by Earl
Don stood himself underneath the colossal machine on stilts, wondering if Professor White knew which control to use. Otherwise he might be fried or crushed by nameless forces with which the anarchists had so amply equipped their gigantic structures. But he heard a familiar whirring click and a gentle, invisible hand raised him up and up. Soon he saw the professor’s moon-like face peering from the opened hatchway.
Don scrambled into Jestun’s cabin with the help of the scientist. Then they shook hands, silently, eagerly.
“What’s the idea,” asked Don presently, “getting me up here?”
“Because I think we’re better off in one of these animated skyscrapers, battles or no battles, than we would be down there in the jungle. Nature has been unhampered by mankind in the past fifty thousand years. The forests are full of ferocious, carnivorous animals. I think I could even run this machine with a little practise.”
“What about him?” grunted Don, pointing to Jestun’s still figure on the floor.
“We can exile him with his force-beam harness. With that he can build himself a new machine in a few days.”
Don threw himself on a couch. “What a crazy world we’re marooned in, Professor! A bunch of fighting anarchists who’ll battle over a speck of dirt! Why did you come here, anyway? How did Elaine ever consent to your leaving?”
Professor White avoided Don’s eyes as he spoke: “I came, Don, because Elaine—because she came here before me! She followed you, Don, realizing at the last moment that she really loved you more than life! She tried to prevent my sending you, there in the laboratory, but it was too late. The vibration dampening had already begun and it would have killed you to stop. Elaine—she insisted on following you that same day, a few hours later!”
“Elaine—here!” Don was on his feet, eyes wild, breath short. “Good God! Not here in this insane world! Damn you, White, how could you ever do such a thing?”
The professor cowered back as Don clenched his fists with a wild rage in his face. But Don quieted down.
“It was my fault,” said the scientist sorrowfully. “My scientific zeal overwhelmed me. Elaine begged, pleaded, to follow you in whatever strange future you were. I remonstrated. But, in sending you, I had failed in one little step to measure the vibration rate of human thought. It came to me that Elaine would complete my data. I transmitted her—my only daughter!”
Don curled his lips in disgust, but the professor went on doggedly: “I saw my folly too late. She was gone. Then remorse for my cold-bloodness overcame me, and to atone, I transmitted myself. If you had wandered away from the rematerializing spot, I figured I could then be with her, to protect her in whatever strange civilization or environment she was. I landed on that little hillock where my laboratory had stood in the far past, but she was gone!”
“Oh, God!” groaned Don, sinking to the couch. “Where is she now?”
PROFESSOR WHITE shook his head sadly, then turned, startled, as the figure of Jestun turned over. The man’s hands strayed to where the scientist’s blunt fingers had squeezed his windpipe. Suddenly he sat up. Don stood himself with his back to the force-beam harness where it hung on a hook. Without this Jestun was helpless to resist them in whatever they wanted.
At this moment the radio light blinked warningly. Don and the professor looked at each other surprised.
“That’s Tosto,” said Jestun, arising. “Let me talk to him.”
Don swore. “I knew I should have been more careful. I should have tied him up.” He shoved Jestun aside and spoke into the microphone, after snapping on the switch: “What do you want, Tosto?”
“Oh, it’s you!” came back Tosto’s voice with a note of hardness. “You attacked me, insulted me, and if you weren’t a primeval being without a war-car, I would challenge you. Tell Jestun, if he is conscious, that I stand ready to battle him any time he is ready.”
Jestun sprang to the radio before Don could stop him, shouting: “I am right here, pig, and stand ready to bend aside your puny rays!”
“Get ready then!” And Tosto’s voice clicked off.
Jestun leaped to his controls. Don leaped with him, to keep him away.
“Fool!” snarled Jestun. “Do you want to die? Only I can handle these weapons and defenses. Let me battle Tosto or we all three die on the spot!”
Professor White pulled Don away. “Too late to stop it. It’s our only way out—letting Jestun battle him. I rather imagine Tosto is just enraged enough to blast us all to atoms if we don’t fight back.”
