ON OUR WAY TO CONQUER THE EARTH!
In the confusion I found myself pushed a considerable distance,
separated from all our party. I could not see any of them; with the
scrambling throng, the changing scene I could not at first determine
where we had been sitting. Then I saw the place; it was empty. I strove
to get there, fighting my way. The amphitheater was fast emptying. The
official voice was still bellowing. Guards were leaping away, perhaps
rushing to the grotto. In the distance across the city a siren was
sounding--a long electrical scream.
I thought, over near the gate through which a press of people were
surging, that I saw father. I forced my way in that direction; went
through the gate. They ought to be waiting for me here. But they were
not.
A cross-street ran down at an angle here into the forest vegetation--a
narrow, shaky-looking causeway of fiber. It was unlighted, dark with
straggling moonlight--a purple, ghostly-looking street. It seemed at
the moment empty of people--the throng surged past it, keeping to the
upper level.
From behind me as I stood there a dark-cloaked figure darted past me
and plunged down it. Dan! It was as tall as he; seemed moving with our
earthly heavy tread. I started down after it; I would have shouted, but
the words choked me. It was not Dan--not anyone of earth, for all its
solid gait! It passed through a shaft of moonlight; from the cloak, I
saw a white arm hanging. Waving.
This was a man, carrying some one; I caught a glimpse of the bulk
of the other body he was holding in his arms, under his cloak. He
disappeared down into the purple darkness. Memory of the little tug I
had felt in my fingers as Zetta's hair was withdrawn sprang to me now.
Was that Zetta under that cloak? Her arm I had seen waving from beneath
it?
With the Essen automatic in my hand, I found myself plunging, half
falling, down the flimsy street. Beneath the strain of my incautious
descent, it bent and crackled. Houses like nests were set here in the
dark, pod-laden foliage. They sagged with me as I passed. A woman came
to the window of one of them and shouted.
I reached the ground. A vaulted, tunnel-like street was cut through the
jungle. Ahead of me, a hundred yards or so, the moonlight showed clear
where the jungle ended and the open country began. I thought I saw the
hooded figure hurrying out there. I ran--I wondered if I would get a
chance to shoot. If that were Zetta he was carrying I would not dare.
I think now I have never been, before or since, so incautious. I came
with a rush out of the dark depths of the forest, into an open moonlit
area. A red glow hovered like a circular curtain near at hand. Within
a dozen steps of me, a small railed platform lay upon the ground. Men
were on it. Brauns! A black-hooded figure was standing holding Zetta!
Zetta, with fear sweeping her face as she saw me appear.
I must have stood for an instant in confusion. I remember casting off
the impediment of my cloak. A dozen men came leaping at me. I fired
the Essen, but hit no one. It was knocked from my hand as one of the
leaping bodies struck me.
They closed in on me. I turned and swung at them. Flimsy things! My
dirk tore into the shoulder of one. He went down with a scream. The
dirk had buried, hilt and all; I let it go. I wrenched an arm loose
from around my neck; hit another man full in the face. Two others I
knocked aside with a sweep of my arm. Another leaped astride my back,
but I heaved him off as though he were a child clinging there. They
must have been without weapons. They clung, bit and tore at me--a ring
of them struggling to hold me.
I burst through them; but, like birds, they were at me again. One I
lifted bodily and hurled a dozen feet. Another I caught by his legs,
whirling him, a thirty-pound bludgeon to knock the others away. I
had almost reached Zetta. I shouted to her--I do not know what. She
answered; but it was a scream of warning. I turned too late. Some one
from behind crashed a block of metal stone on my head. I went down into
soundless, empty darkness.
* * * * *
When I recovered consciousness I was lying on the platform. It was in
mid-air; I could feel it sway, feel the rush of the wind past me on
that thirty-foot square, railed platform. Some fifteen men crowded near
its center, where in a small pit, its anti-gravity, lifting mechanism
was installed. It was this pit--a white glow there--which first I saw
when I opened my eyes. The glow shone upward upon the faces and figures
of the seated men. Brauns. I sat up unsteadily. One of my captors was
beside me. He murmured an unintelligible command; but when he saw I
only intended to sit up, he relaxed.
The platform was sailing through the purple moonlight. I was too far
from the rail to see over it to the ground, but in the distance I could
make out a line of the metal mountains--naked crags glistening under
the stars.
From behind a platform a yellow fire streamed out, like a vessel's
wake; we were being propelled forward by the impulse of its thrust
against the air. Vertical and horizontal rudders were back there. In
front also, and to the sides, were small lateral wing-rudders.
A gentle hand touched my shoulder. Zetta was seated beside me.
Unharmed, her face lighting with relief that I, too, seemed uninjured.
