_Weird Battleground!_
"We have it going very well," said Tako, chuckling. "Don't you think
so? Sit here by me. We will stay here for a time now."
Tako had a small flat rock for a table. On it he had spread his
paraphernalia for this battle--if battle it could be called. Weird
contest! Opposing forces, each imponderable to the other so that no
physical contact had yet been made. Tako sat at his rock; giving
orders to his leaders who came hurrying up and were away at his
command; or speaking orders into his sound apparatus; or consulting
his charts and co-ordinates, questioning Don and me at times over
the meaning of shadowy things we could see taking place about us.
A little field headquarters our post here might have been termed.[8]
[8] The detailed nature of the scientific devices Tako used
in the handling of his army during the attack never has been
disclosed. I saw him using one of the eye-telescopes. There
was also a telephonic device and occasionally he would
discharge a silent signal radiance--a curious intermittent
green flare of light. His charts of the topography of New
York City were to me incomprehensible
hieroglyphics--mathematical formula, no doubt; the
co-ordinates of altitudes and contours of our world-space in
its relation to the mountainous terrain of his world which
stood mingled here with the New York City buildings.
We were grouped now around Tako on a small level ledge of rock. It
lay on a broken, steeply ascending ramp of a mountainside. The
mountain terraces towered back and above us. In front, two hundred
feet down, was a valley of pits and craters; and to the sides a
tumbled region of alternating precipitous cliffs and valley depths.
Upon every point of vantage, for two or three miles around us,
Tako's men were dispersed. To us, they were solid gray blobs in the
luminous darkness. The carriers, all arrived now, stood about a mile
from us, and save for their guards, the men had all left them. The
weapons were being taken out and carried to various points over the
mountains and in the valley depths. Small groups of men--some two
hundred in a group--were gathered at many different points,
assembling their weapons, and waiting for Tako's orders. Messengers
toiled on foot between them, climbing, white figures. Signals
flashed.
Fantastic, barbaric scene--it seemed hardly modern. Mountain defiles
were swarming with white invaders, making ready, but not yet
attacking.
* * * * *
We had had as yet no opportunity of talking alone with Jane since we
left the carrier. The incident with Tolla was to us wholly
inexplicable. But that it was significant of something, we knew--by
Jane's tense white face and the furtive glances she gave us. Don and
I were ready to seize the first opportunity to question her.
Tolla, by the command of Tako, stayed close by Jane, and the two
girls were always within sight of us. They were here now, seated on
the rocks twenty feet from us. And the two guards, whom Tako had
appointed at the carrier, sat near us with alert weapons, watching
Jane and us closely.[9]
[9] There was a thing which puzzled me before we arrived in
the carrier, and surprised me when we left it; and though I
did not, and still do not wholly understand it, I think I
should mention it here. Traveling in the carrier we were
suspended in a condition of matter which might be termed mid
way between Tako's realm and our Earth-world. Both, in
shadowy form, were visible to us; and to an observer on
either world we also were visible.
Then, as the carrier landed, it receded from this sort of
borderland as I have termed it, contacted with its own realm
and landed. At once I saw that the shadowy outlines of New
York were gone. And, to New York observers, the carriers as
they landed, were invisible. The mountains--all this tumbled
barren wilderness of Tako's world--were invisible to
observers in New York.
But I knew now how very close were the two worlds--a very
fraction of visible "distance," one from the other.
Then, with wires, disks and helmets--all the transition
mechanism worn now by us and all of Tako's forces--we drew
ourselves a very small fraction of the way toward the
Earth-world state. Enough and no more than to bring it to
most tenuous, most wraithlike visibility, so that we could
see the shadows of it and know our location in relation to
it, which was necessary to Tako's operations.
In this state, New York City was a wraith to us--and we were
shadowy, dimly visible apparitions to New York observers.
But in this slight transition, we did not wholly disconnect
with the terrain of Tako's world. There was undoubtedly--if
the term could be called scientific--a depth of field to the
solidity of these mountains. By that I mean, their
tangibility persisted for a certain distance toward other
dimensions. Perhaps it was a greater "depth of field" than
the solidity of our world possesses. As to that, I do not
know.
But I do know, since I experienced it, that as we sat now
encamped upon this ledge, the ground under us felt only a
trifle different from when we had full contact with it.
There was a lightness upon us--an abnormal feeling of
weight-loss--a feeling of indefinable abnormality to the
rocks. Yet, to observers in New York, we were faintly to be
seen, and the rocks upon which we sat were not.
There was just once after we left the carrier, toiling over the
rocks with Tako's little cortege to this vantage point on the ledge,
that Jane found an opportunity of communicating secretly with us.
