Roal whistled softly. "So that is the explanation of the phantom tavern. It seems incredible that such power exists. But what of your father's part in this plot—and yours?"
The Queen of the Silver Stars hung her head for a moment, then looked frankly into Roal's eyes. "My first concern was to save my father from death and injury at the hands of the Martians. Perhaps I was selfish in this. But, secondly, he was the one man in the system who knew more about them than anyone else in the world. If anyone could know their vulnerable spots it was he.
"So I stayed with him as closely as possible during this long association with the Martians. He was so incensed by the thing that Earthmen are doing to the Martians that he even fell in with their plan to destroy through the drug. He knew that an appeal to Earth powers and governments would be futile. Commercial interests would not allow the withdrawal of Earthmen from Mars. He knew better than to ask for that.
"I gave up my career and came to Starhouse. It was a vicious, horrible existence, but I stayed to try to protect him and to persuade him to try to bring about a peaceful solution to the problem. I thought if this could eventually be done it would atone for the crimes I've committed in persuading men to use the drug.
"Now I know that I was wrong. For my father turned more and more against Earthmen and beat and lashed me at times when I tried to persuade him against his course of action. At last I gave up altogether and called you. The Thousand Minds knew of it, of course, and ordered me reduced to the status that my father had been in for so long."
"What was that?" Roal asked. "What was going to be done to you?"
"They told me then that long ago they had performed an operation on my father and it made him the same as if his parents had beenharmeenaaddicts. His brain was totally under the control of the Thousand Minds. That was the reason I could not prevail against him. But at the same time he was aware of the wrong that he was doing to his countrymen and to me. He lived for years in a mental hell of torment. That is why I'm glad he is gone. There is peace for him now. But the Thousand Minds were forcing him to perform the operation on me.
"You see, he had become a great figure to the common people among the Martians. He symbolized their hidden revolt. Hardly any knew of the actual persons in the group of the Thousand Minds, but my father was their emissary to the people. To them he was the symbol of all that the Thousand were doing. That is why his death so demoralized those in the laboratory. It was as if their whole revolution were suddenly tumbling down."
When Alayna finished she was trembling as if with cold. Roal reached to his own shoulders and placed his cape about her. She looked up at him. "Thank you. Did you ever wonder why it was that I tried to warn you against the drug when you first came to Starhouse? It was because of the cape. It was the first true kindness that any man had shown me for so long that it made me want to cry."
Roal thought he understood, but he said, "There have been plenty to admire you in Starhouse."
Alayna shuddered. "The things I see in their eyes are not admiration."
Shorty had not relaxed his guard at the doorway, though he had strained to hear the words of Alayna's story. Now he gave a warning. "Martians down the passage. They act like they're on a hunt. We'd better move!"
VI
Alayna rose and then hesitated as if in indecision. "The only way to wipe out the Martian plot is to destroy the Thousand Minds and do it now. If we fail to attack now, it will give them a respite to re-establish themselves and our hopes will be lost."
"But there are only the three of us and two weapons," said Roal. "We cannot attack a thousand Martians with such powers as you say they have. We'll have to be concerned merely with escape now, and attack later."
"You'll never find the Thousand Minds again, if you fail to follow through now," said Alayna. "Would you attack if I could get you a hundred armed spacemen?"
"With a third that many I'd attack, but where can you find them? Surely not in the desert."
"Follow me."
The Queen of the Silver Stars stepped to the opening in the chamber and glanced down. "It's too late to go that way. We'll have to use the old air tunnel."
She came back into the room and approached an opening on the other side so small that the two men had not noticed it.
"I can squeeze through. If you can follow me we can get out through here."
Roal considered the width of his shoulders dubiously. "We can try."
He assisted Alayna into the narrow opening after she again discarded the cape which hampered her movement. Shorty followed. He was of small build, not very much larger than Alayna. Finally Roal wormed his own way into it, thankful he was not bothered by claustrophobia.
He lay on his side with one arm extended forward, the other down towards the mouth of the tube. This made it possible to guard the entrance with the flame lance.
It was stifling hot in the tube, and dust rose to choke them as the result of their struggles. Roal assumed Alayna was making good progress. And Shorty seemed to be having no trouble but he was creeping forward by painful inches.
The opening was visible as a dim spot of light beyond his feet, but suddenly that spot of light wavered and darkened. Someone had passed before it. Roal stopped moving and stared down. It wasn't merely someone standing before the opening. A Martian was bending forward, looking into it. And Roal caught the glimmer of light on a gun as it was aimed down the tube towards him.
