NEW MARVELS
That Zitran, too, ran past. During it word came from Zitra that Jadgor
had approved and recommended for acceptance by the national assembly
that scheme for a chain of schools among the masses, Mutlos of Cathur
had introduced. Thereupon Croft and Jadgor selected several expert
metal molders and set them to work at making type, and Jason choosing
some of the skilled workmen whom he had trained to exact methods in
making the motors, months before, directed them now in the building of
a rather simple set of presses in which the type should be used.
Also looking to the future he commanded others of the motor mechanics
to begin the construction of a half dozen engines of a somewhat
different design. Questioned by Robur as to his purpose, he explained
that these were destined to finish the lifting power for the first
Tamarizian airplanes.
"Zitu! Zitu!" exclaimed the governor of Aphur, flashing his perfect
teeth; "I doubt you not, Jason, but my wonder does not cease. Recall
you the morning when you drove the first motor through the streets of
Himyra and well-nigh frightened the civic guards to death?" He smiled,
and Jason laughed. And then he sobered.
"Yes," he replied. "And I recall also how the same morning, Chythron,
Lakkon's driver, lost control of the gnuppas and they bolted, and I
spoke with Naia, thy fair cousin, first."
Robur nodded. He laid a hand on his companion's arm. "Fear not," he
admonished in sympathetic understanding. "Though the maid repel you
because of a lack of understanding, yet shall she come to you at
length."
"Aye," Croft looked the other man full in the eyes with meaning. "Once
more shall I place Azil's sign upon Naia of Aphur's girdle."
Yet to all outward seeming he appeared immersed in his work, and even
as the dynamo and the turbines took shape, he sent men into the vast
plain that stretched between Himyra and the mountains of Aphur, to a
spot of his selection, and bade them build there a huge shed to house
his airplane fleet. Still others he set on the fashioning of ribs for
the wings of the planes themselves, to building the fuselage bodies out
of sheets of copper, and after a consultation with the local caste of
weavers, he picked on a fabric for the wings.
And with all his ceaseless activities he still found time in a
whimsical mood to inaugurate among his workmen a series of recreation
and games lest under the driving of Robur and himself the sweating
laborers grow stale. Indeed, he introduced a sort of competitive spirit
in the various shops, organizing from the members of each a separate
club and matching them one against the other in their sports. And of
all the games on which he might have picked, Jason Croft, Mouthpiece of
Zitu, and virtual commander of the remaking of a nation, chose baseball!
In this he gave his at times bizarre fancy full rein. The balls were
fashioned from well-turned gnuppa hide, about a rubber core, with a
covering of string. The bats, were of tough resilient wood, which the
new devotees of the pastime swung with might and main.
Then for the first time on Palos were heard the crack of the batsman
lining out a clean drive, and the cry of the umpire, Croft himself at
first: "Ball four--take a free pass! Strike--one!"
And because even the most serious mind must find relaxation at times,
Croft found he enjoyed the matches between teams immensely, while
Robur entered with almost animal spirits into the rivalry of the
games, and nearly pestered the life out of Jason, trying to master the
intricacies and comprehend the casual principles involved in curves, in
and outshoots, drops and breaks, after he had seen them first. Indeed
Jason had more than one laugh after he discovered Robur in the bathing
court of the palace one morning, hurling a ball against a backstop he
had arranged, and trying to learn to throw it around a corner, as he
somewhat naively explained.
But if Robur did not accomplish his purpose, several of the pitchers
eventually did to some extent, and Robur got a laugh of his own, when
one of them whom he had secretly had Jason coach in the copper foundry
team, was produced. The batter who happened to be up swung sharply
at what looked like a slow and easy delivery, and Aphur's governor
chuckled for days because the fellow very nearly broke his neck when
his bat failed to find the ball where he thought it was.
* * * * *
Croft's main satisfaction, however, in the success of the innovation
lay in the fact that from rivalry in the game it was but a step to
rivalry between the various corps of laborers in the shops. He took
that step and introduced a system of bonuses and holidays for increased
production or extra-efficient work. And because the Tamarizians were a
pleasure-loving people, the plan was a success from the first. Working
three shifts, as he had before the Zollarian war, Croft found his plans
progress. Five weeks--the length of a Zitran--after his return from
the mountains, found his turbines finished, his dynamo ready to be
transported and assembled in its appointed place.
