by Jerry
The more I thought of it the more I was sure that the metal thing was possessed of legs; that it was a senseless amphibian. It had probably followed the coast into the south from some place on the North Pacific, thence by land across the neck connecting the two great Americas. Reason tottered as I strove to fancy this great thing walking across the Isthmus, trampling whole mountains under foot, wiping out cities and towns which stood in the way. But what was it doing here? Its activities were making a boiling cauldron of this portion of the ocean; but how?
In the instant of asking the question I knew the answer. For by scores and hundreds there darted from the massive side of the thing, under water, egg-shaped things not unlike our own monopters. Tiny submarines, these, each with a man inside it! That was the answer. There were thousands of them, so that, darting into the deep water, visible until they had entered the boiling area to be lost from view, they looked like a vast school of speedy fish, darting headlong toward that section of the Great Rampart upon which the waves were breaking their crests into wisps of flying spume. That boiling had been induced for the express purpose of masking from the view of our aerial scouts whatever the enemy was doing.
Even as one school of the tiny submarines darted into the whiteness, another emerged from it, dashing against the side of the metal monster to be taken in and absorbed. Like a great fish spawning, then receiving her young into her body again. Even as I thought this, my brain working furiously to find a solution, school after school of them broke from the whiteness and were lost in the side of the monster.
Inside my left glove, which is part of the monopter, my fingers worked like mad upon the tiny instrument with which, in the air, I keep in contact with Sark Darlin. I gave him the section of the rampart where the mysterious activity was going on, and a brief description of the monster in the slime below, of the tiny submarines which, their work already accomplished perhaps, were returning to the mother sub with the speed of game fish.
Faintly to my ears came the answer of Sark Darlin.
“I have your message. I am acting. Watch the Big Submarine!”
By the renewed pressure on my hand I knew that Lena, too, had caught her father’s message. Motionless there, both leaning forward, watching the metal monster feverishly, we were totally unprepared for what followed. For behind us, with a roar that made the very air about us a seething maelstrom, a five-mile section of the Great Rampart, carrying with it the hundred and fifty story buildings of early days, leaped skyward and crashed back again, a smoking, powdery ruin—into which, on the instant, poured the mighty Atlantic to fill the breach!
Simultaneously the surface of the seething ocean became a welter of dismembered, horribly mangled corpses. But all that I could see were nude. Sark Darlin, then, had acted in time, when he had had but seconds in which to do so. Only the unimportant Menials had suffered from the catastrophe.
A monster wave, breaking against the broken wall beyond the breach, rolled back to sea—a veritable mountain of water. I saw it crash against the metal monster in the depths. Swiftly she heeled over—and I knew my first guess had been correct. Metal legs waved in sight for a few moments as the thing strove to right itself. Then they disappeared, in all their monstrous bigness and tentaclelike waving, as the submarine came back, upright and, with the same motion, swerved to the right, to disappear like some unbelievable deep-sea fish, into the darkness of the Atlantic!
3
A KIND providence must have been with us at that moment; for we faced each other and I took her hands in mine, while our eyes met in questioning and horror. I am sure that this involuntary, instinctive clasp of hands saved the life of Lona. In the instant of the clasp, while those soundless messages passed between us, the aerial maelstrom caused by the explosion and attendant rupture of the Great Rampart was upon us—a shock such as I hope never again to feel.
The noise of City of the East is a vast and awesome thing when one hears it without the ears protected; multiply that sound by a thousand and you have some idea of the shock which that explosion caused us, and we almost ten miles off-shore from the breach in the wait It was like being instantly compressed in a monster vise, with all the fiends above and below the earth hurling gibes into the teeth of the sufferer, so that palsied hands fly to ears and fill them to save the hearing. One wonders at the massive strength of that great submarine, that it was not riven in twain at the explosion; for even as the swirl and crush of the gases broke about us, I glanced down, to see that, among the out-floating corpses of the Menials, fishes of all sizes, of many schools, had turned their white bellies upward on the stormy surface of the water below.
But the other sensation was even more terrifying. We had clasped hands, Lona and I, and the maelstrom whirled us over and over, distant from each other by the lengths of our two pairs of arms, clinging for life. Now Lona would be above me, like some fantastic acrobat, balancing on my upraised hands; then we changed positions, all in the batting of an eyelash, a speed of movement that was doubly terrifying. First I gazed at the sea below me, apparently looking up; then I would look upward at the sky, so that all the universe seemed turning topsyturvy with unbelievable speed. I realized one thing instantly then, a thing that froze me with dread, remembering the white bellies of the fishes so far below me. Lona was unconscious! Only because I held so tightly to her hands was she saved from the frightful plunge, through thirty thousand feet of space, into the ocean—for I judged that we had dropped that far below Air Lane 50,000 before the breaking of the tragic storm.
Was Lona dead? Could I support her dead weight and transport us back to some safe platform in City of the East? I’d do it, I told myself, or plunge with her to the depths. For if she fell from me I had no desire to live. So I clung to her and prayed.
