by Jerry
She was standing where a projecting tooth of rock almost blocked the pass. For a second she was in full view, while the sun, hard with brilliance, picked out every horrible feature. Her little head was sunk between her shoulders; her huge arms were raised in air. She was all mottled yellow and brown, a scraggle of red hair, an open toothless mouth and eyes that glared white with triumph.
Once more came the hideous mockery of human speech. “Mine!” the cry tore the still mountain air. “Mine! Zeeten!”
Coyne had the silver rod. He knew it was useless, but he swung it up. Z-10 dodged back. A moment later came the thud of her feet pounding back down the trail. Z-10 was gone—but she had learned the way.
Below, in the valley, figures gathered. One among them wore a robe of gold like Coyne’s. Lorell said slowly:
“The Master waits; I must report. I will tell him that I have brought Koh-een. But I must also tell him that I have brought—death.”
In silence she led the way down the slope toward the peaceful valley she had called home.
VIII.
ON A PATCH of green turf Coyne paced restlessly back and forth. The sun, low in the west, threw long shadows from the trees, lances of shadow that reached out across a peaceful valley. They reached to the shore of a little lake where they dimmed the lustrous twinkling of a mass of twisted metal, the shattered aircraft that Coyne had seen; they pointed on toward the mountains that hemmed the valley on the east.
Once Coyne stopped and stared fixedly where the shadows, like fingers of doom, pointed the way. Up there on the bleak slopes was the pass; a mass of color there meant men. Men, crowded together; men armed only with spears, waiting at the pass, guarding it, knowing they must die.
They did not move, but other, darker blots were in motion. Big bodies, tiny in the distance, clung to other jagged pinnacles or flung themselves in enormous leaps among the rocks. The first of the homoid pack had reached the pass; they waited impatiently for the thousands that would come.
Coyne turned and strode toward a cluster of maples. A man was there. He stood erect, his handsome face set in grim lines, his eyes hard. A mass of blond hair, flung back and reaching to his shoulders, gave him the look of some prophet of Bible times. He wore a golden robe. Lorell had called him the Master.
She stood beside him, as silent and motionless. Only her dark, troubled eyes moved, following Coyne’s every step.
Coyne stopped and faced them. In a hard, strained voice he said: “There must be some way. You said that Tahgor’s people controlled the damned beasts.”
The Master’s gaze was fixed on the distant pass. He said: “It is the third day. This night the homoids will come. We had hoped for great things from you, Koh-een, but there is nothing to be done.” And after a pause he added bitterly: “We die to-night. Did men in your time know how to face that?”
Coyne rasped out: “We didn’t quit. We kept on thinking and plannning and fighting.”
The Master made no reply.
Lorell said softly: “Think hard, Koh-een. Our men are brave. They will fight. It is only that we know this is the end—and we cannot plan.”
“Forgive me—of course they’re brave. Men with spears facing those brutes!” But Coyne was not looking at Lorell; his eyes were fixed on the wreckage beside the lake.
“I’ve looked that over”—he was speaking more to himself than to the others—“but there’s nothing there. Bones! Twisted scrap! But if one of those machines would fly
It couldn’t though, after all this time.”
Lorell caught up his thought sharply. “There is another, Koh-een; another ship of the air. I thought the Master——”
The tall man broke in: “Quite useless! The homoids would not fear a flying thing. They are long-lived; they saw flying ships by thousands in Tahgor’s time.”
But Coyne had sprung to Lorell’s side. He gripped her shoulders. “Take me to it,” he said. “If there’s a single chance——” Then he was running with the girl’s hand gripped in his.
The Master followed more slowly. He joined them a half mile away beyond a little hill, where, resting on the ground in a cleared field, was a great bulletlike gleaming thing.
A cylindrical body, perfectly streamlined, rested on an undercarriage of curved bars. It was not unlike the planes of an earlier time—it even had a propeller at the front—but the wings, widespread on either side, were only a gossamer of silvery threads held in a frame. They gleamed as if newly made; their sheen was like that of the ball Z-10 had held, or the slender rod that Lorell had used. Under one of the wings Coyne strained at a door in the big rounded body.
