by Anthology
From behind them, in the corridor through which they had raced, came a chorus of whistling shouts. Rawson whirled to find more of the red fighters, and again, though their hissing green flames were held ready, they did not descend.
A priest, copper-colored, shining resplendently in the weird glow, detached himself from the group and stepped forward under the protection of their weapons. Loah's hand was depressing the muzzle of Rawson's rifle. "Wait!" she said. "He wishes to speak."
* * * * *
The priest stopped and addressed them. Loah answered; and to Rawson it seemed horrible that her lips and throat should be called upon to form those whistling words. Then she turned toward him.
"He says they will not harm you now if you surrender. Later, when they select a new ruler, he may order you set free."
Rawson was doing some quick thinking. The priest was lying, clumsily, childishly, but it might be he could bargain with them.
"Tell them this," he ordered Loah: "they are to let you go free--let you go right now! If they do that, I'll lay down my gun. If they don't, that priest will die before they get me. I don't think you can make it," he added, "but go back to the jana. Don't stop for anything. Drive it as fast as you can; you may still get there before Gor does his stuff. And take the flame-thrower in case you are followed--" He stopped; Loah was laughing.
"Did you really think, Dean-San, that I would desert you?" Again she laughed softly--laughing squarely in the face of that waiting death, a laugh that was half a sob, that caught suddenly in her throat as she stared at Dean.
He could not read the look in her eyes as their expression changed. "Yes," she said slowly, "yes, you are right. If I stay we both die, quickly."
Again her voice made whistling sounds; the priest replied. Then Loah threw her arms around Dean and kissed him. He was gripping his rifle; before he could take her in his arms, she was gone. She walked swiftly, the flame-thrower in her hands, toward the dark cleft in the rocks, through which she disappeared. And Dean, though she had done what he really wished, felt that all of his life and strength had gone with him with that fleeing figure.
He placed his rifle on the floor and, straightening, held out his empty hands; the priest's talons were upon his flesh.
"But I got Phee-e-al, anyhow," he was thinking dully.
CHAPTER XXV
Smithy
Scarcely more than a vault in the solid rock, the room where Rawson lay. He had seen it for an instant when the priest, after tying his hands behind him, had hurled him viciously into the room. It had but one entrance, though up high on one wall was a crack some two feet in width that admitted fresh air. A little room, only some twenty feet square; but he would not suffocate--the priests did not intend that he should die--not yet.
He saw one of the giant yellow workers bring a big metal plate. He put it before the doorway; then, by the red glow, he knew that they had sealed him in.
"I got Phee-e-al," he thought. "I did that much to help. That may put a crimp in their plans, check the invasion up above. But Gor didn't do as I told him, or it didn't work. The twenty-four hours must have gone by."
Then, even in that thought, he found happiness. "That means that Loah is safe," he told himself. "The shaft is clear; she's on her way back right now."
He pictured the jana falling swiftly through that dark shaft. He saw in his mind the beautiful figure of the girl, lithe and slender, standing at the controls.
About him was a silence like that of the grave; his blood pounded in his temples like a throbbing drum. It was some time before he knew that, with that throbbing, other faint sounds were mingled.
They came from the wall beside him, sharp tappings muffled by distance, the faintest whispering echo of rock striking upon rock. Tap-tap ... tap. A longer pause.... Tap. They were making dots and dashes that blurred with the beating in his own brain.
In that dreadful silence he strained every nerve in an agony of listening. There was nothing more.
He had been roughly handled by the savages. His whole body was bruised and aching, his thoughts hazy and blurred. "Woozy," he told himself. "Guess the old bean must have got a bad crack. Hearing things--mustn't do that."
Again he tried to picture the girl, speeding on toward that inner world. Was she thinking of him? Surely she was. He could hear her calling his name. "Dean," she was saying. "Dean-San." The words were repeated, an agonized, ghostly whisper--repeated again, "Dean-San--oh, Dean-San," before he knew that the sound was coming from overhead. Then a light flashed once in the little room, and he saw her face, looking down.
