by Don Wilcox
“The first one that gets back can have the honor of going up and bombing out that devil’s nest.” Menniker’s voice.
Bill looked at me. We had forgotten the helicopters. Bill ran his hands through his hair speculatively, and I knew he was mentally preparing himself for company.
The sun was on its way down. Midafternoon. The rikits were marching, five abreast, about twenty-five rows of them, into the valleys and out again. They resembled some fantastic fairy-story crawling thing made of more than a hundred separate parts, each part topped by a rider.
Bill whispered. “Do they know, down there?”
I glanced at the telephone and shook my head. As far as we could tell, the March to Marshington had not yet been discovered by the Menniker fortress. We were the observers, and we were keeping mum. And even I didn’t know all—not until Bill told me. He whispered for me to watch the sneak approach that was swinging around us.
Then I began to see what I was sure Stubble-chin hadn’t noticed, in spite of his practiced eye. The hundred and twenty-five rikits and riders in formation were a small part of the actual movement of Seventh Point Martian troops that was taking place before our eyes. It was only the conspicuous part. The rest of the rikit army—and as we later realized, by far the larger part—was slipping along under cover.
Not the cover of darkness, but the cover of mid-afternoon sunlight. From the tower elevation, rikit shadows were at a minimum. The protective coloration of the brown and yellow beasts climbing over brown and yellow rocks was a pretty efficient cover in itself. The riders, dressed jh tan, crouched low, At first discovery you’d have sworn these were wild rikits without riders.
You saw them not as a group, but as individuals slipping from one hiding place to the next. At first you’d think there were only two or three—well, five or six—no, fifteen, twenty, possibly fifty—but look! And right away you began to find scores of them.
“They’re forming a half circle,” Bill whispered. “I wonder if they know the helicopters are out . . . Listen. The phone—”
We caught echoes of excited talk below, now. From the fourth level they were observing the Marshington March. They were trying to signal the two helicopters (the third had been knocked out earlier by an encounter with an intelligent beast named Tan-Jack).
One of the helicopters limped home just before sundown, and almost immediately it rose from its roof landing and started up in our direction. Our window was open and it came close enough for us to hear its engine cough and sputter.
Bill aimed his atomic pistol and picked off a blade on the second shot.
Clink! Whirrr!
The helicopter sailed down dizzily, but landed where it meant to land, and right away the mechanics were giving it first aid. Someone shook his fist toward the top of the tower. It gave me a weird, sinking feeling, even though the fist-shaker was four hundred feet below me.
“It won’t be long now,” I whispered to Bill.
“The sun’s about to set,” Bill said, drawing a tense breath. “I wonder whether these Martians will be good for more than one quick round of fireworks. I’ve never heard of these peaceful Seventh Pointers making war. They can’t have filched many weapons in last night’s raid on the arsenal. But there have been lots of crashes—ugh.”
Bill rubbed his eyes. He was seeing something in the vicinity of the tower base directly below us. He leaned so far out the window that even Stubble-chin gulped.
“Get me another tool,” Bill said. “Another hammer or a wrench.”
He removed his shirt, weighted it, and threw it out the window. It landed with a little puff of dust. Then I saw Tan-Jack taking a few cautious steps out of the bushes where he had been hiding. He sniffed at the shirt, and then looked up.
He slid back into the bushes. The copper sunlight highlighted the streak of his back for a few moments. I wondered if I would ever see him again. I wondered if he knew that a whole army of his rikit brothers and their masters were closing in.
The motor of the helicopter down there was running again. Quietly humming. I caught a glimpse of Stubble-chin’s self-satisfied smile. I knew, then, that he had seen everything—the Marshington March and the approaching sneak army. He knew that the March was only a screen and that with nightfall it would turn from its course and come back. It was still moving away through the evening shadows, having passed within two miles of the tower, and was now about four miles down the valley from our station. Vedo herself had ridden at the head of that procession, but Stubble-chin didn’t know that, for she couldn’t be distinguished by the naked eye.
