Twenty minutes later a monstrous machine with ungainly flapping wings came heavily over the swamp. It checked and settled with a terrific flapping and an even more terrific din. Half a dozen armed men waited warily for the three to approach. The golden weapons lifted alertly as they drew near. The wounded man explained at some length. His explanation was dismissed brusquely. A man advanced and held out his hands for Tommy’s weapons.
“I don’t like it,” growled Tommy, “but we’ve got to think of Earth. If you get a chance hide your gun, Evelyn.”
He pushed on the safety catches and passed over his guns. The pilot he had shot down led them onto the fenced-in deck of the monstrous ornithopter. Machinery roared. The wings began to beat. They were nearly invisible from the speed of their flapping when the ship lifted vertically from the ground. It rose straight up for fifty feet, the motion of the wings changed subtly, and it swept forward.
It swung in a vast half circle and headed back across the marsh for the Golden City. Five minutes of noisy flight during which the machine flapped its way higher and higher above the marsh—which seemed more noisome and horrible still from above—and then the golden towers of the city were below. Strange and tapering and beautiful, they were. No single line was perfectly straight, nor was any form ungraceful. These towers sprang upward in clean-soaring curves toward the sky. Bridges between them were gossamerlike things that seemed lace spun out in metal. And as Tommy looked keenly and saw the jungle crowding close against the city’s metal walls, the flapping of the ornithopter’s wings changed again and it seemed to plunge downward like a stone toward a narrow landing place amid the great city’s towering buildings.
CHAPTER VI
The Golden City
The thing that struck Tommy first of all was the scarcity of men in the city, compared to its size. The next thing was the entire absence of women. The roar of machines smote upon his consciousness as a bad third, though they made din enough. Perhaps he ignored the machine noises because the ornithopter on which they had arrived made such a racket itself.
They landed on a paved space perhaps a hundred yards by two hundred, three sides of which were walled off by soaring towers. The fourth gave off on empty space, and he realized that he was still at least a hundred feet above the ground. The ornithopter landed with a certain skilful precision and its wings ceased to beat. Behind it, the two fixed-wing machines soared down, leveled, hovered, and settled upon amazingly inadequate wheels. Their pilots got out and began to push them toward one side of the landing area. Tommy noticed it, of course. He was noticing everything, just now. He said amazedly:
“Evelyn! They launch these planes with catapults like those our battleships use! They don’t take off under their own power!”
The six men on the ornithopter put their shoulders to their machine and trundled it out of the way. Tommy blinked at the sight.
“No field attendants!” He gazed out across the open portion of the land area and saw an elevated thoroughfare below. Some sort of vehicle, gleaming like gold, moved swiftly on two wheels. There was a walkway in the center of the street with room for a multitude. But only two men were in sight upon it. “Lord!” said Tommy. “Where are the people?”
There was brief talk among the crew of the ornithopter. Two of them picked up Tommy’s weapons, and the pilot he had wounded made a gesture indicating that he should follow. He led the way to an arched door in the nearest tower. A little two-wheeled car was waiting. They got into it and the pilot fumbled with the controls. As he worked at it—rather clumsily on account of his arm—the rest of the ornithopter’s crew came in. They wheeled out another vehicle, climbed into it, and shot away down a sloping passage.
Their own vehicle followed and emerged upon the paved and nearly empty thoroughfare. Tall buildings rose all about them, with curved walls soaring dizzily skyward. There was every sign of a populous city, including the dull drumming roar of many machines, but the streets were empty. The little machine moved swiftly for minutes. Twice it swung aside and entered a sloping incline. Once it went up. The other time it dived down seventy feet on a four-hundred-foot ramp. Then it swung sharply to the right, meandered into a street-level way leading into the heart of a monster building, and stopped. And in all its travel it had not passed fifty people.
The pilot-turned-chauffeur turned and grinned amiably, and led the way again. Steps—twenty or thirty of them. Then they emerged suddenly into a vast room. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet long, fifty wide, and nearly as high. It was floored with alternate blocks of what seemed to be an iron-hard black wood and the omnipresent golden metal. Columns and pilasters about the place gave forth the same subdued deep golden glow. Light streamed from panels inset in the wall and ceiling—a curious saffron-red light. There was a massive table of the hard black wood. Chairs with curiously designed backs were ranged about it. They were benches, really, but they served the purpose of chairs. Each was too narrow to hold more than one person. The room was empty.
They waited. After a long time a man in a blue tunic came into the room and sat down on one of the benches. A long time later, another man came in, in red; and another and another, until there were a dozen in all. They regarded Tommy and Evelyn with a weary suspicion. One of them—an old man with a white beard—asked questions. The pilot answered them. At a word, the two men with Tommy’s weapons placed them on the table. They were inspected casually, as familiar things. They probably were, since some of Jacaro’s gunmen had been killed in a fight in this city. Another question.
The pilot explained briefly and offered Tommy the black-metal pad again. It still contained the incomplete map of a hemisphere, and was obviously a repetition of the question of where he came from.
