I gripped Nereid's white-cloaked arm. "That big figure in red—who is that?"
I had seen the giant figure here at an edge of the crowd, when we crossed the arcade bridge. A man in robe and cowl of red and black. Then he had vanished. He was visible again now, a huge fellow, six and a half feet, at least. He was standing a hundred feet or so ahead of us, on the pink-white coral sand of the shore. And then abruptly he moved away and was gone again.
Nereid stared, and then shook her head. "I do not know. I—" She checked herself; her face had a queer startled look.
"What—" I demanded. But we were in the pavilion now, with the jam of watching people pressing us.
"You will wait here, Kent?" Nereid murmured. "I will ask Jenten-Shah of my father."
I drew back behind a palm on which great orchid-like flowers were growing. I could see the dais where the gay fatuous ruler was seated with food and drink before him, with his young women favorites around him as they watched the platform where a barbarically voluptuous woman in flame-colored drapes was dancing with colored light-beams upon her.
I had a glimpse of Nereid importuning Jenten-Shah. It was brief; and then Nereid came back to me.
"Father is not here, Kent. He told the King not to hold this festival tonight."
"Did you mention that imbecile worker?"
She nodded. Her face was grim, frightened now. "He said, if any imbecile causes trouble there will be a hundred imbeciles killed as punishment. He is drunk withmarite. He laughed at the idea that Tollgamo would dare attack."
Merrymaking on the brink of disaster and death.
As though both Nereid and I were fascinated now, for a time we stood in the pavilion corner, watching the colorful scene. Half the people here were robed and masked, waiting a later time when a bell would give the signal for the unmasking. I saw several of the white-robed girls—the Untouchables. Then one of them, with a golden star on her breast, like Nereid's but without the crescent moons, came and joined us. Nereid had met her a while ago near the Ruler's dais. Her name was Venta. Under Nereid, she was commanding the little group of protesting Virgins.
She was very like Nereid, save that beneath her white cowl I could see that her hair was dark. She stared at me. "So? The Earthman?" She shook my hand with a quaint awkwardness. "You look in the same fashion as her father, the Meester Peters," she commented.
Then suddenly all three of us were stricken tense. There was a commotion across the crowded pavilion, where a scantily clothed young girl was struggling, terrified, in the grip of a thick-set, crooked little imbecile man. He was forcing his caresses on her and the girl was screaming.
The music suddenly ceased. In the hushed, stricken silence, the imbecile's crazy childish laughter mingled with the girl's screams. Then there was a rush as a group of young men nearby plucked the girl away, knocked the gnome-like worker down, beating him, slamming him until he lay inert.
It was like a spark in gunpowder. People were shouting. Somebody found another imbecile and attacked him. A wave of shouting spread beyond the pavilion. But it lasted only a moment. The music started up again. The dancing continued.
Nereid gripped me. "Out in the workers' village they will hear of that. And what they might try to do—"
Her words evoked a grim picture of powerful little men, with minds like children suddenly enraged to frenzy; and the half-drunken youths at the festival, ready enough to kill any worker, with the Ruler encouraging them.
And this was what Tollgamo wanted, of course; confusion here to make his attack easier.
The girls now were swiftly talking in their own language. We had shoved our way out of the pavilion, were standing near the shorefront; and the girls had drawn a little apart from me. I could see Venta nodding as Nereid gave her instructions. Then Nereid came to me.
"She will get our Virgins, Kent. She has ten other girls who will help her collect them all."
The Virgins—five hundred of them if Venta could locate them all—would come in surface boats, past the Water City to the Arsenal. Nereid and I would precede them, starting now. All to offer ourselves to Peters and his fighting men if Tollgamo should strike tonight. But how would he strike? That we did not know.
"And in the Water City," Nereid was hastily telling me, "many of the people living there have come here to the festival tonight. But some of our girls live there." Again her lips twisted with that wry little smile. "They will be there now. Some have brothers and fathers who work with my father in the Science Arsenal. But some do not, and I will send them here. If there is trouble with the imbeciles, they will help quell it."
Venta, ready to start on her mission, called goodbye. Then for just a moment Nereid ran after her to add something. Two other girls in the white Untouchable robes joined them, and stood talking about fifty feet away from where I waited. The shore there had risen to a little grassy bluff about twenty feet above the glittering, light-bathed lagoon.
And suddenly I gasped. From a clump of vivid blue and orange palms which grew thickly beside the four girls, a figure suddenly emerged. A giant man-shape, in red and black robe. Then his robe and cowl dropped from him, revealing a towering powerful giant with dark close-clipped hair, dressed in a grey garment of woven metal with jeweled weapons at his broad belt. And in that second of my numbed gaze, I was aware that he had scattered the girls and had seized Nereid, holding her slim form against his huge bulk.