"Tolla told me something about the giant projector! Something about
how it--"
She could say almost nothing but that. "The projector, Bob, if you
can only learn how it--"
Tolla was upon us, calling to attract Tako's attention, and Jane
moved away.
* * * * *
The giant projector! We had it with us now; a dozen men had
laboriously carried it up here. Not yet assembled, it stood here on
the ledge--a rectangular gray box about the size and shape of a
coffin, encased now in the mesh of transition mechanism. Tako
intended to materialize us and that box into the city when the time
came, unpack and erect the projector, and with its long range
dominate all the surrounding country.
Tolla had almost told Jane something about it! Jane was trying to
learn that secret. Or she thought we might learn it from Tako. But
of what use if we did? We were helpless, every moment under the eyes
of guards whose little hand-beams could in a second annihilate us.
When, leaving the carrier, Jane had appeared garbed like the rest of
us and we had all been equipped with the transition mechanism which
we knew well how to use now, the thought came to me of trying to
escape. But it was futile. I could set the switches at my belt to
materialize me into New York. But as I faded, the weapons of the
guards would have been quick enough to catch me. How could Jane, Don
and I simultaneously try a thing like that.
"Impossible!" Don whispered. "Don't do anything wrong. Some chance
may come, later."
But with that slight transition over, Tako at once removed from our
belts a vital part of the mechanism in order to make it impotent.
An hour passed, here on the ledge, with most of the activity of
Tako's men incomprehensible to us.
"You shall see very soon," he chuckled grimly, "I can give the
signal to attack--all at once. Look there! They grow very bold,
these New York soldiers. They have come to inspect us."
* * * * *
It was night in New York City--about two A.M. of the night of May
19th and 20th. Our mountain ledge was within a store on the east
side of Fifth Avenue at 36th Street. We seemed to be but one story
above the pavement. The shadowy outlines of a large rectangular room
with great lines of show-cases dividing it into wide aisles. I
recognized it at once--a jewelry store, one of the best known in the
world. A gigantic fortune in jewelry was here, some of it hastily
packed in great steel safes nearby, and some of it abandoned in
these show-cases when the panic swept the city a few days
previously.
But the jewelry of our world was nothing to these White Invaders.
Tako never even glanced at the cases, or knew or cared what sort of
a store this was.
The shadowy street of Fifth Avenue showed just below us. It was
empty now of vehicles and people, but along it a line of soldiers
were gathered. Other stores and ghostly structures lay along Fifth
Avenue. And five hundred feet away, diagonally across the avenue,
the great Empire State Building, the tallest structure in the entire
world, towered like a ghostly Titan into the void above us.
This ghostly city! We could see few details. The people had all
deserted this mid-Manhattan now. The stores and hotels and office
buildings were empty.
A group of soldiers came into the jewelry store and stood within a
few feet of us, peering at us. Yet so great was the void between us
that Tako barely glanced at them. He was giving orders constantly
now. For miles around us his men on the mountains and in the valleys
were feverishly active.
* * * * *
But doing what? Don and I could only wonder. A tenseness had gripped
upon Tako. The time for his attack was nearing.
"Very presently now," he repeated. He gestured toward the great
apparition of the Empire State Building so near us.
"I am sparing that. A good place for us to mount the projector--up
there in that tall tower. You see where our mountain slope cuts
through that building? We can materialize with the projector at that
point."
The steep ramp of the mountainside upon which we were perched sloped
up and cut midway through the Empire State Building. The building's
upper portion was free of the mountain whose peaks towered to the
west. We could climb from our ledge up the ramp to the small area
where it intersected the Empire State at the building's sixtieth to
seventieth stories.
The apparitions of New York's soldiers stood in the jewelry store
with futile leveled weapons.
"They are wondering what we are doing!" Tako chuckled.
A dozen of Tako's men, unheeding the apparitions, were now busy
within a few hundred feet of us down the rocky slope. We saw at
close view, what Tako's army was busy doing everywhere. The men had
little wedge-shaped objects of a gray material. The materialization
bombs! They were placing them carefully at selected points on the
rocks, and adjusting the firing mechanisms. This group near us,
which Don and I watched with a fascinated horror, were down in the
basement of the jewelry store, among its foundations. There for a
moment; then moving out under Fifth Avenue, peering carefully at the
spectral outlines of the cellars of other structures.
Then presently Tako called an order. He stood for a moment on the
ledge with arms outstretched so that his men, and Don and I and
Jane, and the wondering apparitions of the gathered soldiers and New
York Police could see him. His moment of triumph! It marked his face
with an expression which was utterly Satanic.
Then he dropped his arms for the signal to attack.