A sudden approving buzz went through the Council hall.
CHAPTER VII
The Fleet from Rahn
The approval of the citizens of Yugna was not enthusiastic. It was desperate. Their faces were weary. Their lives were warped. They had been fighting since birth against the encroachment of the jungle, which until the days of their grandparents had been no menace at all. But for two generations these people had been foredoomed, and they knew it. Nearly half the cities of their race were overwhelmed and their inhabitants reduced to savage hunters in the victorious jungles. Now the people of Yugna saw a chance to escape from the jungle. They were offered rest. Peace. Relaxation from the desperate need to serve insatiable machines. Sheer desperation impelled them. In their situation, the people of Earth would annihilate a solar system for relief, let alone the inhabitants of a single planet.
Shouts began to be heard above the uproar in the Council hall—approving shouts, demands that one be appointed to conduct the operation which was to give them a new planet on which to live, where their food-plants would thrive in the open, where jungles would no longer press on them.
Tommy’s face went savage and desperate, itself. He clenched and unclenched his hands, struggling among his meagre supply of words for promises of help from Earth, which promises would tip the scales for peace again. He raised his voice in a shout for attention. He was unheard. The Council hall was in an uproar of desperate approval. The orator stood flushed and triumphant. The Council members looked from eye to eye, and slowly the old, white-bearded Keeper of Foodstuffs placed a golden box upon the table. He touched it in a certain fashion, and handed it to the next man. That second man touched it, and passed it to a third. And that man….
* * * *
A hush fell instantly. Tommy understood. The measure was being decided by solemn vote. The voting device had reached the fifth man when there was a frantic clatter of footsteps, a door burst in, and babbling men stood in the opening, white-faced and stammering and overwhelmed, but trying to make a report.
Consternation reigned, incredulous, amazed consternation. The bearded old man rose dazedly and strode from the hall with the rest of the Council following him. A pause of stunned stupefaction, and the spectators in the hall rushed for other doors.
“Stick to Aten,” snapped Tommy. “Something’s broken, and it has to be our way. Let’s see what it is.”
He clung alike to Evelyn and to Aten as the air-pilot fought to clear a way. The doors were jammed. It was minutes before they could make their way through and plunge up the interminable steps Aten mounted, only to fling himself out to the open air. Then they were upon a flying bridge between two of the towers of the city. All about the city human figures were massing, staring upward.
And above the city swirled a swarm of aircraft. Tommy counted three of the clumsy ornithopters, high and motelike. There were twenty or thirty of the small, one-man craft. There were a dozen or more two-man planes. And there were at least forty giant single-wing ships which looked as if they had been made for carrying freight. They soared and circled above the city in soundless confusion. Before each of them glittered something silvery, like glass, which was not a screw propeller but somehow drew them on.
The Council was massed two hundred yards away. A single-seater dived downward, soared and circled noiselessly fifty yards overhead, and its pilot shouted a message. Then he climbed swiftly and rejoined his fellows. The men about Tommy looked stunned, as if they could not believe their ears. Aten seemed stricken beyond the passability of reaction.
* * * *
“I got part of it,” snapped Tommy, to Evelyn’s whispered question. “I think I know the rest. Aten!” He snapped question after question in his inadequate phrasing of the city’s tongue. Evelyn saw Aten answer dully, then bitterly, and then, as Tommy caught his arm and whispered savagely to him, Aten’s eyes caught fire. He nodded violently and turned on his heel.
“Come on!” And Tommy seized Evelyn’s arm again.
They followed closely as Aten wormed his way through the crowd. They raced behind him downstairs and through a door into a dusty and unvisited room. It was a museum. Aten pointed grimly.
Here were the automatic pistols taken from those of Jacaro’s men who had been killed, a nasty sub-machine gun which had been Tommy’s, and grenades—Jacaro’s. Tommy checked shell calibres and carried off a ninety-shot magazine full of explosive bullets, and a repeating rifle.
“I can do more accurate work with this than the machine gun,” he said cryptically. “Let’s go!”
It was not until they were racing away from the Council building in one of the two-wheeled vehicles that Evelyn spoke again.
