“Why?” he protested. “Don’t I get in this at all, Len?”
But I kept him there. It was no time for us to plunge recklessly at
Talon. He had surprised our first attack and worsted us in the conflict.
I was not willing to try that again.
Flying low, I headed over the rolling hills for Talon’s present land
base. I put on my helmet, drew up the insulating shields that lined the
sides of the platform. At my wrist the pulse-motor was throbbing.
I switched on the Frazier current, gripped the controls of the huge
projector. If I could concentrate my thoughts enough . . . with
intensity enough. I was letting them rove now, gathering strength. If I
could halt that devastating black beam, and then order another attack,
all our remaining forces attacking at once—
In my ears suddenly was Maxite’s voice, “I’m ordering Jim to use the
wind projector. Talon’s forces are making for the island. We may be able
to blow them away, toward the East Channel, where our boats can get at
them.”
Behind me I heard the hiss and roar as the great wind projector got into
action, a stream of expanding, heat-yielding electrons flung in a path
over the channel surface. A roar, the hot air rising, the cold wind
sweeping in; the channel was soon lashed with angry waves.
It had grown very dark. Black clouds edged with lightning were coming
down from the north. The thunder claps were louder. I swept low over
Talon’s lines. Groups of head clustered on the ground, some mounted on
the brutemen.
A crowd moved about a huge black muzzle pointed diagonally upward toward
Kalima.
I passed close over it, a hundred feet up, but I hoped that for a moment
I would not be seen in the darkness.
To my right was the yellow barrage radiance along the shore. Large,
bowl-like wire cages set at intervals of a hundred feet. They glowed
yellow, huge pots of the spreading barrage light. Mounted heads were
attending them.
I dashed at one. I shouted, stood up on my swaying platform and screamed
with menacing words. The heads looked up, surprised. The Frazier
projector spat its intensified ray.
Woodenly, the heads and the brutemen stood stricken; the pot of light
went out. I passed within fifty feet of it; my fire-flash, effective at
this short range, spat its tongue of blue flame. The brutemen and the
heads, the pot of barrage light itself, shriveled under the blast.
I swept along the barrage line, the Frazier beam preceding me. From the
other side, and from below, yellow rings of fire darted up. They struck
my upraised side-shield, and the bottom of the platform. I could hear
the crack of the reports as they struck.
The encampment was in confusion, thousands of dark, surging figures.
Small, black beams swung at me, mingled with the fire-rings. A
light-flare burst over my head. Shouts, a rush of dim figures to avoid
me; one of my birds was struck. I cut it loose. It fell.
But I was not halted; a minute or two of swift flight, the barrage went
dark as I sprayed it with the Frazier beam and the blue fire. I came to
the giant projector of the black ray; it shriveled, fused. Its gunners
vanished under my blast.
The air was acrid with metallic gases and the smell of burning human
flesh. But Talon’s shoreline was dark, devastated. Another of my birds
wavered; I urged them all upward. Fire-rings rocked my platform with
their detonations. But I was rising. They fell away. The shouts of
confusion lessened, melted beneath me.
I was over the water again, safe beyond the lines. The barrage was gone.
The giant black beam was destroyed. I tried to tune in for Maxite, could
not get him. But I got Jim.
“Forward! Attack now! Swiftly, Jim, with all you’ve got!”
Then I got Maxite. “Order the attack!”
I could not get his image. My controls were disabled, or the atmosphere
was overcharged. But I heard his triumphant voice. “We’ll get them,
Leonard, get them now!”
The storm from the north broke with fury; no rain, but a blast of wind,
sizzling lightning bolts, and the roar of thunder.
Jim had evidently abandoned his windblast. His forces were dashing
forward. A spray of the violet needle beams curved up before him.
Talon’s line was answering. Fire-rings were floating up. Black rays were
waving. The two lines, came together as Jim’s army rushed forward; the
rolling hills off there were a confusion of darting lights and crossing
rays, myriad mid-air explosions.
