by Don Wilcox
Well, I was in it now, caught by a chance skirmish that had descended in my path. I whirled about, quite in the open, and faced the three Wedge-heads who were racing after me.
My little white-handled weapon cut a line of blue fire through the air. The closest of the three Wedges lost the middle section of his body as the disintegration ray caught him. He fell to the ground with a thump.
A knife whizzed through the air at me. The spray of blue caught it arid it vanished into nothing. The red-hooded warrior who threw it stumbled back and ducked for the protection of a ravine. The tip of his red hood bobbed down.
Warrior number three was slow to get the idea. I skimmed the blade of his knife, upraised. He drew his hand down slowly, discovering that he held only the handle. Still he came on, shouting the shout of the devil.
I blasted the ground in front of his feet. Dirt and rock melted into nothing; and the charging warrior sprawled headlong into a four-foot hole. Pow! The dust flew and the shouts turned into a sick gurgle.
I holstered my weapon and pounced on the warrior with my bare hands. He sagged back from the impact of the first square blow I delivered to his pudgy jaw. Then I had a brief moment of peace and quiet—just what I needed to collect a few souvenirs.
I took his packet of food, his bells from his shoes, and the black wedge-shaped hood he wore over his head and shoulders. I adorned myself with these articles of clothing.
For half a second, while fitting the covering over my head, I was off my guard. I heard a swishing noise, and turned to see a wide, bright steel sword upraised. I staggered back, but I was too late. Nothing would save—
But something did! Someone who was very clever with a rope had thrown a loop over my would-be murder’s head. The rope Jerked back just in-time to send the sword glancing over the tip of my black hood. In that split second my integration pistol came into play again.
The sword melted away. Its owner blundered into the path of my ray and fell apart; with two thumps his bisected body struck the ground. Then I looked around to see who had saved my life and Lorna, half crying, came running into my arms.
If I had forgotten, for the moment, that there were still several bloodthirsty Wedges in the immediate vicinity, Lorna hadn’t.
“You really walked into it!” she said. “Come on, this way!”
“What, are you doing here?”
“I’ve been trying to catch up with you for miles.” We ran for several minutes to reach, a point of safety around the shoulder of the mountain. “You would have to get mixed up with the son of the chieftan!”
“The one I killed?”
“The one you didn’t kill. The one wearing the red hood. He was eyeing you, knowing you for an Earthman. After you destroyed his knife in the air he held back, watching you.”
“Then I should go back and kill him.”
I looked back toward the trail, but Lorna pleaded with me not to go. They were everywhere back there, she said. They could dance out of rocks without warning. Their lust for blood was running high.
“I never saw them behave, so,” she said. “Even in fighting they were never this way.”
“It’s their devil.”
“Devil?”
“You don’t know about BEE-gee-gee-gee?”
She gave me a strange look. “I thought I knew all of their superstitions. But this must have come” since I was here.”
“Haven’t you noticed how they dance? It’s a mania. Remember the dance manias back in history? Something like that has seized them. The way they’re going, they’ll win their war—”
“Don’t say it!”
“They’ll win by their very madness. They’re demons. I never saw anything like it. They don’t rest, they don’t sleep. Even while they eat they carry on with all their frenzied, insane BEE-gee-gee-gee!”
“Please, don’t say they’ll win. If you can succeed in your rescue, then the Earth’s support of the Big Zims will surely frighten them away.”
I felt that cold wave of doubt again, and my eyes must have expressed the skepticism I couldn’t help feeling. “You do have faith that I’ll rescue Bennington, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s happened? Are you faltering? Are you afraid?”
“I don’t know. It’s this uncanny power—this something I can’t understand—this something they’re getting from their devil—”
“So you believe in such things! Devils—and magic! ” She was shaming me with her eyes.
“For myself I don’t believe it. But look what it’s doing to them. You can’t deny what you see.”
I saw the look of terror come into her eyes then, and I felt, ashamed of what I had said. I caught her arms and drew her close.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forget it. Have I said ‘thank’ you yet? Thank you for saving my life, young lady!”
“I was waiting for that.” She looked at me searchingly.
“You haven’t answered my question, however. What are you doing here?”
“I’m alone now. So I came to you.”
I held her very close and kissed her tenderly. I understood well enough what she meant. There wasn’t much I could say, for I had known when I said good-by to her father that the end was very near.
She had buried him with her own hands, she said. She had not marked the grave. It would never be disturbed by people who came and went along the river.
Cautiously we wended our way toward the stone walls of the city. We moved to the south, toward the cliff above the sea. We made camp above the trail that zigzagged down the steep embankment to the waters. The pounding of the sea quieted while we sat there, and for the moment all seemed serene.
“And so you followed me, Lorna,” I said, watching her intently.
“I came to you,” she said simply because I liked you.”
I murmured uncomfortably. The fact was, she hadn’t had much Earth companionship in the past years. If she could get back to the Earth soon, she would find her country full of people like me.
