by Don Wilcox
What had the vine meant by dropping him into the middle of this awful secret?
“Whooiee! Does King Arvo know about all this? What’s Nitti up to anyway?”
Even as he was gasping for understanding, he heard the slight thump of footsteps outside the thick wall.
A door opened very slowly. It was a thick metal door, and Joe felt the swoosh of air before he saw the thin vertical crack of light.
Only two inches open, the door stopped. Nitti and a stranger were talking. The stranger, a thick chested fellow in a dark green business suit, was trying to look in. Nitti wasn’t quite ready for him to see.
“It’s the same plan we’ve discussed many times before, Rouzey. If you can use serums and convert my slaves into interplanetary thieves as you’ve always claimed you can, I have enough treasure here for us to start action.”
Rouzey may have come from another planet, Joe thought. His voice was as metallic as a copper gong. “Those I can’t convert I can kill,” Rouzey said. “We’ve already proved that part of it. But we can’t get far, shaking down the whole interplanetary world unless we’ve got plenty of gems and gold to start with. As your man Stobber says, we’ll need it for bait.”
“That’s the plan.” Nitti opened the door another inch wider. “You’re ready to start?”
“As soon as you buy out the sky-station so we’ll have a respectable base where the travelers pass.”
“That’s easy,” said Nitti. “I’m all set to buy the new skystation office building.” His inflection on the word
buy caused the stranger to laugh with a weird clang of his metallic throat.
Then Rouzey said, “All right. We know the deal, and we can get a choke hold on three planets before the big sleepy nations get wise. Then they’ll be too late. But we’ve got to play it smart. Are you sure your king doesn’t know you’ve scraped this wealth together?”
Nitti laughed. “That whiff. I’ve kept him too busy bleeding the kingdom for taxes and stamping out slave trouble. He’s not aware that this vault exists.”
“Are you sure he won’t walk in on us?” Rouzey asked anxiously.
“Dead certain.” Nitti turned his head and made sure that Stobber had locked the door.
“All right,” Rouzey said. “Let’s see your treasure.”
Nitti swung the door open, and the light of the outer room glanced over the surfaces of gold and emerald and sapphire. The light also struck full in the face of Joe.
“Y a-a-yaki-ying-yang!” Rouzey’s immense chest shuddered like a wounded animal, and his copper gong throat gave out a wild series of notes. “The—the king!” he backed away.
“Nonsense!” Nitti said huffily and started to walk in. He came in with a gun, and it was pointed in the only direction a gun could point in such a small narrow room. It would flash a ray straight through Joe’s chest if he pulled the trigger. “Nonsense. I tell you the king is—”
Nitti’s elbows gave a backward jerk and his narrowed eyes suddenly opened as if they meant to jump out of their sockets.
Joe jumped back, too. He bumped against the wall. He reached for a handful of the coins and gems. The only defense he could think of was to throw the stuff square at Nitti.
He threw wild. There was a clang and a clatter and a spray of treasure through the door. It went wild because Joe wasn’t fully under his own control. The vine still had him. And as he threw, the vine lifted him.
Click! Blaze! The stream of silver fire shot in from the ray pistol in Nitti’s hand. Straight at Joe.
But the lavender vine caught if first and it splashed off. Invisible though the vine was, it was around him, holding. And no ray could penetrate. Yes, Pudgy had told him that once before, and now he was seeing it.
He was rising. Into the ceiling. How much had Nitti seen? Nitti was looking around blankly.
“There’s no one in there,” Nitti was saying with vast confidence. “Not a soul.” He pocketed his gun.
“I swear I saw the king,” Rouzey said, coming back to the door.
“Optical illusion,” said Nitti, looking as pale as white gold. “You can see for yourself no one’s there.”
“What made that stuff come flying out?” Rouzey grated.
“Oh, that? That always happens when we open the door. Dust combustion. Isn’t that right, Stobber?”