Then it seemed that Talon’s line was drawing back, a retreat northward.
A yellow barrage went up to cover it. But Jim rushed it; the barrage
vanished. With some great projector, Talon’s heads made a stand.
A great ball of fire rose into the heavens, a tremendous arc over Jim’s
army, until it fell at the horizon. Fell on Kalima? I thought so; There
was a glare against the sky over there. At five-minute intervals these
fire-balls went up, bombarding the distant city.
Sonya was fifteen thousand feet over the channel when our second attack
began. The storm was driving the girls back; the birds could barely hold
against the wind. The sea far below was a turmoil of lashing waves.
Our boats in the east channel started forward to try and reach Talon’s
rafts. But the rafts had blown ashore, were wrecked on the north rocky
beach of the island.
Angry waves dashed over them. The heads and the brute-bodies were washed
ashore with each white surge of the water.
Our boats saw it. They dropped back into the lee of the island, in the
East Channel. The water was a little calmer there.
Close along shore they hovered, and began raking the island with their
needle beams, a steady outpour of violet streams, and blasts from the
blue fire-guns.
The island’s verdure shriveled, all along the east shore. Then Maxite
ordered Jim to set a projector on the west bluff. It soon was sending a
blue stream across the channel. The west side of the island was raked
from end to end.
Sonya’s girls were scattered by the wind. But she saw some of them
poised over the north end of the island where Talon’s men were trying to
land from the rafts. The girls dropped a bomb, then another. The bombs
were finding their marks.
Sonya urged her bird in that direction. But abruptly the thought of
Altho came clear and vivid to her mind. She had long since given Altho
up for dead, killed by our own weapons. But he was not dead. His
thoughts came to her with sudden clearness.
I saw the bombardment of Kalima finally halted. Jim, victorious, was
sweeping everything before him. His projector still raked the island.
The island’s vegetation was burning now from end to end. On the north
beach the huddled figures were nearly gone; bodies were everywhere. The
water was dotted with them.
Along the main shore now, in advance of Jim, Talon’s army was in utter
rout. Frantic brutemen with mounted heads rushed to the beach, plunged
in. The heads were torn away; floating like balloons on the white
lashing waves. Back along the shore, Jim’s men were lined. Needle beams
darted out at the floating heads.
Everywhere we were winning. Far back in the country I could see Jim’s
triumphant lights, spreading everywhere.
From the turmoil of water beneath me, a boat rose up, a long, narrow
black boat. Its cover slid back. It was heading northward, away from
Kalima, speeding swiftly, with a line of bubbles in its wake.
I remembered it; the boat Jim had described. Talon’s boat! Talon, who
had been lurking beneath the surface of the sea, waiting in safety for
victory, so that he might rush for Kalima. Now, with defeat, he was
escaping. Altho, perhaps, was with him.
I turned my aerial, trying to pick up Maxite. But I could not get him.
Then I tried one of our nearest boats raking the island, ordered it to
follow Talon. Behind me, far down, I saw it turn and start.
I drove my birds downward in a swoop for Talon’s boat. Beneath me, close
to the water I seemed to see the shadow of a flying bird, but in a
moment I had forgotten it.
A breathless swoop and I was close upon the boat. From the dim glow of
its engines, I saw it held only four figures, three mounted heads. Two
were controlling the boat. The other was Talon. I could see him moving
about giving commands. And Altho lay in the boat’s bottom, Altho, his
body lashed and bound into an inert bundle.
My Frazier beam struck the boat’s interior. The two mounted heads
controlling it stiffened and fell. But Talon was untouched. I was close
over the stern of the boat, holding my projector downward. Talon’s face
glared up at me, untouched. His brute-body stiffened and slumped, but
Talon disconnected from it.
His head dropped to the deck upon his hands. His eyes glared up at me. A
flash of black spat from his hand-projector. At this close range my
platform crumpled. It fell, struck the boat’s stern, and toppled half
into the water. I had leaped. I fell into the boat.
But another figure had landed there before me, a giant, fluttering bird.
