_The Fight_
The city was pandemonium. Tommy, looking down from his post of
command, swore softly under his breath. The Death Mist was harmless to
the defenders of Yugna as a gas, because of their gas masks. But it
served as a screen. It blotted out the waves of attackers so the steam
guns could not be aimed save at the shortest of short ranges. His
precautions were taking effect, to be sure. Two thirds of the
attackers were Ragged Men drawn from about half the surviving cities,
and against such a horde Yugna could not have held out at all but for
his preparations. Now the defenders took a heavy toll. Swarms of men
came racing toward the open gate, their truncheons aglow in the
sunlight. The ring of Death Mist was contracting as if to strangle the
city, and it left the ramparts bare again. And from more than one
point upon the battlements the roaring clouds of steam burst out
again. A dozen guns concentrated on the racing men of Rahn, plunging
from the jungle to enter by the gate. They were racing forward,
without order but at top speed, to share in the fighting and loot.
Then streams of metal balls tore into them. The front of the irregular
column was wiped out utterly. Wide swathes were cut in the rest. The
survivors ran wildly forward over a litter of dead and dying men.
Electric-charge weapons sent crackling discharges among them. Their
contorted figures reeled and fell or leaped convulsively to lie
forever still where they struck. And then the steam guns turned about
to fire into the rear of the men who had charged past them.
The steam guns had literally blasted away the line of Ragged Men where
they stood. But the line went on, with great ragged gaps in it, to be
sure, but still vastly outnumbering the defenders of the city. Here
and there a steam gun was silent, its gun crew dead. And presently
those that were left were useless, immobile upon the ramparts in the
rear of the attack.
* * * * *
Down in the ways of the city the fight rose to a riotous clamor. At
Tommy's order the women of the city had been concentrated into a few
strong towers. The machines of the city were left undefended for a
time. A few strong patrols of fighting men, strategically placed,
flung themselves with irresistible force upon certain bands of
maddened Ragged Men. But where a combat raged, there the Ragged Men
swarmed howling. Their hatred impelled them to suicidal courage and to
unspeakable atrocities. From his tower, Tommy saw a man of Yugna,
evidently a prisoner. Four Ragged Men surrounded him, literally
tearing him to pieces like the maniacs they were. Then he saw dust
spurting up in a swift-advancing line, and all four Ragged Men
twitched and collapsed on top of their victim. A steam gun had done
that. A fighting patrol of the men of Yugna swept fiercely down a
paved way in one of the Golden City's vehicles. There was the glint of
gold from it. A solid, choked mass of invaders rushed upon it. Without
slackening speed, without a pause, the vehicle raced ahead.
Intolerable flashes of light appeared. A thermit-thrower was mounted
on the machine. It drove forward like a flaming meteor, and as
electric-charge weapons flashed upon it men screamed and died. It tore
into a vast cloud of the Death Mist and the unbearable flames of its
weapon could only be seen as illuminations of that deadly vapor.
A part of the city was free of defenders, save the isolated steam
gunners left behind upon the walls. Ragged Men, drunk with success,
ran through its ways, slashing at the walls, battering at the
light-panels, pounding upon the doorways of the towers. Tommy saw them
hacking at the great doorway of a tower. It gave. They rushed within.
Almost instantly thereafter the opening spouted them forth again and
after them, leaping upon them, snapping and biting and striking out
with monstrous paws and teeth, were green lizard-things like the one
that had been killed--years back, it seemed--on Earth. A deadly combat
began instantly. But when the last of the fighting creatures was down,
no more than a dozen were left of the three score who had begun the
fight.
* * * * *
But this was not the main battle. The main battle was hidden under the
Death-Mist cloud, concentrated in a vast thick mass in the very center
of the city. Tommy watched that grimly. Perhaps eight thousand men had
assailed the city. Certainly two thousand of them were represented by
the still or twitching forms in queer attitudes here and there, in
single dots or groups. There were seven hundred corpses before the
city gate alone, where the steam guns had mowed down a reinforcing
column. And there were others scattered all about. The defenders had
lost heavily enough, but Tommy's defense behind the line of the
ramparts was soundly concentrated in strong points, equipped with
steam guns and mostly armed with thermit-throwers as well. From the
center of the city there came only a vast, unorganized tumult of
battle and death.
Then a huge winged thing came soaring down past Tommy's tower. It
landed with a crash on the roofs below, spilling its men like ants.
Tommy strained his eyes. There was a billowing outburst of steam from
the tower where Denham had been working the night before. A big flier
burst into the weird bright flame of the thermit fluid. It fell,
splitting apart as it dropped. Again the billowing steam. No
result--but beyond the city walls showed a flash of thermit flame.
"Denham!" muttered Tommy. "He's got a steam cannon; he's shooting
shells loaded with thermit! They smash when they hit. Good!"
