by Philip Wylie
Machine-guns were spitting from the woods once more, and both lights were blinded.
A rocket rasped its yellow streak into the air and burst above in shower of stars. A Fourth of July rocket, unquestionably a signal!
Tony fired at random into the woods; all through the camp, rifles and machine-guns were going. But no attack came.
A second rocket rasped up and broke its spatter of stars. Now the camp held its fire and listened. It heard—Tony heard, only a whistle, like a traffic whistle, or the whistle that summoned squads to attacking order.
A third rocket went up.
“Here they come!” some one said; and Tony wondered how he knew it. Soaked in perspiration, Tony glared into the blackness of the woods. He longed for the lights; he longed for military rockets. But there never had been any of these. Hendron, in making his preparation, had not foreseen this sort of attack. He had imagined vagrants in groups, or even mobs of desperate men, but nothing that the wire would not stop or a few machine-guns scatter. That is, he had imagined nothing worse until it was too late to prepare, adequately, for—this.
Now machine-guns in the woods were sweeping the camp enclosure. The fire radiated from a few points; and as it was certain the attackers were not in the path of their own fire, but were in the dark spaces between, Tony swept these with his bullets.
The gun bucked under his tense fingers. Yells rewarded him. He was wounding, killing the attackers—units of that horde that had sent that murderous fire to mow down the men, the splendid men, the great men who had whispered their names quietly to Tony as he had bent over them before they died.
Shouts drowned the yells of the wounded—savage, taunting shouts. There must be a thousand men on this bit of the front alone, more than all the men in the camp. Tony heard his voice bawling over the tumult: “Get ’em! Get ’em! Don’t let ’em by!”
His machine-gun was overheating. A little light came from somewhere; Tony could not see what it was, except that it flickered. Something was burning. Tony could see figures at the wire, now. He could not reckon their numbers, did not try to. He tried only to shoot them down. Once through that wire,—that wire so weak that he could not see it,—and that thousand with the thousand behind them would be over him and the men beside him, they would be over the line of older men behind; then they would reach the women.
Tony’s lips receded from his teeth. He aimed the gun with diabolic care, and watched it take effect as wind affects standing wheat. The attackers broke, and ran back to the woods.
In the central part of the cantonment the growth afforded better cover and gave the assault shorter range. Men went in pairs to the tops of the buildings, and through loopholes which had been provided for such a contingency began sniping at those who moved in the territory around the buildings.
Every one was overmastered by the same sort of rage which had possessed Tony. The reason for their existence had been to them a high and holy purpose. They defended it with the fanaticism of zealots. They could not know that the flight of their planes to and from the Ransdell metal-supply had indicated to the frantic hordes that somewhere human beings lived in discipline and decency. They could not know how for weeks they had been spied upon by ravenous eyes. They could not know how the countryside around, and the distant cities, had been recruited to form an army to attack them. They could not know that nearly ten thousand men, hungry, desperate, most of them already murderers many times over, armed, supplied with crafty plans which had been formulated by disordered heads once devoted to important, intelligent pursuits—how these besieged them now, partly for spoils, but to a greater degree in a fury of lust and envy. They had traveled on broken roads, growing as they marched. It was a heathen horde, a barbaric and ruthless horde, which attacked the colony.
The siege relaxed to an intermittent exchange of volleys. At this machine-gun station, Tony, suffering acutely from thirst, with six of his comrades lying dead near by, fought intermittently.
Reënforcements came from the center of the camp—Jack Taylor and two more of the younger men.
“Hurt, Tony?” Tyalor challenged him.
“No,” replied Tony; and he did not mention his dead; for Taylor, creeping up, had encountered them. “Who’s killed in the buildings?”
“Not Hendron,” said Taylor, “or Eve—though she might have been. She was one of the girls that went out to attend to the wounded. Two of the girls were hit, but not Eve.… Hendron wants to see you, Tony.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“Where is he?”
