by Don Wilcox
They were leading him into his dressing room. He’d have to get out of those cut-away clothes before anyone else saw him. The Sashes would never be able to believe that there was a little war going on, right in the inner circle.
“Get that blue uniform on and be quick about it,” Nitti snapped. “Keep him moving, Stobber. I’ll see that the path is clear to the basement. What the palace folks don’t know won’t hurt them.”
Nitti’s footsteps receded. Stobber’s form filled the door of the dressing room. Joe hurried into a different uniform. What did they think they could do with him? The basement again? There’d never be a second escape from that dungeon, Joe thought. But it was probably quick death, this time. Anyway if Stobber had his way—
That one unguarded split second! Joe whirled and caught Stobber’s gun arm. The ray blazed across the dressing room and cut a slice through dozens of suits and uniforms hanging there. The lower halves dropped with a swoosh. The ray was slicing in all directions, and it cut through the steel rod from which the uniforms hung. Three or four sections of the pipe fell, and Joe and Stobber were under them, struggling, rolling on the floor. For an instant Joe thought he had the ray pistol under control. Not so. It sliced down through the door, and half of the panel crashed to the floor.
Then the pistol went flying off into the other room, and the blaze of light had stopped. Stobber was up, he was coming at Joe as Joe rose to his knees. Joe caught his weight and went backward, and his head crashed against the wall. A picture fell. Stobber fell too, for Joe had him by the legs, and then Joe was on him, punching him, and catching the fellow’s sledge hammer fists in his own face.
They rolled into a corner where the king kept a collection of weapons. Stobber reached for a knife. Joe slugged him. He staggered and tried to get up. He was on knees and knuckles and he had a knife. But Joe pounced on him, and the knife clanged and they both scrambled for it—
And then the net of cable fell from the ceiling and they were both trapped under it. Nitti was in the doorway. He had pulled the cord. Above the weapon collection the metal net had hung, waiting to be tripped by the pull of a cord. It hung over both of them, and they couldn’t fight against it.
“I’ve got him, Stobber,” Nitti said, an arrogant smile on his lips. He was rather pleased, Joe thought, that he had proved himself the master of the situation where the chief of the guards had failed. “The way to the basement is clear.”
Joe gave a pained sigh. Too much exertion after a heavy meal, he thought. And here he was, again a prisoner in the basement cell where Pudgy had once before come to his rescue.
The steps of the prime minister and his fiendish bodyguard (the handsome and dignified chief of the Sashes!—and how Joe hated him!) shuffled away into silence. They weren’t walking too spryly themselves, Joe thought. Neither one of them would feel like another fight for a few hours he’d just bet.
And on that theory, they probably assumed that he would fall asleep and rest quietly until they could figure out what to do with him.
That’s where they were wrong. Joe went to work on the rock in the floor.
“That may be my own little secret,” Joe said to himself. “Mine and Pudgy’s. I wonder—”
He pried at the stones. A new understanding of this exit had come to him. It was directly over the giant funnel. It had probably been formed originally, not by the builders of this fortress, but by the vine itself. The thing had no doubt pushed this rock out in the first place, for Pudgy had certainly never been strong enough to lift it alone.
Joe’s wish may have done it this time. Or it may have been the words he was chanting in his mind. “Seevia . . . Seevia . . . Seevia . . .”
The floor stone lifted with hardly any help from Joe. He placed it at one side of the opening, and sure enough, there was the whole magnificent tree of lavender light, rising up through the deep well. Like a huge plant out of a colossal stone vase. And one branch of the thing was whipping itself silently against the opening in Joe’s floor.
He remembered how Pudgy had coaxed it to come on through. He tried the motions, fanning at it with his hands. Within a minute or two his chains were cut. He was free? No, not quite! The steel door hadn’t been left ajar this time.
For the next half hour he worked in vain, trying to get the whipping arm of the vine to slide across to the door and cut its hinges.
It wasn’t working. The vine seemed to have gone its limit. It receded through the hole in the floor. He bent down to watch it.
“Pudgy would leap for it,” he said to himself. “Why shouldn’t I?”
As many times as it had carried him successfully, he shouldn’t lack for confidence. And yet it would be like leaping into shafts of steam. Or ropes of cloud. It looked no more substantial than the stream of light that a searchlight sends into a foggy sky.
He lowered himself part way through the opening and hung there, supporting himself from the elbows. Now he saw the course he wanted to follow. If the large central trunk would catch him, he would slide from it to the down-sweeping branch on the left, and drop from it to a lower, flimsier looking arm beneath—and that one was pretty sure to bend with him and let him down over the steps. Not the deeper steps a hundred feet down, but the outer steps well out of danger from the center of the funnel.
From this point he would be able to make his way back into the palace, he thought. And he would go right to the headquarters of the Sashes. Yes, that would be the right maneuver. Stobber wouldn’t be there. No, Stobber and the prime minister would be in some private chamber holding an all night conference. They had a “problem king” on their hands, and they’d be deciding what to do with him.
Joe chuckled. He’d turn the tables yet tonight. Before the Sashes got wind of the trouble he’d have them under control.