Quickly, he squeezed the trigger of his own lance at full power. A dozen bursts of flame plunged down the length of the air tube. The first one toppled the Martian in the mouth of the tube. Successive shots bit into the roof and walls near the mouth. A hiss of melting sand turned into a roar as the tube collapsed behind them. Waves of choking dust smothered them and threw them into coughing spasms.
Alayna gave a frantic cry of alarm and Shorty tried to squirm about to see what had happened. Roal explained to them. "And it means there's only one way to go, now—forward. Is there any chance of them cutting us off, Alayna?"
"Plenty. It all depends on how many controls the Thousand Minds may have near the other end. Fortunately, the main controls were there in the lab with my father and you killed many of them. But we'll soon be through. I'll try to go faster."
Roal could have said that she needn't hurry on his account. Already Shorty was a considerable distance ahead of him, and Alayna was probably much farther by the sound of her voice.
They were silent then until Alayna called that she had finally dropped into a chamber opening from the tube. Roal increased his struggles, but Shorty was out long before he was.
When he emerged, a gasp of recognition came to his lips. It was one of the dream rooms of Starhouse.
Alayna nodded as she saw Roal's eyes widen. "This is Starhouse," she said. "Follow me as if you were merely spacemen visiting here for dreams."
She led them into the hall outside. The noise of the tavern increased as they approached the main room. "Wait beside the door," Alayna asked.
Roal opened his mouth to question, but she was gone before he could speak. Spacemen looked up suddenly as she appeared in their midst, and the room became quiet as if Alayna carried an advancing wave of silence with her.
She took up her position on the little dais beside the old piano and nodded to the bleary-eyed player. And then her song began. With it came again that magic spell that Roal could hardly fight off. He wondered if it were entirely the song of Alayna or if the mighty power of the Thousand Minds were seizing the spell of her song, weaving, intensifying it until it called out to him to flee back to Earth and blue skies and green fields—to find someone like Alayna—to take Alayna with him.
And he knew within himself that the Thousand Minds had nothing to do with that dream. It was the dream of all spacemen who spend long years amid the cold and blackness of space and the wasteland of alien planets. Their dreams, concentrated and distilled to their strongest essence, flowed forth upon the low, husky notes from the throat of Alayna.
She sang of a sweetheart who waited for the return of a spaceman, and to each man in the room Alayna was the sweetheart and he was the one for whom she waited.
Her song ended and the spotlight upon her shifted from the warm pink glow to a sunny blue. She stood there watching them, keeping their eyes upon her.
Then she said, "Spacemen, what would you do for Alayna?"
There was a moment of silence. Strange, rash promises surged upon the lips of hardened spacemen who thought this was only more of the illusions of Alayna and hesitated.
"Would you fight for Alayna?" she said. "Would you fight for that green Earth with the blue skies?"
"Our guns would be yours, if you needed them," someone said fervently.
"I need them—every one of them, spacemen. At this moment, in the tunnels beyond Starhouse, the Martians are gathered. They are attacking Earthmen and seek to drive you from this planet. If they can be subdued quickly, the rebellion may end. If not, we are doomed, and all Earth with us."
The silence was charged, then a dozen men leaped up at once. "Show us where they are. We'll kill the dirty—"
"You are fighting men, not a mob," Alayna warned. "Ready your lances and follow me."
Swiftly, like a wraith of light she ran from the dais to the doorway where Roal and Shorty waited. "Here are your men, a hundred and more. I'll show you the chamber of the Thousand Minds."
Roal nodded. "We're with you."
He ran behind her, letting her remain far enough in the lead so that she was like an elusive, darting dream inspiring the cursing spacemen who roared out of the tavern room in a surging tide. Most of them were in poor shape as fighting men, Roal knew. Their minds were sodden with drink and some withharmeena, perhaps. But each represented a gun that could be turned against the Thousand Minds.
The passage turned abruptly at right angles into a darkened corridor. Something was wrong in that corridor, Roal knew instantly. He knew it should not be black. He sensed that the light tubes were still illumined. The farther they went, however, the more dense the blackness became. It was like a living, smothering essence that enveloped them and cloaked their souls.
Roal heard sounds of dismay from the spacemen behind. There were murmurings against going further.
"Alayna is in there!" Roal shouted.
At that moment there came the sound of her voice raised again in the song that she had sung in the tavern. Its dream of life and hope buoyed them on into the blind darkness.
What the blackness could be Roal could not guess. It was not merely absence of light. There was light coming from the tubes, but this blackness literally consumed all light before it reached the eyes.
That it was a manifestation of the Thousand Minds he did not doubt, but it did not seem to be harmful—at least so far.