The Master said: “What can you do? Any minute my people at the pass will light the signal fire to tell that the homoids have come. I shall go and die fighting with them. The women will destroy themselves rather than suffer the fury of those female beasts. Will you die with us or with the women, Koh-een?”
Coyne grunted at a jammed lock, then with feverish haste seized a piece of metal that lay on the ground and forced it under the door. A moment later lie was pulling himself up and into a big cabin. Lorell followed.
He had expected complicated machinery; he found instead only a cylinder, solidly anchored, mounted back of the propeller. There was the pilot’s seat. In front of it was a single control, a handgrip on a vertical rod that made Coyne think of the old “joy stick.” On a small rheostat a lever was closed. All this back of the rounded glass nose of the ship. It was as if the big craft had landed only a moment before.
Coyne felt it so strongly; it was as if some one had placed a weapon, cocked and ready, in his hand—this ship was ready to go. Then he saw a little heap of metal cloth near the pilot’s seat. From a fold a skull grinned up at him, and throughout the cabin were similar ghastly reminders that for scores of years the ship had held only a cargo of death.
Still he would not give up. He turned away, walked back a third of the cabin’s length and stopped beside two plates of green metal.
THEY STOOD vertically, side by side. Each was an inch in thickness, not more than two feet high and twice as long. They were mounted in a framework of struts that spread fanwise to the body of the ship.
Coyne wondered about those struts. He said aloud: “This thing took an awful thrust. It’s braced as if it held the whole load. We’re about at the center of gravity, too.” Then he shrugged his shoulders and went back to the bow.
He felt of the loops of cable where two of them, red-coated, entered the metal cylinder. They were still flexible. But his hand dropped as he said despondently:
“What’s the use? We don’t know what drove it.”
Outside the door the Master was standing where he could keep the pass within sight. He told Coyne:
“Our fathers’ fathers told that these ships were made to fly by electriceety. It came from the wings.”
Coyne said in the same tired voice: “All right, it’s an electric drive. But just try to find any juice now.”
Idly he touched the handgrip on the control lever and moved the lever from side to side. It moved stiffly, and somewhere in the ship dry metal joints of control surfaces creaked. He moved it to the right, then to the left; forward and back. He did not mean to lift on it; he had no thought that the stick had a vertical motion as well. But he I lifted——
Back of him scraping metal sounded in the cabin itself. Still holding the control he swung i quickly and saw motion. In the middle of the cabin, amid their framework of struts, the plates were moving.
They creaked and groaned as stiff joints let go. They spread apart at the top where big metal arms pushed against them. Jerking, protesting, they began to form a V—and suddenly the whole ship shivered, tore free from earthy bed with a gulping, sucking sound and surged irresistibly upward.
Outside the open door, fields and j trees and little huts fell swiftly away. Lorell was on the floor.
Coyne shouted: “The plates—they’re lifting us! Negative gravitation—it held the sphere—Tahgor told me—
—”
Then he caught his breath and pulled himself together. He forced his hand that seemed frozen to the handgrip to push downward, slowly.
The plates moved back till he checked them part way. He moved the control delicately up and down until the ship was hanging in air while a wind at that high level whistled about it and set it to rocking.
Coyne called to Lorell: “Sit tight. I’ve got the hang of it. And now—one miracle, why not two?”
He was reaching for the rheostat. He was visioning some wizardry of science: silvery wings—a new substance capable of directly transforming radiant energy to an electric charge. He swung the handle of the rheostat sharply forward.
No groans or scraping of metal now. Inside that metal cylinder a motor had been lubricated and sealed for all time. With never a sound the propeller that had hung huge and gray and motionless outside the blunt nose swept into motion.
In Coyne’s hand the flight control—the joy stick—tugged and pulled into neutral. The big ship flew slowly, then gathered speed and steadied. Mountain peaks showed ahead.