The helicopter was humming. Stubble-chin was contenting himself that he’d be out of his bonds within a few minutes, and what he’d have to tell would turn the Menniker camp into a war front in a twinkling. Stubble-chin would be the hero in the nick of time!
Clatter-clatter-clang!
Noises from a new direction.
We all looked around. Trouble seemed to be coming up through the plastic floor of our crow’s nest.
“The cables!” Bill said. “They’ve hitched something to the cables in the elevator shaft. Whatever it is, it’s riding up.”
“Or maybe they’re riding up.”
“Could be.” Bill tried to peer down through the crack at the edge of the elevator bucket. It would be a perilous climb for anyone unless he had devised an excellent mechanical hitch. The cables were locked so they wouldn’t ride, but we could hear them smacking the inner walls of the shaft.
“Boys,” said Stubble-chin, “you’re about to have company from two directions.”
“Quiet, mascot,” I said. “We’re concentrating.”
“If you want to get off with something easy like horse-whipping, I’d advise you to cut me loose from this pole—”
“Shut up!” Bill snarled. He was white. I knew he was regretting that he’d hung a load of death on the underside of the elevator bucket. He was debating whether to send the bucket down, so the explosion wouldn’t go off right under our feet. “Damn, it’s too late!”
If an explosion occurred a hundred feet away from us instead of immediately beneath our feet, it would make the same hash of us. We were caught in our own trap. But if the blast could be placed a fourth of the way down, it would deal hell to the invisible hand.
“I’m gonna let her drop!” Bill snapped.
He unlocked the elevator bucket. He reached toward the down button. He reached—and jell back.
I fell, too. At first I thought Stubble-chin had got loose and struck the feet from under us. No, the old boy was still bound in his chair, trying to watch us out of the corner of his eye. The button hadn’t been touched. The open elevator bucket still stood there, waiting.
Then I knew—we had been drawn by a rikit!
Did Tan-Jack have the power to draw all the way from four hundred feet below us?
Bill and I started to pick ourselves up. We were pulled to the edge of the window.
Pat-pat-pat-pat—
Tan-Jack! He was coming up. Up the side of the tower. Moving fast. Up through the semi-darkness. The suction-cups of his feet and legs were sounding louder, closer—thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap—
We rolled out of the window and onto his back. His savage head tossed about, he turned around on the perpendicular wall, and taxied us down.
CHAPTER XX
The Battle
The guns blazed that night. We spent the first third of the night getting safely through the Seventh Point lines. Several times we thought we were goners—once when a disappointed helicopter took after us—once when the three big guns from the Menniker fortress started blazing away.
We found Vedo at midnight. There were so many important Martian officers on the scene that a senator from Washington didn’t have much chance. The orders were flying thick and fast. Martian dead were being brought back by the scores. Some of the impetuous troopers had tried another heroic raid on the warehouses and had been stopped by one of the big guns.
“Oh, it is you, the
senator!” Vedo exclaimed, when Bill and I were at last given permission to ride up to her torch-lit headquarters. Her blue-lidded eyes fluttered with excitement.
We dismounted, and Bill stood with his arm around the neck of Tan-Jack, and we all three bowed. Tan-Jack was as unassuming as any hero could be, but it was to Tan-Jack that Vedo demonstrated her forthright affections. In her scale of values, I was the senator who had been Vorumuff’s friend, and I saw the gratitude shine in her eyes as she recalled that I had rescued her from an execution. To her, Bill Rambler was the mysterious friend who had won the confidence of a few natives, so that they had been willing to lend him Tan-Jack. We were both gratefully received. But Tan-Jack was received like one of the family.
“Until the battle is over,” Vedo said, “whether we live or die we do not know.”
“You must live,” I said. “You must go back to Washington, to my American capitol, so my country will make things right with your people.”
“We cannot make more treaty,” Vedo said, “if big ships will always fall on our hills.”