That place was ready to receive it as Croft knew from several trips he
had taken to it, in one of his swiftest motors. A stone power-house
had been erected, the penstocks were in place. Diverting gates were
prepared to turn the stream into them at the proper moment, and send
it roaring through the turbines in the pits. Telling Robur to send men
into the mountains to cut poles, and giving him a model of insulators
to be made of glass, Jason loaded the sections of his dynamo upon his
fleet of transports and set forth again on his journey to the hills.
Thereafter for two weeks he toiled and sweated, thankful at least for
the fact that in Tamarizia labor was plentiful, and regulated by
government control in regard to wages, carefully estimated on a living
scale, so that the dissatisfaction and continual strikes of earth were
unknown. The condition enabled him to command what workmen needed, and
rest assured of a steady advance in the projects he undertook.
More than once in that long, hot fourteen suns, Robur drove out to
inspect the progress made and marvel, and report the insulators being
turned out in satisfactory shape, and the poles coming down from the
hills on creaking motor trucks. Croft gave him drawings to guide him in
setting up a line of power poles across the desert from Himyra toward
the mountains, and at night, when his weary workmen were sleeping,
plunged into the task of devising Tamarizia's first electric lights.
At first he confined his plans to small-sized arcs, intending to give
public demonstration before he went on with the attempt to devise
incandescents for inside use.
Coal was coming down from the vein he had discovered by now in quantity
sufficient to use in the copper smelters, and he decided to gain his
carbons, from this, converted into coke. After several nights of
intensive working, he pushed aside his finished plans and drew a long
breath of relief. The thing was done.
Croft's eyes flashed. This enlightenment of a people and a nation was
becoming well-nigh an obsessing delight in his brain. It partook almost
of the nature of creation despite the fact that he knew those things he
was producing were but crude copies of familiar things he had formerly
known as concomitants of life. For, as he had said to Robur, and to
Zud, and to Naia herself, he was a man--was human in all his impulses
and feelings regardless of the marvelous control of the spirit he had
learned, and he thrilled with a personal satisfaction in the success of
each new endeavor, the wonder each new product of his scheming excited
in other brains.
From Robur he learned that Gaya had returned to the palace, bringing
Naia with her for an indefinite stay. That, indeed, was in accordance
with his plans. For so soon as he had realized that Gaya meant to throw
the girl and himself into a closer association, as he did after the
conversation he had heard between the two women, he had purposely meant
to be absent from Himyra himself when the woman he loved arrived.
Croft would not have been either where or what he was had he been
devoid of a vast psychological knowledge. And deep as were his own
emotions, strong as was his own impulse to indulge a desire for
Naia's closer presence, yet in all he did at that time he followed a
deliberately mapped-out course for the accomplishment of his purpose.
During those days, as her words to Gaya had shown him very clearly,
Naia of Aphur's mental condition was one of vague unrest. And the
principle cause of that unrest was, as Croft knew, himself.
The new estrangement between them, her act in returning his betrothal
jewel in so dramatic a manner, those subsequent excursions into the
unknown world of the astral plane which he had brought about, and which
she was as yet unable to consider other than as vagaries of a sleeping
brain, had induced within her a state of introspection which, even more
than his immediate presence, he felt sure must serve his purpose best.
She had cried out in a sympathy seeking confusion to the wife of his
friend, that she had sought him that day in the mountains, as a sort
of test--a means of convincing herself if her visioning were false or
real. She had admitted that, even despite her former reluctance to
consider a possible mundane love between Croft in his present body
and herself, he had appealed to her that day in his physical form and
strength. And she had complained that he had not kept the promise given
by his astral form to hers, to return to her so again; had confessed
that she had sought for a renewal of those two former meetings, had
tried to repeat her "dreams."
