by Earl
But the moral effect on the Stone Age army was all out of proportion. Many shrieked in superstitious fear, as they ran. Invisible death—magic! An arrow, spear or sword was something you could see, fend off. This hurling down of silent lightning struck dumb fear in Stone Age breasts.
Perry cursed lividly.
When the men had run to cover, finally, one of the planes left formation, darted toward him. He was still in the open. Coppery flash of hair! He saw it before he saw the kicks of dust around him.
“Perry, we must run—”
The plane was past, the danger over, before Aran Deen finished the words.
THE gunner had not been able to aim. Gun-fire from fast aircraft could only be effective against masses of men. Perry knew it had been a mocking gesture on Elda’s part. A threat of the future.
He picked up the note, wrapped around a stone, that had also dropped, a hundred feet ahead.
“To Perry, Lord of Earth, pro-tem. I am on the march. This is Der Tag. We have guns. Win your empire if you can—and me! Fight as you’ve never fought before—for me! Defeat me, if you can—and still I’ll win! Elda.”
“What does it mean?” mumbled Aran Deen. “What nonsense does the green-eyed witch write?” His canny old eyes searched Perry’s face suddenly. “Or does it mean, my son—”
“It means,” broke in Perry harshly, “that you’re an old fool. We have to go on the defensive. Dig trenches, as in the long-ago wars.”
And it meant, too, that the war had passed into a new and terrible phase. That the thunder of guns would once more wake to ravening life, devouring its cannon-fodder food.
Perry looked at the still forms shot down, out in the open. He was appalled.
In the name of the universe, when and where would all this end?
CHAPTER XIX
Mannerheim Line
PERRY hastily reformed the army and marched it back—back. Consulting the Atlas, he picked the narrowest strip between the impassable Alps and the Adriatic Sea. Here, they dug in. Laborers and additional fighters were recruited.
In a week’s time a series of trenches lay athwart the open drive to the Mediterranean. A little Maginot Line. The weapons of the past called for the defenses of the past.
Scouting in a plane over enemy territory, Perry found Elda’s army on the march, as she had said. A formidable force now of 25,000. Lar Tane’s tribal-states were now solidly back of him. Perry made out the units equipped with the new, shiny guns. He breathed easier. Only some ten thousand. With just one metal-producing plant, and a limited staff of technicians, Lar Tane had not been able to turn out more, for the present.
Elda’s army arrived, and attacked immediately.
Little sorties of gun troops rushed toward the first line of trenches, dropped on their stomachs, and began firing.
Perry felt cold, shaken. Guns again! Their deadly bark ripped apart the Stone Age air, in chorus, for the first time in an age. His father had told him of the frightful wars of the 20th century, when guns snuffed out lives in unthinkable numbers.
“Lar Tane has this day turned history into bloodier channels,” Aran Deen murmured.
Men dropped here and there in the long trenches. Perry groaned. What chance did he have? Bullets outclassed spears and arrows by a tremendous margin. Morale dropped. Again his men were grunting in fear and dread at this magic death-dealing.
Perry’s heart stopped. Had all been lost? Had the first roar of guns already won for Elda? White-faced Tribers, frightened to the roots of their being, seemed ready to bolt. Ready to scurry from the trenches like rabbits.
Perhaps at that moment, the fate of the war hung by a thin thread. . . .
Perry ran down the trench, shouting.
“Keep your heads low! The weapon is not magic. If you run, death will strike at your backs. Here, you are safe. Fire back at the enemy. But keep your heads low!”
Some of the men took heart. Longbows twanged and arrows sped out toward the enemy. Some of the men with guns, insolently running close, fell dead. A cheer welled from the trench. And that strange, intangible thing called morale revived.
The acid test had been passed. Perry, panting, exhausted, realized he still had a chance.
And more of a chance, he began to see, than he had thought possible.
A WAVE of enemy swordsmen came.
Perry’s men, in the protective trenches, stopped them with arrow fusillades.