There wasn’t much time to talk, but we came to a quick understanding then and there. This battle had to be won, Vedo declared, to drive off the rash “shooters and killers” like Menniker and the men of the tower—“and such earth woman as Weeks.”
“Sarah Windblow Weeks! Is she one of your prisoners?” I asked. “What’s happened to all of the Blue Palace passengers who came through alive?”
“Some of them fight with us,” said Vedo. “Some waiting in caves to see which way wind blow. Weeks, she like you say, see how the wind blow.”
“What about the Bells?”
“Have you not heard them?”
“I mean Bobby and Betty, the musicians.”
“Yes, the Bells. You have not heard? They help me make the war. They play old Martian war song on hammer instrument.”
A few minutes later Bill and I heard this for ourselves. Vedo was very eager that Betty and Bobby keep moving back and forth along the Martian line, and keep playing. So she sent us out to locate them, and that became our task, through the remainder of the night and into the next forenoon. Each time we found a portion of the Martian circle falling back, we called for the Bells.
Both of them were so excited they could hardly carry out orders. Their vibraharp had been all but obliterated in the crash. But they had salvaged two sections of it, three or four notes each, and that had been enough for the old Martian song. Whenever the native fighters heard it their fighting blood raced faster and they flew into the attack with new vigor.
“It’s a hell of a song,” Bobby panted as he and Betty rode along beside us through the blackness. “It even makes me want to fight, and I never fought in my life.”
“Nobody but my stepmother,” said Betty. “You’ve had to fight her. Everybody does.”
“If I ever come out of this alive I’m gonna give her a fight she won’t forget,” said Bobby.
“What are you going to do?”
“Invite her to a new kind of shotgun wedding, with the guns pointed at her.”
“Honest, Bobby? Will you?”
“And if she utters one false peep when you and I say our ‘I do’s’, I swear I’ll tie her on the back of a wild rikit and give her a one way ride over the mountain.”
I entered their plans at this point and reminded them that if we came out of this alive, Sarah Winslow Weeks could count on a paid trip back to Washington. “The Department of Justice is going to ask a lot of questions, and she’ll have to talk faster than she ever talked before.”
“Will they charge her with treason, Senator Pollard?” Betty suddenly became sympathetic toward the person who was probably her worst enemy on two planets. “Will they send her to jail?”
Bobby had a turn of heart too, and in the light of a flash from a big gun his expression showed alarm. “You see, Senator Pollard, she split with Menniker right after the crash. And she did everything she could to help Vedo with the rescue, and now even Vedo is beginning to trust her a little.”
“Would you two trust her to be your loving mother-in-law?” I asked.
They didn’t answer that one. Then I realized I was being harsh, putting it that way. If Sarah Weeks went to jail it would be because she had plenty to answer for from that Blue Palace affair—not because she was pretty sure to be a disagreeable stepmother-in-law.
“We’ll let the law take its course,” said Bobby, and to this Betty added, “Whatever is for the best. I wouldn’t want her to have to take that one-way ride on a wild rikit.”
The ring of Martians was broken in several places. The three big guns were shooting blind, and only a few times had they caught the advancing line. Toward morning they were shooting over it, and almost all the Martian fighters were gathering in the canyons immediately below the tower elevation. The Martians held back their fire. They had too little to be effective against the concrete fortress. Their one hope was to move in close enough, before daylight, that they could storm the warehouses and fight an inside battle with pistols and knives.
At the first streak of dawn they were discovered, and they beat a fast retreat into the deepest canyon below the tower. Vedo and her officers remained at a distance of a mile, and there the Bells and Bill and I joined them to receive orders.
We watched the big guns flash their fire down over the pitched surfaces of the mountains. The canyon pockets were too deep to be hit. Martians and rikits were safe down there, but they were also virtually prisoners. Their attack had come to a stop. Daylight was on us. We would have to hold our positions through the day—or could, we? Something was happening.
Guards and workers from the tower fortress were being called back. Why? For the next half hour we watched them working their way back gingerly over the steep slopes. Now and then a Martian crackshot would pick one of them off and he would roll back down into the shadows.