* * * * *
Jason Croft, erecting his dynamo, harnessing it to his turbines with
heavy beltings of gnuppa hide, felt that the very desire he had wakened
in Naia's soul, would do its work better while it remained unsatisfied,
would gain in strength as the days passed into weeks, would receive an
added poignancy when she arrived at Himyra and found him gone again
to the hills, engaged without any seeming distraction attributable to
herself, on his work.
For Croft knew very, very well that one of the great laws of all mating
consists in this--that until mating itself is accomplished, one element
retreats, while the other as constantly seeks, before desire itself in
the one awakens desire in the other, and thereby bringing both elements
together, strikes out of them life's fire.
Yet, night after night, his work finished, stretched on a rough couch,
Croft yearned for this woman of all the worlds to his soul. Night after
night he lay picturing her as he had known her, revealing their every
association together, from his first sight of her in her father's
carriage, to those two weird astral meetings which had occurred. He
Pictured her beauty of face and form--the supple strength of the
latter, its litheness, its wonderful grace. He saw it in his mind's eye
as he had seen it time and again in life.
And there were times when he quivered, and stretched out his arms which
throbbed with a strange, numb aching, remembering as it seemed in their
very substance, the soft, warm pressure of her flesh, the glory of
her former surrender to the caress of their embrace. There were times
when his lips writhed as he recalled their first meeting with her
mouth--that quick, spontaneous giving and taking of a kiss, before she
had cried out that now--now--he must win her, or else by the customs of
her country, she stood a maid disgraced--had cried it, and yet before
she left him on that same occasion, had crept to him, inviting a second
kiss.
And though at such things Croft thrilled as may any man thrill, at the
thought of the one woman who can drive him to madness as a man, yet
unlike the ordinary mortal he thrilled still more at the beauty of her
soul. For unlike the customary lover, Croft had seen it--and because
of his knowledge of such matters, because he knew the meanings in a
spiritual sense of certain vibrations--because he could interpret the
meaning involved in auric colors--he knew that only a chastely pure
spirit possessed an aura of blue and gold. Wherefore great as was his
glory in his recollections of her physical beauty and charm, greater
still was his exaltation recalling how even like her golden hair and
purple eyes, that glorious image of her being he had twice called from
it, glowed.
Glorious was she in body, beautiful in soul. And Croft lying while the
night wrapped the mountain, and the stream, plunging over the rocks in
its bed, sent its murmur to his ears, renewed once more his purpose,
and swore by all the highest forces in his conception, that ere this
thing was finished, that glory and beauty should be his. But in his
own way--the true way--the way in which two chemical atoms might come
together--gladly--almost unconsciously because of compelling force,
affinity, desire--let the word used be what it might since in the great
law of Zitu or God, they were the same. And it was so Croft meant to
claim that woman, body and soul, whom he felt was his true twin--that
glorious complement of his entire nature--that lode star of his being
who had drawn him to her--across the empty void between the stars.
On the fourteenth day Robur came up from Himyra at Croft's request.
Jason met him as he descended from his motor and led him into the
newly constructed power-house. There, on a masonry and copper base,
insulated by a heavy plate of glass, stood what was as yet Tamarizia's
most wonderful device. Bolted and belted to the driving-gear of the
turbine it stood, waiting but the driving force of the waters through a
penstock to wake it into life.
Croft's eyes blazed with something of excitement as he gestured toward
it. "Behold, Rob," he said, "with this shall we harness the lightnings
and bid them do our will. With this shall we light the streets of
Himyra and the fire-urns along the Na, and the palace, the houses of
all men in Himyra first, in all Aphur at the last. With this shall we
ere we are done, drive the wheels in many shops, which now are turned
by men and beasts in treadmills or upon the windlass bars. So shall it
come at last that by the mere pressure of a hand upon a lever those
wheels shall move. These things I promise you, Rob--behold." He waved
a hand to a captain standing by the door of the house. And he in turn
signaled to a workman not far off. And he, who had been waiting, lifted
a trumpet to his lips and blew a blast. It was the sign on which Croft
had agreed for the men high up on the mountain to open a penstock gate.