“The green-eyed witch is getting a taste of her own medicine,” Aran Deen chortled. “Now her men fall like leaves before our Maginot Line.”
But Perry was still not too optimistic. The first day was experimental. Elda’s scouting planes told her the defenders were solidly entrenched.
On the second day, the bark of guns became a steady hissing roar. Planes periodically raided the first line trenches, doing little damage—except to morale. That was what Elda counted on, Perry could see. A steady hammering with the “artillery” till the time was ripe.
Still awed by the fearful magic of guns, Perry’s men could not outface that hail of death forever. Men dropped steadily, despite his cautions. These were not seasoned troops of yore, used to the invisible death that struck at the mere lifting of a forehead to fire an arrow.
Perry wondered how it would come out. This was war such as the ancients fought. The kind of war Elda knew from A to Z. Did he stand any chance of holding her off? For a while, perhaps—and then?
Guns! He must have them himself! In the back of his mind, that thought had constantly lurked. Fight fire with fire. Ultimately, it would be the only hope.
His eye went out beyond the trenches. Here and there a rifleman dropped, struck by an arrow. He noticed with what promptness crawling men retrieved the weapons. They were precious, those few guns. And Elda did not want one in his hands.
“I’ve got to have one of those guns,” Perry told Aran Deen. “A suicide squad has to rush out there.”
“In that leaden hail? You won’t find a man to go.”
“They’ll go if I lead them.” Perry shook off Aran Deen’s hand, eyes burning. “It’s the only way, old man. I must have a gun—to duplicate. Without guns, we’re sure to lose the war. If I’m killed, it’s the chance I take of winning all or losing all.”
Grimly, a hundred volunteers squirmed on their stomachs after Perry, beyond their trench. Perhaps the hundred bravest men in all his army. It took a new kind of courage to defy the new kind of death. They crawled fifty feet before the enemy noticed. Then concentrated rifle fire drummed into them. Figures went limp.
Perry shouted to his remaining men and went on. A rifle lay only a hundred feet further, beside a dead man. An enemy force suddenly charged down. But from back of Perry came covering arrow-fire. Perry and thirty men, scuttling low, reached the rifle.
Perry grabbed it first.
Some of the enemy arrived. Swords leaped into play. Perry cut down two men. A third came at his side, sword already slashing viciously.
INSTINCTIVELY, Perry jerked the gun around, pulling the trigger. The man stopped as though he had struck a stone wall, his sword’s unfinished swing gashing Perry’s leg lightly.
For a second Perry stood still. He had fired a gun for the first time in his life. He would never forget, to his dying day, that vicious little kick of the gun, the way the man stopped, and the feeling of immense death-dealing power of that moment.
Then he was scuttling back for his trench, yelling to his remaining men. More than one bullet whined past his ear, singing of death. He and eleven men reached safety, out of the hundred.
“Here’s the gun!” Perry examined it, hardly waiting for his leg-wound to be dressed. “Clever of Lar Tane,” he told Aran Deen an hour later. “Water-breech. Radioactive flint. Bullets of soft alloy, driven out by bursts of steam. Simple enough. Our Gibraltar plant can turn these out within a month.”
“If we can hold Elda off for a month,” Aran Deen croaked. “Tomorrow, a real attack—”
On the third day, the
guns rose to a thunderous crescendo, raking the trenches mercilessly. Suddenly their bull-roar ceased. Hun-like tides of the enemy raided the first-line trench with swords. At the end of a bloody day, Perry retreated to his second line.
“It goes bad for us,” Aran Deen observed.
“Yes.” Perry set his jaw. “But I think our army can hold out. As fast as they gain a line of trenches, we dig another line in back. They’ll have to fight inch by inch. This is not a three-day battle, as in the open. It might take Elda a month to smash through.
In that time, we’ll make guns. You and I are going to Gibraltar.”
Calling his officers together, Perry gave them an impassioned exhortation.
“Hold off the enemy at all costs. Dig trenches behind as fast as the front lines are taken. Hold them off for a month. And then I promise you guns, like theirs. If they break through, all Europe is lost!”