He dispatched a man with orders, but a messenger was panting his way
up as the runner left. He thrust a scribbled bit of paper into Tommy's
hand.
"I'm trying to bring down the ship that's controlling the
Death Mist. I'll shell those devils in the middle of town as
soon as our controls can handle the Mist.
Denham."
Tommy began to snap out his commands. He raced downward toward the
street. Men seemed to spring up like magic about him. A ship with one
wing aflame was tottering in mid-air, and another was dropping like a
plummet.
Then Tommy uttered a roar of pure joy. The huge globe of beautiful,
deadly vapor was lifting! Its control-ship was shattered, and men of
the Golden City had found its setting. The Mist rose swiftly in a
single vast globule of varicolored reflections. And the situation in
the center of the city was clear. Two towers were besieged. Dense
masses of the invaders crowded about them, battering at them. Steam
guns opened from their windows. Thermit-throwers shot out flashes of
deadly fire.
Tommy led five hundred men in savage assault, cleaving the mass of
invaders like a wedge. He cut off a hundred men and wiped them out,
while a rear guard poured electric charges into the main body of the
enemy. More men of Yugna came leaping from a dozen doorways and joined
them. Tommy found Smithers by his side, powder-stained and
sweat-streaked.
* * * * *
"Miss Evelyn's all right?" Smithers asked in a great calm.
"She is," growled Tommy. "On the top floor of a tower, with a hundred
men to guard her."
"You didn't look at the Tube I made," said Smithers impassively; "but
I turned on the steam. Looks like it worked. It's ready to go through,
anyways. It's the same place the other one was, down in that cellar.
I'm tellin' you in case anything happens."
He opened fire with a magazine rifle into the thick of the mob that
assailed the two towers. Tommy left him with fifty men to block a
highway and led his men again into the mass of mingled Ragged Men and
Rahnians. His followers saw his tactics now. They split off a section
of the mob and fell upon it ferociously. There were sudden awful
screams. Thermit flame was rising from two places in the very thick of
the mob. It burst up from a third, and fourth, and fifth.... Denham,
atop his tower, had the range with his steam cannon, and was flinging
heavy shells into the attackers of the two central buildings. And then
there was a roaring of steam and a ground vehicle came to a stop not
fifty feet away. A gun crew of Yugnans had shifted their unwieldy
weapon and its insulated steam boiler to a freight-carrying vehicle.
Now the gunner pulled trigger and traversed his weapon into the thick
of the massed invaders, while his companions worked desperately to
keep the hopper full of projectiles.
The invaders melted away. Steam guns in the towers, thermit
projectiles from the cannon far away: now this.... And the concealing
cloud of Death Mist was rising still, headed straight up toward the
zenith. It looked like a tiny, dwindling pearl.
* * * * *
The assault upon Yugna had been a mad one, a frantic one. But the
flight from Yugna was the flight of men trying to escape from hell.
Wild panic characterized the fleeing men. They threw aside their
weapons and ran with screams of terror no whit less horrible than
their howls of triumph had been. And Tommy would have stopped the
slaughter, but there was no way to send orders to the rampart gunners
in time. As the fugitives swarmed toward the walls again, the storms
of steam-propelled missiles mowed them down. Even those who scrambled
down to the ground outside and fled sobbing for the jungle were
pursued by hails of bullets. Of the eight thousand men who assailed
Yugna, less than one in five escaped.
Pursuit was still in progress. Here and there, through the city, the
sound of isolated combats still went on. Denham came down from his
tower, looking rather sick as he saw the carnage about him. A strong
escort brought Evelyn. Aten was grinning proudly, as though he had in
person defeated the enemy. And as Evelyn shakingly put out her hand to
touch Tommy's arm--it was only later that he realized he had been
wounded in half a dozen minor ways--a shadow roared over their heads.
The crackle of firearms came from it.
"Jacaro!" snarled Tommy. He leaped instinctively to pursue. But the
flying thing was bound for a landing in an open square, the same one
which not long since had seen the heaviest fighting. It alighted there
and toppled askew on contact. Figures tumbled out of it, in torn and
ragged garments fashioned in the style of the very best tailors of the
Earth's underworld.
Men of Yugna raced to intercept them. Firearms spat and bellowed
luridly. In a close-knit, flame-spitting group, the knot of men raced
over fallen bodies and hurtled areas where the pavement had cooled to
no more than a dull-red heat where a thermit shell had struck. One
man, two, three men fell under the small-arms fire. The gangsters went
racing on, firing desperately. They dived into a tunnel and
disappeared.
* * * * *
"The Tube!" roared Smithers. "They' goin' for the Tube!"
He plunged forward, and Tommy seized his arm.
"They'll go through your Tube," he said curtly. "It looks like the one
they came through. They'll think it is. Let 'em!"
Smithers tried to tear free.
"But they'll get back to Earth!" he raged. "They'll get off clear!"
