls. As he worked at it—rather clumsily on account of his arm—the rest of the ornithopter’s crew came in. They wheeled out another vehicle, climbed into it, and shot away down a sloping passage.
Theirown vehicle followed and emerged upon the paved and nearly empty thoroughfare. Tall buildings rose all about them, with curved walls soaring dizzily skyward. There was every sign of a populous city, including the dull drumming roar of many machines, but the streets were empty. The little machine moved swiftly for minutes. Twice it swung aside and entered a sloping incline. Once it went up. The other time it dived down seventy feet on a four-hundred-foot ramp. Then it swung sharply to the right, meandered into a street-level way leading into the heart of a monster building, and stopped. And in all its travel it had not passed fifty people.
The pilot-turned-chauffeur turned and grinned amiably, and led the way again. Steps—twenty or thirty of them. Then they emerged suddenly into a vast room. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet long, fifty wide, and nearly as high. It was floored with alternate blocks of what seemed to be an iron-hard black wood and the omnipresent golden metal. Columns and pilasters about the place gave forth the same subdued deep golden glow. Light streamed from panels inset in the wall and ceiling—a curious saffron-red light. There was a massive table of the hard black wood. Chairs with curiously designed backs were ranged about it. They were benches, really, but they served the purpose of chairs. Each was too narrow to hold more than one person. The room was empty.
They waited. After a long time a man in a blue tunic came into the room and sat down on one of the benches. A long time later, another man came in, in red; and another and another, until there were a dozen in all. They regarded Tommy and Evelyn with a weary suspicion. One of them—an old man with a white beard—asked questions. The pilot answered them. At a word, the two men with Tommy’s weapons placed them on the table. They were inspected casually, as familiar things. They probably were, since some of Jacaro’s gunmen had been killed in a fight in this city. Another question.
The pilot explained briefly and offered Tommy the black-metal pad again. It still contained the incomplete map of a hemisphere, and was obviously a repetition of the question of where he came from.
Tommytook it, frowning thoughtfully. Then an idea struck him. He found the little stud which, pressed by the pad’s owner, had erased the previous drawings. He pressed it and the lines disappeared. And Tommy drew, crudely enough, that complicated diagram which is supposed to represent a cube which is a cube in four dimensions: a tesseract. Upon one surface of the cube he indicated the curving towers of the Golden City. Upon a surface representing a plane beyond the three dimensions of normal experience, he repeated the angular tower structures of New York. He shrugged rather hopelessly as he passed it over, but to his amazement it was understood at once.
The little black pad passed from hand to hand and an animated discussiontook place. One rather hard-faced man was the most animated of all. The bearded old man demurred. The hard-faced man insisted. Tommy could see that his pilot’s expression was becoming uneasy. But then a compromise seemed to be arrived at. The bearded man spoke a single, ceremonial phrase and the twelve men rose. They moved toward various doors and one by one left, until the room was empty.
But the pilot looked relieved. He grinned cheerfully at Tommy and led the way back to the two-wheeled vehicle. The two men with Tommy’s weapons vanished. And again there was a swift, cyclonelike passage along empty ways with the throbbing of machinery audible everywhere. Into the base of a second building, up endless stairs, past innumerable doors. It seemed to Tommy that he heard voices behind some of them, and they were women’s voices.
At a private, triple knock a door opened wide, and the pilot led the way into a room, closed and locked the door behind him, and called. A woman’s voice cried out in astonishment. Through an inner arch a woman came running eagerly. Her face went blank at sight of Tommy and Evelyn, and her hand flew to a tiny golden object at her waist. Then, at the pilot’s chuckle, she flushed vividly.
Hourslater, Tommy and Evelyn were able to talk it over. They were alone then, and could look out an oval window upon the Golden City all about them. It was dark, but saffron-red panels glowed in building walls all along the thoroughfares, and tiny glowing dots in the soaring spires of gold told of people within other dwellings like this.
“As I see it,” said Tommy restlessly, “the Council—and it must have been that in the big room to-day—put us in our friend’s hands to learn the language. He’s been working with me four hours, drawing pictures, and I’ve been writing down words I’ve learned. I must have several hundred of them. But we do our best talking with pictures. And Evelyn, this city’s in a bad fix.”
Evelyn said irrelevantly: “Her name is Ahnya, Tommy, and she’s a dear. We got along beautifully. I’ll bet I found out things you don’t even guess at.”
“You probably have,” admitted Tommy, frowning. “Check up on this: our friend’s name is Aten, and he’s an air-pilot and also has something to do with growing foodstuffs in some special towers where they grow crops by artificial light only. Some of the plants he sketched look amazingly like wheat, by the way. The name of the town is”—he looked at his notes—“Yugna. There are some other towns, ten or twelve of them. Rahn is the nearest, and it’s worse off than this one.”