And one of the other girls screamed: "Tollgamo!"
Tollgamo! My first sight of him. And like Allen, for just a second I stood numbed, awed by the power, the dominance that radiated from him. He was quietly smiling. His hand went up to wave the girls away.
"Tollgamo! Tollgamo!" The name went like a wave, back from the shore, so that the merrymakers gasped, stood stricken. For that second it was a tableau, with only the smiling Tollgamo in movement. Slowly he was backing, drawing the fighting, struggling Nereid with him. Backing toward the thick clump of palms.
Then I was aware that I was dashing forward, shouting. It was only fifty feet. From one of Tollgamo's hands, a spit of tiny blue light hissed at me. Missed. Then Venta and two of the other girls had cast off their white robes. Slim little creatures, like Nereid, greenly clad. Soon Tollgamo was struggling with all four of them. He flung them off, still trying to hold Nereid.
It was only a second or two as I plunged at them. Then in a group they went over the little promontory and hit the water with a splash. Almost simultaneously I dove. The green opalescent water closed over me. Somewhere near at hand I could see the blurr of the struggling figures. But I could not reach them. With all my strength I swam, but then I had to come up for air. I dove again. Accursedly helpless. Then on another try I met a girl coming up, then another and another—all four of them bobbing to the surface with me. All panting; unhurt, but angry that they had not captured Tollgamo!
Then Venta and the other two girls swam away on their errand. Nereid drew me forward as we swam, to avoid the commotion of gathered people on the bank. Tollgamo was gone. His plan had been, quite evidently, to dive into the water with Nereid here. Some twenty feet down, as the girls attacked him, he had tried to shove Nereid through a rock-rift, which obviously opened again to some cave where air was trapped.
"I got away from him," Nereid was saying. "A man, even Tollgamo, is so clumsy in the water, so quick to smother. I could have followed him but he blocked the little passage with a rock."
"And maybe he's trapped down there?"
She shook her head. "There are so many passages, and all lead out to the sea. Of course he had a cylinder-boat under there."
Together we swam out into the open lagoon, diagonally across it to where, beyond the lights of the festival, Nereid had a little surface boat in which we could get now to the Water City.
"My boat is about a mile from here. Can you swim so far?"
"Yes. I guess so." I had always counted myself a strong swimmer; a mile was not too much for me. But I was like a puffing tugboat now, laboriously splashing along. Nereid was laughing at my efforts; trying to tow me; then giving it up, swimming around me, under me.
Occasionally, while we were still in the light-glare, other girls came dashing up, with questions of Tollgamo; and of me. Once a group of them dashed at me, with shouts of laughter trying to seize me, but Nereid drove them off. Then we were swimming alone in the luminous opalescent night; and at last we reached the little boat. Nereid was already in it; waiting impatiently to haul me aboard as I came panting.
It was a narrow, canoe-like surface craft; some twenty feet long, of dull white metal. Its hooded mechanisms were in bow and stern—water electrolysis. Soon we had attained a considerable speed, silent, vibrationless. And then we were on the open sea, with the lights of Arron fading behind us.
Venus night at sea. It was weirdly beautiful. The low-hanging curtain of heavy clouds was luminous with pale blue and silver sheen. The water, silver-rippled by a gentle night-breeze, was opalescent as our little craft hurled up a bow wave, with a gleaming phosphorescent wake behind us. Off to the right, for a time, the faint blurred outlines of metal mountains were visible on a promontory near the land of the Gorts. Then we passed it; and the forest to the left had faded away to be just a blur.
Beside me, Nereid sat grim and silent, staring ahead as she steered our boat. The breeze tossed her tawny tresses against me. My mind went back to that other night, back on Earth when she had sat in my little fishing boat, with its outboard motor puttering. How long ago that seemed. And like that other night, my hand went now to a lock of her hair, beside us on the seat.
"Nereid, when this is over, this war—"
Her face turned toward me. She was faintly, whimsically smiling.
"I think my father will like you," she murmured.
"And you, Nereid?"
There was no impishness, this time. Her gaze met mine, shyly, and she nodded.
But a moment later we were again both thinking of Tollgamo. And we were wondering about Allen, and Nereid's brother, Leh. Had Tollgamo put them to death, in vengeance for our escape from Rhool's spaceship?
Then at last, to our left, the outlines of the lush forest shore were close at hand.
"The Water City," Nereid murmured.
It was built in what seemed a partly submerged area of the jungle. Tangled tree-tops projecting from the water, with little houses of thatch and wood built like birds' nests between them. Or queer little dwellings of woven blue rush, built on platforms that floated on the water and were lashed between the protecting tree-trunks. Narrow arcade bridges connected the houses; and the little balcony platforms where boats were moored.