The sharp, cracking sound of a gun-cotton explosion came out of the
doorway into which Jacaro and his men had dived. Tommy smiled very
grimly indeed.
"They've gone through," he said drily, "and they've blown up the Tube
behind them. But--I didn't tell you--I took a look at your castings.
Your pupils were putting them together, ready for the steam to go in,
in place of the coils I used. But--er--Smithers! You'd discarded one
pair of castings. They didn't satisfy you. Your pupils forgot that.
They hooked them all together."
Smithers gulped.
"Instead of four right-angled bends," said Tommy grimly, "you have six
connected together. You turned on the steam in a hurry, not noticing.
And I don't know how many series of dimensions there are in this
universe of ours. We know of two. There may be any number. But Jacaro
and his men didn't go back to Earth. God only knows where they landed,
or what it's like. Maybe somewhere a million miles in space. Nobody
knows. The main thing is that Earth is safe now. The Death Mist has
faded out of the picture."
He turned and smiled warmly at Evelyn. He was a rather horrible sight
just then, though he did not know it. He was bloody and burned and
wounded. He ignored all matters but success, however.
"I think," he said drily, "we have won the confidence of the Golden
City, Evelyn, and that there'll be no more talk of gassing Earth. As
soon as the Council meets again, we'll make sure. And then--well, I
think we can devote a certain amount of time to our personal affairs.
You are the first Earth-girl to be kissed in the Fifth Dimension.
We'll have to see if you can't distinguish yourself further."
* * * * *
Again the Council hall in the tower of government in the Golden City
of Yugna. Again the queer benches about the black wood table--though
two of the seats that had been occupied were now empty. Again the
guards behind the chairs, and the crowd of watchers--visitors,
citizens of Yugna attending the deliberations of the Council. The
audience was a queer one, this time. There were bandages here and
there. There were men who were wounded, broken, bent and crippled in
the fighting. But a warmly welcoming murmur spread through the hall as
Tommy came in, himself rather extensively patched. He was wearing the
tunic and breeches of the Golden City, because his own clothes were
hopelessly beyond repair. The bearded old Councilor gathered the eyes
of his fellows. They rose. This Council seated itself as one man.
Quiet, placid formalities. The Keeper of Foodstuffs murmured that the
ransom paid to Rahn had been recaptured after the fight. The Keeper of
Rolls reported with savage satisfaction the number of enemies who had
been slain in battle. He added that the loss to Yugna was less than
one man to ten of the enemy. And he added with still greater emphasis
that the shops being fitted with automatic controls had released
now--it had grown so much--two thousand men from the necessary
day-and-night working force, and further releases were to be expected.
The demands of the machines were lessened already beyond the memory of
man. Eyes turned to Tommy. There was an expectant pause for his reply.
* * * * *
"I have been Commander of Defense Forces," he told them slowly, "in
this fighting. I have given you weapons. My two friends have done
more. The machines will need fewer and fewer attendants as the hints
they have given you are developed by yourselves. And there is some
hope that one of my friends may show you, in ultra-sonic vibrations, a
weapon against the jungle itself. My own work is finished. But I ask
again for friendship for my planet Earth. I ask that no war be made on
my own people. I ask that what benefits you receive from us be passed
to the other surviving cities on the same terms. And since there can
be no further fighting on this scale, I give back my commission as
Commander of Defense."
There was a little murmur among the men of Yugna, looking on. It rose
to a protesting babble, to a shout of denial. The bearded old Keeper
of Foodstuffs smiled.
"It is proposed that the appointment as Commander of Defense Forces be
permanent," he said mildly.
He produced the queer black box and touched it in a certain fashion.
He passed it to the next man, and the next and next. It went around
the table. It passed a second time, but this time each man merely
looked at the top.
"You command the defense forces of Yugna for always," said the bearded
old man, gently. "Now give orders that your requests become laws."
* * * * *
Tommy stared blankly. He was suddenly aware of Aten in the background,
smiling triumphantly and very happily at him. There was something like
a roar of approval from the men of Yugna, assembled.
"Just what," demanded Tommy, "does this mean?"
"For many years," said a hawk-faced man ungraciously, "we have had no
Commander of Defense. We have had no wars. But we see it is needful.
We have chosen you, with all agreeing. The Commander of Defense"--he
sniffed a little, pugnaciously--"has the authority the ancient kings
once owned."
Tommy leaned back in the curious benchlike chair, his eyes narrow and
thoughtful. This would simplify matters. No danger of trouble to
Earth. A free hand for Denham and Smithers to help these folk, and for
Denham to learn scientific facts--in the sciences they had
developed--which would be of inestimable value to Earth. And it could
be possible to open a peaceful trade with the nations of Earth without
any danger of war. And maybe....
He smiled suddenly. It widened almost into a grin.
"All right. I'll settle down here for a while. But--er--just how does
one set about getting married here?"