Slowly, when the swirling of the aerial maelstrom had abated somewhat, so that I found myself once more in a state of equilibrium, Lona hanging before me, her head against my limbs, I faced toward City of the East and drove my monopter toward safety. Was she dead? Could I maintain my grasp upon her hands? Would the mechanism of my monopter support us both? The answer to the last question was capable of a speedy solution. We were making excellent time toward the shore; but we were losing altitude with fearful rapidity—a planing glide that seemed endless.
It seemed hours; but reason told me but a few minutes had passed, before I sank, all but exhausted, on a platform of a building just westward of the breach in the rampart, with the still unconscious Lona clinging to my hands. I sat down weakly and held her in my arms.
All this time my phones had been transmitting a message from Sark Darlin; but I could not use my hands to answer him. He was asking after my safety and Lona’s, and for information about the great submarine. Clasping Lona the more tightly with my right hand, for the number on the window back of me told me that we were two hundred stories above the bottom of this particular street-canyon, I managed to send a feeble message of reassurance through the air to Sark Darlin. He must have caught it instantly, for his answer came back, after I had assured him of our return:
“Thank God!”
I whispered the words myself, reverently, for Lona had stirred in my arms. She was not dead, and I lived again. I unfastened the head-piece of her monopter, so that she might have the fresher air outside; unfastened my own headpiece and placed it close beside me. Lona opened her eyes; her whole body quivered in my arms in a shudder I understood. She was, after all, a woman, and I loved her. She said nothing of our return from above the Atlantic, though she must have known how she had been brought back; but her eyes were eloquent. I had saved her life; more than ever, now, was that life a part of my own. Our lips came together in a kiss which was a delirium of happiness, of which there is all too little in this world of ours.
IT was Lona who first recalled the horror we had witnessed.
“Quick, Gerd!” she exclaimed, rising to her feet, wavering so that I held her fast lest she topple from the platform. “Our headpieces immediately! I am all right
now. We must get back to Father Sark. He needs us, as all City of the East needs us now!”
I made no reply. None was needed. She had spoken truth. Our headpieces were replaced swiftly and in silence. Still hand in hand we soared aloft from the platform, rising straight upward between the walls of the street-canyon until we had cleared the tallest buildings about us. Then, straight as homing pigeons, we turned our goggled faces toward Executive Building, a vast white needle eastward. Did I fancy it, or had an ominous black cloud suddenly dropped down to hover above the spire of the Building of the Engineers?
I do not know. I do know that as we fled toward Executive Building, through air lanes that now were silent and deserted because of the catastrophe, a vaster dread than any which had yet been mine was at my throat.
What must be done to combat this monstrous menace that had come to us from the deeps of the ocean? For centuries we had been looking to our Invisible Frontier as protection, and this had been so perfected that nothing had yet been invented which could pass through or over the Wall of the Rays. But we had paid little heed to the ocean. We knew that City of the West, the city of the Aliens, possessed monopters as good as our own. Yet our whole City was surrounded by that Invisible Frontier, save only that side which faced the ocean. We had thought of submarines as obsolete, and our cocksureness was threatening us with disaster. Of course we were not being caught entirely unprepared; for that would have been the height of folly. We had prepared, after a fashion, against attack from the Atlantic by separating City of the East into sections, each of which could be isolated in a second by the man at the keyboard in Sark Darlin’s office—so that, were entrance gained to any one section, that section could be shut off from the City at once, and the remainder of the City be as impregnable as before. This had been my reason for sending that message, naming the section, when I had caught my first glimpse of the great submarine. Sark’s instant warning had cleared that section of the people who mattered. In fancy I could see them quitting those buildings in their monopters like swift birds that are flushed by the hunter. Some, of course, had been caught; but there had been few, for I had been able to distinguish below us only the nude bodies of the Menials.
Of this I was thinking as we hurtled toward the Executive Building, wondering subconsciously at the black cloud which hid the glistening spire in which was the office of Sark Darlin—wondering at its meaning, and why a vague intuition told me that all was not well.
Nearer and nearer we flew, yet the spire did not appear from the black cloud. That meant we should have to land on some lower platform until the lifting of the cloud. Delay, delay, delay! But we dropped down into the canyon swiftly, along the edge of that ominous cloud, and landed upon the first platform of the Executive Building we could see. And made a ghastly discovery!
There was no spire of the Executive Building! This platform upon which we stood was the highest platform remaining of the needlelike shaft which was the Building of the Engineers! We stood on a platform on the four hundred and ninety-eighth story; there should have been two stories above us. Yet half of story 498, all of story 499, and the glistening white spire which had been the pride of Sark Darlin were gone! All the mass of the building above where we stood had been sheared off as though a great knife had passed cleanly through the building! Nodebris at all and, as far as we could see, none in the canyon below. The upper portion of Executive Building had vanished! From where we stood we could look into what remained of story 498, where the office appurtenances stood in the open as their fleeing users had left them, no cover above them to protect them from the elements, shadowed by the ominous cloud which, from a distance, I had thought obscured the crest of the Executive Building.