Then abruptly the blackness exploded into light—searing, livid radiance that stabbed their eyes with even greater blindness. Roal flung an arm before his eyes and halted before that radiance. There was no heat, but the light was the very antithesis of the darkness that had gone before.
Yet amid the hoarse exclamations and angry cries of the spacemen the song of Alayna still persisted, urging them forward in the face of that radiant wall.
For it was a wall, Roal saw behind the shield of his arm. It was close to them. Alayna was standing before it as he came up to her.
"This is the doorway leading into the chamber. Beyond is the assembly of the Thousand Minds. Blast through the door and kill!"
Roal found the edge of the door and the handle. He placed the flame lance against it and as he pressed the trigger the door handle suddenly became a living, writhing snake in his grasp. An involuntary exclamation escaped his lips as he dropped the snake and released the trigger of the lance.
He tried again and found he had the point of the lance pressed against the back of Alayna as she stood flattened against the door.
"Press the trigger, quickly," her voice said. "It's only a trick of the Thousand Minds."
His head whirled. There was Alayna standing beside him. "I'm real," she said. She touched his arm to prove it.
He pressed the trigger against the image before him. Slowly the stuff of the door melted away in a mass that dropped to the floor and became great, writhing snakes. Each drop split into a thousand droplets and each became a thousand tiny snakes that writhed and swelled. They flowed back towards the crowd of spacemen in a streaming mass. Flame lances turned upon them to burn them down. Flames that made no impression upon the flood of serpents—but which found their marks in other spacemen. A dozen men went down before Alayna's voice reached them.
"Don't shoot! It's a Martian trick. These aren't real. You'll only kill each other. Now—look! The door is opening. There are our enemies. The Thousand Minds. Kill them all! Let none escape!"
The door flung back under the force of Roal's and Shorty's push. They rushed in beside Alayna and found themselves on a ten-foot balcony overlooking tiers of seats arranged in concentric circles. There were enough of them to be a thousand, Roal thought. In each seat was an immobile, withered Martian. The entrance of the Earthmen caused no stir of movement among the Martians. They sat as if dead, but Roal sensed the tremendous, concentrated mental power of that immobile assembly—mental power that could conjure up the powers of darkness and of light which they had seen, and the flood of writhing serpents.
Roal raised his flame lance to turn it on the Martians. A sense of revulsion at such an attack upon the seemingly helpless creatures assailed him, but he knew they were far from helpless. And their purpose was deadly to Earthmen.
Before he could pull the trigger, a dozen Alaynas appeared beside him. Scores were in his line of sight. Those standing in the air before him were not real, he knew, but of those beside him he could not tell the difference between Alayna and the mental creations of the Thousand Minds. But one of them grasped his arm tightly.
"I'm real," she said. "Fire quickly."
He poured flame into the midst of the assembly. Behind him the other spacemen were pouring onto the balcony. Many of them, drunken, thought the visions that beset them were creations of their own minds and fired wildly.
The total effect was marked. Below, tens of Martians withered and died in the blast. But those who were left bent their mighty power of their minds to new creations of horror. As the Earthmen watched, there grew in the air over the assembly a monstrous head that swelled until it threatened to fill the whole space of the chamber. A hundred gaping mouths breathed out smoke and tongues of flame that licked hungrily towards the spacemen.
It was a harmless, unreal creation, thought Roal. He moved near to it, planning to fire through the monster into the assembly. But one of those flame tongues lashed out and flung itself about him. He cried out involuntarily at the unexpected pain.
The thing was far from harmless. The fire of those tongues burned with untold agony. A score of the others must have felt it, too, for their cries of alarm spread through the chamber. One by one they began to fall back, retreating towards the passage as the head swelled.
Alayna tugged at Roal's arm. "Down! Over the edge of the balcony before the head swells and fills the chamber. Get down into the midst of them!"
Roal saw she was right. He called hoarsely to the spacemen, who turned at his beckoning. He grasped the edge of the railing and leaped over as a tongue of flame reached for him.
Alayna called. "Follow him! It's the only way!"
Her voice was still magic to them and with shouts of fury they began leaping over to the floor below, scrambling over in a circle that spread about the seated Martians.
The Martians still did not move a muscle. They remained as if carved from stone, even as Roal poured his deadly flames into them.
He looked up to see what had become of Alayna. He thought that she had followed. But she remained there on the balcony, a symbol to urge the spacemen over its edge. Now that they had almost all come, she was nearly alone, and the fury of the monstrous head seemed to be turned on her alone.
Roal gave a hoarse cry. "Alayna! Jump!"
She saw the threatening tongue of fire too late. It was as if the fire of all the other tongues had combined in one. It covered her from head to foot.