* * * * *
Yet for a moment there was nothing to mark the effect, until with a
whisper, rising to a roar, the huge pipe filled and discharged its
plunging contents against the waiting wheel. Then, as the wheel turned
and the belt of gnuppa hide revolved, there crept through the new rock
house a strange and droning hum. Louder and louder it rose, as faster
and faster the shining armature which Croft and Robur watched spun
round. Faster and faster, louder and louder--blue sparks began to shine
and quiver under the copper brushes. And suddenly, with a blinding
scintillation, a hissing crash, a giant spark leaped the gap between
the terminals of two wires Croft had arranged to test the ascending
charge.
"Zitu!" Above the crackling discharge the captain in the door cried
out: "Fly--we are undone, man of Zitu--fly!" He staggered back and
paused and stood staring, vaguely reassured at the smile of triumph on
Croft's face.
"Fear not," Jason told him quickly, as he struck up a lever, released
the tension of the belt, and caused the first dynamo on Palos to sink
from a dizzy whirling toward rest. "This moment speaks success for all
our toil of weeks. Go tell the men on the pipes to close the gates."
Robur's face, too, was pale, well-nigh as that of the captain's, though
he had held his place. His lips were close pressed, however, and his
nostrils slightly pinched. Then, as Croft so easily chained the fiery
breathing of the monster he had produced, his eyes began to flash.
"By Zitu, and by Zitu!" he swore the Tamarizian oath of wonder. "Jason,
you have indeed harnessed His own lightning, as you have said. For a
moment I feared that His wrath were excited by your daring, and He had
sent a bolt of His fire to destroy us, with the house." He broke off
with an almost shamefaced laugh.
"Yet now it gentles like a wild gnuppa under its master's hand," he
went on again as the dynamo stopped and naught remained save the
dwindling rush of the waters through the waste pipes from the turbine
beneath their feet. "Zitu, my friend, but all men shall marvel yet as I
do now at this! What plan you next?"
"Light!" said Croft. "Light, first, and after that to make use in all
the ways I mentioned of this force--to turn the wheels in shops, to run
the presses I have made to print from type and so supply the schools
Jadgor has favored with the means of broadening men's minds--to print
for them and their children, and so to spread the truth."
"Thou wilt build a city here to do these things?" Robur questioned, as
yet unable to fully sense quite all Croft's words embraced.
"No," Jason told him. "This power shall flow from here to Himyra, Rob,
across the line of poles your men are building, along the wires."
"Zitu!" The governor of Aphur stared.
Croft smiled. "Tomorrow," he went on, "I return to Himyra to arrange
for the making of lights, and a demonstration of their working when
the time is ripe." And suddenly his whole face lighted at an inward
thought. "Naia--Rob. Tell me of her." For suddenly at the mention of
his return her picture had leaped before him; the certainty had come
upon him that in Himyra he should meet her, speak to her, dwell beneath
the roof of the same house. And the accomplishment at which Robur, of
Himyra, was staring in awestruck wonder--the great dynamo, successful
in its primary test, and all it stood for--sank into nothingness before
the thought. Naia of Aphur's face, the hinted perfume of her presence,
blotted it out.
"Thou wilt see her," said Robur--"of course." It was as though he read
Croft's thought. "And could you see her now as each sun I see her,
perchance you would feel as do I, that she will be glad of your coming
now at last. Like one without purpose she moves, Jason, my strange
friend, whom I love as no other man, yet do not understand. There is
the look of one who waits for one who comes not in her eyes. In their
purple depths they hold a question ever that makes them doubly dark.
Yet if at times I say I am driving forth to meet you, I have seen her
lay a white hand over Ga's snowy fountain beneath her robe. I have
seen her lips part as though to speak or question concerning thee, and
having returned, I have known that her ears were like thirsty lips to
drink in what reports I made regarding the progress of your work. Yet
in such mood is she sweeter, more desirable as it seems to me, than
ever in her life."
Croft nodded. "Not more desirable to me," he said, "than the first sun
whereon I saw her. Today I place a guard and send the workmen back to
Himyra. Tomorrow I shall come."