There were a few dots of lights. Then we passed the first group of houses. Very queer. Nereid stared at me. Queer indeed. It was far into the time of sleep, but still there should have been someone attracted to the house doorways as we passed.
We had slackened now, with the houses, most of them dark, clustering all about us.
"There is Venta's home," Nereid murmured. "Her father and brother will be there."
We drifted under an arching bridge. The figure of a man was lying on it. Asleep? Nereid called softly to him, but he did not move. Then I was aware of a queer, acrid smell here. Choking smell. Nereid coughed suddenly.
The boat landed at a low platform dock of Venta's home. We jumped to the platform. Two men were here. Venta's father and brother. They lay in a heap, one half upon the other. Dead! The opalescent sheen of the glorious night was ghastly on their dead faces; mouths goggling with blackened, protruding tongue; eyes staring with the agony and death.
And from here we could see other house balconies. Inert forms on them. All dead.
In that stricken second, as we stood shuddering on the little platform with the sea lapping under it, a new horror suddenly assailed us. There was a tangle of vegetation here, tree branches overhead; air-vines with redolent flowers and pods on them, dangled, swaying in the breeze. And abruptly I realized that the dangling, rope-like vines were visibly growing! At an edge of the platform one of them was slithering like a serpent!
And Nereid gasped: "That smell! The gas of nitro-carbon in some terrible concentration!"
I stood numbed. Nitrogenous gas-fumes, sprayed here on the night-breeze by what deadly means I could not guess, had asphixiated the people of the little Water City. Most of them asleep, they were quickly overcome by the insidious fumes. An intensification of the gas which was normally used by the Arones to stimulate vegetation growth, as we on Earth use fertilizer. Nitro-carbon—deadly to humans; stimulating to plant-life!
And the air-vines here were growing with a deadly acceleration!
In that same second, as we stood momentarily confused, one of the dangling, swaying vines, grown monstrous now to be as thick as my arm, struck against Nereid. Sentient vegetation! With the contact, the damnable dangling vine suddenly wrapped itself around her, its powerful sinuous blue feelers gripping her slender white throat, strangling her! And in the night-silence an imbecile was gibbering, with triumphant, maniacal laughter!
VI
For an instant I was stunned, with so great a rush of horror that the weird scene blurred before me. Then I leaped, tearing at the quivering vine-rope that held Nereid in its grip. Ghastly thing. I tore it loose, broke it—gruesome, squashing, flimsy stuff. But as I cast broken segments of it away, more seemed to come.
Weird, horrible combat. A slithering tentacle gripped my ankles. Another was winding itself around my throat. There was a terrible moment when I thought that Nereid and I would go down; and on the platform now at our feet, another leafy vine had come crawling, with lashing feelers and red pods that opened like little bloody jaws.
Then I tore Nereid loose. The whole platform now seemed cluttered with writhing vegetation. From overhead dangling things were swinging, reaching down at us.
"Nereid, our boat—which way?" In the dim luminous light I was confused. Nereid led me; and we staggered to our boat, tumbled into it. A vine-end like a rope threshed at us as we frantically shoved off.
And in the silence now, with only the leafy rustling of the growing vines, the gibbering, maniacal laughter of the imbecile still sounded.
"Kent, look—" Nereid touched my arm as she guided our little boat out into the open water. On a rock nearby, a hunched, gnome-like figure was crouched. Then I saw his face, goggled with great round eyepanes and nose-breather, with a pipe that led to a pack on his back.
Nereid steered us toward him; we stopped and I reached and seized him.
"You did this?" I demanded. "You turned loose the gas that killed these people? Who told you to do it? Who gave you the gas, and the mechanisms to spread it?"
His laughter turned to a terrified whimpering. Nereid murmured,
"That mask he's wearing—the workers use that, in our agriculture when they spray with the nitro-carbon. But we have no sprayers that could do a thing like this, nor gas deadly enough."
"You did it?" I shook him.
And then he was laughing again. And suddenly I realized that of course he could not understand English. I cast him loose. And Nereid flung questions at him in her own language.
"Figures came up from the water," she said. "He happened to have his mask and saved himself."
We left him there on the rock, still laughing. Tollgamo's first attack! Would he try to loose this gas on Arron? Our little boat sped past the Water City. I could see now that the quivering, slithering vegetation everywhere was engulfing the flimsy houses. Its stimulated growth would persist, an hour or a day, and then subside.
Shuddering, we drove our boat onward. The great Arsenal rock loomed ahead of us now, a huge almost square lump of metallic rock rising sheer from the water to a height of two or three hundred feet. On all sides it was like that; its only access was from beneath where subterranean passages ran into its honeycombed, grotto interior. Impregnable fortress, save from beneath the sea.
