_Sarka Commands Again_
Ahead, through the storms which still hung tenaciously to the roof of
the world, flashed those dozen aircars of the Moon. Now Sarka could
plainly see the dome of his laboratory, and from the depths of him
welled up that strange glow which Earthlings recognize as the joy of
returning home, than which there is none, save the love for a woman,
greater.
Now he could see the effect of those flares, or lights, from Mars, which
impinged on the face of the Earth, though he could see no purpose in
them, no reason for their being, since they seemed to do no damage at
all, though the effect of them was weird in the extreme.
Outer darkness, rent with ripping, roaring storms, flurries of ice, snow
and sleet, shot through and through by balls of lambent flames in
unguessable numbers. Eery lights which struck the surface of the Earth,
bounded away and, half a mile or so from the surface again, burst into
flaming pin-wheels, like skyrockets of ancient times. Strange lights,
causing weird effects, but producing no damage at all, save to lessen to
some extent the courage of Earthlings, because they did not understand
these things. And always, down the ages, man had stood most in fear of
the Unknown.
* * * * *
Sarka peered off across the heavens where a ball of flame now seemed to
be rising over the horizon, and was amazed at the size of this planet.
Mars was close to Earth, so close that, had they possessed aircars like
those of the Moon-people--which remained to be seen--they could easily
have attacked the Earth.
Across the face of the Earth flashed those fiery will-o'-the-wisps from
Mars, without rhyme or reason; yet Sarka knew positively that they
possessed some meaning, and that the Earth had been forced thus close to
Mars for a purpose. What that purpose was must yet be discovered.
Then, under the aircars, the laboratory of Sarka.
Down dropped the aircars to a landing near the laboratory, and to the
cubes in the forepeak of each Sarka sent the mental command:
"Assure yourselves that the aircars will remain where they are! Muster
inside the laboratory, keeping well away from the Master Beryl!"
Then to the people who had returned, clothed in strange radiance, from
the Moon with Sarka and with Jaska he spoke:
"Leave the cars and enter my laboratory, where further orders will be
given you!"
With Jaska still by his side, Sarka entered the laboratory through the
Exit Dome. Inside, clothing was swiftly brought for the rebels, for
Sarka and for Jaska. But, even when they were clothed, these people who
had come back seemed to glow with an inner radiance which transfigured
them.
Sarka the Second, his face drawn and pale, came from the Observatory to
meet his son, and the two were clasped in each other's arms for a
moment. Sarka the Second, who had looked no older than his son, seemed
to have aged a dozen centuries in the time Sarka had been gone.
But it was not of the threatened attack by Martians that Sarka the
Second spoke. He made no statement. He merely asked a question:
"Was Lunar very beautiful, and just a bit unearthly in appearance?"
* * * * *
Sarka started.
"Yes. Beautiful! Wondrously, fearfully beautiful: but I had the feeling
that she had no heart or soul, no conscience: that she was
somehow--well, bestial!"
A moan of anguish escaped Sarka the Second.
"Dalis again!" he ejaculated. "But much of the fault was mine! Before
you were born, we scientists of Earth had already several times realized
the necessity of expansion for the children of Earth if they were to
continue. Dalis' proposal to my father was discarded, because it
involved the wholesale taking of life. But after the oceans had been
obliterated, and the human family still outgrew its bounds, Dalis came
to my father and me with still another proposal. It involved a strange,
other-worldly young woman whom he called Lunar! Her family--well,
nothing was known about her, for her family could not be traced. Wiped
out, I presume, in some inter-family quarrel, leaving her alone. Dalis
found her, took an interest in her, and the very strangeness of her gave
him his idea, which he brought to my father and me.
"His proposal was somewhat like that which you made when we sent the
Earth out of its orbit into outer space, save that Dalis' scheme
involved no such program. His was simply a proposal to somehow
communicate with the Moon by the use of an interplanetary rocket that
should carry a human passenger.