Sonya jumped from it, seized Altho’s bound body. Talon’s small flash
darted at her, but missed.
My wrecked platform, half on the boat’s stern, weighed it down. The boat
began to fill with water.
I saw vaguely as I leaped at Talon, that Sonya was dragging Altho’s
inert form to the gunwale. They went overboard together. My hurtling
body struck the head of Talon. It cracked, smashed under my weight. I
climbed from its noisome, sticky mass.
The boat was filling, sinking stern first. I dove over its side, into
the wave-whipped sea.
The sinking boat sucked me under. But I came up. Around me was a white,
tumultuous darkness. Overhead the storm clouds had broken into a rift;
the yellow moonlight came through. Something was floating near me, some
wreckage from the boat, a gas-filled pontoon. I seized it.
Behind me, our boat from the island was approaching. Then I saw,
upraised near me by a surging wave-crest, a human figure struggling.
Sonya, struggling to keep Altho above the water. I reached them.
“Sonya! Here, hold to this! I’ve got him!”
A sea animal went by us with a rush. Our pursuing boat drew up; its
black side was a wall above us. The insulating side-shield rolled back.
Anxious men’s faces stared down at us over the gunwale. Arms came down
and hauled us up.
I heard Alice’s voice; and Dolores’s, “Len! And Sonya . . . and the
prince! Thank God you’re all safe!”
And from far over the land came the scream of Jim’s siren, the signal of
victory there.
XVIII
THE GREAT RIDDLE
The homecoming! The return of our war-racked forces to the city, with
half its suburbs burned, and a thousand of its people killed by Talon’s
bombardment! I shall not describe the cheers, the laughter, the sobbing.
Victory in war can seem to be so little better than defeat! All the
paeans of triumph cannot heal the maimed, or bring back the dead.
I was king no longer, for our prince now was ruler, with Sonya for his
queen. I was glad to be released. There is a very false, a pseudo-glory,
in ruling a nation.
But Altho would not have me wholly resign. My promised reforms, my
earthly ideas of government, were needed here. And so they called me
premier, and thrived upon a crude but humane version of what we on earth
would call a civilized government: a veneration of the aged, a new idea
of infant welfare, a monogamy of marriage with the surplus women doing
their rational work in art and industry.
Of Talon’s thousands, fully half of them escaped back into the
mountains. They are there now. They will always be a menace. But there
is not a race of humans in all the universe unmenaced by something. The
very essence of human existence is struggle. We do not think of Talon’s
brutes now as the Nameless Horror, and we are always prepared.
It was shortly after my marriage to Alice, that one evening I came upon
Jim and Dolores in each other’s arms.
“Well!” I said. “What’s this?”
He kissed her again. “I loved her right from the beginning,” he
declared.
Which was not exactly true, but I knew he thought so.
I had never seen little Dolores so radiant. “And I always loved him,
Len. You know that.”
I did indeed. And she had never wavered in that love, from the days when
he had seized the little blind child and whirled her in the air.
Our return to earth? We never made it. With Dr. Weatherby’s death, the
grave held the vital knowledge we needed for such a journey. Nor did we
desire it. Our lives were cast here.
Often now, from earth, thought-waves reach me, tiny earth, rolling on
with a speeding time so much faster than ours of this outer realm!
Centuries have passed on earth. Of what use for me to return—a
primitive, savage being of their past ages?
Civilizations have risen, held their peak, and declined. Great cities
have come and gone. Ice has been again where once I saw the jungles of
the tropics. And the ice has melted again through countless ages.
The new humans of earth often communicate with me. Their thoughts are
amazed at what I have to tell them. It is all amazing to me, the great
riddle of the universe. And I think sometimes of that ancient
earth-astronomer, groping with the riddle, writing in his ancient book:
Man, the little god of this earth, tied down to the small star
which infinite Nature gave him for an abode, storms forth into
immeasurable stellar space with his thoughts.
From that little earth I stormed forth in body, beyond the stars!