Nereid tied our little craft to a metal fastener against the black, sleek rock-cliff. Then for me she produced the air-mechanisms and round transparent helmet with elastic gasket to fit around my throat. And heavy, metal-weighted shoes for us both.
But no helmet was needed for her. "We will be there in ten or fifteen minutes," she said. "I can see better without the head-covering."
We dropped into the luminous, opalescent water. Nereid held my hand as I floundered a little, trying to remain balanced upright while our weighted shoes carried us slowly down. It was a descent of some fifty feet, with the opalescent surface light fading into the black-green of the depths. Then slowly an undulating dark surface seemed coming up to us; and we landed, swaying on our feet. Weird, submarine world. The jagged slope to one side went on down into the depths. Beside us, swaying leafy vegetation stood upright in the water—a little thicket here, with what seemed a rocky path, ascending along the edge of the black abyss.
Through my transparent helmet I stared at Nereid. She was smiling, unbreathing, as much at home down here as on the land. She gestured that we were to take the ascending path; and held my hand to steady me as we started our swaying, shoving climb. I could see now that ahead of us there was a little tunnel into the cliff where we would emerge into air.
And suddenly I felt Nereid's hand tighten convulsively on mine. I saw the blurred figures in another second, two upright swaying blobs close ahead of us as we emerged past the seaweed clump. Two men down here. Tollgamo's men? I shook loose from Nereid and plunged forward.
Then in another second I could see the faces in the transparent helmets. And one of them I recognized. It was Leh and Allen here, as startled as ourselves at the sudden encounter.
I think now I need only briefly sketch that following hour or two while within the Arsenal fortress Allen and I met Peters and his men, and all of us hastily prepared for Tollgamo's attack. I found Nereid's father quite what I had expected—a quiet, grave-faced man of somewhat my own type, garbed like his fellow scientists in tight trousers and blouse of sleek black fabric. There was no time then to exchange more than the briefest of questions, as Nereid hastily told him what had happened to her since her little note had informed him of her furtive departure for Earth.
"You worried me very much, my daughter," he said quietly. And the same sense of humor which she herself had twinkled now in his grey eyes. "But I think this is no time for reproof."
Peters of course had known that Tollgamo's attack was imminent; and he was almost ready. Allen and I could help little here with everything so indescribably strange. Nereid's virgins were arriving now in little dripping groups that scattered through the workshop grottos with chattering voices that added immeasurably to the confusion. They were all like Nereid, most of them clad in the brief, shining sea-green garment, all of them with flowing hair and eager, excited little faces. But I could see now the evidence of Nereid's Earth heritage—these other girls, even more slim and frail-looking, with oval faces and pert little pointed chins. And their skin was distinctly less pink-white than hers.
Finally the departure for battle. Assembling of this weird little sub-sea army. I watched it with silent, awed amazement. There was but one type of sub-sea vessel here, the small underwater cylinders such as Leh and Allen had come in from the country of the Gorts. Most of them were that same twenty foot size, to carry two men; and a few of them were some thirty feet, with space for three. An underwater electronic ray armed them in bow and stern. Leh explained the weapon to me. It had an effective range of fifty feet, with a current duration of some ten seconds. It would kill any living substance at that range almost instantly; and with duration would eat into the metal armour of Tollgamo's ships.
"My father has had no opportunity to build an underwater weapon of more range and power than this. It is all we have," Leh was telling us. And my heart sank, and Allen and I exchanged glances of dismay, as Leh added:
"Tollgamo has built them up to a range of three hundred feet."
There were about fifty of the small cylinder-boats; most of them to take two men. For battle tonight it was all Peters could assemble. But the cylinders were fleet as darting fishes. We had mobility, and courage, but with sinking heart I wondered if it would serve us.
And I also wondered what Tollgamo would have. Leh's information gave us little hint; and presently he, Allen and I took one of the larger cylinders.
We ran without lights. For a time all I could see was a turgid vista of dark-green depths. An abyss of water at times was beneath us. Then there were the tops of jagged mountain peaks, naked black needle spires rising in clusters out of the depths. Leh knew very well the oceanography here in this undulating terrain of seascape. We headed for the mouth of the inlet at the head of which Tollgamo's city was perched. But before we reached there, little lights down in the watery green haze suddenly appeared. An orange, blurred haze, separating in a moment into dotted points of light.
"Tollgamo's forces!" Leh murmured.
At perhaps a hundred feet of depth, we shut off our tiny rocket-streams of oxo-hydro fluorescence and hung poised. The three of us sat breathless, peering. Had our tail-stream been discovered? It seemed not. There was no undue movement of the Tollgamo lights. Just a slow-moving little string of them, ahead and below us.
