by Hal Annas
“Against Novakkan raiders? They’ve ringed the planet like an Earth blockade fleet.”
“And you think we could get through the ring?”
“We could try. It would spare the populace here.”
His smile was bitter. “When I took you Novakkan blood flowed like water. You didn’t cringe or wince. Why so tender now?”
“The populace is defenseless.”
“But I,” Nyuk asserted, “am not defenseless. I assure you that when those raiders come down they will receive a surprise the like of which has never been witnessed in this galaxy. I’ve long sought to lure them here. I paraded my wealth. I went among them and acted as arrogantly as they. But they assumed they could brush me aside whenever they wished. Or perhaps they feared me. It no longer matters. I have given them cause to seek vengeance, and they are gathering to move into the trap.”
Thought of the helpless populace drove Aleta to make one more plea. “Take me away,” she said. “The Novakkans come to avenge the humiliation they suffered when you took me from under their eyes. Believing this, I can never know happiness if I bring death and misery to innocent creatures.”
Nyuk smiled. “You would be happy if I took you away?”
Aleta tried to put sincerity into her voice, but the words came out in a hesitant tremolo: “I will try to be. I will try very hard.”
“I am pleased to learn that you can be happy with me,” he said unemotionally, “because I must bring you bad news. I’ve hesitated to tell you before, but now—”
“News from Earth?” she said quickly. “From Earth, yes.”
Norwich Wyatt? Is he all right.”
“In the best of health”
“Then what?”
“Try to take it calmly,” he said. “You’re an orphan.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“Raids from space. Possibly Novakkans. They struck where your people lived. They were among the casualties.”
“Dead?”
He nodded. “That is the best information I’ve been able to get. Both your mother and father.”
The room seemed to spin. Aleta spoke quickly. “My sister and brother?”
“Brother paralyzed by a spinal injury. I didn’t want to tell you that. The shock seems to have affected your sister mentally and emotionally. She’s to be sent out to Mars along with the other ineffectives.”
“You’re sure there’s no mistake?” He shrugged. “There is always that possibility. But I wouldn’t advise you to build hope.”
She couldn’t grasp it. Mother and father dead. Dave and Mae ineffectives. They needed her now. They needed her as they had never needed anyone.
“Can you get a message to Norwich Wyatt to get me transportation back to Earth?”
Again Nyuk shrugged. The hopelessness of the situation dawned over her. For a moment she had forgotten herself.
“Wyatt,” Nyuk said, “seems to be away from the planet. He was in good health when he left.”
“A message could be forwarded to him,” she went on desperately. “I must get back to Earth.”
Nyuk shook his head. “You’ve been gone from the planet for quite a while. It is presumed there that you are dead. That should make it easier for you to accept what I must tell you. Norwich Wyatt will hardly care to be interrupted. He is honeymooning.”
“What?”
He explained again. Still the words hardly registered. Norwich Wyatt was her fiance. He would come for her if he knew where she was. Nothing else seemed to make sense, but the words were in her mind and kept repeating themselves. She didn’t remember returning to her own quarters.
Armed men moved through the palace. They guarded the entrance-ways and allowed no one to enter or leave without special permission. They drilled the servants in emergency activities. Aleta moved through the routine in a semi-trance. What she was ordered to do seemed to have no meaning. At the ringing of a bell in a certain key she was to follow a dimly lighted passage to a dead-end. That was all. It didn’t make sense.
She responded as an automaton. But as the weight of grief and hopelessness diminished in her leaden body, her mind cleared and again she took interest in her surroundings.
As far back as she could remember, she had been highly sensitive. Without willing herself to do so, she would become aware of the emotional attitude of others, of the harmony or disharmony surrounding her. The clashing of poorly blending colors would disturb her. Abruptness in a room or a scene or in dress brought a sense of irritation.
As this acuity came back, she knew that something was out of order. This was not simply defense of a planet from raiders. For some reason Nyuk had deliberately lured the Novakkans here. No defense she had seen could possibly withstand their attack when it came. And yet she could not believe that Nyuk was intentionally making a suicidal stand for the glory of it. He expected, she believed, not only to survive, but to deal the raiders a blow from which they would be long in recovering.
But how? And what about the populace?
It would be impossible for the innocent to escape when the fighting began. They would die like insects under a spray.
And there was terror outside the walls of the palace. No one could doubt. Clamoring at the gates was incessant. The little people knew their predicament. They were caught between two implacable enemies. And they had no way to turn.
This was the real horror for Aleta. Her sensitive nature understood how they felt in their helplessness. And her mind searched for some means of aiding them.
Before she could formulate any plan the first attack came. She learned about it from the servants. The Novakkans descended against little resistance and seized a broad area halfway around the planet. It appeared that they knew where resistance would be encountered and avoided this side of the planet in the preliminary stages.
She watched some of the fighting on visicom until the scenes sickened her. As always, the Novakkans swept everything before them. They killed and destroyed without thought of mercy. They polluted food and laid waste villages and cities in the sunlit regions. They spread about the planet, moving always toward the dark side.