Lona and I still clasped hands. Now her hand gripped mine more tightly, and I returned the pressure. No words were needed. We both knew that Sark Darlin had vanished as mysteriously as his office had vanished, together with all of those high officials who had occupied the offices that should have remained above where we stood. In one blow, mysteriously delivered, the enemy had shorn City of the East of leadership. Then the realization following on this thought staggered me: I was the leader now, with Lona my equal in power! In an instant that responsibility which I had not expected to assume for years to come had settled upon my shoulders—and I must get busy at once.
That ominous cloud was settling. Lona suddenly stepped to the edge of the platform and dropped off into space, pulling me with her. As we fell, plummeting downward, her words whispered into my ears.
“That cloud, Gerd! Whatever took Daddy and the crest of Executive Building is inside that cloud! In another instant City of the East would have been leaderless indeed! We must prepare!”
“WE MUST prepare!” Yet what were we to do? For with the obliterating of Sark Darlin’s office had been obliterated that vast mechanism of his by which he had been in communication with all the City. There was now no way to send forth a warning. But Lona knew! Her father had confided in her, more than he had seen fit to confide in me before I had in fact become his son-in-law. Her hand held mine as we continued dropping into the canyon. We struck the bottom as lightly as feathers and, Lona leading, both of us running awkwardly because of the impediment of our monopters, approached a tunnel-like opening in the bottom floor of the Executive Building. This was the closest I had been in all my life to ground level. And we still were going down.
Inside the tunnel we ran, into darkness. We dropped into ebon space and our monopters were automatically in use again. Then we were in the cavernlike immensities of the level of the Menials, and I had set foot on the soil of Earth for the first time in all my days, the first of all my family so to do for generations! But there was no time to think of this now, for Lona was running again, leading me swiftly with her, among the nude people who were the Menials, bowing and bending, toiling and steaming in perspiration, as they labored with the soil to make it bring forth fruit for food. I had no opportunity then to observe what they did, for Lona was leading me to one of those slender piles about which I had been told—one of those piles which support the Great Rampart, which is the floor of City of the East. She opened a door set flush with the surface of the slender piling, and we were in the piling’s heart.
“See!” cried Lona. “Sark Darlin, dead though he may be now, was still too far-sighted to be caught as they thought to catch him! Here, in miniature, is a keyboard of communication which is an exact duplicate of that in Father Sark’s office—a duplicate whose secret Daddy gave me only yesterday. Gerd Sota, you are now the chief administrator of City of the East! Give your orders!”
I am thankful, looking back upon that moment, that I acted without hesitation. I doffed my head-piece and took my stand before the myriad-faced board of communication—ticked my frenzied message forth into space. It was a message to the nearest station of the Invisible Frontier, and it was a command that a single one of the Invisible Rays be directed into the heart of the black cloud which hovered over Executive Building. When I had finished the message I turned to Lona, feeling a certain pride in my own ability; but Lona was nowhere to be seen! Frightened, I stepped to the door and called her name. But no one answered. The Menials, some of them, looked dully up from their tasks for a moment; but a sharply snarled oath from me caused their eyes to fall. A member of the upper levels does not allow the Menials to gaze upon his face—it is the law.
Then, from directly above, Lona settled to the earth beside me.
“I went up to Rampart Level,” she told me breathlessly, “and I was right about the cloud! I reached the bottom of street-canyon just as the ray was turned upon it. I couldn’t see the ray, of course; but I could see the effect, for the cloud vanished in a breath, and tongues of fire filled the air where it had been! Out of the fire fell a single monopter, like no monopter in City of the East, but larger than any three of them, and marked in motley colors, like the costume of an ancient clown! It crashed to the ground quite near where I stood, and three men, mere blackened cinders, so that
I could not tell the color of their faces, rolled from it! I ran and looked at them—each one held in his blackened fingers a slender tube. These three tubes, whatever powerful agency they may have contained, were, I am sure, the inventions which wrought such havoc with Executive Building!”
“But, Lona!” I objected. “How could the monopter have got through Invisible Frontier?”
“It didn’t come through the Frontier!” she retorted. “I am sure it came from the other way, else one of our people at the Frontier is a traitor, which I’ll never believe! That submarine brought it, just as it brought those tiny submarines which caused the breach in the Great Rampart. The big submarine must have emerged far out to sea to discharge the monopter, and the monopter, hiding itself in a cloud of its own making, floated over the city. Some way, which we may never learn, its occupants kept in contact with a common leader inside the submarine, so that the leader was informed of the proper moment to make his attack. Ugh! Imagine it, Gerd Sota! An evil monopter, traveling in its own cloud, high above even Air Lane 50,000, emitting its self-concealing blackness like a giant squid that has left the water suddenly and grown wings! Then, at the proper moment, the attack. God! Beloved! Daddy Sark!”
It had been too much for Lona Darlin. Even as I once more removed her headpiece she swooned in my arms, and I bore her inside the room of the board c5 communication. With the two monopters, hers and mine, whose material is soft as eiderdown, I prepared her a pallet on the floor. I laid her down, covering her with cloths which I found at hand. Then, knowing that a good rest would be the best thing in the world for her, and that she would waken when nature willed it, burdened only by the natural sorrow caused by the loss of her beloved father—I seated myself before the board of communication and began to send forth my messages.