Tommy took it, frowning thoughtfully. Then an idea struck him. He found the little stud which, pressed by the pad’s owner, had erased the previous drawings. He pressed it and the lines disappeared. And Tommy drew, crudely enough, that complicated diagram which is supposed to represent a cube which is a cube in four dimensions: a tesseract. Upon one surface of the cube he indicated the curving towers of the Golden City. Upon a surface representing a plane beyond the three dimensions of normal experience, he repeated the angular tower structures of New York. He shrugged rather hopelessly as he passed it over, but to his amazement it was understood at once.
The little black pad passed from hand to hand and an animated discussion took place. One rather hard-faced man was the most animated of all. The bearded old man demurred. The hard-faced man insisted. Tommy could see that his pilot’s expression was becoming uneasy. But then a compromise seemed to be arrived at. The bearded man spoke a single, ceremonial phrase and the twelve men rose. They moved toward various doors and one by one left, until the room was empty.
But the pilot looked relieved. He grinned cheerfully at Tommy and led the way back to the two-wheeled vehicle. The two men with Tommy’s weapons vanished. And again there was a swift, cyclonelike passage along empty ways with the throbbing of machinery audible everywhere. Into the base of a second building, up endless stairs, past innumerable doors. It seemed to Tommy that he heard voices behind some of them, and they were women’s voices.
At a private, triple knock a door opened wide, and the pilot led the way into a room, closed and locked the door behind him, and called. A woman’s voice cried out in astonishment. Through an inner arch a woman came running eagerly. Her face went blank at sight of Tommy and Evelyn, and her hand flew to a tiny golden object at her waist. Then, at the pilot’s chuckle, she flushed vividly.
* * * *
Hours later, Tommy and Evelyn were able to talk it over. They were alone then, and could look out an oval window upon the Golden City all about them. It was dark, but saffron-red panels glowed in building walls all along the thoroughfares, and tiny glowing dots in the soaring spires of gold told of people within other dwellings like this.
“As I see it,” said Tommy restlessly, “the Council—and it must have been that in the big room t
o-day—put us in our friend’s hands to learn the language. He’s been working with me four hours, drawing pictures, and I’ve been writing down words I’ve learned. I must have several hundred of them. But we do our best talking with pictures. And Evelyn, this city’s in a bad fix.”
Evelyn said irrelevantly: “Her name is Ahnya, Tommy, and she’s a dear. We got along beautifully. I’ll bet I found out things you don’t even guess at.”
“You probably have,” admitted Tommy, frowning. “Check up on this: our friend’s name is Aten, and he’s an air-pilot and also has something to do with growing foodstuffs in some special towers where they grow crops by artificial light only. Some of the plants he sketched look amazingly like wheat, by the way. The name of the town is”—he looked at his notes—“Yugna. There are some other towns, ten or twelve of them. Rahn is the nearest, and it’s worse off than this one.”
“Of course,” said Evelyn, smiling. “They use cuyal openly, there!”
“How’d you learn all that?” demanded Tommy.
“Ahnya told me. We made gestures and smiled at each other. We understood perfectly. She’s crazy about her husband, and I—well she knows I’m going to marry you, so….”
Tommy grunted.
“I suppose she explained with a smile and gestures just how much of a strain it is, simply keeping the city going?”
“Of course,” said Evelyn calmly. “The city’s fighting against the jungle, which grows worse all the time. They used to grow their foodstuffs in the open fields. Then within the city. Now they use empty towers and artificial light. I don’t know why.”
Tommy grunted again.
“This planet’s just had, or is having, a change of geologic period,” he explained, frowning. “The plants people need to live on aren’t adapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce. They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take an abnormal amount of supervision—I don’t know why. The air-conditions for the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creepers which thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city to smother it; the power machines; the clothing machines—a million machines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight off starvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization. And they’re short-handed. The law of diminishing returns seems to operate. They’re trying to maintain a civilization higher than their environment will support. They work until they’re ready to drop, just to stay in the same place. And the monotony and the strain makes some of them take to cuyal for relief.”
He surveyed the city from the oval window, frowning in thought.
“It’s a drug which grows wild,” he added slowly. “It peps them up. It makes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly, they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything they ever knew or did. It’s a sort of delayed-action psychosis which goes off with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using their belt-weapons until they’re killed. More of them bolt for the jungle. The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to the jungle. And then they’re Ragged Men, half mad at all times and wholly mad as far as the city and its machines are concerned.”
Evelyn linked her arm in his.
“Somehow,” she told him, smiling, “I think one Thomas Reames is working out ways and means to help a city named Yugna.”
“Not yet,” said Tommy grimly. “We have to think of Earth. Not everybody in the Council approved of us. Aten told me one chap argued that we ought to be shoved out into the jungle again as compatriots of Jacaro. And the machines were especially short-handed to-day because of a diversion of labor to get ready something monstrous and really deadly to send down the Tube to Earth. We’ve got to find out what that is, and stop it.”