Their ships remained inexorably in a blockading encirclement above the surface. Only a few descended in the first attack. And their numbers out in space grew. It was evident that vengeance was to be taken in the full-scale Novakkan manner. They would leave little, if any, life on the planet.
Her own helplessness disturbed Aleta more than her fear. Virtually a prisoner, she could do nothing to alleviate suffering outside the palace. And except that tension grew with each passing hour, life went on here as usual.
She stopped watching the scenes, but this did not relieve her conscience. She felt that she was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the suffering, and her mental anguish became greater than physical.
It was almost a relief when the fighting reached the dark side. Out of some curious sense of justice, she felt that the palace should receive its full share of Novakkan vengeance, if vengeance had to be dealt. Here was the cause. She and Nyuk. Living in luxury while the little people suffered and tired. Surrounded by walls. Protected by armed men and supposedly super weapons.
The fighting moved inexorably closer. The scenes on the dark side, she learned when she could no longer remain away from the visicom, were as clear as those that had been brought from the sunlit side. They were not photographic. They were picked up in some other manner.
And then she learned that the simulated forest which camouflaged the palace was literally jammed with refugees. They were dying by the thousands from exposure, starvation, disease and wounds. And she was helpless.
“Nyuk,” she finally told him, “you’ve got to do something to stop this.”
His features were grim, his eyes red from loss of sleep. “Just when I’ve got them in a trap?” he snarled. “All my adult life I’ve waited for this day.”
“But the populace? They are dying a thousand to one!”
He turned away and it oc
curred to her that his obsession for vengeance was on a level with that of the Novakkans. It was not rational. The real shock came then. His defense might be as impractical as his thought of luring the raiders into a trap. She could not conceive of any weapon or maneuver that could save either him or her.
The summons came while she was resting.
“Be careful,” the Eg woman warned. He’s in a fiery temper. He killed three servants for begging him to allow their kin to enter the palace.”
Nyuk was indeed in a fiery temper, she realized when she looked into his eyes, but outwardly calm.
“You understand clearly what you are to do when the emergency alarm is sounded?” he demanded.
She nodded.
“You will demonstrate in my presence.”
He accompanied her back to her quarters. The bell rang in the key that she recognized as her own signal. Leisurely she went along the passage to the dead-end, waited.
He followed and when she turned to him again his eyes were blazing.
“You’ll have to move faster than that,” he snapped.
“But the passage leads nowhere,” she pointed out. “What’s the use in hurrying there to wait?”
Summoning guards, he said, “Put her through the drill. If she lingers use a whip with silken laches.”
It didn’t make sense. Over and over she responded to the ringing of the bell. Over and over she stood at the deadend and waited. Nothing about it seemed different from the other passages except that it was dimly lighted.
She resented being driven, but was not foolish enough to display her feelings. Instead, she tried to discover what it was all about.
Questions brought only head shaking from the guards. Eventually she concluded that they didn’t know any more than she.
And this brought the final shock.
It dawned slowly, and then with great impact, that only Nyuk knew what defense was going to be made, what steps would be taken for protection of the palace, and who was to die and who was to survive.
She was certain that he didn’t hope to hold the palace. She was equally certain that he meant to survive. But she was not certain that he intended for anyone to survive with him.
This sense of uncertainty, she became aware, was rapidly spreading through those about her.
Succeeding hours became nightmares of dread.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE Novakkans struck suddenly. From directly above the palace the ships spiraled down, their photonic weapons burning the forest and scorching the area for hundreds of miles in every direction, but except for a slight rise in temperature the interior of the palace remained unchanged.
The soft-toned bell sounded as Aleta watched the scenes in the view. She rose as an automaton and marched to the dead-end and remained motionless.
The floor moved beneath her feet. Her senses told her she was standing on something like rubber and that it was stretching first one way and then another. Then Nyuk appeared.
He was not beside her nor in her presence in a tri-dimensional way. He was within the wall. The sight and the thought made her think she had lost her reasoning.
Nyuk moved and part of the wall moved with him.
Aleta grasped that some kind of gravity warp had gone into effect and that she was in the presence of a new dimension.
Then she and the floor on which she stood moved in rhythm with Nyuk. It was as if substance had become soluble in relation to certain other substance, for the palace remained as it had been, its floor overlapping the one on which she stood. She moved through solid matter.
Nyuk extended a hand, clasped hers. His hand was cold and now had a metallic touch.
In the next moment a brilliant flash of white spread outward from the dead-end. That it was an explosion she had no doubt, but she felt nothing but a slight warmth, as under a ray-lamp.
Other explosions occurred a few feet away and then she realized that she was truly in another dimension watching what was taking place in the palace.
At the sight of Novakkans she shivered, clung tighter to Nyuk’s hand. They appeared from everywhere, looked directly at her, but were solely concerned with protecting themselves from the heat of the smoldering ruins while they searched for something they couldn’t find.