“At the ship. I’ll take over here for you. Good luck!”
Tony stumbled through the dark to the buildings, black except for faint cracks of light at the doors behind which the wounded were collected. He found Hendron inside the Space Ship, and there, since its metal made an armor for it, a light was burning. Hendron sat at a table; it was now his headquarters.
“Who’s hurt?” said Tony.
“Too many.” Hendron dimissed this. “What do they think they are doing?” he challenged Tony abruptly.
“Getting ready to come again,” Tony returned.
“To-night, probably?”
Tony glanced at his wrist-watch; it was eleven o’clock. “Midnight, would be my guess, sir,” he said.
“Will they get in next time?” Hendron demanded.
“They can.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, if they come on more resolutely. They can do more than they have done.”
“Whereas we,” Hendron took up for him, “can scarcely do more.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tony. “We used all the defenses we had; and they could have carried us an hour ago, if they’d come on.”
“Exactly,” nodded Hendron. “And now we are fewer. We will be fewer still, of course, after the next attack; and fewer yet, after they get in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“However,” observed Hendron thoughtfully, “that will be, in one way, an advantage.”
Tony was used, by now, to be astonished by Hendron; yet he said: “I don’t follow you, sir.”
“We will defend the enclosure as long as we can, Tony,” Hendron said. “But when they are in,—if they get in,—no one is to throw himself away fighting them uselessly. They must be delayed as long as they can be; but when they are in, we gather—all of us that are left, Tony—here.”
“Here?”
“Inside this ship. Hadn’t that occurred to you, Tony? Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”
Tony stared at his chief, and straightened, the blood of hope racing again hot within.
“Of course I see!” he almost shouted. “Of course I see!”
“Very well. Then issue cloths—white cloths, Tony; distribute them.”
“Cloths?” repeated Tony, but before Hendron answered, he realized the reason.
“For arm-bands, Tony; so, in the dark, we will know our own.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No time to lose, Tony.”
“No, sir. But—Eve is safe?”
“She is not hurt, I hear. You might see her for an instant. The women are tearing up bandages.”
Tony found her, but not alone; she was in a room with twenty others, tearing white cloth into strips. At least, he saw for himself that she was not yet hurt; at least he had one word with her.
“Tony! Take care of yourself!”
“How about you, Eve?”
She disregarded this; said only:
“Get back to the ship, Tony, after the fight. Oh, get back to the ship!” He went out again. A bullet pinged on the wall beside him; bullets were flying again. Behind Tony, on the other edge of the camp, sporadic firing flashed along the road and in the woods. The bursts of machine-gun fire sounded uglier; there were groans again, and screams. Tony could sense rather than see the gathering of attackers on this edge; then firing broke out on the other side too.
He wondered how many of his runners with the arm-bands and
with the orders would fall before they reached the first line of the defense. With his own burden of machine-gun cartridges, he returned to the post he had fought.
“That you, Tony?” Jack Taylor hailed. “Cartridges? Great! We’ll scrap those bimboes. Hell! Just in time, I’d say.… Here they come!”
“Listen!” yelled Tony, giving his orders with realization that, if he did not speak now, he might never: “If they get in, delay them but don’t mix with them; each man tie a white cloth on his sleeve—and retreat to the ship!” And he issued the strips he had brought with him.
From the buildings, reënforcements arrived—six men with guns slung over their shoulders, and bayonets that caught a glint from the firing. They were burdened with more cartridge-cases, and they carried another machine-gun. Tony placed them almost without comment.
One of the new men produced a Very pistol. His private property, he explained, which he had brought along “for emergencies.”
“It’s one now,” Tony said simply, and took the pistol from him. He fired it; and the Very light, hanging in the air, revealed men at the wire everywhere. A thousand men—two thousand; no sense even in estimating them.
In the green glare which showed them, Jack Taylor looked at Tony. “My God, I forgot,” he said, and shoved Tony his canteen.
