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 with _harmeena_, 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.