"He put the idea up to this girl, Lunar, and she did not seem to care
one way or another. Dalis was all wrapped up in his ideas, and gave the
girl the name of Lunar, as being symbolical of his plans for her. He
coached and trained her against the consummation of his plan. We knew
something, theoretically at least, about the conditions on the Moon, and
everything possible was done for her, to make it feasible for her to
exist on the Moon. My error was in ever permitting the experiment to be
made, since if I had negatived the idea. Dalis would have gone no
further!
"But I, too, was curious, and Lunar did not care. Well, the rocket was
constructed, and shot outward into space by a series of explosions. No
word was ever received from Lunar, though it was known that she landed
on the Moon!
* * * * *
"I say no word was ever received, yet what you have intimated proves
that Dalis has either been in mental communication with her, hoping to
induce her to send a force against the Earth, and assist him in
mastering the Earth, overthrowing we Sarkas--or has been biding his
time against something of the thing we have now accomplished."
This seemed to clear up many things for Sarka, though it piled higher
upon his shoulders the weight of his responsibilities. The
other-worldliness of Lunar, called now Luar, explained her mastery of
the Gnomes, and through them the cubes, and her knowledge of the
omnipotent qualities of the white flames of the Moon's core, which might
have been, it came to Sarka in a flash, the source of all life on the
Moon in the beginning!
"But father," went on Sarka, "I don't see any sense in this aerial
bombardment by Mars!"
"I believe," said Sarka the Second sadly, "that before another ten hours
pass we shall know the worst there is to be known: but now, son, instead
of going into attack against the Moon, we go into battle against the
combined forces of Mars and of the Moon!"
* * * * *
Sarka now took command of the forces of the Earth. Swiftly he turned to
the people of the Gens of Dalis who had come back with him.
"You will be divided into eleven equal groups, as nearly as possible.
Father, will you please arrange the division? Each group will be
attached to the staff of one of the Spokesman of the Gens, so that each
Spokesman will have the benefit of your knowledge with reference to
conditions on the Moon. Each group will re-enter its particular aircar,
retaining control of the cube in each case, of course, and will at once
repair to his proper station. Telepathy is the mode of communication
with the cubes, and you rule them by your will. Each group, when
assembled by my father, will choose a leader before quitting this
laboratory, and such leader will remain in command of his group, under
the overlordship of the Spokesman to whom he reports with his group. You
understand!
"Your loyalty is unquestioned. You will consecrate your lives to the
welfare of the Gens to which you are going, since you no longer have a
Gens of your own!"
Sarka turned to the cubes, which had formed in a line just inside the
Exit Dome, and issued a mental command to the cube that had piloted his
aircar from the Moon. The cube faded out instantly, appearing
immediately afterward on the table of the vari-colored lights.
"Father," said Sarka, "while I am issuing orders to the Spokesmen,
please see if you can discover the secret of these cubes: how they are
actuated, the real extent of their intelligence! The rest of you, with
your cubes, depart immediately and report to your new Gens!"
* * * * *
Within ten minutes the divisions had been made, and the Radiant People
had entered the aircars and, outside the laboratory, risen free of the
Earth, and turned, each in its proper direction, for the Gens of its
assignment. The Sarkas and Jaska watched them go.
There remained but one aircar, standing outside on half a dozen of those
grim tentacles, with two tentacles swinging free, undulating to and fro
like serpents. Harnessed electricity actuating the tentacles--cars and
tentacles subservient to the cubes.
The aircars safely on their way, Sarka stepped to the Master Beryl,
tuned it down to normal speed, and signalled the Spokesmen of the Gens.
"The Moon and Mars are in alliance against us, and Dalis has allied
himself and his Gens with the ruler of the Moon! I don't know yet what
form the attack will take, but know this: that the safety of the world,
of all its people, rests in your hands, and that the war into which we
are going is potentially more vast than expected when this venture
began, and more devastating than the fight with the aircars of the Moon!