Tony tasted the whisky and passed it on, then again he claimed the machine-gun. He made a flat fan of the flashes before him as he swung the gun back and forth. He was killing men by scores, he knew; but he knew, also, that if the hundreds had the nerve to stick, they were “in.”
CHAPTER 19—ESCAPE
THEY were in! And Tony did not need the green flare of the last light from the Very pistol to tell him so.
“Fall back! Fall back to the ship—fighting!” Tony yelled again and again.
He did not need to tell his men to fight. They were doing that. The trouble was, they still wanted to fight, holding on here.
What saved them was the fact that the machine-gun ammunition was gone. The machine-guns were useless; nothing to do but abandon them.
“Fall back!” Tony yelled. “Oh, fall back!”
A few obeyed him. The rest could not, he suddenly realized; and he had to leave them, dying. Jack Taylor was beside him, firing a rifle. They were five altogether who were falling back; firing, from the machine-gun post.
Figures from the black leaped at them, and it was hand to hand. Tony fought with a bayonet, then with a clubbed rifle, madly and wildly swinging. He was struck, and reeled. Some one caught him, and he clutched the other’s throat to strangle him before his eyes got the patch of gray which was a white arm-band.
“Come on!” cried Jack Taylor’s voice; and with Taylor, he ran in the dark. Clear of the attack for an instant, they rallied—the two of them—found a pistol on a body over which they stumbled, emptied it at the attackers, and fell back again.
They reached the buildings. Gunfire was flashing from the laboratories which otherwise were black. The dormitories sprang into light; windows shone, and spread illumination which showed that they were deserted and were being used, now, by the defenders of the camp to light the space already abandoned. The final concentration was in the center, dominated by the looming black bulk of the Space Ship standing in its stocks.
The lights from the dormitories were holding up the advance of the attackers. They could not shoot out hundreds of globes so simply as they had smashed the searchlights. And they could not advance into that illuminated area, under the machine-guns and rifles of the laboratories. They had first to take the deserted dormitories and darken them.
They were doing this; but it delayed them. It held them up a few minutes. Here and there a few, drunker or more reckless than the rest, charged in between the buildings, but they dropped to the ground dead or wounded—or waiting for the support that was soon to come.
Room by room, dormitory windows went black. The lights were not being turned out; they were being smashed and the window-panes were crashing. Yells celebrated the smashing, and shots.
The yells ceased; and the defenders knew that some sort of assault was being reorganized.
Tony moved in the dark, recognized by his voice, and knowing others in the same way.
“Keep down—down—down,” he was crying. “Below the window-line. Down!” For bullets from machine-guns, evidently aimed from the dormitory windows, were striking in.
Many did not obey him; he did not expect them to. They had to fight back, firing from the windows. Yells at the farther end of the main laboratory told that it was hand-to-hand there, in the dark. A charge—a rush had been pushed home.
Tony found Taylor beside him; they had stuck together in the dark; and a dozen others rose and ran with them into the mêlée.
Men of science, Tony was realizing even as he stumbled in the dark, the best brains of the modern world, fighting hand to hand with savages! Shoot and stab and club, wildly, desperately in the dark!
Your comrade went down; you stepped back over him, and shot and stabbed again; yelling, groaning, slipping, struggling up again. But many did not get up. More and more lay where they fell. Tony, stumbling and slipping on the stickily wet floor, realized that this rush was stopped. There was nobody left in the room to fight—nobody but two or three distinguished as friends by the spots of the arm bands.
“Jack?” gasped Tony; and Taylor’s voice answered him. They were staggering and bleeding, both of them; but they had survived the fight together.
“Who was here!” Tony asked. Who of their comrades and friends were dead and dying at their feet, he meant. Tony found the flash-light which, all through the fight, he had in his pocket, and he bent to the floor and held it close to the faces.