But what about the vine? Could he control that too?
The vine had been darned good to him, he couldn’t deny that. But he knew he had struck a deep truth when he told Nitti that any ruler of this land was doomed if he couldn’t make the vine serve him.
He lowered himself further and hung by the fingertips for a moment. The lavender light blazed in his eyes. Once more he traced his course mentally. The vine arms were moving slowly. He’d better make the leap now before they changed too much.
He dropped.
The steamy light passed through his hands. He was going down.
It wasn’t catching him. And he wasn’t catching it. He was falling straight for the center of the funnel. He scrambled wildly. He might as well have snatched at the air. He was falling. The series of white stone stairs that curved around in terraces, closing in toward the funnel’s center, were slipping past him. He was falling straight and fast.
Down, down—now it was the vertical shaft around him, nothing else—down, down through the bottomless well of light.
CHAPTER XIX
Down . . . down . . . He wasn’t sure whether he was breathing. He began to wonder whether he was still falling. Or whether he was just suspended there. The steamy, luminous substance was simply racing past him, he thought. No, the white stone walls were flowing upward too, when ever he could catch glimpses of them. If he had spread his arms he might have burned his fingers on them.
Down . . . down . . .
The luminous substance was thickening. He was falling more slowly Now he lost the dread of striking solid bottom and feeling his life crush out. He was coasting, leisurely . . .
And he was hearing sounds.
Sounds of human voic.es. Far away, yet close within the walls. A welter of little sounds. A confusion of many people talking at once. Scores of little conversations overlapping each other.
And his own breathing—he could hear it, and it almost drowned the faint little sounds. It was better if he held his breath. Yes, now he could hear plainly. He had stopped falling. He breathed again. He was falling again, and again the echoes of conversations were tumbling over each other.
Presently he was finding the key to the weird situa
tion. Breathing very slowly, he lingered within range of certain conversations long enough to catch the drift.
Now he was hearing the chant of several voices. The plaza. They were holding their religious rites up there on the surface again tonight. And the lavender vine was sensitive to their song.
The voices began to fade. Then Pudgy’s voice came through, clear and strong. Pudgy was singing the religious song too. Singing alone. And when Joe knew it was time to recite their prayers, he heard Pudgy praying that he could be closer to the lanterns, and that the guards wouldn’t chase him away.
“Strange little fellow!” Joe thought. And as he breathed again, he fell again. The lavender light flowed upward, and a hundred more voices chattered . . . Rebel talk . . . Fear of the vine . . . Talk of escaping the Sashes . . . the outcry of a slave, asleep, dreaming he was being punished.
Then came the voice of Marcia. Joe held his breath. Yes, it was Marcia talking with some native girl, confiding in her.
“If you could help me make Nadoff believe,” Marcia was saying, “I would be so grateful. I’ve tried to tell him that this man is the king. I know he is. I think Nadoff doesn’t want to believe me because he’s beginning to like this fellow—and he knows he doesn’t like the king! So you see?”
The native girl said, “You like him too, I believe.”
“Yes, now that I understand him. He had certain qualities that a king needs. He could do what we rebels don’t have a chance to do. I mean, if he were back on the throne—”
“And if he had a good woman back of him,” the Karridonzan girl added. “Please don’t misunderstand.”
Joe was quivering, and his Ups went tight “Do you mean you’re not in love with him?” the girl asked. Her voice sounded plaintive. “I thought from the way he has idolized you—”
“I’m doing what I can to help him regain his confidence,” Marcia said. “But I’m not thinking of love.”
“There’s someone else you’re in love with, then. There must be. Is it that American slave you’ve been telling me about?”
Marcia’s words were so quiet and so far away that Joe’s heart almost stopped beating as he listened.
“The American slave is, the man I’ve always dreamed of.”
The girl murmured some sort of Karridonzan blessing. “Do you know him well?”
“I met him only recently. But a little frog-boy named Pudgy has told me many things about him. And Pudgy goes everywhere and knows everything. I hope I’ll see the American again.”
Joe drew a deep, filling breath of air—and dropped away from the voice that had held him spellbound.
For many minutes the passing voices meant nothing to him. He wanted to close his eyes and simply fall, slowly and peacefully, through this mysterious well of light. This was a one way passage, he believed. It seemed unlikely that he would ever find his way out. And if this was to be all—if there should never be another glimpse of sunshine, or another conversation with living human beings, then he wanted those pretty words of Marcia to keep ringing—
A harsh note intruded upon his reverie.
The voice of Nitticello!
With half a breath, Joe stopped again. And before he had listened for more than a few seconds he discovered that the conversation was drifting along with him, so that he could breathe slowly without passing out of range.
It was a tense hour for Nitticello and Stobber, and Joe could feel the feverish eagerness with which they worked.
They were searching for the secret of the lavender vine.
“Here it is,” Nitti was saying. “On page one hundred. An old legend. Some crackpot historian’s theory.”
“Read it.” said Stobber. Joe could guess from the muffled words that Stobber was nursing a swollen face.
Nitti read, “That which you give to others the vine also gives to you.”
“Read on.”
“Give the people bread, and the vine will give you bread.”