She was beside him an instant later. "Dean-San," she was saying, "did you think that I really would leave you?" She was pressing her lips to his. Uncovering her light, she worked frenziedly at the metal cords that bound his wrists, pausing only to repeat her caresses--and at last he was free.
"I reached the jana," she told him in hurried whispers, "and then I came up. Their great room, where the Pathway to the Light begins, was deserted. With a cord I pulled the lever, and the jana vanished. I could not leave it for them to use. Then I followed--I knew by the sounds where they were taking you. And now, what can we do, Dean-San? Where can we go?"
It was real! Loah was there beside him; he had her in his arms, his bruised, bleeding arms whose hurts he no longer felt. And then, through his mind, flashed the question: if this was real, what of the other--the rappings he had heard? Perhaps it hadn't been a dream.
He lifted a fragment of rock and crashed it against the wall from which those rappings apparently had come. Laboriously he spelled out his name, remembering the dots and dashes from earlier flying days when planes had been equipped with key-senders. He spelled it slowly and waited, while only the silence beat upon him and the blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it. The answer came from a quicker hand:
"Rawson--this is Smithy."
But Smithy was dead! What could it mean? Slowly Rawson pounded out the letters of his question: "Where--are--you?" The answer dispelled his last doubt as to the reality of what he had heard.
It was Smithy. Others were with him, for Smithy said "we," and they were prisoners, sealed up in a living tomb. But where? Smithy did not know. He knew only that they were in a big room where the rocks had been shattered and molten gold spilled on the floor. There was a hole in the roof, but too small to get through--a round hole, about eight inches in diameter. And, at that, Rawson interrupted to tap out a single word.
"Coming!" he said, and turned toward Loah and the light.
The girl had found a metal rope in her wanderings; she had used it to let herself down into the cave. And now it was she who helped Dean to pull his bruised body up and into the narrow crack. Loah had clung to the flame-thrower; they found it where she had left it up above.
The tapping rocks she could not understand, but she knew Dean had a definite plan in mind when he whispered: "The room where you first found me--do you remember? Do you know the way?"
"I will always remember," she said simply. "And, yes, I know the way."
Rawson caught glimpses now and again of that broad thoroughfare along which he had once traveled, a prisoner of the mole-men. But Loah knew other and seldom-used passages that roughly paralleled it; and then, after a time, Rawson himself knew in what direction they must go.
He knew, too, that they had followed a circular route, and that the room in which he had been sealed was not a great way from the place in which Smithy was a prisoner. Yet this had been his only way to reach it.
When they came to a sudden sharp turn, he realized that they were close. Beyond that bend would be the branching, lateral tunnel that led to Smithy's prison.
The main runway had been deserted by the Reds. Stopping often to listen, starting at times into side passages at some fancied alarm, they had met with no opposition. But now, from beyond the angling passage, came the familiar shrillness of the mole-men's voices.
Again the two concealed themselves, but no one approached. "It's a guard we hear
," Rawson whispered. "They're guarding that entrance where we must go. They're taking no chances on Smithy's escaping." Then he crept to the point where the passage turned, the flame-thrower ready in his hand.
He drew back. For the moment it seemed to him physically impossible to turn this weapon upon them. They were savages, true, but it seemed horrible to slash living bodies with a weapon like this. Then he thought of the devastation those same weapons had wrought among the people of his own world. His momentary hesitation vanished. With one spring he leaped into the open where, a hundred feet away, red bodies were massed, and the air above was quivering with the green jets of their weapons.
His own flame-thrower he had turned to a tiny point of light; now it roared forth in fury as he swung it forward. They had no time even to aim their weapons or to turn them on. They were stampeded by the astounding attack. And still Rawson sickened as he saw them fall.
There were some who, panic-stricken, dropped their cylinders and leaped for safety in a narrow branching way. Rawson knew he should have killed them, knew it in the instant that they vanished, but that momentary, uncontrollable revulsion within him had stayed his hand.