I could see the bottom now, a great undulating spread here of dark surface. Rock, doubtless, with slime and ooze on it. The moving dots of light presently disclosed the blobs of enemy vessels. Ten of them, crawling on the bottom in a slow moving line. Cubes and oblongs of metal. Dwarfed by distance they were like struggling little bugs, with lighted eyes and tiny searchbeams waving like feelers before them. Metallic vehicles, perhaps with caterpiller tread, crawling on the bottom.
We drifted closer; almost over them for a moment so that I could guess that each of them was a hundred feet or more in length. Turreted oblong vessels, armoured; and armed with the three hundred foot rays. How many men were in them? Of this Leh had little knowledge, save that he thought perhaps a total of two thousand. Men and women, crawling along in the ooze of this sea bottom, tense, with minds only upon the kill.
"They're heading for Arron," Leh murmured. "In those big ships they surely must have a vast apparatus for land attack."
To come up abruptly within the lagoons and interior waterways of Arron. Perhaps then, on the windward side of the city, to loose their deadly lethal gas.
Two hours, at least, for them to reach Arron. The lights crawled under us; and a vagrant ocean current drifted us away, so that presently we dared fling on our rocket-stream power and speed back to Peters. He was ready now, and his hundred men embarked in the fifty little cylinders. And the five hundred girls were ready, too. I saw them on the ocean surface, from the turret of our cylinder as we bobbed to the top. An amazing army of green-clad nymphs. Each of them had a ray-cylinder of our fifty foot projector. They lay, each of them on a six-foot little sub-sea sled, powered, like our cylinders, with the oxo-hydro gas-streams. In effect, a narrow, six foot long raft, with a hooded bow that housed the control mechanisms and protected the girls' faces from the rush of water. The girls' bodies had a weight of about the same as water. Specific gravity of 1. And the sled with its mechanisms was adjusted to be the same. Girl and sled—neither to float nor sink, but approximately to hang poised. And thus, with little tilting fins on the sled's sides, and lateral and vertical bow and stern rudders, the power would thrust them down into the depths and up again at will.
We started. Running at first on the surface, the largest of our little cylinders with Peters and two of his skilled men led us in a line. And behind us came the girls, in squads of twenty, each with a leader. They had often practiced it, for sport and for the possibility of such a time as this.
As we passed the Water City, we submerged to fifty feet. I turned to look back through our turret. Like darting fishes the girls came down, still holding their formation as we swept on through the green-black depths to battle.
VII
For a time we ran with short-range headlight beams preceding us, then, as we neared the area where we knew Tollgamo's ships should now be, we ran dark. But still there were the glowing, bubbling rocket-stream tails of our fifty little cylinder boats; and the rocket-streams of the girls' diving sleds. And our swift passage through the water left a phosphorescent wake so that the area all around us glowed, opalescent with a pallid, eerie light.
Leh and his father had arranged the tactics of battle which we hoped we could employ. He explained them to us now. Peters' larger cylinder was banded with white alumite stripes so as to be easily distinguishable. Its light signals would give us orders.
"There is a ridge," Leh was saying. "It crosses from the promontory head of the metal mountains across to the Arron forests. We think Tollgamo will follow it as his best method of approach."
It was a transverse ridge, lying at an average of not much more than fifty feet beneath the surface. A submarine plateau, in main extent some ten miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, with deeps on both sides of it where the bottom dropped sharply away, in places to unfathomable depths. If we could catch the Tollgamo vehicles in that area it was our best chance for a shallow attack. And that, we needed. The girls especially, could not dive into the lower, higher pressures.
Then presently ahead of us, Peters signalled and we all slackened, wheeling, gathering in a group.
"There they are!" Leh murmured tensely. "Just climbing to the ridge."
The shallower water here was bright with the upper light filtering down. Astonishingly bright; and suddenly I realized that the Venus night was over. Dawn had come to the world of air above us, penetrating the cloud-masses of the Venus atmosphere. It came down here with a faint ruddy glow, so that now we could see miles of the area before us. At first it was blurred and unreal. But in a moment I was used to it, my mind translating its distortion into the terms of its reality.
A dark abyss was under us here as we poised. Ahead, a thousand feet away now, the ridge was visible. A cliff was at one side of it, a honeycombed, submarine wall, a peak of which rose above the surface as a volcanic little island, with a tiny crater mouth, yawning faintly yellow from the fires of the earth which here must be close.
The slow-moving, struggling little line of submarine vehicles was just mounting to the ridge. Only a few miles from here and they would be under the city of Arron. We must turn them back here.
Slowly we approached, still out of Tollgamo's range. We had long since been seen, of course. The waving headlights of the ten huge black vessels turned our way. Monsters with searching, glaring eyes. And then a tentative shot came. In the blurred watery twilight it was a stab of thin violet light. Not instantaneous, but slow-moving as though for a second it was pushing its way at us. But it blurred to nothingness far short of us; and in a few seconds it died.