* * * *
But on the second day afterward, when he and Evelyn were summoned before the Council again, he still had not found out. During those two days he learned many other things, to be sure: that Aten for instance, was relieved from duty at the machines only because he was wounded; that the power of the main machines came from a deep bore which brought up superheated steam from the source of boiling springs long since built over; that iron was a rare metal, and consequently there was no dynamo in the city and magnetism was practically an unknown force; that electrokinetics was a laboratory puzzle—or had been, when there was leisure for research—while the science of electrostatics had progressed far past its state on Earth. The little truncheonlike weapons carried a stored-up static charge measurable only in hundreds of thousands of volts, which could be released in flashes which were effective up to a hundred feet or more.
And he learned that the thermit-throwers actually spat out in normal operation tiny droplets of matter Aten could not describe clearly, but which seemed to be radioactive with a period of five minutes or less; that in Rahn, the nearest other city, cuyal was taken openly, and the jungle was growing into the town with no one to hold it back; that two generations since there had been twenty cities like this one, but that a bare dozen still survived; that there was a tradition that human beings had come upon this planet from another world where other human beings had harried them, and that in that other world there were divers races of humanity, of different colors, whereas in the world of the Golden City all mankind was one race; that Tommy’s declaration that he came from another group of dimensions had been debated and, on re-examination of Jacaro’s Tube, accepted, and that there was keen argument going on as to the measures to be taken concerning it.
* * * *
These things Tommy had learned, and he and Evelyn went to their second interrogation by the city’s Council armed with written vocabularies of nearly a thousand words, which they had sorted out and made ready for use. But they were still ignorant of the weapons the Golden City might use against Earth.
The Council meeting took place in the same hall, with its alternating black-and-gold flooring and the saffron-red lighting panels casting a soft light everywhere. This was a scheduled meeting, foreseen and arranged for. The twelve chairs above the heavy table were all occupied from the first. But Tommy realized that the table had been intended to seat a large number of councilors. There were guards stationed formally behind the chairs. There were spectators, auditors of the deliberations of the Council. They were dressed in a myriad colors, and they talked quietly among themselves; but it seemed to Tommy that nowhere had he seen weariness, as an ingrained expression, upon so many faces.
Tommy and Evelyn were led to the foot of the Council table. The bearded old man in blue began the questioning. As Keeper of Foodstuffs—according to Aten—he was a sort of presiding officer.
Tommy answered the questions crisply. He had known what they would be, and he had developed a vocabulary to answer them. He told them of Earth, of Professor Denham, of his and the professor’s experiments. He outlined the first experiment with the Fifth-Dimension catapult and the result of it—when the Golden City had sent the Death Mist to wipe out a band of Ragged Men who had captured a citizen, and after him Evelyn and her father.
* * * *
This they remembered. Nods went around the table. Tommy told them of Jacaro, stressing the fact that Jacaro was an outlaw, a criminal upon Earth. He explained the theft of the model Tube, and how it was that their first contact with Earth had been with the dregs of Earth humanity. On behalf of his countrymen he offered reparation for all the damage Jacaro and his men had done. He proposed a peaceful commerce between worlds, to the infinite benefit of both.
There was silence until he finished. The faces before him were immobile. But a hawk-faced man in brown asked dry questions. Were there more races than one upon Earth? Were they of diverse colors? Did they ever war among themselves? At Tommy’s answers the atmosphere seemed to change. And the hawk-faced man rose to speak.
Tommy and Evelyn, he conceded caustically, had certainly come from another world. Their own most ancient legends described just such a world as his: a world of many races of many
colors, who fought many wars among themselves. Their ancestors had fled from such a world, according to legend through a twisting cavern which they had sealed behind them. The conditions Tommy described had been the cause of their ancestors’ flight. They, the people of Yugna, would do well to follow the example of their forebears: strip these Earth folk of their weapons, exile them to the jungles, destroy the Tube through which the Mist of Many Colors had been sent. All should be as in past ages.
Tommy opened his mouth to answer, but another man sprang to his feet. His face alone was not weary and worn. As he stood up, Aten murmured “Cuyal!” and Tommy understood that this man used the drug which was destroying the city’s citizens, but gave a transient energy to its victims. He spoke in fiery phrases, urging action which would be drastic and certain. He spoke confidently, persuasively. There was a rustling among those who watched and listened to the debate. He had caught at their imagination.
Evelyn, exerting every faculty to understand, saw Tommy’s lips set grimly.
“What—what is it?” she whispered. “I—I don’t understand….”
Tommy spoke in a savage growl.
“He says,” he told her bitterly, “that in one blow they can defeat both the jungle and the invaders from Earth. In past ages their ancestors were faced by enemies they could not defeat. They fled to this world. Now they are faced by jungles they cannot defeat. He proposes that they flee to our world. The Death Mist is a toy, he reminds them, compared with gases they know. There is a gas of which one part in ten hundred million is fatal! In a hundred of their days they can make and send through the Tube enough of it to kill every living thing on Earth. They’ve figures on the Earth’s size and atmosphere from me, damn ’em! And he reminds them that that deadly gas changes of itself into a harmless substance. He urges them to gas Earth humanity out of existence, call upon the other cities of this world, and presently move through the Tube to Earth. They’ll carry their food-plants, rebuild their cities, and abandon this planet to the jungles and the Ragged Men. And the hell of it is, they can do it!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 36