Almost immediately, as Jestun shot the battle signal into the air, the fight began. In a titanic, senseless waste of energy, the two steel leviathans hurled lightnings and unnamable ray-forces at each other. The trees around splintered and crashed till all the immediate vicinity had been leveled. Behind their electronic screens, the two belligerents worked furiously, each waiting for the other’s defenses to weaken, even if for an infinitesimal instant.
Driving their power units to excess, it was only a question of time and opportunity. They were evenly matched. Each had already won over a thousand duels. But Tosto proved the better after ten minutes of nerve-racking thunder. Jestun’s screens spluttered. With diabolical aim, Tosto sheared away his roof, even as Jestun had demolished his before. Then he hurled boring beams of incandescence at Jestun’s four stilt legs. They vanished in molten streams.
Jestun, with an exclamation of sharp disappointment, snapped on his underside force-beams, and flung skyward the yellow flare of surrender. The avalanche of sound and light ceased. Their cabin bumped against the ground roughly, despite the cushioning force-beams.
The radio signaled imperiously, and Tosto’s voice came, crawling with triumph. “So, Jestun, do I deal with temerity. Au revoir. You can have the primordial being called Don Jones and welcome. I go now to search out Vio and battle her. I have a new ray nearly completed that will batter down her screens in short order.”
The voice clicked off, and through the window those in Jestun’s cabin could see Tosto’s great walking house lumber off to the southward.
Professor White clutched at Don’s arm. “Did you hear that?—Tosto is going to battle Vio! Vio is the woman who picked up Elaine and carried her away before I came an hour later. I know that, because Jestun here, who found me, told me his charts informed him Vio had passed the spot just before!”
“Has Vio an ovoid airship?” asked Don.
“Yes,” answered Jestun, looking up. “Tosto has tried to mate with her several times but she always defeated him. But since then Tosto has become a pretty good fighter.”
Don remembered the egg-shaped airship they had passed on the way to the present rendezvous. It must have been Vio herself, then! Tosto was even now hurrying to give her battle. And in Vio’s cabin was Elaine! Don thought of the girl going through the nerve-racking experience of a battle, with possible death in the end, and shuddered.
Don suddenly advanced on Jestun. He spoke savagely: “Aboard that craft of Vio’s is a girl I love. I don’t know if you get what I mean, but that girl is more to me than my life. But to you your own petty skin is all-important, because in this anarchic madhouse on earth today, love and friendship for others seem to be entirely unknown. I’m desperate, Jestun, because the girl I love is in danger. How soon can you fix up this crate and follow Tosto?”
Jestun qualified before the livid deadliness in Don’s face. He said hurriedly: “It will take three days to re-install my cabin with motivation.”
“Wait!” exclaimed Professor White. “You can outfit this cabin, I believe, with gravity-repelling engines and make it an airship of sorts in a much shorter time.”
“In a day,” agreed Jestun.
“Then do it!” commanded Don. “But first of all see if you can contact Vio by radio. Being a woman, maybe she will listen to reason and avoid the battle with Tosto.”
After some minutes of signaling, Jestun succeeded in contacting Vio. Her sweetly feminine voice came to them, and Don spoke in a rush, explainin
g the situation. He begged her, for the sake of the girl she had in her cabin, to flee from Tosto and come to meet Jestun’s craft.
But Don had stirred ten thousand years of tradition, using the word “flee.”
“Flee?” came back Vio’s voice. “From Tosto?—whom I have six times defeated, and can do so a dozen times again? I should say not! However, I won’t go to meet him. If he desires a tussle, let him come to me. As for the girl——”
“Yes, good God! Think of her!” Don’s voice was ragged. “Can’t you people once think of someone else besides yourselves and your foolish pride?—Elaine! Are you there?—Let me talk to her!”
But for some inexplicable reason, the connection clicked out at the other end. No amount of signaling would induce Vio to reopen communication. Don cursed the eternal feminine and its perverseness, then grabbed Jestun by the shoulders, shook him like a child.
“Get that engine made as quickly as you can. Any stalling on the job and I’ll finish the throttling my friend didn’t!”