My head was roaring from the blow; blood, now drying, matted my hair.
But it seemed only a scalp wound.
The man guarding us called to his fellows; two of them came and looked
me over, and then went back. The guard moved to seat himself between us
and the rail. Zetta and I were left free to talk. She had been seated
beside me in the Stadium; when the panic began she had turned to see
our two insect guards vanishing under a tiny red beam.
She had leaped up, unnoticed in the confusion, and had seen me fall.
Hulda was nearest her. She called, but a hand over her mouth stifled
it. She was carried off. Her captor had crouched hidden near the gate,
with his cloak over them, waiting his chance to get unobserved down the
little street. At the forest entrance, when they were about to take her
on the platform, I had burst upon them.
This was not the platform upon which Graff and his men had escaped from
the amphitheater. "That is much larger," said Zetta. "It is ahead of us
now."
"They're taking us to the Braun city?"
"Yes. It is not so much farther. Oh, Peter, you have been lying here
like death so ver' long time!"
Zetta's account of her abduction, it suddenly struck me, did not ring
wholly true. I eyed her.
"Did you try to escape from the man who seized you in the Stadium?" I
demanded.
She understood me at once. She shook her head. "No. Mus' I confess
it? I will, Peter. I heard that the controls were stolen--doom for my
worl'--perhaps for yours."
She stopped. I said: "So you gave yourself up? Is that it?"
"No. Not jus' that. The man had me--but you ask me frankly if I try to
escape. I said no."
"You mean you're glad you're here?"
"Yes," she said solemnly. "In what other way possibly could I help my
Garla, or your earth?"
"You think you can help them?"
She shrugged. She was almost unbelievably calm, but I knew it was a
pose. "Perhaps. If there is any way I can influence Graff--I am no
fool, I will do my best--oh, Peter, not you would I have sacrificed! I
did not know you were following--did not know you would be taken--"
"But Zetta, darling--"
"Peter--please!"
She was building a wall up between us! "I am not pledge' to you yet,
Peter--"
I thought it best to drop the subject then.
There were many other such small platforms escaping from Garla.
They came presently, converging in upon us. We sailed high over the
border--a thin, very tall latticed wall stretched over the country to
mark it.
Zetta pointed. "The border searchbeams are gone. Our guards all
dead--it was what Kean feared. These platforms came into Garla
unseen--taking back the Brauns and what they have stolen."
The Infra-red control globes! They were on Graff's platform,
undoubtedly.
"See!" exclaimed Zetta. "There are the city lights!"
Ahead, a great yellow radiance illumined the sky. The full moon was
low to one side of us; to the other, the dawn was coming. Almost
soundlessly we swept on. Over a sea of deep purple water, with a barren
metal plain beyond it.
The city came up into view. Tremendous metal buildings, set in terraces
upon a barren metal rock surface. Fantastic structures, aerial like a
giant hive. Spider-web bridges of gleaming metal; giant ladders; metal
causeways swinging from cables at heights tremendous. All aerial,
spiderlike, fantastically unreal. Glaring with blasts of yellow light;
roaring with the noises of industry.
We swept over it at a considerable height and dropped into a broad
metallic pit in the plain beyond. A pit two hundred feet deep and
several miles across. It was flooded with yellow radiance. Brauns
crowded close around us; but I caught glimpses of a great activity. A
thousand men at least were busy here. Platforms were landing, like ours
from the direction of Garla. A large one was already here.
Zetta and I were pushed to the ground. A dozen or more space-flying
globes of various sizes--somewhat similar to the one Dan, Freddie and
I had used coming from earth--stood about. At a distance one gigantic
affair--a great terraced cylinder with banks of windows like a monster
modern steamship--lay on a raised stone platform. Leaders led up to it
from the pit-bottom. Our captors shoved us, though not ungently, in
that direction.
Graff's expedition to earth! His forces, embarking now! I saw very
little of it as with a crowd of Brauns around me I was shoved toward
the monster vehicle. The sloping ladders had wide steps one above the
other at nearly ten-foot intervals. At a word of command, Zetta bounded
up.
They let down a cable, hooked it on me, hauled me up the fifty-foot
height. I saw them leading Zetta away. She turned toward me, but they
forced her on. A Braun abruptly threw a metal hook around me, pinning
my arms. I was jerked through a doorway, down a long echoing metal
passage and thrown into a metal room, which had a single bull's-eye
window. The door slammed upon me. I was left alone.
[Illustration: A cable they let down was hooked onto me; I was hauled
up the fifty-foot height. . . . In an hour, I knew, the great cylinder
would embark for Earth]
Within an hour, in the light of my second dawn upon Xenephrene, we left
the purple planet on our way to conquer the earth.