The palace was levelled progressively. Nyuk remained unmoved. He spoke and his voice had a metallic ring: “We are quite safe, but we must move a few yards. I’m going to destroy the Novakkans. There is danger of breaking the field that protects us.”
They moved slowly through what appeared to be solid matter in solution. A wall before them crumbled and then she saw the armed men of the palace desperately defending themselves, making their last stand.
The Novakkans had trapped them in a broad corridor. Weapons such as she had never seen came into play. The palace men actuated beams of light from wall to wall and wherever a Novakkan touched a beam he staggered back with an arm or part of his body gone.
Glowing red pellets, no larger than a match-head, showered down from what was left of the simulated sky, and burned holes through bodies.
Gravity fields went into effect to throw the attackers off balance, but because they wore little armor they were hardly more affected than the defenders.
In close quarters the Novakkans avoided the use of rays. Their main weapon seemed to be the eighteen-inch knives they carried at their girdles. Their skirts were ripped off and used as shields, and then Aleta realized that they were impervious to the red pellets and to some of the lesser rays-
Ignoring their losses, the Novakkans pushed on and cut the defenders down.
Aleta thought that Nyuk’s place was there with the defenders, but he merely looked on with a grim smile. Life meant nothing to him. In that respect he differed in no way from the green-tinged giants. In another way he was as far removed at the stars. The Novakkans liked fighting. They would, she knew, cross the galaxy to avenge a wrong. Nyuk liked killing in a more detached manner. He would use elaborate schemes and science to trick an enemy; but it was impossible to picture him in hand-to-hand combat.
As she moved along beside him, she touched a hand to her cheek, was astonished at how metallically cold it felt. Her weight seemed to have increased. And she couldn’t keep herself from hesitating when she approached an object, nor could she entirely control the sense of eeriness as she walked through objects.
Their progress was downward, deeper into the solid substance of the planet. Her weight continued to increase. On looking up she saw what, she knew, she had thought of as the surface of the planet. It was startling for a different reason.
Things on the surface, which couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet overhead, appeared tiny. The green giants now seemed hardly three feet tall. She turned to Nyuk, her features mirroring an expression of awe and horror.
His expression was grim, apprehensive. “Attenuation,” he said. “We can carry it only so far. Our volume is greater, but our density has decreased. We don’t pass through objects; they pass through us. Time, I think, is accelerated. We may age very fast. An hour will seem shorter, material objects smaller.”
“But where are we going?”
He avoided a direct answer and she gathered that he was in doubt about future events.
“We will find out soon,” he said. “Only once have I gone farther than this and that was when I was a child. My father told me of the dangers, but said that I would someday have to make use of his science. His laboratory is directly under our feet.”
It was true. The substance about them was translucent. She could make out objects below in a series of huge vaultlike rooms. As they advanced they sank through substance into those rooms.
The experience defied description. The illusion was that of sinking into water, but there was no increase in external pressure and their weight was supported solely by their feet.
At last they stood on a cushiony floor that no longer allowed them to sink. Nyuk drew a breath of relief, released her hand and moved to controls on a
white panel. He turned to her.
“We are going to look,” he said, “at a cosmic secret.” His hand was unsteady as he reached toward the control. “There is no way back. Where the palace was is now a lethal field, gradually decreasing the oxygen content in the atmosphere. In a few hours nothing will be alive in a radius of a hundred miles. In a few weeks no life will exist on the planet.”
The carnal horror of it made Aleta wish that she had died back there in the palace or out in space in the lifeship. Nyuk she grasped, was not human. The Egs, the Golgons, tire tall, slender pale women, the Novakkans, all were human or had evolved essentially as humans evolved, so far as she could gather. Not even the Novakkans would erase all life on a planet. Only Nyuk—!
And only Nyuk, she felt, had ever unveiled the secret of attenuation of atomic structure in organic matter.
Fear shuddered through her, and with it came the thought that she, too, might not be human. Some vast change had taken place. Here, actually inside substance, she thought that she could feel the throb of life itself in the planet. There was a gentle pulsing about her. In the atmosphere, or whatever served to replace the atmosphere they had left on the surface, was a sense of communion, as if living thought flowed in every direction.
It seemed that she had become part of the substance around her, part of its field of energy, and that, with her, it resented this violation of its secrets and its innermost being.
She wondered how long it would be before she would lose her ability to reason.
“There is no way back,” Nyuk repeated, “but there is a way on out or deeper in the direction we’re going. I must try to remember the things my father told me.”
His hand moved the control, went on moving it. For a moment nothing happened, then the floor on which they stood, the walls of the rooms, the substance overhead, took on depth, and bright points of light began to show.
The light moved in flashes so small they could hardly be registered by the eyes, flashes that were continual, endless. They stretched away to infinity in very direction.
The import dawned, and it was the final blow. Aleta’s knees trembled, gave beneath her. She sat on the floor and held herself upright with her hands.