He rushed forward now, Loah still bravely at his side--past the fallen bodies, through the choking odor of burned flesh. Grabbing up one of the weapons that had been dropped, he thrust it into her hands and said: "Wait here. Stand them off if they come back." Then he was rushing up the side corridor toward a room where once, in a far-distant past, he himself had been confined.
The flame-thrower lighted the way. It showed him the metal plate and the smooth, glassy rock that had been melted around its edge. He pounded on the metal and shouted Smithy's name.
Voices answered from within--voices almost unintelligible for the wonder and unbelief and joy that made them a confusion of wordless shouts. Then he stepped back and turned the blast of his weapon upon the rock at the edge of the plate.
The metal sheet moved at last, its top swinging slowly outward. Its base was held by the gummy, hardening rock. Then it broke free and crashed to the floor, and the light of Dean's weapon showed through the black opening upon the blanched faces of men, where eyes were still wide in disbelief.
Though they were looking at one of their own kind, it must have taken then a moment to realize that the naked body, clad only in a golden loin cloth, and the hands that held one of the fearful, green-flamed weapons, were those of a human. Then one of them broke from the others, sprang heedlessly across the still-glowing plate, and threw his arms about the barbaric figure.
"Dean!" he choked. "Dean, it's really you! You're alive!"
And Rawson's voice, too, was husky as he said: "Smithy, I thought you were gone. The radio said they had got you, old man."
Then other khaki-clad bodies, a dozen of them, were crowding through the hot portal, and Rawson came suddenly to himself.
"Quick!" he shouted. "They'll be after us in a second. Follow me."
Loah was waiting. Her own flame-thrower spat a little jet of green; it was the only light. Rawson saw here she had gathered up the other weapons and had turned them off so that even their little light would not blind her as she kept watch down the dark passage.
"Do we want them?" Dean shouted to the others. And Smithy echoed the question:
"Do we want them, Colonel?"
Colonel Culver, his face almost unrecognizable under its smears of powder stains and blood, snapped a quick answer: "No. We outrange them with our rifles. They're only flame-throwers, not ray projectors. Beat it! Run like the devil!"
Rawson snatched Loah's weapon and threw it with the others. It would be hard going, ahead--she must not be uselessly burdened. But he kept his own. Then with his one free hand he swept her up till she was racing beside him as they led the way.
"I should have kept the fire weapon," the girl protested; "I, too, can fight."
Rawson, speaking between breaths, reassured her: "Too heavy. Their guns will protect us--"
Behind them, a man's voice cried out once, a single, hoarse scream of agony; then the rock wall took the sharp crackle of rifle fire and threw the sound into crashing, thundering echoes.
CHAPTER XXVI
Power!
A girl whose creamy body was strangely unsoiled by smoke or grime, whose jeweled breast-plates flashed in the light of her torch while the loose wrappings about her waist whipped against her as she ran. And Rawson, naked but for the golden loin cloth, running beside her. Then Smithy, and ten others in the khaki uniform of the service--it was all that was left of the fifty who had dared the depths. And now all of them were harried and driven like helpless animals in the burrows and runways of that under-world.
But not entirely helpless. Colonel Culver had been right: their rifles outranged the flame-throwers. And Rawson, looking past that first burst of rifle fire, saw the one flame that had reached them whip upward as its owner fell. Others of the Reds came crowding in after, and the jets of their weapons made little areas of light as they crashed to the floor. Then Colonel Culver took charge of the retreat.
Ahead of them and behind them was impenetrable darkness; only the nearby walls were illumined by the torch that Loah had been forced to turn on. And out of that darkness at any moment might come devastating flames. Culver detailed two men as a rear guard and two others to run ahead a few paces in advance. At intervals of a minute or two their rifles would crack, and the echoes would be pierced by the whining scream of ricochets, as their bullets glanced from the walls.
"We may not need them up ahead," Culver shouted to Rawson. "I don't understand it. The place seems deserted--there were plenty of them here before!"