“Of course,” said Evelyn, smiling. “They usecuyalopenly, there!”
“How’d you learn all that?” demanded Tommy.
“Ahnya told me. We made gestures and smiled at each other. We understood perfectly. She’s crazy about her husband, and I—well she knows I’m going to marry you, so….”
Tommy grunted.
“I suppose she explained with a smile and gestures just how much of a strain it is, simply keeping the city going?”
“Of course,” said Evelyn calmly. “The city’s fighting against the jungle, which grows worse all the time. They used to grow their foodstuffs in the open fields. Then within the city. Now they use empty towers and artificial light. I don’t know why.”
Tommygrunted again.
“This planet’s just had, or is having, a change of geologic period,” he explained, frowning. “The plants people need to live on aren’t adapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce. They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take an abnormal amount of supervision—I don’t know why. The air-conditions for the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creepers which thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city to smother it; the power machines; the clothing machines—a million machines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight off starvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization. And they’re short-handed. The law of diminishing returns seems to operate. They’re trying to maintain a civilization higher than their environment will support. They work until they’re ready to drop, just to stay in the same place. And the monotony and the strain makes some of them take tocuyalfor relief.”
He surveyed the city from the oval window, frowning in thought.
“It’s a drug which grows wild,” he added slowly. “It peps them up. It makes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly, they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything they ever knew or did. It’s a sort of delayed-action psychosis which goes off with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using their belt-weapons until they’re killed. More of them bolt for the jungle. The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to the jungle. And then they’re Ragged Men, half mad at all times and wholly mad as far as the city and its machines are concerned.”
Evelyn linked her arm in his.
“Somehow,” she told him, smiling, “I think one Thomas Reames is working out ways and means to help a city named Yugna.”
“Not yet,” said Tommy grimly. “We have to think of Earth. Not everybody in the Council approved of us. Aten told me one chap argued that we ought to be shoved out into the jungle again as compatriots of Jacaro. And the machines were especially short-handed to-day because of a diversion of labor to get ready something monstrous and really deadly to send down the Tube to Earth. We’ve got to find out what that is, and stop it.”
Buton the second day afterward, when he and Evelyn were summoned before the Council again, he still had not found out. During those two days he learned many other things, to be sure: that Aten for instance, was relieved from duty at the machines only because he was wounded; that the power of the main machines came from a deep bore which brought up superheated steam from the source of boiling springs long since built over; that iron was a rare metal, and consequently there was no dynamo in the city and magnetism was practically an unknown force; that electrokinetics was a laboratory puzzle—or had been, when there was leisure for research—while the science of electrostatics had progressed far past its state on Earth. The little truncheonlike weapons carried a stored-up static charge measurable only in hundreds of thousands of volts, which could be released in flashes which were effective up to a hundred feet or more.
And he learned that the thermit-throwers actually spat out in normal operation tiny droplets of matter Aten could not describe clearly, but which seemed to beradioactive with a period of five minutes or less; that in Rahn, the nearest other city,cuyalwas taken openly, and the jungle was growing into the town with no one to hold it back; that two generations since there had been twenty cities like this one, but that a bare dozen still survived; that there was a tradition that human beings had come upon this planet from another world where other human beings had harried them, and that in that other world there were divers races of humanity, of different colors, whereas in the world of the Golden City all mankind was one race; that Tommy’s declaration that he came from another group of dimensions had been debated and, on re-examination of Jacaro’s Tube, accepted, and that there was keen argument going on as to the measures to be taken concerning it.
Thesethings Tommy had learned, and he and Evelyn went to their second interrogation by the city’s Council armed with written vocabularies of nearly a thousand words, which they had sorted out and made ready for use. But they were still ignorant of the weapons the Golden City might use against Earth.
The Council meeting took place in the same hall, with its alternating black-and-gold flooring and the saffron-red lighting panels casting a soft light everywhere. This was a scheduled meeting, foreseen and arranged for. The twelve chairs above the heavy table were all occupied from the first. But Tommy realized that the table had been intended to seat a large number of councilors. There were guards stationed formally behind the chairs. There were spectators, auditors of the deliberations of the Council. They were dressed in a myriad colors, and they talked quietly among themselves; but it seemed to Tommy that nowhere had he seen weariness, as an ingrained expression, upon so many faces.
Tommy and Evelyn were led to the foot of the Council table. The bearded old man in blue began the questioning. As Keeper of Foodstuffs—according to Aten—he was a sort of presiding officer.