Suddenly the tempo of the mysterious Menniker retreat was stepped up. The men in workers’ uniforms were racing back as hard as they could go. Through the arched entrance. Into the square-cut doorway of the concrete base.
“Shall we go after them?” Bobby said. “Shall we beat the war song again and have the Martians give chase?”
“Wait,” said Vedo. “I do not yet understand.”
Bill thought it was a trap. “That’s just what they Want us to do—follow them in a group and get our heads shot off.”
“No, I think something else.” Vedo’s beauty was matched by her courage, I thought, as I watched her now. The fate of the Seventh Point hung in the balance. And the fate of the American destiny on this planet. Vedo stood calm, watching, waiting.
It was one of the Martian officers who discovered what was happening—a tall, keen-eyed, bronzed specimen. He pointed to the sky. He spoke in Martian.
Vedo passed his words on to us. “This time perhaps all lost. A cargo ship is coming down out of sky path.” It was beyond me how the Martian could have spotted the black speck in the vast yellow sky. But he was right. It was coming. It was some sort of space ship, about to arrive at the Marshington port.
“Their machines,” said Vedo, gesturing toward the tower, “will bring ship down—crash—on top of canyon. Crash hard to kill our army. We lost . . . We lost . . . We lost.”
Her thin fingers moved upward across her cheeks as she watched. The speck was growing larger. Moving down. Coming closer.
I thought a thousand thoughts in the next awful minute. I ran, I shook my fists, I leaped down along the rocks, and might have fallen over a cliff if Bill hadn’t raced up beside me on Tan-Jack and drawn me on.
All of us, Vedo, the Bells, the officers, were riding now toward the canyon. A strange gesture of lost hope! No miracle could have got us there soon enough to warn the Martian army to scatter. It would be caught.
I thought a thousand thoughts, and all of them were remorse for wasted opportunities.
“If we had only blasted that tower, Bill,” I cried, “if we could only have known
it would come to this—”
“The Martians would have had a fighting chance,” Bill agreed, yelling back at me as we galloped on. “But that invisible hand will beat us now. In another minute—hey, wait! Wait, all of you!”
Tan-Jack was the first to heed. He slowed up so sharply that only his drawing power kept us from sliding over his head. Then Vedo whirled and turned back to us.
“What is it? Are we wrong to hope? If we could signal them to scatter—” The ship was almost over the canyon. There wouldn’t be time—
“But Menniker can’t blast that ship down!” Bill said. There was a strange glint of humor in his eye. I thought he was giving way to some kind of panic. “No, they can’t. Not unless—”
“They didn’t miss on us,” I growled. “If they could do that well when Jattleworth was drunk, what’ll they do when they’re on their toes? This time they’ve got a target. It’ll be slaughter. Here is comes—”
“It won’t come!”
“Why not?”
“Those explosives I tied under the tower elevator! I wired them to the invisible hand. If they snap on the switch—”
A flash of fire burst from the middle of the tower. It blazed out like a new sun. Tan-Jack leaped back. In his surprise he let us fall off. He didn’t even turn to apologize, and we lay there on the rocks, too fascinated by a wonderful explosion to think of anything else.
Brrrummmb-blumb-blang-blang! I The space ship that was riding over didn’t even wobble. It steered straight on toward Marshington and in a moment was forgotten. But the blaze from the tower—that wonderful, glorious explosion—that was the thing! I could imagine Menniker’s face—if he still had a face. Which I doubted. There was probably no longer a Menniker, or a Jattleworth, or dozens of ship-crashing officers who had dreamed greedy dreams of a private Menniker Empire.
Instead there was a ruined tower, engulfed in flame and smoke. And there was a Martian army, riding up over the canyon walls on trusty rikits . . .
When the smoke of battle had cleared, later that day, and a Martian victory procession was forming to ride to Marshington, Bill and I rode back to the scene of the Blue Palace wreckage,
