_In the Blood Light of Dawn_
Drake leaped to his feet. "But this must be stopped! Good God, this is
madness!"
An hour or more had passed. The brief night was more than half over.
Drake had sat in the palace with the harassed council. Night of
turmoil! This brief night, preface to the end.
It seemed as though all the city sensed it. The crowds were in a wild
chaos, surging everywhere throughout the city. Aimless, leaderless mobs.
The government, too, was in chaos, striving to do a multiplicity of
abnormal things at once. A welter of official activities was around
Drake. He sat watching and listening, waiting an opportunity to take
his part in the one thing most vital to him--the expedition which soon
was to start upon the rescue of the Princess Dianne, and the capture of
the Togarites.
The whereabouts of the enemy was known now. The island at the near-by
horizon held them. It was no more than three miles away across the
water. A public garden and park occupied this small island. No one
lived there, but pleasure parties often went to spend a few hours. The
island had been searched many times and nothing found.
Yet it was Togaro's headquarters, quite evidently. His giant form had
been seen wading out there. He was there now. Drake from the palace
balcony had stood and seen the towering figure in the moonlight. And
then it had dwindled. In smallness there, beyond doubt, the Togarite
ship was hidden. He and his leaders were there.
Drake listened to the council making its plans. An expedition of
young men who had been trained in the use of the drugs was now being
assembled. They were coming into the palace now, in groups, as the
messengers sought them out in the city and brought them.
There seemed only one way to get to the island unperceived by Togaro.
The space-ship in which Drake had arrived was being hastily repaired.
In an hour or two it would be ready. A hundred young men, and Drake
with his automatics, would board it. The ship would then dwindle to a
size very small. It would seem a flight of miles to the island--but the
ship could do that in a brief time. And in such a small size could land
unobserved.
The cause of the turmoil in the city was puzzling and disturbing to the
council. The arrival of Togaro had created an excitement almost verging
upon panic. But the excitement had started before Togaro's arrival. All
during the three-hour daylight preceding, and the night before that, a
strange air of unrest had been apparent among the people. There were
fifty thousand of them here. The near-by rural districts held another
fifty thousand. There was an influx from the country into the city. No
one knew why. Whole families coming in their carts, then abandoning the
carts, and mingling with the city crowds.
Messengers arriving from other cities reported the same conditions.
The people everywhere were frightened, acting strangely. The small
government flyer came on its four-hundred-mile voyage from the other
side of the globe. It was mostly water in that hemisphere; but there
was one island--one large city. It, too, was in a turmoil.
A strange restlessness, which the panic here in the Shore City over
Togaro's arrival could not explain, pervaded Mita. To Drake it was as
though by some occult force the knowledge was spreading throughout the
world of impending doom. But he knew it was nothing occult. Might it
not be that Togaro's followers were dispersed widely over this little
globe, mingling with the people, spreading insidious, frightening
propaganda?
The minutes passed while Drake sat watching the arriving men whom he
was to lead. The council room was in the upper story. The men came up,
were checked and given instructions, and then taken to the lower floor
to be equipped with belts and the drugs.
Word came that the space-ship was not badly damaged. The repairs were
progressing. It would be ready for the voyage by dawn.
All this time, in the garden of the palace the mob had stood
unnaturally silent, watching the building as though trying to guess
what activities were going on inside. Messengers were constantly
arriving and departing. Police were bringing in the young men whom
Drake was to take into smallness. The airship from the other hemisphere
came and landed near by; its officials hurried in through the police
cordon at the palace doorway.
As though nature were conspiring with a premonition of what the future
might hold, a cloud lifted above the horizon across the city and
passed near the moon; a cloud at a considerable altitude, tinged with
red from the coming sunrise. It threw a red cast upon the moon. The
moonlight suddenly seemed drenching all the scene with blood. An omen?
Drake shuddered. He turned from the window. But the murmur down there
grew to a shouting. It brought his gaze back. A rhythmic shouting--the
repetition of a few words over and over. It may have started with a
single voice, and the crowd took it up like a chant.