Joe heard Stobber give an irritated cough. “Sure, it always happens. Er—excuse me, Nitti, I’m going down just to make sure the king’s still where we think he is.”
Then Joe was going up again, and the opening through the palace roof was closing after him. He’d have to tell Pudgy about this one. But, by the stars and comets, he was going to think twice before he made another wish that the lavender vine might jump at!
CHAPTER XXI
Across the brown and green valley toward the western edge of the kingdom, the battle had begun.
It began as many civil wars begin—with a trifling incident between citizens and authorities.
A tradesman was confronted by one ot the Sashes and asked to give certain information which he didn’t possess. The Sash had been drinking, contrary to court regulations, and he forgot that he wasn’t speaking to a slave. He grew arrogant when the tradesman couldn’t answer him, and struck the fellow across the hand with a whip. The tradesman turned on him and threatened to strike him. The Sash gave him two more lashes, and by that time a crowd had begun to gather. People weren’t used to seeing this law-abiding tradesman in trouble.
“Don’t strike back,” someone yelled at him. But the tradesman was seeing red. He picked up a nearby carpenter’s tool—a mallet—and struck the Sash on the side of the head.
Two more Sashes came up to establish order, but a score of townsmen had already rushed to the defense of their friend, and the battle was on.
Seven persons, including two women, were sliced through with ray fire, and that threw the battle wide open. The town’s alarm bells rang. People came running from all surrounding neighborhoods. When certain slave masters refused to join the mob, the townsmen pushed them into the street, toward the barricade of vehicles that the Sashes had hastily put together.
By evening, the ringleaders of the fight against the Sashes were joining other rebel groups in neighboring
towns.
In most villages the officials rode up and down the streets shouting frantically from loud speakers for everyone to go home and stay there, and not to join the outbreak. But that couldn’t stop the tide. The dam had burst.
When morning came, Nadoff led an advance through the streets-of Redroot Hill. Eight hundred slaves dropped their jobs and joined the march.
They moved eastward. It was a badly organized army, almost entirely without firearms. The slaves picked up clubs along the way, or brought pitchforks, or gathered sackfuls of rocks. Some of the townsmen carried ray pistols. A few of them had cars. The cars moved slowly, and the marching army accompanied them. They were moving toward the palace at the other side of the kingdom.
That forenoon they were attacked by the air spinners from the king’s arsenal.
The air spinners were deadly. They would fly low and spray ray guns over the motorcade. A few attacks left the cars crippled and useless. And there were casualties.
But the rebels had by this time taken to the groves of trees, both below the ridge road and above it. And they kept making progress, not backward but forward.
“It’s Nitti’s neck or ours!”
That was the battle cry. Lucky, Joe thought, that they could forgive the king and vent their wrath on the prime minister. But gradually the rumor was getting around. The king was on their side!
“He’s one of us,” the slaves were saying. “He’s incognito. Yes, he’s marching with us. And he’s going to fight Nitti to a showdown.”
“But he’s always been in favor of slavery,” others would protest.
“Not any more. He’s been a slave himself the last few days and now he knows what it’s like.”
“Then why
doesn’t he just abolish it, if he’s the king?”
“Because he almost got himself abolished the other day, in the execution chair. Nitti ran a double in on him and meant to kill him before he could become powerful. But the double got wise and stopped the deal just in time.”
The rumors were racing around like wildfire. Everything that was said lifted the spirits of the marching men. Somewhere among them there was a king, wearing slave clothes, marching in a mob against the evils of his own land!
Joe had been with the group from the first hour of the battle. He too had discarded his kingly clothes in favor of a slave outfit. But he carried a bundle containing a blue uniform with gold epaulettes, just in case. Also a trim mustache and a spade shaped beard that might be added to his make-up at a moment’s notice.
By the second morning he found Marcia, traveling in one of the rebel cars with a family. The woman who was driving was the Karridonzan girl whose voice he had heard while down in the shaft of the lavender vine.