A month to stem the invasion. Was there time?
CHAPTER XX
Thunder of Old
BACK in his Gibraltar workshop, Perry felt as though he had returned from some shrieking purgatory.
It was quiet here, peaceful. He looked around at the implements of science, touching them. Had he once worked here, a young eager scientist? Or had it been a poignant dream? It seemed he had been fighting, seeing men die, all his life.
It suddenly overwhelmed him.
Yes, he had once labored here, in monastic devotion to science. He had been happy, soul-satisfied, sure of his mission. Now he was back. But not to resume his constructive tasks. To make weapons of war! To make the power and engines at his command grind out guns, horrible guns. Like Archimedes and his burning lens, Perry had to help prolong the blood-bath into which the world was being dipped.
For worse than even years of war would be years of domination under Lar Tane’s mailed fist, followed by years of rule by Elda, and her love-slave Stuart. The fight against that was a good fight.
Renewed in his resolve, Perry switched to his new role of scientist swiftly. Time still snapped savagely at his heels. He took Lar Tane’s gun apart, piece by piece, and made blueprints. These he passed out to his staff of technicians, with orders to drop the manufacture of swords.
Overnight, swords had fallen from first place, as major weapons of the war. As, a few months before, Stone Age spears and arrows had been demoted before swords. Swift change. The war, with each passing day, pyramided toward higher destruction. Like a film of past history run at super-speed, the war had already skipped insanely through three stages, each a former age of slow advance.
Perry was appalled. The next skip would be to Lar Tane’s century—and horrors beyond telling.
Within a week, the first model had been put together. Perry tested it himself. The trigger struck the radioactive flint, releasing infra-red energy, like a touch of dynamite. A coincident spray of water changed instantly to live, bursting steam, in the stout water-breech. The alloy bullet was propelled out of the barrel at violent speed.
The 20th century might have made such steam-guns, if they had had the radioactive flint unknown at that time.
Perry’s quick mind made one improvement in the gun—rifling in the barrel. Lar Tane had apparently turned his out too hurriedly to bother. Perry was able to hit a foot-high target hung on a tree, at a hundred paces, five shots out of ten.
It was not the finely-made precision instrument of the 20th or 30th centuries. That would take years of development. It was little more than a crude, improved blow-gun, shooting metal pellets instead of darts. But it could kill.
On the eleventh shot, the breech exploded.
Luckily, in forethought, Perry had protected his face with a light metal shield. Pieces of flying metal drummed against it harmlessly. One piece tore a gash in his arm, to replace the sword-gash in his leg, now nearly healed.
“Make the breech stronger,” Perry said to his watching technicians. “Outside of that, it’s what we want.”
The real job started, turning out the guns in quantity.
Presses, stamping machines and lathes had to be readjusted to the new requirements. Days flew. A plane shuttled back and forth from the northern battle-front to Gibraltar, bringing spot-news of the struggle there.
Perry held his breath each time the messenger came, dreading to hear that Elda had stormed through his little Maginot Line. But his army held. The enemy had taken ten lines of trenches, in three weeks, but the defenders had kept pace with their digging in at the rear. More cheering, his army had become trench-wise, veterans against the new guns. The enemy was losing heavily.
“Mannerheim Line,” mused Aran Deen, searching misty memories he had of accounts of long-ago historical battles. “In your father’s century, a little nation called, I think, Finland held out for months against the gigantic military machine of China. Or was it Russia?”
IN ANOTHER week, just under his self-imposed deadline of a month, Perry had whipped his staff, on day and night shift, to turn out five thousand of the new guns. His twenty Nartican planes droned back and forth to the battle-ground, delivering them and their ammunition.
Perry went with the first shipment. Passing out the guns to a corps of men at the rear, they were given rifle practice. Amazed and awed, the men quickly became delighted, learning fast to sight along the barrel—there were no sights—and slip bullets into the breech rapidly.
They were single-shot guns, as with Lar Tane’s. A far cry from the automatic rifles and machine-guns of lost antiquity, but incalculably more effective in range and death-dealing than arrows or swords.