Tommy answered the questions crisply. He had known what they would be, and he had developed a vocabulary to answer them. He told them of Earth, of Professor Denham, of his and the professor’s experiments. He outlined the first experiment with the Fifth-Dimension catapult and the result of it—when the Golden City had sent the Death Mist to wipe out a band of Ragged Men who had captured a citizen, and after him Evelyn and her father.
Thisthey remembered. Nods went around the table. Tommy told them of Jacaro, stressing the fact that Jacaro was an outlaw, a criminal upon Earth. He explained the theft of the model Tube, and how it was that their first contact with Earth had been with the dregs of Earth humanity. On behalf of his countrymen he offered reparation for all the damage Jacaro and his men had done. He proposed a peaceful commerce between worlds, to the infinite benefit of both.
There was silence until he finished. The faces before him were immobile. But a hawk-faced man in brown asked dry questions. Were there more races than one upon Earth? Were they of diverse colors? Did they ever war among themselves? At Tommy’s answers the atmosphere seemed to change. And the hawk-faced man rose to speak.
Tommy and Evelyn, he conceded caustically, had certainly come from another world. Their own mostancient legends described just such a world as his: a world of many races of many colors, who fought many wars among themselves. Their ancestors had fled from such a world, according to legend through a twisting cavern which they had sealed behind them. The conditions Tommy described had been the cause of their ancestors’ flight. They, the people of Yugna, would do well to follow the example of their forebears: strip these Earth folk of their weapons, exile them to the jungles, destroy the Tube through which the Mist of Many Colors had been sent. All should be as in past ages.
Tommyopened his mouth to answer, but another man sprang to his feet. His face alone was not weary and worn. As he stood up, Aten murmured “Cuyal!” and Tommy understood that this man used the drug which was destroying the city’s citizens, but gave a transient energy to its victims. He spoke in fiery phrases, urging action which would be drastic and certain. He spoke confidently, persuasively. There was a rustling among those who watched and listened to the debate. He had caught at their imagination.
Evelyn, exerting every faculty to understand, saw Tommy’s lips set grimly.
“What—what is it?” she whispered. “I—I don’t understand….”
Tommy spoke in a savage growl.
“He says,” he told her bitterly, “that in one blow they can defeat both the jungle and the invaders from Earth. In past ages their ancestors were faced by enemies they could not defeat. They fled to this world. Now they are faced by jungles they cannot defeat. He proposes that they flee to our world. The Death Mist is a toy, he reminds them, compared with gases they know. There is a gas of which one part in ten hundred million is fatal! In a hundred of their days they can make and send through the Tube enough of it to kill every living thing on Earth. They’ve figures on the Earth’s size and atmosphere from me, damn ’em! And he reminds them that that deadly gas changes of itself into a harmless substance. He urges them to gas Earth humanity out of existence, call upon the other cities of this world, and presently move through the Tube to Earth. They’ll carry their food-plants, rebuild their cities, and abandon this planet to the jungles and the Ragged Men. And the hell of it is, they can do it!”
A sudden approving buzz went through the Council hall.
Theapproval of the citizens of Yugna was not enthusiastic. It was desperate. Their faces were weary. Their lives were warped. They had been fighting since birth against the encroachment of the jungle, which until the days of their grandparents had been no menace at all. But for two generations these people had been foredoomed, and they knew it. Nearly half the cities of their race were overwhelmed and their inhabitants reduced to savage hunters in the victorious jungles. Now the people of Yugna saw a chance to escape from the jungle. They were offered rest. Peace. Relaxation from the desperate need to serve insatiable machines. Sheer desperation impelled them. In their situation, the people of Earth would annihilate a solar system for relief, let alone the inhabitants of a single planet.
Shouts began to be heard above the uproar in the Council hall—approving shouts, demands that one be appointed to conduct the operationwhich was to give them a new planet on which to live, where their food-plants would thrive in the open, where jungles would no longer press on them.
Tommy’s face went savage and desperate, itself. He clenched and unclenched his hands, struggling among his meagre supply of words for promises of help from Earth, which promises would tip the scales for peace again. He raised his voice in a shout for attention. He was unheard. The Council hall was in an uproar of desperate approval. The orator stood flushed and triumphant. The Council members looked from eye to eye, and slowly the old, white-bearded Keeper of Foodstuffs placed a golden box upon the table. He touched it in a certain fashion, and handed it to the next man. That second man touched it, and passed it to a third. And that man….
A hushfell instantly. Tommy understood. The measure was being decided by solemn vote. The voting device had reached the fifth man when there was a frantic clatter of footsteps, a door burst in, and babbling men stood in the opening, white-faced and stammering and overwhelmed, but trying to make a report.
Consternation reigned, incredulous, amazed consternation. The bearded old man rose dazedly and strode from the hall with the rest of the Council following him. A pause of stunned stupefaction, and the spectators in the hall rushed for other doors.