“You’ll have to leave the car,” Joe advised, stopping them on the ridge road at daybreak. He and the king had been helping Nadoff keep watch the latter part of the night.
“Joe!” Marcia exclaimed. “You’re with us, aren’t you! Of course you are.”
“No time to talk,” Joe snapped. “Drive into the thicket if you want to save the car. There’ll be air spinners over us before the sun shows—”
The sun was coming up, again shrouded by a network of lavender vine hanging above the mist. And a moment later the air spinners were seen rising into the sky.
Joe jumped into the car. The girl let him take the controls. He shot ahead over the road and then swung down over the ridge through a break in the wooded slope. The car jumped a ravine, careened, righted itself and plunged deep into the darkness of the woods. Another ravine was ahead, too deep to cross. The girl screamed. “Stop, Joe!” Marcia cried.
Joe jammed the brakes. He was crashing against branches. But there was a ravine, and that was what he wanted. He steered into it, and the car jerked and clunked to a stop.
He swung the door open.
“Quick! Under the car, everybody!” It was a fast scramble. Marcia was beside him, and the girl, and the others. Now the ray fire was slicing the tree-tops away. The air spinner went past in a hurry, and all along the line you heard the swish, crash, clunk—tree tops falling.
Everyone along the ridge had ducked for the lowest point. The luckiest ones were protected, as Marcia and her party were, from things that fell from overhead.
“Here they come back!” Joe warned. “Stay where you are.”
“Joe,” Marcia was holding tight to his arm. He caught her hand.
“They’re not going to get us, pal,” Joe said. “Or if they do, the rest of the army will keep right on going.”
“I’m not scared,” she said, “I just wanted to say, thanks for coming.” The air spinners found a part of the band that morning and there were some severe losses. But the rebel army was still marching when night came, and everywhere it was gathering more recruits.
“It’s Nitti’s neck or ours,” was the hushed battle cry.
By this time the king’s identity was known. It was King Arvo himself who started the story that they couldn’t lose this rebellion because the kings were already on their side—not one king but two. And then Joe, the American slave, became known as the “king” who had saved the real king from Nitti’s assassination scheme.
“And it was the American girl’s jewels that bought our dinner tonight,” some of the self-appointed captains announced as the rebel throngs passed the supply cars to be served their midnight dinners.
The searchlights from three air spinners played over the valley, trying to locate their camp. Once a bright beam swept over Joe and the inner circle that were gathered around Nadoff. The flash of the king’s blue uniform with the gold trimmings showed for just an instant Joe had turned the uniform over to him and, with Nadoff’s consent, the king had restored himself to his original appearance. A careful shave, after several days of growing whiskers, had brought back the trim pattern of his mustache and beard. He looked fine, Joe thought—more regal than ever. And the passing searchlight gave Joe a reassuring glimpse. Here was a moment of danger, but there was new strength in the king’s face.
“You may be right about Arvo,” Joe whispered to Marcia. “He may possess the qualities that Karridonza needs in a king.”
“I hope he’ll have another chance.”
“Has it occurred to you, Marcia that he might need the strength of a good woman at his side? Karridonza could use a beautiful queen like you.” Joe tried to read her expression by starlight. Her answer evaded him. There was some work she must attend to, helping the other women with the food supplies. “If you’ll excuse me, please, Joe . . . We’ll see each other again before we reach the palace.”
A little later that night Joe and King Arvo got their heads together, and with Nadoff’s consent, they called for the lavender vine.
Like a stationary bolt of lightning skirting the tops of the trees, it came into view—deep purple turning to blue and then to a brilliant lavender. It was less than half a mile away. Arvo said he hoped no one was under it. Joe saw that he was terribly hurt over the way it had caused chance disasters.
“When it flows over the country on an errand, I’m always afraid it will strike some innocent victims.”
“That’s what happened the first two nights I saw it,” said Joe. “But after that, the frog boy and I began to use it without any such trouble. I don’t understand it.”