“Now,” exulted Perry, “we’ll fight them to a standstill!”
His trained corps of five thousand were in the front-line trenches. At dawn, enemy “artillery” began its preparatory raking, prior to attack. No shot came from Perry’s men, at his orders. Not even when waves of swordsmen charged.
“Wait till you see the whites of their eyes!”
Perry’s command rang down the line, a phrase borrowed from the past.
Perry rested his own rifle on a sandbag, sighting along the barrel. He fired the first shot. At the signal, a volley thundered from the trench. The enemy fell as though mown down by an invisible scythe. A second and third volley thinned the attack to a straggly line. At the fourth volley, the enemy stopped, dumfounded at the sudden decimation. At the fifth volley, the survivors turned and ran in utter panic.
A tremendous cheer welled from the trenches. Perry joined with a shout of triumph. No more attack came that day. The lion was licking its wounds. In the lull, Perry wrote a note.
“TO Elda, Commander of World Empire Military. Burned your fingers, didn’t you? You won’t break through now. I have superior manpower to draw from, over Earth. If I need them, the factories of Nartica can turn out limitless guns, much faster than your single Rhine plant. I am ready at any time to hold an armistice conference. Perry Knight, Lord of Earth.”
He dropped the note, weighted with a stone, at the enemy’s back lines, from a plane. It would be delivered to Elda. Perry could picture the flushed vexation that would come over her satanically beautiful face. What would she do, in the face of stalemate?
In the next week, enemy activity ceased utterly. Perry toyed with the idea of a surprise counter-attack, but thought better of it. Why waste men? If Elda stubbornly continued, then would be the time to gather masses of men and guns and crush her once and for all. Perhaps she would see her predicament.
“The green-eyed witch will not arbitrate,” old Aran Deen predicted. He lifted his head, as though sniffing for trouble. “She has some new trick up her sleeve.”
Perry’s elation died.
He could feel it too, a brooding air of impending something. The quiet before the storm. Would she make one last, desperate assault, with her full army? He scouted in a plane and saw, along their supply route, huge wagons drawn by twenty horses. Nameless objects of ominous size, covered with canvas, were being dragged up to the front lines.
Perry had no chanc
e to see more.
Three planes droned up to meet him. Their mounted guns peppered at him. When a bullet drilled through his windshield, past his ear, Perry boiled. He had seen the coppery flash of Elda’s hair again, in one of the planes.
“Get on the tail of one of those ships,” Perry barked to his co-pilot. He stuck his gun, taken along for emergency, through the cracked windshield grimly.
Chasing him away again, was she? Perry knew he was being mad, reckless, inviting an aerial battle—one against three. But the vision of her mocking smile in his mind had the same power to make him almost a maniac, as twice before.
Hounding the tail of one ship, Perry shot steadily. A bullet struck somewhere in the left wing motor. Smoke poured from it, then flame, and the plane dove down as a blazing firebrand.
One gone!
Shot at by the second plane, Perry himself slewed his ship away with a wrench that threatened to tear the wings off. Circling, he angled back, let the co-pilot take over, and aimed for the other ship’s windshield. The gods again leaned his way, as a bullet sped through glass. The pilot killed or wounded, the plane flopped crazily. Half-way down it righted, perhaps under the hand of a co-pilot, and managed to land safely.
The second out of action!
Panting, Perry looked for the third ship—Elda’s. It had hovered off, as though indolently watching. Perry roared at it, aiming with his gun. He had a perfect shot, at either the windshield or right wing motor.
His finger hesitated at the trigger. He groaned, involuntary thoughts booming in his mind. Starkly, he saw a vision of Elda’s lithe body crumpling at the impact of a bullet. Or her ship crashing to flames out of which no living thing could emerge.
Twice before, with her death at his fingertips, he had felt this same stab within him, without quite knowing what it meant. Now he knew.
GRIMLY he shot, reviling the fate that had combined his most dangerous enemy with the thing he loved, against all rhyme or reason.