_On the Tower Balcony_
Upon the little observatory balcony at the top of the Empire State
some twelve hundred feet above the stricken city, Don and I were
with Tako as he erected the giant projector. In the midst of the
silent shadowy outline of the stricken city falling around us, we
had carried the projector up the mountain slope. The spectre of the
Empire State Building was presently around us; we were in a hallway
of one of the upper stories. Slowly, we materialized with our
burden. I recall, as the dark empty corridor of the office building
came to solidity around me, with what surprise I heard for the first
time the muffled reverberations from the crumbling city....
We climbed the dark and empty stairs, upward into the mooring mast.
Don and I toiled with the box, under the weapons of our two guards.
It was only a few minutes while Tako assembled and mounted the
weapon. It stood a trifle higher than the parapet top. It rolled
freely upon a little carriage mounted with wheels. Don and I peered
at it. We hovered close to Tako with only one thought in our minds,
Jane's murmured words--if we could learn something about this
projector....
* * * * *
Then the horror dulled us. We obeyed orders mechanically, as though
all of it were a terrible dream, with only a vague undercurrent of
reiterated thought: some chance must come--some fated little chance
coming our way.
I recall, during those last terrible minutes when Tako flung the
projector beam to send all his distant enemies hurtling into
annihilation, that I stood in a daze by the parapet. Don had ceased
to look. Tako was rolling the projector from one point to another
around the circular balcony. Sometimes he was out of sight on the
other side, with the observatory room in the mast hiding him.
We had been ordered not to move. The two guards stood with hand
weapons turned on so that the faint green beams slanted downward by
their feet, instantly ready, either for Don or me.
And I clung to the balcony rail, staring down at the broken city. It
lay strewn and flattened as though, not ten minutes, but ten
thousand years of time had crumbled it into ruins.
Then shots from the distant warships began screaming at us. With a
grim smile, Tako silenced them. There was a momentary lull.
And then came our chance! Fate, bringing just one unforeseen little
thing to link the chain, to turn the undercurrent of existing
circumstances--and to give us our chance. Or perhaps Jane, guided by
fate, created the opportunity. She does not know. She too was dazed,
numb--but there was within her also the memory of what Tolla had
almost said. And Tolla's frenzy of jealousy....
* * * * *
Tako appeared from around the balcony, rolling the projector. Its
beam was off. He flung a glance of warning at the two guards to
watch us. He left the projector, flushed, triumphant, all his senses
perhaps reeling with the realization of what he had done. He saw the
two girls huddled in the moonlight of the balcony floor. He stooped
and pushed Tolla roughly away.
"Jane! Jane, did you see it? My triumph! Tako, master of everything!
Even of you--is it not so?"
Did some instinct impel her not to repulse him? Some intuition
giving her strength to flash him a single alluring moonlit glance?
But suddenly he had enwrapped her in his arms. Kissing her,
murmuring love and lust....
This was our chance. But we did not know it then. A very chaos of
diverse action so suddenly was precipitated upon this balcony!
Don and I cried out and heedlessly leaped forward. The tiny beams of
the guards swung up. But they did not reach us, for the guards
themselves were stricken into horror. The shot from a far-distant
warship screamed past. But that went almost unheeded. Tako had
shouted, and the guards impulsively turned so that their beams
missed Don and me.
Tolla had flung herself upon Tako and Jane. Screaming, she tore at
them and all in an instant rose to her feet. Tako's cylinder, which
she had snatched, was in her hand. She flashed it on as Don and I
reached her.
* * * * *
The guards for that instant could not fire for we were all
intermingled. Don stumbled in his rush and fell upon Tako and Jane,
and in a moment rose as the giant Tako lifted him and tried to cast
him off.
My rush flung me against Tolla. She was babbling, mouthing frenzied
laughs of hysteria. Her beam pointed downward, but as she reeled
from the impact of my rush, the beam swung up; missed me, narrowly
missed the swaying bodies of Tako and Don, and struck one of the
guards who was standing, undecided what to do. It clung to him for a
second or two, and then swung to the other guard.