“That’s foolishness,” Stobber growled. “Who gives us bread? The servants put it on the table, but the chefs prepare it, and the baker makes it, and before that there’s the slaves—they raise the grain and grind it—”
“This means the vine would give the bread to the slaves,” said Nitti.
Joe could imagine he heard a grinding of teeth. Nitti read on. “Give service to your fellow men, even as a good king, and the vine will give you service.”
“Humph!”
“Give them death and it will give you—”
“Stop it!” Stobber shouted. “I don’t want to hear any more of that damned nonsense. There ought to be a better book somewhere in this junk heap. Let’s look around.”
Then Joe could hear the shuffling of books and the occasional scraping of feet. Their voices were conspicuously silent.
“Here’s something,” Stobber said finally. “When the lavender vine hangs itself upon the sun, great troubles will fall upon the land.”
Nitti retorted that that was nothing new. All the old timers could quote that one. “And after all, what does it mean? It never happens, does it? How could the vine hang itself on the sUn. The sun’s millions of miles away. The vine’s here. Right here under our palace.”
“You mean it would be here if it stayed at home,” said Stobber. “People are seeing it everywhere these days. The slave masters have been seeing it all over the valley. And some of the Sashes claim that one arm of it has been hanging along the ledge under the new king’s window—”
“S-s-s-sh. Someone’s coming.”
Joe listened intently. It must have been one of the Sashes, he decided. Stobber ordered him to come on in.
“We’re just browsing through some old books,” Nitti said. “Help us put them back on the shelves.”
“I came to report something very strange, sir,” the Sash said, and he was breathless about it.
“What is it?” Stobber snapped.
“The sun’s coming up, sir—”
“Is there anything strange about that?”
“It looks like it has purple veins on it, sir. I think it’s the vine, sir, hanging in the air between us and the sun. But some of the old people are in a panic. They say it means catastrophe!”
Joe’s unintentional sharp breathing sent him gliding away once again, and the remainder of the conversation was lost.
CHAPTER XX
Joe never knew when he went through the curve that reversed his direction, but he was surely falling up Instead of down.
From somewhere out Of the marshes he came through the surface, falling feet first—upward—into the open air.
He was half a mile high before he could realize that this was the same Karridonzan valley. Mentally he was still descending through the vine—until he discovered the rising sun.
He continued to fall upward. He was fountaining up through a shaft of the vein that couldn’t be seen plainly in the sunlight. But wherever a shadow crossed it, from a wisp of cloud, it showed in clearcut lines. It was like a geyser, Joe thought, rising through miles of air, straight toward the zenith.
He swung past a few scattered clouds, and then again he was within plain view of the sun. And there was more of the lavender vine I It was everywhere this morning. The whole countryside was alive with it!
“It hangs on the sun,” he repeated. “There’s a catastrophe ahead.”
High over the valley he tried holding his breath to see whether he could stop his dizzy ride through what seemed to be only thin air. No, he was floating with just enough motion to cause the trees and buildings to turn gently, miles beneath him.
Now he began to descend.
He looked down to the red rectangles that comprised the palace roof far below. He tried to discern the ledge along one side of the building, wondering whether this particular arm of the vine would settle at that resting place.
“No, there aren’t any rules,” he told himself. “It springs out of the mysterious depths of the planet in any quantity. It’s like the wind. It grows u
ntil it’s everywhere at once. It diminishes until it’s nowhere. How can anyone ever control it?”
Many minutes passed before he realized that he was no longer falling. He was resting, high in the air, with nothing but an almost invisible trunk of light supporting him.
An air spinner from the skystation came across the purple mists and landed in the palace grounds. From this elevation Joe couldn’t tell whether one person or many had arrived. He guessed that the visitor wouldn’t stay long, for the spinner wasn’t being wheeled into a hangar.
His curiosity was at work. Although he had fancied the idea of taking a brief nap here in the sky, in case the vine decided to hold him at this point, his curiosity—his wish—started him in motion again. He was descending.
“Service!” He smiled to himself. No wonder Pudgy was so happy and carefree—for Pudgy knew what it was to make a wish and have the vine obey.
There was just a moment of panic for Joe as he came down squarely over the roof of the palace. If he landed on the ledge, could he be sure the way was clear. Or would Nitti be right there waiting?
But Joe didn’t land on the ledge. Instead, he moved gently and noiselessly right through the roof. The stones folded back and he dropped through the opening, within five feet of one of the tall brick chimneys.
Ceilings and floors made way for him through the upper levels. Then he slowed to a stop and found himself sitting on a heap of small objects in a very tiny room.
It was almost completely dark. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that the light came from one miniature window no larger than a saucer. The window was a mosaic of glass that admitted a hundred little blades of colored light. And Joe suddenly realized that he was sitting on a heaped treasure of coins and precious stones.
Nitti’s treasure, of course! Joe gasped. His fingers touched the surfaces of coins all around him. He should have velvet gloves on. It was bewildering, unbelievable, untouchable. From the outlines of the little room, he guessed that it would take more than a dozen large trunks to hold this collection. And here he was sitting on it and barely able to breathe.