“Stick to Aten,” snapped Tommy. “Something’s broken, and it has to be our way. Let’s see what it is.”
He clung alike to Evelyn and to Aten as the air-pilot fought to clear a way. The doors were jammed. It was minutes before they could make their way through and plunge up the interminable steps Aten mounted, only to fling himself out to the open air. Then they were upon a flying bridge between two of the towers of the city. All about the city human figures were massing, staring upward.
And above the city swirled a swarm of aircraft. Tommy counted three of the clumsy ornithopters, high and motelike. There were twenty or thirty of the small, one-man craft. There were a dozen or more two-man planes. And there were at least forty giant single-wing ships which looked as if they had been made for carrying freight. They soared and circled above the city in soundless confusion. Before each of them glittered something silvery, like glass, which was not a screw propeller but somehow drew them on.
The Council was massed two hundred yards away. A single-seater dived downward, soared and circled noiselessly fifty yards overhead, and its pilot shouted a message. Then he climbed swiftly and rejoined his fellows. The men about Tommy looked stunned, as if they could not believe their ears. Aten seemed stricken beyond the passability of reaction.
“I gotpart of it,” snapped Tommy, to Evelyn’s whispered question. “I think I know the rest. Aten!” He snapped question after question in his inadequate phrasing of the city’s tongue. Evelyn saw Aten answer dully, then bitterly, and then, as Tommy caught his arm and whispered savagely to him, Aten’s eyes caught fire. He nodded violently and turned on his heel.
“Come on!” And Tommy seized Evelyn’s arm again.
They followed closely as Aten wormed his way through the crowd. They raced behind him downstairs and through a door into a dusty and unvisited room. It was a museum. Aten pointed grimly.
Here were the automatic pistols taken from those of Jacaro’s men who had been killed, a nasty sub-machine gun which had been Tommy’s, and grenades—Jacaro’s. Tommy checked shell calibres and carried off a ninety-shot magazine full of explosive bullets, and a repeating rifle.
“I can do more accurate work with this than the machine gun,” he said cryptically. “Let’s go!”
It was not until they were racing away from the Council building in one of the two-wheeled vehicles that Evelyn spoke again.
“I—understand part,” she said unsteadily. “Those planes overhead are from Rahn. And they’re threatening—”
“Blackmail,” said Tommy between clenched teeth. “It sounds like a perfectly normal Earth racket. A fleet from Rahn is over Yugna, loaded with the Death Mist. Yugna pays food and goods and women or it’s wiped out by gas. Further, it surrenders its aircraft to make further collections easier. Rahn refuses to die, though it’s let in the jungle. It’s turned pirate stronghold. Fed and clothed by a few other cities like this one, it should be able to hold out. It’s a racket, Evelyn. A stick-up. A hijacking of a civilised city. Sounds like Jacaro.”
Thelittle vehicle darted madly through empty highways, passing groups of men staring dazedly upward at the soaring motes overhead. It darted down this inclined way, up that one. It shot into a building and around a winding ramp. It stopped with a jerk and Aten was climbing out. He ran through a doorway, Tommy and Evelyn following. Planes of all sizes, still and lifeless, filled a vast hall. And Aten struggled with a door mechanism and a monster valve swung wide. Then Tommy threw his weight with Aten’s to roll out the plane he had selected. It was a small, triangular ship, with seats for three, but it was heavy. The two men moved it with desperate exertion. Aten pointed, panting, to slide-rail and it took them five minutes to get the plane about that rail and engage a curious contrivance in a slot in the ship’s fuselage.
“Tommy,” said Evelyn, “you’re not going to—”
“Run away? Hardly!” said Tommy. “We’re going up. I’m going to fight the fleet with bullets. They don’t have missile-weapons here, and Aten will know the range of their electric-charge outfits.”
“I’m coming too,” said Evelyn desperately.
Tommy hesitated, then agreed.
“If we fail they’ll gas the city anyway. One way or the other….”
There was a sudden rumble as Evelyn took her place. The plane shot forward with a swift smooth acceleration. There was no sound of any motor. There was no movement of the glittering thing at the forepart of the plane. But the ship reached the end of the slide and lifted, and then was in mid-air, fifty feet above the vehicular way, a hundred feet above the ground.
Tommyspoke urgently. Aten nodded. The ship had started to climb. He leveled it out and darted straight forward. He swung madly to dodge a soaring tower. He swept upward a little to avoid a flying bridge. The ship was travelling with an enormous speed, and the golden walls of the city flashed past below them and they sped away across feathery jungle.
“If we climbed at once,” observed Tommy shortly, “they’d think we meant to fight. They might start their gassing. As it is, we look like we’re running away.”