The guards in a puff of spectral light were gone. Tolla stood
wavering; then swung her light toward Tako and Don. But I was upon
her.
"Tolla! Good God--"
"Get back from me! Back, I tell you."
I heard Jane's agonized warning from the floor. "Bob!"
Tolla's light missed my shoulder. Tako had cast Don off and stood
alone as he turned toward us. Then Tolla's light-beam swung on him.
I heard her eery maddened laugh as it struck him.
A wraith of Tako was there, stricken as though numbed by
surprise.... Then nothingness....
Shots from the distant warships were screaming around us. One struck
the base of the building.
I clung to my scattering senses. I gripped Tolla.
"That projector--what was it you almost told Jane?"
* * * * *
She stood stupidly babbling. "Told Jane? That projector--"
She laughed wildly, and like a tigress, cast me off. "Fools of men!
Tako--the fool!"
She swung into a frenzy of her own language. And then back into
English. "I will show you--Tako, the fool! All those fools out there
under the ground and in the sky. I will show them!"
She stooped over the projector and fumbled with the mechanism.
Don gasped, "Those apparitions--is that what you're going to
attack?"
"Yes--attack them!"
The beam flashed on. But it was a different beam now. Fainter, more
tenuous; the hum from it was different.
It leaped into the ground. It was a spreading beam this time. It
bathed the white apparitions who were peering up at the city.
Why, what was this? Weird, fantastic sight! There was a moment of
Tolla's frenzied madness; then she staggered away from the
projector. But Don and I had caught the secret. We took her place.
We carried it on.
We were hardly aware that the far-off warships had ceased firing. We
hardly realized that Tolla had rushed for the parapet; climbed,
screaming and laughing--and that Jane tried to stop her.
"Oh, Tolla, don't--"
But Tolla toppled and fell.... Her body was almost not recognized
when it was later found down in the ruins.
Don and I flung this new beam into the night. We rolled the
projector around the platform, hurling the beam in every direction
at the white apparitions....
* * * * *
It had caught first that group which lurked in the ground near the
base of the Empire State. Tolla had turned the beam to the reverse
co-ordinates from those Tako used. It penetrated into the
borderland, reached the apparitions and forcibly materialized them!
A second or two it clung to that group of white men's shapes in the
ground. They grew solid; ponderable. But the space they now claimed
was not empty! Solid rock was here, yielding no space to anything!
Like the little materialization bombs, this was nature outraged. The
ground and the solid rock heaved up, broken and torn, invisibly
permeated and strewn with the infinitesimal atomic particles of what
a moment before had been the bodies of living men.
We caught with the beam that marching line of apparitions beneath
the ground surface--a section of Tako's army which was advancing
upon Westchester. The city streets over them surged upward. And some
we caught under the rivers and within the waters of the bay, and the
waters heaved and lashed into turmoil.
Then we turned the beam into the air. The apparitions lost contact
with their invisible mountain peaks. And with sudden solidity, the
gravity of our world pulled at them. They fell. Solid men's bodies,
falling with the moonlight on them. Dark blobs turning end over end;
plunging into the rivers and the harbor with little splashes of
white to mark their fall; and yet others whirling down, crashing
into the wreckage of masonry, into the pall of smoke and the lurid
yellow flames of the burning city.
The attack of the White Invaders was over.
* * * * *
A year has passed. There has been no further menace; perhaps there
never will be. And again, the invisible realm of which Don, Jane and
I were vouchsafed so strange a glimpse, lies across a void
impenetrable. Earth scientists have the projector, with its current
batteries apparently almost exhausted. And they have the transition
mechanism which we three were wearing. But of those, the vital
element had been removed by Tako--and was gone with him. Many others
were found on the bodies, and upon the body of poor Tolla. But all
were wrecked by their fall.
Perhaps it is just as well. Yet, often I ponder on that other realm.
What strange customs and science and civilization I glimpsed.
Out of such thoughts one always looms upon me: a contemplation of
the vastness of things to be known.
And the kindred thought: what a very small part of it we really
understand!
End of Project Gutenberg's The White Invaders, by Raymond King Cummings