“Like you?” she said, lifting her eyes. “I doubt it.”
“They look like me, talk like me, they’re even named like me. Smith. Did you ever hear a more ordinary name? William Smith. There are thousands of people with my name.”
“It’s a nice name.”
“It’s not very original. You step up to one of these Wedge-head Martians and tell him your name is
Smith, and what would he think?”
“He’d think I was your wife,” Lorna said.
“Now just a minute—”
“But I am your wife. I’ve come to you to be yours.”
“Lorna. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve been away from people for a long time.”
“Does that mean I don’t know what love is? In these years with my father I have learned what it means to serve and to be devoted. Now my father is gone. Someone must need me now, someone I can serve and help—”
“When you get back to Earth, you’ll find many—”
“Have you a wife already?”
“No.”
“Girl friends, then?”
“Sure. At least seven. One for every day of the week.”
“I’ll be your girl-friend for every day. Only I want, to be more. I want to love you and be your wife. Let me be your wife now. Say that I am, and then I will serve you and help you and love you forever. Yes, Mr. William Smith?”’
I tried to take my eyes away from hers but I couldn’t, she was so beautiful, so completely fascinating, so deeply sincere.
“Lorna, it’s important that I rescue Bennington as soon as possible—if he’s still alive. I confess I’m doubtful, with these Wedge-heads on such a killing spree. But I’m asking you to be my guide and stay with me until this job is finished. Then I’ll pay you well, and you’ll have money enough to get back to Earth. Do you understand?”
For a long moment she said nothing, looking down at the ground. The
n she slipped her warm hand into mine and her fingers locked tightly into my grip.
“Mr. William Smith,” she said, “anyway, you say.”
After resting we marched on along the edge of the cliff. If there had been ships below, we might easily have been seen. But the sea, at this point, struck squarely against a perpendicular wall of, more than a hundred feet, offering no safety for seagoing craft. Two miles up the coast a few tiny fishing boats could be seen, and nearer the city, troops and other pedestrians were visible along the trails. But at this elevation, well outside the city’s walls, the world was all ours. In comparative safety we trudged toward the spot where Lorna believed we would find our secret entrance.
“It’s an opening in this cliff below us,” I said, recalling the earlier instructions she and her father had given me.
“We’ll be safer using the rope”
“Can we be sure the Wedge-heads never use this entrance?”
“Why should they? They have gates through the city walls, and they know the maze of tunnels that lead in and out. Besides, this opening in the cliff leads into a big room under the city—a forbidden room. Father and I discovered it by accident when we were making our escape.”
“And you think it won’t be occupied?”
“Only by sea vultures.”
“Then why is it forbidden?”
“There are superstitions about the vultures. They’re supposed to be sacred. The Wedges believe them to be all-wise, but of course a vulture never reveals his knowledge. Here, we can tie one end of the rope to this clump of trees.”
The other end of the rope dangled down past the dark slit in the side of the cliff. We waited for a few moments, watching in all directions to make sure no one had followed us.
The slightest tinge of red among the vegetation would have caught my eyes. I was on the alert for sight of the chieftan’s son with the red hood. But apparently the attack. of three Big Zim balloons had. prevented our being followed. Whatever peril might await us at the end of our dangling rope, we were ready to take our chances.
I crawled downward, hand after hand, and swung into the mouth of the cavern, fifty or sixty feet directly above the level of the water. Lorna followed, and I helped her in. This was it, the big, gloomy, forbidden room, under the city.
It was deathly silent, at first. Our own footsteps made ominous echoes! Through the dim light we made out the contours of the room. From our angle it was a veritable forest of stalactites and stalagmites, irregular walls and heaps of jagged stones. There was an open distance somewhere beyond the stumps of rock that surrounded us, and we could see dim light filtering through from a rough-hewn stairway across that distance.
“They must come into, this place over yonder. That should be our way up into the city,” I said.
We moved cautiously. At first we thought the whole cavern to be unoccupied, but soon we got the feeling that other persons might be moving along among these shadowy hiding-places. We avoided the open center of the room, but now our eyes adjusted to the light, and the great ornament suspended from the middle of the ceiling took shape.
“It looks like a throne underneath,” I whispered. “Or is it an altar for sacrifices?”
“I’ve never seen it before,” Lorna said.
“It must, have been there when you and your father came through this passage. Overhead there’s a giant stalactite pointing down to the chieftan’s throne. See it?”
“It glistens like glass. It’s, not a stalactite. It must have been built for some kind of ceremony.”
The imitation stalactite, if such it was, hung down from the cavern ceiling like a twenty-foot chandelier, pointing down, cone-shaped. It was perfectly carved. It glistened like a mirror, or rather like a series of circular mirrors, one band above the other, each of wider diameter than the one before.
Beneath the point of this great ceiling ornament there was a seat within a cluster of circular objects, the nature of which we could not at once determine.
“It looks like a big bouquet around the chieftan’s seat,” I observed.
“A bouquet of what? Round stones? Is it a giant game of checkers?”