ALL that day and on into the night, Don stared moodily over the jungle land, his heart torn with anxiety for the girl he loved. But Professor White, with the eager soul of a scientist, followed every step as Jestun fitted his cabin with atmospheric engines. By asking innumerable questions, the professor was able to understand much of what went on. Jestun was not so much a great scientist as a great mechanician, armed as he was with semimiraculous forces and instruments. Indeed, Professor White came to realize that Jestun’s science was greater than his own in degree rather than in quality.
Jestun fashioned his power unit from a heap of dirt. Finished, it was amazingly simple, no bigger than a console radio. Yet Jestun admitted that its atomic power-valves could lift and catapult forward at least a thousand tons of weight. The motivation was to be by a beam which would repulse gravitation, to serve as a lifting medium, and would react against the earth’s magnetic lines of force for forward propulsion.
“There,” said Jestun, straightening up. Already the first rosy signs of coming dawn were in the east. “Now if you will open the floor panels, I’ll fasten it solidly to the underside of the cabin, and it will be done.”
Professor White’s voice was firm, after detecting a crafty gleam in the other’s eye: “Open the panel yourself, and also detach from your force-beam harness the welding-instrument, which is all you need.”
“But how will I move the engine-unit?” remonstrated Jestun. “It’s heavy.”
“Use your muscles and drag it to the hatchway,” said the scientist laconically. “You need the exercise. The underside force-beam will serve for lowering it.”
Frowning impotently, Jestun detached his welding-unit and handed over the rest of the harness peevishly. He made much work of dragging the engine toward the open trap-door, but the professor grinned pitilessly, knowing it was mostly aluminum and beryllium.
Then Jestun tipped it into the range of the lowering force-beam, and shoved the now weightless apparatus into position. Using his welder, he joined metal to metal as firmly as if they had been cast in one piece.
“Shall we test it?” inquired the professor as Jestun came into the cabin again.
“Test it? What for? Nothing we make in this day and age must be tested, unless it is something radically new and untried.”
Professor White conceded the point, hiding the admiration in his eyes at Jestun’s great skill in things mechanical.
“Now one thing,” he said, “before we leave with our new engine. That mirrored apparatus over there—does it produce vibration of some sort?”
Jestun followed his pointing finger. “Yes, it is a weapon that shoots out a broad beam of vibration. It will disrupt a tree in three seconds, bursting it into——”
“Into pure vibration?” asked the scientist eagerly.
“Yes, but it is a minor weapon. Against an electronic screen of power it is useless. I use it now and then to disintegrate animals of large size when I go out hunting for sport.”
“Can you give me the elements of the formula-curve for its radiation?” queried the scientist.
Jestun thought a moment and then rattled off a complicated mathematical equation. Professor White had him repeat it more slowly, and in the mathematical terms used with the English language. In the week they had been together, they had come to understand each other’s mode of mathematical definition.
“That’s it!” cried the scientist suddenly, capering around in a most undignified manner. He explained his sudden exuberance to Don, who had turned to stare in surprise, with cryptic briefness. “All set, my boy. We’re ready to trail Tosto and rescue Elaine.”
Don blinked, coming out of a trance of thought, and sprang to his feet. His jaw set firmly, he spoke: “Start her up, Jestun, and give her everything she’s got. Maybe we can catch the fighting fool before he attacks Vio.”
Jestun obediently worked the controls—already set to motivate the underside engine by ether control—and with a humming surge, the large round cabin leaped away from the ground. A careful glance at the ruled chart set for the two craft with which they were concerned showed Tosto nearing the dot which was Vio. Tosto had gone slowly, evidently working out the new ray he had boasted would make him the foreordained victor. Jestun, when asked, thought it doubtful that they could overtake him before meeting Vio, unless yi° herself retreated. But Vio moved not at all, neither ahead nor back.
“Now then,” said Professor White, as Don took up his silent brooding at the window again. “Jestun, set your robot pilot and listen to me.”