At Peters' signal we divided now, spreading fanshape between the leading Tollgamo ship and Arron; skimming close under the surface, still keeping three hundred feet or more away from the leading vessel. But we had to get within fifty feet for our rays to be effective! I could feel my heart pounding, and my blood seemed cold.
And then a puff of orange light from the bow of Peters' cylinder gave the signal for our first attack. Beside me I could hear Allen suck in his breath. My hands were on the small gun-firing mechanisms—my two small ray projectors on one side of the cylinder, Allen's on the other, with Leh's ranging in a quadrant of the bow and stern. In a slanting dive, we plunged forward and down.
It was a chaos of blurred confusion to me, that first slanting plunge that took us close past the looming black side of one of the Tollgamo vessels, half circling it until in a few seconds we had fired our six little stabbing bolts and were past, rising again. I was aware that all the area of water suddenly seemed churned into silver phosphorescence through which shapes were diving. A bolt stabbed at us and missed. Then as we were mounting, one caught us. For a second it clung, with a bubbling red viscosity of fusing metal, glaring against my small bullseye pane. Would it eat through? Undoubtedly, if it clung too long, or if another were to strike in the same place.
But we twisted away from it: and in another second its built-up electronic power had discharged and it died. I realized then the advantage of our mobility with our five hundred and fifty agile little units against the ten huge caterpiller vehicles of Tollgamo, at least we might have an equal chance. Their three hundred foot rays were thin as pencil-streaks. Not easy for them to hit a tiny, swift-moving target. And I saw too, that once we were close, there were many angles at which the rays could not reach us.
Leh, Allen and I each fired two charges in that first dive. I saw some of them strike against the looming black armoured hull of the Tollgamo vessel as we flipped past it, each hit marked by bubbling red pits of metal. Through the bullseye windows I caught a vague glimpse of crowded men and women Gorts inside.
Then we were back, almost at the surface, out of range again, wheeling, poising, with the enemy behind and beneath us. I stared down, and saw that the girls, like a school of plunging dolphins, were making their dive. And then I had my first sight of one as she was struck. She was a tiny descending silver streak; and the bolt darted up, caught her. For a horrible second or two it clung. I saw her waver; come loose from her sled. And then she was a twisted, blackened, almost shapeless blob, slowly drifting down, with crimson air-bubbles for a moment rising. Then on the black ridge bottom her inert form lay, with a little movement as the water made it weave, as though horribly she were still alive.
For five minutes we stared down at the swarm of attacking girls. They swarmed within the wide angles of the opposing rays. Some of them were at the hulls of the enemy ships, holding their rays close, trying to melt through.
Then at last they were rising; swooping back to the surface. Some of them! But others were wavering away. With broken mechanisms discarded, some were swimming free. And others were sinking. Broken, twisted little shapes, with the water tinted crimson as they sank.
Leh, Allen and I stared at each other, white-faced, as the girls came fluttering up, flipping on the surface to get air, organize into squads again; and to recharge their tiny projectors. The squads reformed. My heart sank at the pitiful gaps in the formations. We had lost more than a hundred and fifty girls in that first attacking dive. And two of our ten cylinder-boats were crippled. Air bubbles were oozing from them; then the exit escape porte of one of them opened as the little cylinder sank. The two men came out, with buoyant belts which all of us were wearing so that they floated away on the surface.
But we had done some damage. Two or three of the big Tollgamo vessels seemed to be in distress. The one leading the line had checked its advance. Those behind seemed trying to hasten forward, so that now the ships were bunching. One of them, seemingly out of control, had slued sidewise, close to the edge of the abyss where the green-black depths went down perhaps a thousand fathoms. Perilously close, so that now as we stared it sagged drunkenly on the brink and seemed out of commission. And at the window portes of another of them, a dull-red glare was apparent. An interior fire.
"Not too bad," Leh was muttering. "We'll do better, next time."
Where was Nereid? My heart seemed to stick in my throat with apprehension as I watched the girls coming up. And then I saw her; still unharmed. She came close past our turret on her power-sled, her white arm waved at us as she flipped past and broke the surface for air.
And then Allen suddenly gasped,
"What the devil is that? What now?"
Tollgamo wasn't waiting for our second dive! His leading ship suddenly was starting ahead of the others. And then suddenly, from three or four of the enemy vessels tiny black dots were rising. Water bullets.... Needle-like, foot-long projectiles. They came hurtling at us. And then they burst with muffled, blurred sounds of little explosions. Some were near the surface, tossing up spouts of iridescent water.