“I—understand part,” she said unsteadily. “Those planes overhead are from Rahn. And they’re threatening—”
“Blackmail,” said Tommy between clenched teeth. “It sounds like a perfectly normal Earth racket. A fleet from Rahn is over Yugna, loaded with the Death Mist. Yugna pays food and goods and women or it’s wiped out by gas. Further, it surrenders its aircraft to make further collections easier. Rahn refuses to die, though it’s let in the jungle. It’s turned pirate stronghold. Fed and clothed by a few other cities like this one, it should be able to hold out. It’s a racket, Evelyn. A stick-up. A hijacking of a civilised city. Sounds like Jacaro.”
* * * *
The little vehicle darted madly through empty highways, passing groups of men staring dazedly upward at the soaring motes overhead. It darted down this inclined way, up that one. It shot into a building and around a winding ramp. It stopped with a jerk and Aten was climbing out. He ran through a doorway, Tommy and Evelyn following. Planes of all sizes, still and lifeless, filled a vast hall. And Aten struggled with a door mechanism and a monster valve swung wide. Then Tommy threw his weight with Aten’s to roll out the plane he had selected. It was a small, triangular ship, with seats for three, but it was heavy. The two men moved it with desperate exertion. Aten pointed, panting, to slide-rail and it took them five minutes to get the plane about that rail and engage a curious contrivance in a slot in the ship’s fuselage.
“Tommy,” said Evelyn, “you’re not going to—”
“Run away? Hardly!” said Tommy. “We’re going up. I’m going to fight the fleet with bullets. They don’t have missile-weapons here, and Aten will know the range of their electric-charge outfits.”
“I’m coming too,” said Evelyn desperately.
Tommy hesitated, then agreed.
“If we fail they’ll gas the city anyway. One way or the other….”
There was a sudden rumble as Evelyn took her place. The plane shot forward with a swift smooth acceleration. There was no sound of any motor. There was no movement of the glittering thing at the forepart of the plane. But the ship reached the end of the slide and lifted, and then was in mid-air, fifty feet above the vehicular way, a hundred feet above the ground.
* * * *
Tommy spoke urgently. Aten nodded. The ship had started to climb. He leveled it out and darted straight forward. He swung madly to dodge a soaring tower. He swept upward a little to avoid a flying bridge. The ship was travelling with an enormous speed, and the golden walls of the city flashed past below them and they sped away across feathery jungle.
“If we climbed at once,” observed Tommy shortly, “they’d think we meant to fight. They might start their gassing. As it is, we look like we’re running away.”
Evelyn said nothing. For five miles the plane fled as if in panic. Evelyn clung to the filigree side of the cockpit. The city dwindled behind them. Then Aten climbed steeply. Tommy was looking keenly at the glittering thing which propelled the ship. It seemed like a crystal gridwork, like angular lace contrived of glass. But a cold blue flame burned in it and Tommy was obscurely reminded of a neon tube, though the color was wholly unlike. A blast of air poured back through the grid. Somehow, by some development of electro-statics, the “static jet” which is merely a toy in Earth laboratories had become usable as
a means of propelling aircraft.
Back they swept toward the Golden City, five thousand feet or more aloft. The ground was partly obscured by the hazy, humid atmosphere, but glinting sun-reflections from the city guided them. Soaring things took shape before them and grew swiftly nearer. Tommy spoke again, busily loading the automatic rifle with explosive shells.
Aten swung to follow a vast dark shape in its circular soaring, a hundred feet above it and a hundred yards behind. Wind whistled, rising to a shriek. Tommy fired painstakingly.
The other plane zoomed suddenly as a flash of blue flame spouted before it. It dived, then, fluttering and swooping, began to drift helplessly toward the spires of the city below it.
“Good!” snapped Tommy. “Another one, Aten.”
Aten made no reply. He flung his ship sidewise and dived steeply before a monstrous freight carrier. Tommy fired deliberately as they swept past. The propelling grid flashed blue flame in a vast, crashing flame. It, too, began to flutter down.