He caught breath, bitterly. Bronson was there. Bronson, the discoverer of the two stranger planets whose passing had loosed this savagery; Dr. Sven Bronson, the first scientist of the Southern Hemisphere, lay there in his blood, a bayonet through his throat! Beside him Dodson was dying, his right arm hacked almost off. He recognized Tony, spoke two words which Tony could not hear, and lost consciousness.
A few of those less hurt were rising.
“To the ship! Into the ship!” Tony cried to them. “Everybody into the ship! Spread the word! Jack!… Everybody, everybody into the ship!” There was no alternative.
Three-fourths of the camp was in the hands of the horde; and the laboratories could not possibly beat off another rush. They could not have beaten back this, if it had been more organized.
Bullets flew through the dark.
“To the ship! To the ship!”
Creeping on hands and knees, from wounds or from caution, and dragging the wounded with them, the men started the retreat to the ship. Women were helping them.
Yells and whistles warned that another rush was gathering; and this would be from all sides; the laboratories and the ship were completely surrounded.
Tony caught up in his arms a young man who was barely breathing. He had a bullet through him; but he lived. Tony staggered with him into the ship.
Hendron was there at the portal of the great metal rocket. He was cooler than any one else. “Inside, inside,” he was saying confidently.
“Where’s Eve?” Tony gasped at him.
“I saw her—a moment ago.”
“Safe?”
Her father nodded.
Tony bore in his burden, laid it down. Ransdell confronted him. From head to foot, the South African was dabbled and clotted with blood. He was three-quarters naked; a bullet had creased his forehead; a bayonet had slashed his shoulder. His lips were set back from his teeth. His eyes, the only portion of him not crimson, gazed from the pit of his face, and a voice that croaked out of his wheezing lungs said: “Seen Eve?”
“Her father has, Dave. She’s all right,” replied Tony.
Ransdell pitched head foremost toward the floor as Tony caught him.
The second rush was coming. No doubt of it, and it would be utterly overwhelming. There would be no sur
vivors—but the women. None. For the horde would take no prisoners. They were killing the wounded already—their own badly wounded and the camp’s wounded that they had captured.
Eliot James, a bullet through his thigh, but saved by the dark, crawled in with this information. Tony carried him into the ship.
They were all in the ship—all the survivors. The horde did not suspect it. The horde, as it charged in the dark, yelling and firing, closed in on the laboratories, clambered in the windows, smashing, shooting, screaming. Meeting no resistance, they shot and bayoneted the bodies of their own men and of the camp’s which had been left there.
Then they came on toward the ship. They suddenly seemed to realize that the ship was the last refuge. They surrounded it, firing at it. Their bullets glanced from its metal. Somebody who had grenades bombed it.
A frightful flame shattered them. Probably they imagined, at first, that the grenade had exploded some sort of a powder magazine within the huge metal tube, and that it was exploding. Few of those near to the ship, and outside it, lived to see what was happening.
The great metal rocket rose from the earth, the awful blast from its power tubes lifting it. The frightful heat seared and incinerated, killing at its touch. A hundred of the horde were dead before the ship was above the buildings.
Hendron lifted it five hundred feet farther, and the blast spread in a funnel below it. A thousand died in that instant. Hendron ceased to elevate the ship. Indeed, he lowered it a little, and the power of the atomic blast which was keeping two thousand tons of metal and of human flesh suspended over the earth, played upon the ground—and upon the flesh on the ground—as no force ever released by man before.
Tony lay on his face on the floor of the ship, gazing down through the protective quartz-glass at the ground lighted by the garish glare of the awful heat.
In the midst of the blaring, blinding, screaming crisis, a man on horseback appeared. His coming seemed spectral. He rode in full uniform; he had a sword which he brandished to rally his doomed horde. Probably he was drunk; certainly he had no conception of what was occurring; but his courage was splendid. He spurred into the center of the lurid light, into the center of the circle of death and tumult, stiff-legged in stirrups of leather, like one of the horrible horsemen of the Apocalypse.