“Or are they tin pans?”
“I’m sure that wasn’t here before.”
“Then we’ll probably never know what it means. If we can find our man, we’ll come back over this trail too fast to ask questions.”
We stopped to make sure we knew how to thread our way back. The hole in the cliff by which we had entered now looked, like a jagged window at the end of a dark room.
We moved on to where the long circling stairway came into fuller view! The steps were shallow and wide, leading upward gradually toward the rectangle of daylight perhaps forty yards, outward from the cavern. “There’s our way to the city!”
“And it’s blocked!”
At the upper end of the passageway four guards stood silhouetted against the light of the out-of-doors. “Now what?” Lorna asked.
“Is that the only way into this place, or, would there be others?”
“There are probably tunnels, if we could find them.”
“How did you and your father find your way into this place? By that stairway?”
“Oh no. There have always been guards there. They’re, bound to kill anyone who tries to break into this forbidden sanctum. No, father and I found our way in by accident—by some tunnelled passageway—”
“Which must have been connected with the quarters where you were kept prisoner.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then that’ll be our way to Mr. B.G. Bennington, if the poor guy is still, alive. Keep to the deep shadows, Lorna, and look for an opening.”
We knew we were taking a deadly risk to toss pebbles, but soon that’s what we were doing. Exploring every patch of blackness that might lead off from the room, we would toss small stones and listen to see whether they would strike solid walls.
Then we would stop and wait in silence to make sure unseen prowlers were not on our trails.
“Listen. Something’s pounding.”
“I heard it too.”
It came again, a deep, heavy thud like a giant’s sledge hammer striking the rocks somewhere under the cavern floor.
Thud! A long moment of silence. Thud! Another silence. Thunnng! It was growing stronger, more like, a boom.
“It seems to come from the window in the cliff where we entered,” Lorna said.
“Of course. It’s only the sea.”
We went on with our futile search. The sound of the sea grew stronger. Its boom, echoing through the cavern, made us bolder.
There was less danger that we would be heard. But time was passing and we had discovered no tunnel. We stopped again within sight of those four guards, standing stiffly at the upper end of the incline. The daylight back of them was waning. I took my pistol from its holster and weighed it in my hand.
Lorna touched my arm. “Be careful, Mr. William Smith.”
“If you stay back here, you’ll be safe.”
“What are you going to do?”
“If I had just one of those boys alone for five minutes, of questioning—”
“But the other three—do mean to kill them?”
“Can you think of a better way?”
“If you start up the stairs they’ll hear you. They’ll cry a warning to the whole city. Perhaps if you’d wait till dark—”
“Stand back, Lorna. I’m going to throw a big stone up those steps. That might bring one guard down. It won’t bring all four.”
I threw a stone. It struck with a good clatter, no doubt, but the sound happened to be swallowed up by. the boom of the sea which sounded at the same instant. I started to pick up another stone when Lorna said, “Wait!” Her whisper was tense.
“What is it?”
“Someone over there. I saw a shadowy form moving.”
We drew back, watching the vague shadows until our eyes swam. I began to think it had all been an optical illusion when suddenly—
The giant impact of the sea waves against the cliff. But this time there was something more—the simultaneous beat of a drum.
Louder. Loud and close. We looked toward the center of the room. Dim though the light was we could see that someone sat in the seat which we had called the chief tan’s throne. The big cone-like object that hung from the ceiling was directly over his head. In fact, the top of his head seemed to be enclosed in the open point of the cone, so that the whole glistening object was like an immense hat that fitted down over his forehead and spread upward, wider and wider, all the way to the ceiling.
The sea noises continued with the regularity of a slowly striking clock. The arms of the man occupying the chieftan’s seat struck down at the array of drums in time with each beat. Another noise was added, a flapping sound.
“There’s something in the window,” Lorna whispered.
Looking back toward that jagged opening, I saw that a sea vulture had perched itself there, silhouetted in the path of light. Each boom, of the sea threw a spray of water upward, and the huge bird shook its wings with a rhythmic flap.
I can’t say how or when the strange emotions induced by these sounds—that of the sea and the flap of the vulture’s wings—began to take possession of us. We crouched in the darkness, our hands locked together my arm close around Lorna’s trembling body. Our eyes tried to watch in all directions at once. The rhythm was growing stronger, a trifle faster. The boom of the sea was rising in volume and tempo, and now it seemed echoes were coming back from the farthest ends of the cavern in time with the beat.
“The stairs!” Lorna cried under her breath. “Look!”
Warriors were moving down in an orderly procession. Guards shouted at them. The shouts, far from breaking the rhythmic beat, only added to it. Halfway down the long incline, the marching soldiers began to bend and twist and sway. Their feet keeping exact time, they allowed their bodies to give way to the weird rhythmic impulses that permeated the whole underground room. Their officers were encouraging them to shout and dance. Before the first of the procession reached the foot of the long stairs; a blur of lights began to come on gradually all across the center of the room.