“There are lots of secrets in controlling it,” the king said. “If we’re going to make use of it, we’ve got to work together—you and I—and all the rest. We’ve got to wish for the same thing.”
“That should be easy,” Nadoff said. “What we all want is a showdown with Nitticello.”
“If you’ll call the leaders together,” King Arvo said, “I’ll reveal what I know about handling the vine. Then, if we have good luck, it may move over to the ridge and pick us up bodily and take us right to the palace door. We’ll turn our march into a ride.”
The vine was moving slowly now, coming closer, but moving uncertainly. It was near enough that Joe could see the flow of light through the trunk and out into, the undulating branches. There was a huge claw tonight, as there had been the night it had picked him up at the wrecked air spinner. Joe shuddered. After all the amazingly delightful rides he had taken, he shouldn’t have any fears. But there was an angry look about the claw. Gigantic fingers of light.
“It could strike down a hundred Sashes,” someone had said hopefully at its first appearance. But now that same observer was saying, “It could slap down a thousand slaves.”
A tremble of panic was going through the rebel army. Joe wondered whether it had been a mistake to call the vine into service.
The leaders gathered close around Nadoff and the king and Joe. It was a moment of King Arvo to prove that he was willing to share his deepest secrets.
The king began. It wasn’t easy to give away a secret, he said, if the secret was so complicated that one had to live with it and work with It before he knew it intimately himself.
He explained that the rash acts and unaccountable deaths caused by the vine could be attributed, he believed, to the fact that he and Nitticello were not in harmony.
“Our wishes were never in balance,” Arvo said. “Although I have made many mistakes, I know that my greatest mistake was that of yielding to Nitticello. When he tried to command the vine, his wishes were always more selfish than mine. And that always made the vine jump angrily.”
“It looks angry tonight,” Joe said.
The crowd, standing in the darkness, their faces dimly lighted by the flare of lavender, kept turning to watch. The vine was moving around them gradually.
“Better hurry,” Nadoff said. “Tell us what to do.”
“I can’t hurry,” Arvo said, “because the vine isn’t ready for
a command—not until all of you understand. You see, the vine knows us. It’s a power in our lives. And what does it do to us? Here is the secret: It gives back to us what we give to others.” The king paused. There were little whispered comments. Then deep silence. The king continued.
“For you who give your neighbors kindliness, the vine will give back kindliness. Sometimes the return gift takes a freakish form. A little boy at the court who was always playing mischief upon others received a gift of mischief from the vine. It gave him some of the characteristics of a frog.
“This American slave who helped us out of the mud—who gave us a lift—has been given many a lift by the vine. Am I right, Joe Peterson?”
“Y-yes! So that’s it. I’m beginning to understand these favors. But go on. What about this business of being susceptible to change? The frog-boy was telling me—”
“That’s very important for us to know. If the vine lifts us, as we hope, and takes us to the door of the palace so we can have our showdown with Nitticello, there’ll be a crucial hour for everyone of us. After being in the hands of the vine, our natures are ready to bend more easily than at other times. The frog-boy received his frog nature when he played in the swamp after a ride in the vine. And my friend, Joe Peterson, confesses that he felt himself turning into a king—almost—as the result of a secret wish that was strong in him after a ride in the vine.”
“Then what are we to wish?” Nadoff asked.
“If the vine will engulf us, we’ll descend from it wishing that we may all be proud, honest citizens and free!”
“It’s coming,” someone shouted.
“Don’t be afraid,” Arvo called out. “Ascend the ridge and wait. And wish, first of all, for a showdown with Nitti.”
Joe joined the hike, trying to keep an eye on Arvo. He was proud of the things Arvo had said. And he couldn’t help being a little jealous, too. For Marcia was right, this king had the qualities that Karridonza needed. If he succeeded in making a comeback—and if he was in love with Marcia—how could Joe stand in the way of her becoming his queen?