Evelyn said nothing. For fivemiles the plane fled as if in panic. Evelyn clung to the filigree side of the cockpit. The city dwindled behind them. Then Aten climbed steeply. Tommy was looking keenly at the glittering thing which propelled the ship. It seemed like a crystal gridwork, like angular lace contrived of glass. But a cold blue flame burned in it and Tommy was obscurely reminded of a neon tube, though the color was wholly unlike. A blast of air poured back through the grid. Somehow, by some development of electro-statics, the “static jet” which is merely a toy in Earth laboratories had become usable as a means of propelling aircraft.
Back they swept toward the Golden City, five thousand feet or more aloft. The ground was partly obscured by the hazy, humid atmosphere, but glinting sun-reflections from the city guided them. Soaring things took shape before them and grew swiftly nearer. Tommy spoke again, busily loading the automatic rifle with explosive shells.
Aten swung to follow a vast dark shape in its circular soaring, a hundred feet above it and a hundred yards behind. Wind whistled, rising to a shriek. Tommy fired painstakingly.
Theother plane zoomed suddenly as a flash of blue flame spouted before it. It dived, then, fluttering and swooping, began to drift helplessly toward the spires of the city below it.
“Good!” snapped Tommy. “Another one, Aten.”
Aten made no reply. He flung his ship sidewise and dived steeply before a monstrous freight carrier. Tommy fired deliberately as they swept past. The propelling grid flashed blue flame in a vast, crashing flame. It, too, began to flutter down.
Tommy did not miss until the fifth time, and Aten turned with a grimace of disappointment. Tommy’s second shot burst in a freight compartment and a man screamed. His voice carried horribly in the silence of these heights. But Tommy shot again, and, again, and there was a satisfying blue flash as a fifth big ship went fluttering helplessly down.
Aten began to circle for height Tommy refilled the magazine.
“I’m bringing ’em down,” he explained unnecessarily to Evelyn, “by smashing their propellers. They have to land, and when they land they’re hostages—I hope!”
Confusion became apparent among the hostile planes. The one Yugna ship was identified as the source of disaster. Tommy worked his rifle in cold fury. He aimed at no man, but the propelling grids were large. For a one-man ship they were five feet in diameter, and for the big freight ships, they were circles fifteen feet across. They were perfect targets, and Aten seemed to grasp the necessary tactics almost instantly. Dead ahead or from straight astern, Tommy could not miss a shot. The fleet of Rahn went fluttering downward. Fifteen of the biggest were down, and six of the two-man planes. A sixteenth and seventeenth flashed at their bows and drifted helplessly….
Thenthe one-man ships attacked. Six of them at once. Aten grinned and dived for all of them. One by one, Tommy smashed their crystal grids and watched them sinking unsteadily toward the towers of the city. As his own ship drove over them, little golden flashes licked out. Electric-charge weapons. One flash struck the wingtip of their plane, and flame burst out, but Aten flung the ship into a mad whirl in which the blaze was blown out.
Another freight ship helpless—and another. Then the air fleet of Rahn turned and fled. The ornithopters winged away in heavy, creaking terror. The others dived for speed and flattened out hardly above the tree-fern jungle. They streaked away in ignominious panic. Aten darted and circled above them and, as Tommy failed to fire, turned and went racing back toward the city.
“After the first ones went down,” observed Tommy, “they knew that if they gassed the city we’d shoot them down into their own gas cloud. So they ran away. I hope this gives us a pull.”
The city’s towers loomed before them. The lacy bridges swarmed with human figures. Somewhere a fight was in progress about a grounded plane from Rahn. Others seemed to have surrendered sullenly on alighting. For the first time Tommy saw the city as a thronging mass of humanity, and for the first time he realized how terrible must be the strain upon the city if with so large a population so few could be free for leisure in normal times.
The little plane settled down and landed lightly. There were a dozen men on the landing platform now, and they were herding disarmed men from Rahn away from a big ship Tommy had brought down. Tommy looked curiously at the prisoners. They seemed freer than the inhabitants of Yugna. Their faces showed no such signs of strain. But they did not seem well-fed, nor did they appear as capable or as resolute.
“Cuyal,” said Aten in an explanatory tone, seeing Tommy’s expression. He put his shoulder to the big ship, to wheel it back into its shed.
“You son of a gun,” grunted Tommy, “it’s all in the day’s work to you, fighting an invading fleet!”
A messenger came panting through the doorway. Tommy grinned.
“The Council wants us, Evelyn. Now maybe they’ll listen.”
Theatmosphere of the resumed Council meeting was, as a matter of fact, considerably changed. The white-bearded Keeper of Foodstuffs thanked them with dignity. He invited Tommy to offer advice, since his services had proved so useful.