But Coyne was confident. He knew now that those fragile wings had nothing to do with lift. They were not flying surfaces, but mere gatherers of energy. The green plates, under the upthrust of negative gravitation, buoyed them up.
Lorell, at Coyne’s side, was peering ahead and down. She cried out something that was half a sob.
Ragged, earthquake-gashed rock was below. Crags, canyons—and between two great peaks where a trail mounted up to a narrow pass was a column of smoke.
“The signal!” Lorell choked. “Oh, Koh-een, it means——”
But Coyne was looking beyond the signal smoke. He could see the farther slopes that ran down into hidden valleys, and he saw them alive with a writhing mass that fouled the clean hills. He swung the ship dizzily and headed back.
Below them the valley was peaceful under the setting sun; but shadows from the western rim were creeping across it, slowly, surely, like the darkness under the wings of death. From scattered huts women in clinging robes came together in little bands and moved toward the lake. The Master, a single figure in a shining robe, was running toward the trail to the pass. He halted as the ship came down.
Coyne helped Lorell to the ground and stood with one arm about her as the Master came up. His arm drew her close. Under her robe was the soft firmness of her body, vital, living—and soon she would be with the others.
The Master said: “There is nothing you can do.” It was not a question.
Coyne said shortly: “Nothing.”
The Master’s voice was bitter. “Thinking, planning, never quitting; thus did the men of another age. But you have made the ship to fly—you have done that. Now you can escape. You can save yourself.”
Coyne looked down into Lorell’s face raised to his. The Master’s words were true; he could escape, and he could take Lorell with him. He smiled as he glanced up and caught the Master’s hard gaze.
Softly he said: “That’s something we didn’t do, either.” Then he bent and kissed the girl full on the lips while he held her to him in one trembling embrace.
“Days—it has been only days,” he whispered before he let her go, “yet it seems I have loved you always. I loved you from the first; I shall be loving you at the end——”
She was still standing beside the great body of the ship, one hand pressed tightly over her heart where Coyne’s hand had been. And the shadows from the western hills gathered about her while she watched. Coyne did not look back. He was following the Master toward the trail that led to the heights.
IX.
COYNE, panting over the last rise at the trail’s end, saw the launching of the homoid attack.
An open space, like an amphitheater, was before him, the narrow pass beyond. Men thronged the smooth rocky floor; others, spears slanted before them, blocked the pass. Then, from that narrow cleft, a wave of shrieking beasts crashed through, and the blood lust of their savage cries mingled with the shouts of men, while the setting sun’s last rays filled the amphitheater with a blood-red glow that made it like a pit from some deepest hell.
Human bodies were hurled upward while great hands tore them apart in a deluge of spurting red. Spears rose and fell and slashed again as they were sent home. The amphitheater was a turmoil of hideous blotched bodies and of men who threw themselves desperately upon them, while the quivering air shuddered under the uproar of beastly cries and the shriller scream of some homoid as the spears found her and sent her hurtling to the depths.
One instant, while Coyne and the Master stood spellbound; then again men were holding the pass while the melee raged at their backs. Coyne and the Master leaped in.
One mammoth homoid had fought through. She sprang clear, and her leap brought her beside the Master. In the instant of landing she gripped the struggling golden figure and swung it in air. In the same instant Coyne’s hand closed about a spear beside a dead body at his feet. He thrust once outward and up.
Piercing horribly through the pandemonium came the beast’s scream. The Master fell, rolled and came to his feet. A blotched body was writhing on the rocks. It, too, rolled, but toward the rim of the flat-floored space. The mountain chasms seemed bottomless—her scream died swiftly away.
But Coyne still stood in the attitude of thrusting the spear home. He could not move. He was frozen rigid by the battering impact of thoughts that the sight of that body had sent ripping through his mind.