Jestun complied. The scientist thereupon engaged him in a technical discussion about the vibration-apparatus. Don, deaf to all else except his own anxious thoughts, did not see the two men bend suddenly to work with the energy-harness. Nor did he notice that Jestun, at the other’s prompting, was welding a small, but intricate, unit in the heart of the vibration weapon’s mechanism. He might have been surprised had he turned around, to see Professor White beaming exultantly, and to see Jestun looking at the scientist from the past with a grudging wonder, not unmixed with admiration.
The newly converted airship traversed the distance which Tosto had leisurely navigated in a full day, in no more than two hours. But just before they arrived, Don, staring at the chart, exclaimed aloud: “Look! The two dots are together! They must be fighting already!”
“Not yet,” said Jestun, tuning the radio. “Listen.”
Tosto’s voice came to them, challenging Vio. The latter’s feminine tones came back, taunting, reminding the challenger that she had time and again defeated him.
“Ah, but not this time!” rasped Tosto’s voice confidently. “I will warn you beforehand that I have a new ray, a combination I have been long seeking of two of my most powerful beams. If your paltry screens stand up one minute against it, you’ll be lucky. Get ready, Vio, my dear! I’ll be your lord and master in less time than it takes to tell!”
“Wait, Tosto!” came Vio’s tones, and somehow her voice was pleading. “I do not wish to fight you at present. I don’t fear your silly new ray, but I have in my cabin a creature—a woman—from the past. It is for her sake that I ask you to revoke your challenge. This girl is a gentle thing, unused to battle and noise.”
Don silently thanked the unknown woman Vio for having finally used her better judgment. But his face went white as he heard Tosto’s sneering answer.
“So you have also a being from the past! There is getting to be an epidemic of them. Well, it makes no difference. I suppose she is what is called a ’friend’ of the male atavist who recently attempted to take my life in my own cabin. Accordingly, let her suffer for it. Vio, prepare yourself!”
“Tosto, I beg of you! Revoke your challenge and—and I’ll surrender to you without battle!”
Tosto’s gasp from the radio coincided with Jestun’s. For the first time in their lives, a citizen of the Anarchy had shamefully offered surrender without fight! A woman, fully the military equal of any male, offering to pay
the customary tribute in such man-woman battles, without raising a finger in resistance. It was incredible!
Then Tosto’s voice issued from the radio: “That is a joke I don’t appreciate, Vio. I cannot believe you a coward—in fact, such a creature has not existed on earth for ten thousand years—so I take it as your spiteful humor. I give you one minute to signal battle. Then I start regardless!”
Don clenched his fists involuntarily, cursing. He whirled on Jestun. “Can’t you go any faster? We must get there before he starts. With that new ray, he’s likely to murder his opponent.”
Jestun did manage to eke out a little more speed, but it took them five minutes to arrive. They swooped down on a wide, open space wherein trees had been leveled to smoking ruins, to find Tosto’s walking machine standing over Vio’s fallen airship.
THE victor’s voice blared out of the radio: “Ha, you are here too, Jestun? Looking for another tussle? Better run away while the running’s good—look what my new ray did to Vio, the confident!” Don shouted over the radio: “If the girl Elaine in that airship is harmed, I’ll—I’ll——”
“You’ll what?” taunted Tosto. “You are rather quick with your fists, apeman, but I stand invincible——”
“In your ship, yes,” cried Don. “But I challenge you to fight me man to man on the ground, instead of hiding behind energy-screens and metal walls.”
A harsh, mocking laugh came from Tosto.
Don, grinding his teeth, faced his two companions. “What are we going to do—let that woman-beater, Tosto, get away without punishment? If he’d only face me——”
Professor White pulled Don’s ear down and whispered into it. A surprised look came into the younger man’s face. Then he sprang before the radio: “All right, Tosto. Since you’re afraid to risk your precious hide on the ground with me, we’ll battle you, ship to ship.”
“Fine!” returned Tosto. “I don’t mind adding another victory to my string. You’ve got three minds there in your cabin, Jestun, but I don’t fear defeat. What are two atavists and one nincompoop to me?” Jestun, who had been a sort of apathetic spectator, fumed in sudden anger. His slender fingers reached for the controls.