Every spaceman in the chamber ceased firing and stared at the horror of her plight. Her screams rang through the chamber as she was lifted from the balcony and hurled into the air only to fall into the midst of a great, devouring maw that appeared in the side of the head. It closed over her, and the sound of the voice of golden-haired Alayna, Queen of the Silver Stars was heard no more.
Her screams rang through the chamber.
Her screams rang through the chamber.
Her screams rang through the chamber.
As she vanished from their sight the spacemen turned the unleashed fury of their very souls upon the Martians. How long Alayna could live within that horror hanging in the air above them, they did not know, but they knew the thing would vanish only with the last of the Martians.
With wild cries they leaped upon the seated creatures stabbing, burning, slashing a frenzy of killing and slaughter.
As for Roal, his own fury congealed into a single bright purpose beside which all else dimmed into insignificance. He selected a path from the outer circle to the center of the assembly and slowly blasted his way forward. A thousand ghastly mental creations of the Martians now beset them. Great lizards slashing with fanged teeth, enormous slugs that dropped from above and encased them in suffocating slime.
But Roal gradually found himself in possession of a defense against them. He observed that if he gave way to fright and fear at their presence they were able to attack him. But those that came up without his awareness produced no effect until he saw them and let a moment's anxiety sweep over him. Then he felt the pain of their stabs. That was what had happened on the balcony.
"Shorty," he called to the patrol pilot who was fighting beside him. "It's only your imagination. Don't believe in the thing and it can't hurt you!"
Shorty was down on his back slashing vainly to get from under an enormous blob of living slime that was sucking the life from him. Shorty's own fear gave the thing life.
"Shorty. It's gone. There's only a blanket over your head."
For an instant, Shorty appeared, "Yeah?" Then the thing came back as his imagination powered it again.
But he had seen enough to know what Roal meant. He rose with the thing still about him and slashed out towards the Martians with his lance as if the slug weren't there. Gradually it vanished and he walked forward unhindered.
"We've got it!" he exclaimed. "They can't hurt us if we won't believe in them!"
"Right!" said Roal. "These are created by the Thousand Minds, but they are powered by our own! Let's get these devils!"
Shorty looked up. "The head is shrinking. We must be making headway."
Roal glanced up hopefully. Alayna was familiar with these things. She must know the secret of their vulnerability. If that were the case, then perhaps she still lived unharmed within the mass of force and tenuous substance that formed the monster.
But if that were true, he wondered why it had been able to attack her at all. Perhaps it was because it represented the mightiest efforts of the Martians, or she had allowed a moment's fright to enter her mind.
The monster head was dwindling fast as the mental forces of the remaining Martians was insufficient to support it. The thing shrank and dropped down to the floor. Less than a hundred of the dry Martians remained and they were vanishing rapidly in the flames of the remaining starmen.
Then abruptly, the head was gone, and from out of that mass of horror fell the unconscious form of Alayna. The few remaining Martians came to life. They leaped from their seats and began running—straight into the flames of the starmen where they died.
Amid the shambles Roal slowly and tenderly lifted Alayna in his arms. She was miraculously alive and apparently unharmed. Her own knowledge of the monster and her refusal to believe in its ability to harm her had saved her life.
Within an hour a dozen SBI guards arrived at Roal's call. Then Shorty let Roal have the patrol ship to take Alayna to Heliopolis. Calvin exploded all over the place when he arrived. But his wrath finally died to a stammer as the truth was unfolded to him.
In the small patrol ship, Alayna sat beside Roal watching the sunrise on the desert. Her eyes were dew-bright and she seemed at once glad and shy.
"I've found out one thing that made me glad," she said.
"What's that?"
"My father was not a dope addict as I had believed. The Martians could never force it upon him and so they had to change his brain instead. I know that what I did was not under compulsion of the Thousand Minds."
Roal smiled down at her. She must be reading his thoughts, he supposed. "Your father was a great man," he said. "He tried to solve a problem that the human race has muffed for ten thousand years, the problem of how to make it possible for incompatible races to live together."
"Perhaps he accomplished something. This conflict will bring the problem to light. I think Earth will find a solution."
"The Martians will go the way of the Indian. Perhaps we may eventually find some worthless, barren planet and put a few hundred of them there on a reservation. But the problem is as old as man. There can be no solution. The strong overcomes the weak and man calls it progress."
"Some day there'll be a solution."
"You're a dreamer like your father. Don't ever lose sight of your dreams. That's the only thing that makes life worth while."
"Dreams sometimes come true, don't they?"
Roal drew her tight, drinking in her loveliness with his eyes. "I think mine is going to," he said slowly.