Was it Z-10? He could not be sure. But Z-10 had fallen like that when Lorell’s red light had struck! Red light! Lorell had found that one weapon—no others were to be had. Or were there? Red light! And infra-red rays! That was it! They couldn’t stand the infra-red! That was why the young and the males were kept in violet light. Infra-red!
Flashing thoughts; then a plan fully formed. Coyne shouted to the Master: “Hold them!” An instant later he was in full flight back down the trail.
Down in the valley the big airship was a dark blur in the dusk. Lorell, standing as he had left her, was only a darker shadow. Coyne, running, gasping, choked out words:
“I’m going—back! There’s—a chance——” Then he had torn the door open and dragged himself inside.
“Koh-een!” Lorell’s voice, anguished with a certainty she could not believe, reached him as he touched the controls. “Koh-een—leaving us! Oh, my dear one!”
The great ship rose as if some giant hand had come from the Earth and thrown it bodily in air; the propeller slashed the air in thunder that changed to a high, singing whine.
But only the girl’s straining, tear-dimmed eyes saw it, watching the big craft clear the eastern peaks and vanish in a star-flecked sky. Coyne, in the blunt glass nose of the ship, one hand on the control, the other jamming the rheostat to the limit of its sweep, was seeing ahead the glow of a great city whose lights had shone unendingly through the long years to guide him this night.
LIGHTS everywhere. The city was a bewildering pattern of lines and circles and spiral curves woven to intricate, dizzying forms as he drove in above. But Coyne, flying high to escape any unlighted spire, handled the ship well. Back in an almost forgotten past he had held a limited transport license, and already he had the “feel” of this ship.
Far at one side a battery of signals stabbed vertically into the night—orange; red; green. Coyne swung the ship and whipped down across a roof that was a tangle of wreckage. He dared not land; instead he swept out toward the only open place he knew and set the ship down on the plaza.
In a world silent but for some wild animal’s far cry he turned and ran. The sphere, dark and motionless, rested above him on the apex of the hill; he left that behind and plunged into a debris-strewn avenue that led toward the signals, three vertical beams stabbing up into the black sky.
He stood beside them at last-massive lamps, each mounted on a round base and a slender standard. The task of moving one was appalling, until in desperation he seized one, lifted it, and found its weight negligi
ble. New metals! He flung himself upon the cables that led out to the lamps from a silvery dome and tore them free.
Broken contacts within the dome flared into hissing flame; then the signals went dark. High voltage, Coyne was thinking grimly—heavy amperage surely—that was why the homoids had not disturbed them. Perhaps other lamps had wrought havoc in homoid hands—or the red glare might have held them off; it was the same peculiar tint as Lorell’s light.
Coyne was gambling on that. He was gambling, too, on the city’s being deserted. The man-things were here somewhere—he did not fear them, but, as he staggered out into the open plaza, he was praying that every fighting she was with that hideous horde in the north. Then he cursed savagely through set teeth as the night air rang shrilly with the homoid cry.
He was approaching the plane from the side, but still it was far away. He knew in one sickening moment that he could never reach the ship. Back of him not one but a score of throats were shattering the night. They were close. He turned and headed toward the sphere looming blackly above.
He never let go of the lamp; it was across his shoulders though footsteps thudded close at his back, But, before him, the door of the sphere was open—some homoid voice must inadvertently have spoken the word—and the inner room was aglow with light. One final effort flung him inside as a great hand, smashing down, tore at his arm.
One thought, one faint hope, still was his; it gave him strength for one last wild leap aside. He let the big lamp go to the floor, though even then he managed to break its fall; then he whirled, sprang toward the cabinet in the wall; and his hand, in one sweep, crashed down over a row of projecting keys.
They were switches—he was sure of that. They might throw on Tahgor’s voice—these beasts had feared Tahgor—if only Tahgor would speak again
He stood without moving through one long second. He even found time to read lettering above some of the tumblers, Voice control——Tridimensional projector, but the words had no meaning. The first homoid was crouched. It sprang. And in the same instant the room rang with new sound. Tahgor’s rasping nasal voice came on full.