It startled us into sudden confusion. Several of our girls were caught in the exploding puffs; and one of our cylinders. I saw it break apart in sluggish tearing fragments of metal and what had been its living occupants. A girl, caught at the surface, was hurled into the air.
A chaos. And in the midst of it, Peters gave the signal for a general attack; sustained attack, this time. Again Leh plunged us into what now was a watery inferno. How long it lasted I cannot say. Ten minutes. Half an hour. An eternity of horror, with everyone for himself. There were times when I could see little of it. The shallow, fifty foot depth of ocean here was a glare of red and orange and opalescent light through which our cylinders dove and the girls plunged up and down like voracious little fishes.
There was an inferno of lights and muffled ghastly rumbles down below. And the surface now was strewn. Our broken cylinders sagging there; then sinking as the men tried to get out. Men and girls swimming, wounded, and then sinking. Chaos of human wreckage. The rippled daylight surface now was tossed by crazy waves; water stained with blood; or orange and blue with oil and gas-fumes.
Then I saw that Peters' cylinder was gone. Only ours and two others left. Leh, Allen and I, now in command. Empty authority. The girls, down in the weird lurid depths, were fighting with utter desperation, heedless of the possibility of command.
An eternity of horror. But now, two of the Tollgamo vessels had slid over the brink, sinking slowly into the abyss. I saw another of them burst with interior fire. Muffled explosions, that spewed out Gorts and broken equipment. Then there was a time when one of the distressed vessels emitted an inky fluid as though it were some giant squid—a pall of black water, to hide the disembarking men. We fought through it, until presently it drifted away.
"Getting them," I heard Allen mutter once. "By Heaven, only two of those boats in action now—Tollgamo's and this other one."
We were plunging at Tollgamo's ship. Its portes were red with glare. The enemy rays now were lessening. It seemed that only one or two were left. And the battle now had changed its aspect. From the broken Tollgamo ships, many of the Gorts had safely emerged, with helmets and weighted shoes so that now they were walking, swaying on the rocky bottom. Five hundred or more of them. And the girls swooped down at them. Myriad hand to hand combats between the unweildy Gorts and the Arron virgins that plunged at them like darting hungry sharks.
The bottom now was strewn with the dead as the girls plunged and fought and we darted our cylinder among them, struggling to find opportunity to strike with our rays.
Where was Nereid? Again cold apprehension struck at me; it was so long since I had seen her. And now a new ghastly horror was entering the turgid scene. Attracted by the lights, the muffled roars and the blood, monsters of the deep were coming. Eaters of carrion. Sea vultures. Some came in little swarms, a thousand tiny silvery shapes, darting at the bodies, picking at them until only white skeletons lay here on the slimy sea bottom. Other shapes, huge with glaring round eyes like torches, came slithering from the deeps, searching for the dead, seizing the wounded.
"That Tollgamo ship is all that's left," Leh was saying. He sped us toward it. Quite obviously now it was trying to escape. Forty or fifty girls were clinging to its hull; too close for its single remaining ray weapon to hit them; girls with close-held projectors eating with bubbling red electro-glare into the hull-plates. We had a glimpse into one of the bullseye portes—gas fumes and red glare in there; and the Gorts, trapped there, in a panic making ready to disembark. We lay close, firing our bolts.
Suddenly a wounded girl was drifting past our turret; she seemed struggling to get to our little pressure porte. Nereid?
Then I saw that it was Venta. She got into the porte; and I pumped out the water; threw myself in and bent over her. She was gasping, but still trying to smile at me.
"We—we have won, Earthman."
"Yes. Yes, Venta. You just lie quiet. Have you seen Nereid?"
"Yes. Here, just a little while ago. I don't know, now."
I stared out the porte bullseye. The Tollgamo ship was breaking; I could see its air coming out in bubbling puffs that caught our cylinder and shoved it away. That ship would be water-filled in a moment. And then I stiffened; tense with horror as I stared. A little side exit-porte of the wrecked vessel suddenly opened. A single huge figure lunged out. A dark-clad giant figure, with round air-helmet and weighted shoes.
Tollgamo! He was no more than fifty feet from me; a red sheen of light struck his helmet so that I could see his face with its quiet, grim smile. And then suddenly, in a leaping dive, he flung himself forward, and seized a girl who was clinging to the vessel's side, blasting with her ray-torch.
Nereid! In the glare, abruptly I saw her, as Tollgamo seized her, catching her by surprise so that she had no chance to escape him. And then her torch and her knife were gone, as he held her body against him and with swaying, shoving tread started away along the bottom.
There were weighted shoes here in our pressure porte. I was only a moment getting Venta out of the porte into the main part of the hull. I slid its door; adjusted my helmet; admitted the water. And then I was swaying out on the rocks, with a knife in my hand.