"Alt, what is that?"
Alt was near Drake. He listened. But Ahlma caught it first.
"They say, '_The world ends tonight! Give us the drugs!_'"
Like a chant the crowd was all shouting it now. "_The world ends
tonight! We want the drugs!_"
The council heard it. A silence fell upon the room as they listened.
Then from the palace doorway, the police began shouting. A new turmoil,
then the sound of thuds upon the front palace walls--missiles were
being thrown. A chunk of rock came hurtling through the window. It
narrowly missed Drake and fell with a crash in the midst of the sitting
councilmen.
It was then Drake leaped to his feet. "But this must be stopped! This
is madness!"
The mob was attacking the palace doorway. It surged at the foot of the
steps. A rain of rocks came hurtling upward.
Drake shouted, "Jain, tell the council I'm going to get large! I'll
disperse this mob--Ahlma, you come with me! You can talk to them--try
to calm them! Tell them you are speaking for your princess."
A turmoil almost equal to the confusion in the garden now broke out in
the council room. The men were all on their feet, jabbering excitedly.
Jain shouted, "No! They say no, Drake--"
Drake was spurred by the feeling of helplessness that had made him
stand by and watch Togaro escape with Dianne.
He handed Ahlma a pellet. Alt pleaded, "Let me come with you."
Before the council could move to stop them, all three had taken the
drug. The room began dwindling. It struck a sudden calmness to Drake.
He said:
"Alt, we must get out of here! Tell the council we will not get very
large. Only enough to disperse this mob. That can do no harm. Togaro
knows we are here--if he sees us, what matter? Tell them we'll be small
again soon--I'll be ready to go when the flyer is ready."
Alt shouted his translation. The balcony doorway was already shrunk to
Drake's waist. He pushed Ahlma through and squeezed through himself
with Alt after them.
At sight of them the crowd gave a roar of mingled surprise and fear.
The fighting at the palace steps was instantly checked. The crowd stood
and gazed. Surprise; awe; terror. It froze them.
There was a total silence. Drake gazed down, and then with a moment of
dizziness looked away. The palace was shrinking. He presently reached
up and gripped its spire at the peak of the roof. With his other hand
drew from his belt pellets of the other drug.
Drake had had much experience with the drugs, each an antidote to the
other; he knew how to check his growth at any point. He checked it now,
and Ahlma and Alt did the same.
They stood precariously upon a tiny balcony of a toy house whose spire
was not much taller than their heads. A few feet beneath them, hardly
more than a comfortable step down, was the miniature garden. Little
trees, bathed in the blood-light of the moon, and small human figures.
The balcony strained and swayed beneath the weight. Drake said, "We
must step down. Alt, call down to them, tell them to give us room."
Alt's voice spurred the crowd to action. The spell which had struck
them motionless was broken. A woman screamed. The crowd took it
up--frenzied screams. In panic, they turned and shoved, fought,
screaming to get away.
But the adjacent streets were packed with people. The crowd from the
garden pressed at them.
The balcony was breaking. This toy house; these toy people!
Drake said, "Step down, Ahlma."
There was room beneath them now: They stepped from the balcony, and
stood together beside the little palace, with the garden down at their
shoe-tops. The crowd in a frenzy was fighting its way back through
the trees. There were open spaces in the garden now. Patches of open,
blood-red moonlight. But in all of these, motionless tiny figures were
lying where they had been trampled.
Contrition swept Drake. It seemed that everything he attempted was
doomed to disaster. Ahlma was gripping him.
"Drake, look--off there!"
They could see behind them over the palace roof; the shining lake; the
island at the horizon where the Togarites were hiding.
Alt cried out, stricken with horror. And then Drake saw it.
They stood, Drake, Ahlma and Alt, three giants, gazing out over the
lake. The dawn was nearer than Drake had realized. The sky above the
island was turning red. A bank of clouds off there was reddening.
The swift-coming dawn was at hand. The moon was fading. The scene
everywhere was brightening.
