We saw where, at several points, the winding catwalk terminated in
low, dome-like kiosks, giving ingress downward. One was on our slope
of the cauldron. "That's the one we'll try," Snap murmured.
He stopped suddenly. The top of the distant globe-dwelling was
glowing. A little round patch there was radiant, like a lighted
window. A transparent ray was coming from inside. The operators within
this globe were observing the sky, training instruments upon it, no
doubt.
And now we saw in the sky the third of those sword-like beams. It had
probably been visible there for some time but we had not noticed it.
"That's Venus," I murmured.
It seemed so. A blurred star, red in this atmosphere, was close above
the horizon. The light-beam stood out from it, sweeping up to the
zenith.
The gravity station here was about to make contact with the Venus
beam. We heard a muffled siren, a signal echoing from the subterranean
control rooms. The current went into all these wires and towers and
twenty-foot ground discs. The hissing and throbbing hum of it was
audible. The discs and towers were glowing; red at first, then violet.
Then that milky, opalescent white. The overhead wire-aerials were
snapping with a myriad of tiny jumping sparks.
I saw now that the top of each tower was a grid of radiant wires, a
six-foot circular projector with a mirror reflector close beneath it
and a series of prisms and lenses just above. It all glowed opalescent
in a moment, a dazzling glare.
Then the tower tops were swinging. The lights from them had reached
the intensity of an upflung beam, and the projectors were swinging to
focus the beam inward. The focal point seemed about a thousand feet
overhead. All the beams merged there; and guided by the towers
directly underneath, a single shaft was standing into the sky.
The entire cauldron depression was now a blinding mass of opalescent
light. We could see nothing but the milk-white inferno of glare. It
painted the rocks up here on the rim so that we shrank back, shaded
our eyes and gazed into the sky. And from the cauldron, the hum and
the hiss of the current, the snapping of sparks, were all lost in a
wild electrical screaming turmoil.
Overhead, we saw the Wandl beam from Venus.
Apparently this control station had two functions: the control of the
planet's movements, its axial rotation and its orbital flight, and its
ability to apply gravitational force to other celestial bodies.
Wandl was controlling her own movements by applying gravity force,
attraction and repulsion, to all the celestial starfield; and
doubtless also by applying the repulsive beam tangentially against the
ether like rocket streams. In this respect, I realized, the planet was
probably operated not unlike one of our familiar spaceships. In
effect, it was itself a gigantic globular vehicle. Later I learned
that it was thought that Wandl's atmosphere could be highly
electronized at will, with a resulting aberration of the natural
light-ray reflected from her into space. This could have caused the
blurring of the image of Wandl when viewed telescopically from other
worlds.
Again, for a moment of the contact, there was that bursting light in
the sky.
The contact with the Venus beam lasted a minute or two. Snap and I, on
the cauldron rim, were engulfed in the blaze of reflected light and
the wild scream of sound. Then presently the turmoil subsided. The
contact in the sky was broken. The tow-rope of Venus jerked itself
away. But on the next Venus rotation it would be attacked again.
Another few minutes passed. The little circular depression beneath us
was dim and silent as we had first seen it. Figures were moving within
the dwelling structure. From several of the underground entrances
figures came up, the ten-foot insect-like shapes of workers. Three or
four of the brains came bouncing up, moving along the ground catwalk
with little leaps. All the figures entered the distant main dwelling
house. The contact was over.
"Probably hardly anyone left down below," Snap whispered. "Now's our
chance."
"If we can get into that opening without being seen," I said.
"Shadows, down the rocks to the left. Damnation, Gregg, we can make it
in one calculated leap."
"I'll try it first. I'll get in and wait for you."
"Right."
We each had a gravity cylinder at our belt and a ray-gun in our hand.
The slope of the depression was dim here, merely starlit; it was a
steep, broken and fairly shadowed descent, fifty feet to the little
dome-like kiosk which marked the nearest subterranean entrance. I went
down it with a swoop, landed in a heap beside the kiosk and ducked
into it. Instinct made me fear a guard, but reason told me none would
be here; there was only the danger of encountering someone coming up.
I was at the top of a winding, descending passage, a step-terraced
floor; there were occasional lights in the ceiling. In a moment Snap
joined me. "Got here! I wonder how far down it goes?"
I gripped him. "Snap, no matter what happens, do it with a rush. Keep
with me. And if I shout to get out...."