“Advice?” said Tommy, in the halting, fumbling phrases he had slaved to acquire. “I would put the prisoners from Rahn to work at the machines, releasing citizens.” There was a buzz of approval, and he added drily in English: “I’m playing politics, Evelyn.” Again in the speech of Yugna he added: “And I would have the fleet of Yugna soar above Rahn, not to demand tribute as that city did, but to disable all its aircraft, so that such piracy as to-day may not be tried again!” There was a second buzz of approval. “And third,” said Tommy earnestly, “I would communicate with Earth, rather than assassinate it. I would require the science of Earth for the benefit of this world, rather than use the science of this world to annihilate that! I—”
For the second time the Council meeting was interrupted. An armed messenger came pounding into the room. He reported swiftly. Tommy grasped Evelyn’s wrist in what was almost a painful grip.
“Noises in the Tube!” he told her sharply. “Earth-folk doing something in the Tube Jacaro came through. Your father….”
There was an alert silence in the Council hall. The white-bearded old man had listened to the messenger. Now he asked a grim question of Tommy.
“They may be my friends, oryour enemies,” said Tommy briefly. “Mass thermit-throwers and let me find out!”
Itwas the only possible thing to do. Tommy and Evelyn went with the Council, in a body, in a huge wheeled vehicle that raced across the city. Lingering groups still searched the sky above them, now blessedly empty again. But the Council’s vehicle dived down and down to ground level, where the rumble of machines was loud indeed, and then turned into a tunnel which went down still farther. There was feverish activity ahead, where it stopped, and a golden thermit-thrower came into sight upon a dull-colored truck.
Questions. Feverish replies. The white-bearded man touched Tommy on the shoulder, regarding him with a peculiarly noncommittal gaze, and pointed to a doorway that someone was just opening. The door swung wide. There was a confusion of prismatically-colored mist within it, and Tommy noticed that tanks upon tanks were massed outside the metal wall of that compartment, and seemingly had been pouring something into the room.
The mist drew back from the door. Saffron-red lighting panels appeared dimly, then grew distinct. There were small, collapsed bundles of fur upon the floor of the storeroom being exposed to view. They were, probably, the equivalent of rats. And then the last remnant of mist vanished with a curiously wraithlike abruptness, and the end of Jacaro’s Tube came into view.
Tommy advanced, Evelyn clinging to his sleeve. There were clanking noises audible in this room even above the dull rumble of the city’s machines. The noises came from the Tube’s mouth. It was four feet and more across, and it projected at a crazy angle out of a previously solid wall.
“Hello!” shouted Tommy. “Down the Tube!”
Theclattering noise stopped, then continued at a faster rate.
“The gas is cut off!” shouted Tommy again. “Who’s there?”
A voice gasped from the Tube’s depths:
“It’s him!” The tone was made metallic by echoing and reechoing in the bends of the Tube, but it was Smithers. “We’re comin’, Mr. Reames.”
“Is—is Daddy there?” called Evelyn eagerly. “Daddy!”
“Coming,” said a grim voice.
The clattering grew nearer. A goggled, gas-masked head appeared, and a body followed it out of the Tube, laden with a multitude of burdens. A second climbed still more heavily after the first. The brightly-colored citizens of the Golden City reached quietly to the weapons at their waists. A third voice came up the Tube, distant and nearly unintelligible. It roared a question.
Smithers ripped off his gas mask and said distinctly:
“Sure we’re through. Go ahead. An’ go to hell!”
Then there was a thunderous detonation somewhere down in the Tube’s depths. The visible part of it jerked spasmodically and cracked across. A wisp of brownish smoke puffed out of it, and the stinging reek of high explosive tainted the air. Then Evelyn was clinging close to her father, and he was patting her comfortingly, and Smithers was pumping both of Tommy’s hands, his normal calmness torn from him for once. But after a bare moment he had gripped himself again. He unloaded an impressive number of parcels from about his person. Then he regarded the citizens of the Golden City with an impersonal, estimating gaze, ignoring twenty weapons trained upon him.
“Those damn fools back on Earth,” he observed impassively, “decided the professor an’ me was better off of it. So they let us come through the Tube before they blew it up. We brought the explosive bullets, Mr. Reames. I hope we brought enough.”
And Tommy grinned elatedly as Denham turned to crush his hands in his own.
Thatnight the three of them talked, on a high terrace with most of the Golden City spread out below them. Over their heads, lights of many colors moved and shifted slowly in the sky. There were a myriad glowing specks of saffron-red about the ways of the city, and the air was full of fragrant odors. The breath of the jungle reached them even a thousand feet above ground. And the dull, persistent roar of the machines reached them too. There were five people on the terrace: Tommy, Denham, Smithers, Aten and the white-bearded old Keeper of Foodstuffs. He looked on as the Earthmen talked.