Upon the island, where a green hill showed dark against the lightening
sky, something abnormal showed. A dark shape, growing, expanding.
It spread, sidewise and upward; not a human shape, not a giant, but
something far more ominous. It was rounded and oblong; and to be
visible at this distance it must be already a hundred feet long.
Then in a moment it was twice that. It seemed shoving at the hill with
its growth--shoving itself toward the water.
The Togaro space-ship! It had come now suddenly from its hiding place.
Realization swept Drake with a surge of horror. Togaro's departure was
at hand!
The ship was expanding with tremendous rapidity. It soon had shoved
itself off the island with its growth. It lifted slightly and then
settled upon the water, floating on a raft-like hull of pontoons.
Another minute. It lay off there as though moored to the tiny island.
It was still growing, a monstrous thing now. Most of it was below the
curve of the horizon, but its stern loomed up beside the island. A ship
a mile long now. In another minute it might be twice that.
Drake's thoughts were whirling. This monstrous thing--why didn't it
rise and be gone?
As though to answer his thoughts he became aware that Ahlma and Alt had
turned and were gazing again over the city. Then Drake knew why the
Togaro vehicle was lingering.
From everywhere about the distant landscape, from a hundred points in
the spread of the city, giants were rising! The dawn--this dawn now
beginning--was the signal. Giants, widely scattered at various points,
appearing now out of smallness!
There was a giant whose head and shoulders rose from one of the city
streets quite near at hand. The sight of him caught Drake's fascinated
attention. He grew with amazing swiftness to a height of perhaps two
hundred feet. Then his growth suddenly stopped. He stood gazing about
him. In the faint light of the dawn Drake could see him plainly--a
Togarite, stocky, wide-shouldered, bullet-headed. He wore, upon his
chest and waist a series of belts. And about his throat a leather
necklace, with pads out over his shoulders.
His torso, shoulders and neck were black with clinging tiny human
figures! They hung upon his straps like clustering insects. They were
in their normal size, Drake judged. They had climbed upon him when
he was small. He seemed to be carrying a hundred or more. He stood a
moment, then stepped cautiously up to the flat roof of a near-by house.
It cracked with his weight. He leaped over it, into another street. He
may have crushed scores of people who were gathered there. Drake could
hear faint screams. The giant leaped again, found a broader street, ran
down it toward the lake, and waded into the water.
A hundred such incidents. A hundred such giants simultaneously
appearing at the signal of the dawn. They were carrying ten thousand
people at the least. They appeared from everywhere, laden with the tiny
clinging figures.
From the distant hills of the open country still more of them came
running, dashing through the city, wrecking its houses, trampling the
crowds in the streets; heading for the lake.
The water was soon lashed into a turmoil. The giants were all a
prearranged height. The water rose only to their hips. It beat white
against them as they forced their way through it toward the island
where the monstrous vehicle was waiting to receive them.
Drake understood it now. In smallness the Togarites had been secretly
working; gathering their followers from among the people. It was an
exodus now to the island where the expedition to conquer the earth was
ready to depart.
There were giants rising from the island now. More of Togaro's
followers, gathered there in smallness, growing now to join this
arriving throng of their fellows. One giant, taller than all the
others, loomed into the sky, black against the blood-red dawn. He was
standing in the lake, far away, so that only his head and shoulders
were above the horizon. It may have been Togaro, directing the
embarkation. He was monstrous; and the vehicle on the water, lying
quiescent now with its stern looming on the curve of the little globe,
was monstrous.
The giants were clustered out there, climbing with their human freight
into the doorway of the ship. And they were still arriving. The city
was wrecked with their passage. The broken streets were littered with
mangled forms of the trampled crowds.
The sunrise came. The blurred little sun was red. It bathed the
shattered, screaming city with crimson; it painted the running giants;
it turned the foaming waters of the lake to blood.
When the turmoil was over and the littered giants had all embarked,
off there against the red morning sky the monstrous vehicle was again
expanding.