"We go out with a rush!"
"Yes. Back to the girls. Use your ray-gun and the gravity projector in
getting back to them and get away without me, if I fall."
"Same for you, Gregg."
We went down the deserted passage. We had had experience in movement
on Wandl now; we handled ourselves more deftly. We went down several
hundred feet. The passage branched, but there always seemed a main
tunnel.
It was all deserted. There were distant, dimly-lighted, silent rooms.
Were these factories of the strange forms of electronic gravity
currents Wandl used? Some were in operation. A hum issued from them.
Workers moved about.
We stopped to consult. The girls, and Molo himself, had described what
we would find: a main route leading to the control room where the
delicate mechanisms which operated all this were centralized, the
nerve center of Wandl. It seemed that we were following that main
route.
A worker came with a swimming leap past us. We dropped into a hollowed
shadow at a tunnel intersection, and he went swooping by.
"Lord, Snap," I muttered, "that was too close for comfort."
Again we advanced. The tunnel turned sharply. Down a short slope, a
glowing room was disclosed, with two or three workmen moving within
it.
The main control room! We could not doubt it. Molo, in his enthusiasm,
had once described it clearly to the girls, its great skeins of little
thread-like wires spread upon the walls, the myriad tiny opalescent
discs contacted with the small gray rock surface under the tangled
masses of thread-wire, the levers and dials banked on the circular
tables: they were unmistakable features.
"There it is, Snap," I whispered in his ear. "In that central rack.
Those insulated rods, see them? Anita told us they used them to adjust
the discs. Watch out for the current."
"But it's off now, Gregg!"
"There's still danger in it, and you'd short-circuit somewhere. Keep
your hands off. Use the rods."
"The operators...."
He got no further. A figure lunged into us from behind, a giant
worker! His largest pincer bit into my shoulder; his hollow shout
resounded. The operators of the control room came with leaps at us.
There was a moment of wild confusion. Light, seemingly almost
weightless bodies flapped against us. Arms gripped us, but they were
flimsy. The huge body-shells cracked gruesomely as we struck with our
solid fists.
A moment of turmoil passed. No bolts were fired. The shouts were brief
down here in the narrow confines of the tunnel. Panting, bruised more
by our collisions against the rocks than by our adversaries, we ceased
our wild lunges. We did not look at the scattered, broken and crushed
bodies drifting now to the floor.
"Now, Snap! Hurry! Others may come."
We lunged into the glowing control room, seized the long insulated
poles from the central rack. They had a grateful feel of weight. I
picked one up, jumped with a twenty foot leap to the wall.
The wires came down like cobwebs under my sweeping blows; the little
discs knocked off as though they were fungus growth. Sparks flew
around us. Shafts of electronic radiance spat out. The wall was
hissing over all its length as I ranged up and down it. The tangled
broken threads of wire writhed like living things on the floor; then
crumpled, fused and turned black.
I swept that wall-segment with frantic haste, lunged around and
started another way. Across the room I saw Snap doing the same. A
turmoil of electrical sound was reverberating around us, deafening,
and the glare was blinding. A belt-shaft shot from the wreckage under
my rod. It seared my left arm. My sleeve burned off; the arm hung limp
and tingling at my side. I stopped to rub it; in a moment strength
came back to its muscles.
Snap was raging like a great heavy bird gone amok. Through the green
fumes of electrical gases which were filling the room I saw him
lunging at the circular tables, overturning them. They cracked like
thin polished stone as they struck the metal floor.
I finished with the wall. There was a twenty-foot square piece of
metal apparatus, ramified and intricate; I heaved it over upon its
side. A thousand little mirrors and prisms, dislodged from it, came
out in a splintering deluge.
I was aware of Snap fighting with a brown-shelled figure. Then he was
free of it. I saw it mashed and broken at his feet as I dove past,
swimming in the smoke to lunge the length of a great fluorescent tube
which was still dimly glowing. My pole pried it over; it crashed with
a brief puff of light and the rush of an explosion as air went into
its vacuum.
I found Snap panting beside me, clinging to me in mid-air. The glare
was dying around us; the din was lessening. We were choking in the
chemical fumes of the released, half-burned gases. Turgid darkness was
coming to the wrecked room, with little hissing flares spitting
through it.
"Enough, Gregg! Listen! Up overhead...."
A great siren from up there was screaming into the night.