“We’re marooned,” Tommy was saying crisply, “and for the time being we’ve got to throw in with these people. I believe they came from Earth originally. Four, five thousand years ago, perhaps. Their tale is of a cave they sealed up behind them. It might have been a primitive Tube, if such a thing can be imagined.”
Denham filled his pipe and lighted it meditatively.
“Half the American Indian tribes,” he observed drily, “had legends of coming originally from an underworld. I wonder if Tubes are less your own invention than we thought?”
Tommy shrugged.
“In any case, Earth is safe.”
“Is it?” insisted Denham. “You say they understood at once when you talked of dimension-travel. Ask the old chap there.”
Tommyfrowned, then labored with the question. The bearded old man spoke gravely. At his answer, Tommy grimaced.
“Datl’s gone looking for the cave their legends tell of,” he said reluctantly. “He’s the lad who wanted the city to gas Earth with some ghastly stuff they know of, and move over when the gas was harmless again. But the cave has been lost for centuries, and it’s in the torrid zone—whichistorrid! We’re near the North Pole of this planet, and it’s tropic here. It must be mighty hot at the equator. Datl took a ship and supplies and sailed off. He may be killed. In any case it’ll be some time before he’s dangerous. Meanwhile, as I said, we’re marooned.”
“And more,” said Denham deliberately. “By the time the authorities halfway believed me, and Von Holtz could talk, there were more deaths from the Death Mist. It wiped out a village, clean. So when it was realized that I’d caused it—or that was their interpretation—and was the only man who could cause it again, why, the authorities thought it a splendid idea for me to come through the Tube. They invited me to commit suicide. My knowledge was too dangerous for a man to have. So,” he added grimly, “I have committed suicide. We will not be welcomed back on Earth, Tommy.”
Tommy made an impatient gesture.
“Worry about that later,” he said impatiently. “Right now there’s a war on. Rahn’s desperate, and the prisoners we took this morning say Jacaro and his gunmen are there, advising them. Ragged Menhave joined in to help kill civilized humans. And they’ve still got aircraft.”
“Which can still bombard this city,” observed Denham. “Can’t they?”
Tommy pointed to the many-colored beams of light playing through the sky overhead.
“No. Those lights were invented to guide night-flying planes back home. They’re static lights—cold lights, by the way—and they register powerfully when a static-discharge propeller comes within range of them. If Rahn tries a night attack, Aten and I take off and shoot them down again. That’s that. But we’ve got to design gas masks for these people, and I think I can persuade the Council to send over and take all Rahn’s aircraft away to-morrow. But the real emergency is the jungle.”
Heexpounded the situation of the city as he understood it. He labored painstakingly to make his meaning clear while Denham blew meditative smoke rings and Smithers listened quietly. But when Tommy had finished, Smithers said in a vast calm:
“Say, Mr. Reames, y’know I asked you to get somebody to take me through some o’ these engine rooms. That’s kinda my specialty. An’ these folks are good, no question! There’s engines—even steam engines—we couldn’t build on Earth. But, my Gawd, they’re dumb! There ain’t a piece of automatic machinery on the place. There’s one man to every motor, handlin’ the controls or the throttle. They got stuff we couldn’t come near, but they never thought of a steam governor.”
Tommy turned kindling eyes upon him. “Go on!”
“Hell,” said Smithers, “gimme some tools an’ I’ll go through one shop an’ cut the workin’ force in half, just slammin’ governors, reducin’ valves, an’ automatic cut-offs on the machines I understand!”
Tommy jumped to his feet. He paced up and down, then halted and began to spout at Aten and the Keeper of Foodstuffs. He gesticulated, fumbling for words, and hunted absurdly for the ones he wanted among his written lists, and finally was drawing excitedly on Aten’s black-metal tablet. Smithers got up and looked over his shoulder.
“That ain’t it, Mr. Reames,” he said slowly. “Maybe I….”
Tommypressed the stud that erased the page. Smithers took the tablet and began to draw painstakingly. Aten, watching, exclaimed suddenly. Smithers was drawing an actual machine, actually used in the Golden City, and he was making a working sketch of a governor so that it would operate without supervision while the steam pressure continued. Aten began to talk excitedly. The Keeper of Foodstuffs took the tablet and examined it. He looked blank, then amazed, and as the utterly foreign idea of a machine which controlled itself struck home, his hands shook and color deepened in his cheeks.
He gave an order to Aten, who dashed away. In ten minutes other men began to arrive. They bent over the drawing. Excited comments, discussions and disputes began. A dawning enthusiasm manifested itself. Two of them approached Smithers respectfully, with shining eyes. They drew their tablets from their belts, rather skilfully drew the governor he had indicated in larger scale, and by gestures asked for more detailed plans. Smithers stood up to go with them.