Tommy did not miss until the fifth time, and Aten turned with a grimace of disappointment. Tommy’s second shot burst in a freight compartment and a man screamed. His voice carried horribly in the silence of these heights. But Tommy shot again, and, again, and there was a satisfying blue flash as a fifth big ship went fluttering helplessly down.
Aten began to circle for height Tommy refilled the magazine.
“I’m bringing ’em down,” he explained unnecessarily to Evelyn, “by smashing their propellers. They have to land, and when they land they’re hostages—I hope!”
Confusion became apparent among the hostile planes. The one Yugna ship was identified as the source of disaster. Tommy worked his rifle in cold fury. He aimed at no man, but the propelling grids were large. For a one-man ship they were five feet in diameter, and for the big freight ships, they were circles fifteen feet across. They were perfect targets, and Aten seemed to grasp the necessary tactics almost instantly. Dead ahead or from straight astern, Tommy could not miss a shot. The fleet of Rahn went fluttering downward. Fifteen of the biggest were down, and six of the two-man planes. A sixteenth and seventeenth flashed at their bows and drifted helplessly….
Then the one-man ships attacked. Six of them at once. Aten grinned and dived for all of them. One by one, Tommy smashed their crystal grids and watched them sinking unsteadily toward the towers of the city. As his own ship drove over them, little golden flashes licked out. Electric-charge weapons. One flash struck the wingtip of their plane, and flame burst out, but Aten flung the ship into a mad whirl in which the blaze was blown out.
Another freight ship helpless—and another. Then the air fleet of Rahn turned and fled. The ornithopters winged away in heavy, creaking terror. The others dived for speed and flattened out hardly above the tree-fern jungle. They streaked away in ignominious panic. Aten darted and circled above them and, as Tommy failed to fire, turned and went racing back toward the city.
“After the first ones went down,” observed Tommy, “they knew that if they gassed the city we’d shoot them down into their own gas cloud. So they ran away. I hope this gives us a pull.”
The city’s towers loomed before them. The lacy bridges swarmed with human figures. Somewhere a fight was in progress about a grounded plane from Rahn. Others seemed to have surrendered sullenly on alighting. For the first time Tommy saw the city as a thronging mass of humanity, and for the first time he realized how terrible must be the strain upon the city if with so large a population so few could be free for leisure in normal times.
The little plane settled down and landed lightly. There were a dozen men on the landing platform now, and they were herding disarmed men from Rahn away from a big ship Tommy had brought down. Tommy looked curiously at the prisoners. They seemed freer than the inhabitants of Yugna. Their faces showed no such signs of strain. But they did not seem well-fed, nor did they appear as capable or as resolute.
“Cuyal,” said Aten in an explanatory tone, seeing Tommy’s expression. He put his shoulder to the big ship, to wheel it back into its shed.
“You son of a gun,” grunted Tommy, “it’s all in the day’s work to you, fighting an invading fleet!”
A messenger came panting through the doorway. Tommy grinned.
“The Council wants us, Evelyn. Now maybe they’ll listen.”
* * * *
The atmosphere of the resumed Council meeting was, as a matter of fact, considerably changed. The white-bearded Keeper of Foodstuffs thanked them with dignity. He invited Tommy to offer advice, since his services had proved so useful.
“Advice?” said Tommy, in the halting, fumbling phrases he had slaved to acquire. “I would put the prisoners from Rahn to work at the machines, releasing citizens.” There was a buzz of approval, and he added drily in English: “I’m playing politics, Evelyn.” Again in the speech of Yugna he added: “And I would have the fleet of Yugna soar above Rahn, not to demand tribute as that city did, but to disable all its aircraft, so that such piracy as to-day may not be tried again!” There was a second buzz of approval. “And third,” said Tommy earnestly, “I would communicate with Earth, rather than assassinate it. I would require the science of Earth for the benefit of this world, rather than use the science of this world to annihilate that! I—”
For the second time the Council meeting was interrupted. An armed messenger came pounding into the room. He reported swiftly. Tommy grasped Evelyn’s wrist in what was almost a painful grip.