"They've got something else to think of," Rawson shouted in reply. "I killed Phee-e-al--he was their leader. But they're after us now. They'll be running through other passages, cutting in ahead of us."
The tunnel turned and bent upward. For a full half mile they ran straight in a stiff climb. Between gasping breaths Colonel Culver shouted hoarsely: "Won't it ever turn? If they bring up their damned heat-ray machines they'll get us on a straightaway like this!"
Then Smithy's voice outshouted his with a note of hope: "We're almost there; I remember this place. There's where we mounted the searchlight. They've ripped everything out. Up ahead, one turn to the right, then a quarter mile, then a turn toward the crater. That runs straight for a mile, but there's a field gun at the bottom of the volcano. We'll be safe when we're on that last stretch."
* * * * *
Ahead of them the rifles of the two who ran in advance crashed out in a fury of fire as a green glow appeared. But this time the flame did not die; and Rawson, staring with hot, wide-opened eyes, saw that the ribbon of green swept transversely across the tunnel.
He could hardly stand when he came to a stop. Beside him Loah was swaying with weariness. The walls echoed only the hoarse, panting breath of the men. Then they crept slowly forward, where the passage went steadily up. Loah's light was out; she had slipped the cap on the torch at the first sight of that green.
They stopped but ten feet short of the deadly blaze. From a narrow rift in the left wall it streamed outward, the rock at the edges of that crack turning to red at its touch. It beat upon the opposite wall, where already the stone was melting to throw over them a white glare and the glow of heat. And, like a shimmering, silken barrier, whose touch could mean only instant death, it reached across the wide tunnel at the height of a man's waist and moved slowly up and down. The heaviest armor plate ever rolled could have formed no more impenetrable a barrier.
"And we almost made it," said Smithy slowly. "Look, beyond there--another hundred feet. There's the bend in the tunnel, a sharp turn--and we almost got around!"
Rawson reached for Loah's light. In the wall where the flame was striking, only a dozen steps back, he had seen another dark mouth, a ragged crack in the rock. He sprang to the entrance; it might be there was another way around. His first glance told the story, for he saw the walls draw together again not a hundred f
eet off.
"A blind alley," he groaned.
* * * * *
One of the two who had been their advance guard snapped his rifle to his shoulder. He was aiming at the glowing crack where the green light was issuing.
"A ricochet," he growled. "It may go on in and mess 'em up." But there was no whine of a glancing bullet that followed his shot; the softened wall had cushioned the impact.
Another man sprang beside him. He was shouting at the top of his voice while one hand reached into a bag that hung at his waist. "Get back, everyone," he said. "If I miss...." He did not finish the sentence, but pulled the pin from a hand grenade, then took careful aim and threw.
It went high--thrown there purposely; he had not dared aim it into the flame. But it struck the crevice fairly, and they heard it rattle on inside. The next instant brought the crack and roar of its explosion.
Like a winking signal light the green barrier vanished. Where it had been was only blackness and the dying glow of molten rock. Then, a hundred feet beyond, up close to the roof, the bend of the tunnel turned red; it seemed bursting into flame. Far back of them, down the long sloping way where they had come, shrill voices were screaming--and still there was no green flame to account for that tunnel end flaming red.
Rawson stood motionless. Loah, and the others beside him, seemed likewise petrified, until the voice of Culver jarred them into action.
"The ray!" he shouted. "It's the heat ray, damn them! Quick, jump into that cave!"
* * * * *
They had all retreated through fear of the grenade; they were opposite the black place into which Rawson had looked. Loah was close beside Dean; he threw her with all his strength into the black mouth of the cave, then he was one of a crowding, stumbling mass of men who followed after, and their going was lighted by a terrible torch of flame.
One man had stood apart from the others, farther across the wide corridor. His khaki-clad body flashed suddenly to incandescence, then fell to the floor. And inside the cave, where the walls came abruptly together to cut off any further retreat, Colonel Culver spoke softly.