Coming to you, in aircars which we managed to take from the
Moon-people, are such of the people of the Gens of Dalis as were able to
return with me. Question them, gather all the information you can about
them, and through them keep control of the cubes which pilot the
aircars, for in the cubes, I believe, lies the secret of our possible
victory in the fight to come!"
* * * * *
Sarka scarcely knew why he had spoken the last sentence. It was as
though something deep within him had risen up, commanded him to speak,
and deeper yet, far back in his consciousness, was a mental picture of
the devastation he had witnessed on his flight above the area that had
once housed the Gens of Dalis.
For in that ghastly area, he believed, was embodied an idea greater than
mere wanton destruction, just as there was an idea back of the fiery
lights from Mars greater than mere display. Somehow the two were allied,
and Sarka believed that, between the blue column, and the fiery lights
from Mars, the fate of the world rested.
He could, he believed, by manipulation of the Beryls that yet remained,
maneuver the world away from that blue column--which on the Earth was
invisible. But to have done so would have thwarted the very purpose for
which this mad voyage had been begun. The world had been started on its
mad journey into space for the purpose of attacking and colonizing the
Moon and Mars.
The Moon had been colonized by the Gens of Dalis, already in potential
revolt against the Earth. Mars was next, and by forcing the Earth into
close proximity to Mars the people of the Moon had played into the hands
of Earth-people--if the people of Earth were capable of carrying out the
program of expansion originally proposed by Sarka!
If they were not ... well, Sarka thought somewhat grimly, the resultant
cataclysmic war would at least solve the problem of over-population!
Inasmuch as the Earth was already committed to whatever might transpire,
Sarka believed he should take a philosophic view of the matter!
* * * * *
Sarka turned to an examination of the Master Beryl, and even as he
peered into the depths of it, he thought gratefully how nice it was to
be home again, in his own laboratory, upon the world of his nativity. He
even found it within his heart to feel somewhat sorry for Dalis, and to
feel ashamed that he had, even in his heart, mistreated him.
Then he thought, with a tightening of his jaw muscles, of the casual way
in which Dalis had destroyed Sarka the First, of his forcing his people
to undergo the terrors of the lake of white flames without telling them
the simple secret; of his betrayal of the Earth in his swift alliance
with Luar; or Luar herself when, as Lunar, a strange waif of Earth,
Dalis had sent her out as the first human passenger aboard a rocket to
the Moon. All his pity vanished, though he still believed he had done
right in sparing Dalis' life.
Suddenly there came an ominous humming in the Beryl, and simultaneously
signals from the vari-colored lights on the table. Sarka whirled to the
lights, noting their color, and mentally repeating the names of the
Spokesmen who signalled him.
Even before he gave the signal that placed him in position to converse
with them, he noted the strange coincidence. The Spokesmen who desired
speech with him were tutelary heads of Gens whose borders touched the
devasted area where Dalis had but recently been overlord!
An icy chill caressed his spine as he signalled the Spokesmen to speak.
"Yes, Vardee? Prull? Klaser? Cleric?"
* * * * *
The report of each of them was substantially the same, though couched in
different words, words freighted heavily with strange terror.
"The devasted area has suddenly broken into movement! Throughout that
portion of it visible from my Gens area, the fused mass of debris is
bubbling, fermenting, walking into life! An aura of unearthly menace
seems to flow outward from this heaving mass, and the whole is assuming
a most peculiar radiance--cold gleaming, like distant starshine!"
"Wait!" replied Sarka swiftly. "Wait until the people I have sent you
have arrived! Report to me instantly if the movement of the mass is
noticeably augmented, and especially so if it seems to be breaking up,
or coagulating into any sort of form whatever!"
Then he dimmed the lights, indicating that for the moment there was
nothing more to be said. Just then his father, face very gray and very
old, entered the room of the Master Beryl from the laboratory.
"Son!" he said. "The crisis is almost upon us! The Martians are coming!"