“Noises in the Tube!” he told her sharply. “Earth-folk doing something in the Tube Jacaro came through. Your father….”
There was an alert silence in the Council hall. The white-bearded old man had listened to the messenger. Now he asked a grim question of Tommy.
“They may be my friends, or your enemies,” said Tommy briefly. “Mass thermit-throwers and let me find out!”
* * * *
It was the only possible thing to do. Tommy and Evelyn went with the Council, in a body, in a huge wheeled vehicle that raced across the city. Lingering groups still searched the sky above them, now blessedly empty again. But the Council’s vehicle dived down and down to ground level, where the rumble of machines was loud indeed, and then turned into a tunnel which went down still farther. There was feverish activity ahead, where it stopped, and a golden thermit-thrower came into sight upon a dull-colored truck.
Questions. Feverish replies. The white-bearded man touched Tommy on the shoulder, regarding him with a peculiarly noncommittal gaze, and pointed to a doorway that someone was just opening. The door swung wide. There was a confusion of prismatically-colored mist within it, and Tommy noticed that tanks upon tanks were massed outside the metal wall of that compartment, and seemingly had been pouring something into the room.
The mist drew back from the door. Saffron-red lighting panels appeared dimly, then grew distinct. There were small, collapsed bundles of fur upon the floor of the storeroom being exposed to view. They were, probably, the equivalent of rats. And then the last remnant of mist vanished with a curiously wraithlike abruptness, and the end of Jacaro’s Tube came into view.
Tommy advanced, Evelyn clinging to his sleeve. There were clanking noises audible in this room even above the dull rumble of the city’s machines. The noises came from the Tube’s mouth. It was four feet and more across, and it projected at a crazy angle out of a previously solid wall.
“Hello!” shouted Tommy. “Down the Tube!”
* * * *
The clattering noise stopped, then continued at a faster rate.
“The gas is cut off!” shouted Tommy again. “Who’s there?”
A voice gasped from the Tube’s depths:
“It’s him!” The tone was made metallic by echoing and reechoing in the bends of the Tube, but it was Smithers. “We’re comin’, Mr. Reames.”
“Is—is Daddy there?” called Evelyn eagerly. “Daddy!”
“Coming,” said a grim voice.
The clattering grew nearer. A goggled, gas-masked head
appeared, and a body followed it out of the Tube, laden with a multitude of burdens. A second climbed still more heavily after the first. The brightly-colored citizens of the Golden City reached quietly to the weapons at their waists. A third voice came up the Tube, distant and nearly unintelligible. It roared a question.
Smithers ripped off his gas mask and said distinctly:
“Sure we’re through. Go ahead. An’ go to hell!”
Then there was a thunderous detonation somewhere down in the Tube’s depths. The visible part of it jerked spasmodically and cracked across. A wisp of brownish smoke puffed out of it, and the stinging reek of high explosive tainted the air. Then Evelyn was clinging close to her father, and he was patting her comfortingly, and Smithers was pumping both of Tommy’s hands, his normal calmness torn from him for once. But after a bare moment he had gripped himself again. He unloaded an impressive number of parcels from about his person. Then he regarded the citizens of the Golden City with an impersonal, estimating gaze, ignoring twenty weapons trained upon him.
“Those damn fools back on Earth,” he observed impassively, “decided the professor an’ me was better off of it. So they let us come through the Tube before they blew it up. We brought the explosive bullets, Mr. Reames. I hope we brought enough.”
And Tommy grinned elatedly as Denham turned to crush his hands in his own.
CHAPTER VIII
“Those Devils Have Got Evelyn!”
That night the three of them talked, on a high terrace with most of the Golden City spread out below them. Over their heads, lights of many colors moved and shifted slowly in the sky. There were a myriad glowing specks of saffron-red about the ways of the city, and the air was full of fragrant odors. The breath of the jungle reached them even a thousand feet above ground. And the dull, persistent roar of the machines reached them too. There were five people on the terrace: Tommy, Denham, Smithers, Aten and the white-bearded old Keeper of Foodstuffs. He looked on as the Earthmen talked.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 37