Vaguely I could see Tollgamo, with Nereid struggling in his grip as he advanced with swaying tread toward where, near at hand, the honeycombed cliff of that little crater-island loomed here. I struggled after him. Then I saw that he had plunged into what seemed a water-filled little passage leading back under the island. I was there in a moment; tense, alert, cautious now that he might be crouching somewhere here in ambush.
The ten foot high narrow passage wound up an ascent until unexpectedly my head broke the surface. I twitched off the helmet. I had thought that Tollgamo knew that he was being followed, but evidently he did not. Neck deep in water, I was near the rocky shore of a subterranean lagoon ... a huge jagged grotto here in the depths of the honeycombed little island.
And then I saw Tollgamo. His helmet was off now. Carrying Nereid in his arms, he had mounted a broken rocky wall of the grotto, so that he was some fifty feet back and ten feet above me. I had kicked off my weighted shoes. I tried to dive, but I was discovered. Nereid gave a little cry; and as Tollgamo saw me, he suddenly checked his climb, set Nereid on her feet and held her against him. I had floundered forward, on the shore now; and dropped my knife, plucking a little ray-projector from my belt. Its fifty foot stab was ample here. Was Tollgamo armed?
Brief thoughts; brief tableau. For that second he and Nereid stared down at me. A red glare painted them, a glare that came from what I saw now was a glowing pit almost beside them on this little volcanic island. In the heavy subterranean silence I could hear the low muttering, hissing rumble of the fires deep in the bowels of the earth, and the grotto was heavy with their sulphuric smell.
A slow ironic smile was on Tollgamo's gray face, painted now by the red and yellow glare.
"So, the Earthman!" he said. "And he finds Tollgamo unarmed."
My little projector was leveled; but as he held Nereid against him I could not dare fire. He saw it, and his ironic smile broadened. Was he really unarmed? It seemed so. I could see the empty weapon-clips at his belt, from which evidently he had torn his exhausted weapons and flung them away. And his hands were both in plain view, gripping Nereid's shoulders. There was just a second when I saw his gaze flick from my leveled gun as he desperately measured his chances for escape.
And then he seemed to reach his decision. The quiet smile still plucked at his thin gray lips. I must have made a move with my leveled muzzle; and suddenly it seemed to startle him.
"Don't fire, Earthman!" he said sharply. "You would kill her."
And then, with a twitch of his big powerful arms he swept Nereid, not further to shield himself, but behind him. And he added softly, to her:
"So you see Tollgamo has lost? That is too bad." His breath went out in a long hiss. "I had thought to conquer Arron, to share it with you." His soft voice was ironical; as though now at the last he was jibing at the futility of all human effort.
I stood numbed, withholding my shot as now he cast her away; and he stood alone on the red-yellow brink. His gaze turned to me.
"You see, Earthman, you need not kill me," he said gently. "I should not like anyone to do that—much less an Earthman."
Still his jibing irony. But there was tragedy in his smoldering dark eyes; the tragedy of failure, as now his dream at last was broken.
He was still quietly smiling, as he poised on the brink, staring down at the fiery abyss. Then slowly he leaned forward, toppled and fell. For a second his plummeting body was visible, and then the red-yellow glare swallowed it.
I think that there is little I need add. I have no wish to picture the return of our pitiful little army to Arron. Victorious army.... How trite, but how true it is—in warfare, even the victor is vanquished! But surely, there is a better time ahead for Venus now. Jenten-Shah, degenerate ruler of the Arones, was killed that night by an imbecile worker. Peters was killed; and Leh is ruling. Surely he will bring order out of chaos, and minimize license in the lives of the pleasure-loving Arones, so that now there need be no rebelling young Virgins with the opprobrium of Untouchables.
Certainly that is what we all hope.
Nereid and I are married now and are very happy. My strange little wife, daughter of two worlds. I know that I shall have to take her back to Venus presently. Loyally she insists she likes our Earth quite as well as Venus. But as I recall the lush tropic beauty of the glowing Arron nights, and the soft iridescence of the water—well, I doubt it very much.
I want Nereid to like Earth. Our little home is in the tropics, by the palm-lined edge of a lagoon. We are secluded here, which is what Nereid wants. When people see her she is dressed always in Earth fashion. But when we are, alone, at night—
I wanted to finish this narrative tonight. I thought I could finish by dawn. It is bright moonlight. I thought Nereid was asleep, but just a little while ago she came from our bedroom to the veranda where I am writing. Nereid, with her tawny hair flowing, her beautiful body again in the shining sea-green garment.
Then she went past me, flinging me her impish, whimsical little smile as she ran for the lagoon. She is swimming down there now. Occasionally she calls up to me, daring me to come down.
[Transcriber's Note: No heading for Section IV in original.]