“You’re a hero, now, Smithers,” Tommy informed him exultantly. “They’ll work you to death and call you blessed!”
“Yes, sir,” said Smithers. “These fellas are right good mechanics. They just happened to miss this trick.” He paused. “Uh—where’s Miss Evelyn?”
“With Aten’s—wife,” said Tommy. This was no time to discuss the marital system of Yugna. “We were prisoners until this morning. Now we’re guests of honor. Evelyn’s talking to a lot of women and trying to boost our prestige.”
Smitherswent over to the gesticulating group of draftsmen. He settled down to explain by drawings, since he had not a word of their language. In a few minutes a group went rushing away with the sketch tablets held jealously to their breasts, bound for workshops. Other men appeared to present new problems. A wave of sheer enthusiasm was in being. A new idea which would lessen the demands of the machines was a godsend to these folk.
Then Denham blew a smoke ring and said meditatively:
“I think I’ve got something too, Tommy. Ultra-sonic vibrations. Sound waves at two to three hundred thousand per second. Air won’t carry them. Liquids will. They use ’em to sterilize milk, killing the germs by sound waves carried through the fluid. I think we can start some ultra-sonic generators out there that will go through the wet soil and kill all vegetation within a given range. We might clear away the jungle for half a mile or so and then use ultra-sonic beams to help it clear while new food-plants are tried out.”
Tommy’s eyes glowed.
“You’ve given yourself a job! We’ll turn this planet upside down.”
“We’ll have to,” said Denham drily. “This city may believe in you, but there are others, and these folk are a little too clever. There’s no reason why some other city shouldn’t attack Earth, if they seriously attack the problem of building a Tube.”
Tommy ground his teeth, frowning. Then he started up. There was a new noise down in the city. A sudden flare of intolerable illumination broke out. There was an explosion, many screams, then the yelling tumult of men in deadly battle.
Everyman on the tower terrace was facing toward the noise, staring. The white-bearded man gave an order, deliberately. Men rushed. But as they swarmed toward an exit, a green beam of light appeared near the uproar. It streaked upward, wavering from side to side and making the golden walls visible in a ghostly fashion. It shivered in a hasty rhythm.
Aten groaned, almost sobbed. There was another flash of that unbearable actinic flame. A thermit-thrower was in action. Then a third flash. This was farther away. The tumult died suddenly, but the green light-beam continued its motion.
Tommy was snapping questions. Aten spoke, and choked upon his words. Tommy swore in a sudden raging passion and then turned a chalky face toward the other two men from Earth.
“The prisoners!” he said in a hoarse voice. “The men from Rahn! They broke loose. They rushed an arsenal. With hand weapons and a thermit-thrower they fought their way to a place where the big vehicles are kept. They raided a dwelling-tower on the way and seized women. They’ve gone off on the metal roads through the jungle!” He tried to ease his collar. Aten, still watching the green beam, croaked another sentence. “Those devils have got Evelyn!” cried Tommy hoarsely. “My God! Aten’swife, and his….” He jerked a hand toward the Councilor. “Fifty women—gone through the jungle with them, toward Rahn! Those devils have got Evelyn!”
He whirled upon Aten, seizing his shoulder, shaking the man as he roared questions.
“No chance of catching them.” Far away, in the jungle, the infinitely vivid actinic flame blazed for several seconds. “They’ve sprayed thermit on the road. It’s melted and ruined. It’d take hours to haul the ground vehicles past the gap. They’re got arms and lights. They can fight off the beasts and Ragged Men. They’ll make Rahn. And then”—he shook with the rage that possessed him—“Jacaro’s there with those gunmen of his and his friends the Ragged Men!”
Heseemed to control himself with a terrific effort. He turned to the white-bearded Councilor, whose bearing was that of a man stunned by disaster. Tommy spoke measuredly, choosing words with a painstaking care, clipping the words crisply as he spoke.
The Councilor stiffened. Old as he was, an undeniable fighting light came into his eyes. He barked orders right and left. Men woke from the paralysis of shock and fled upon errands of his command. And Tommy turned to Denham and Smithers.
“The women will be safe until dawn,” he said evenly. “Our late prisoners can’t lose the way—aluminum roads that are no longer much used lead between all the cities—but they won’t dare stop in the jungles. They’ll go straight on through. They should reach Rahn at dawn or a little before. And at dawn our air fleet will be over the city and they’ll give back the women, unharmed, or we’ll turn their own trick on them, by God! It’d be better for Evelyn to die of gas than as—as the Ragged Men would kill her!”