Collected Short Fiction, page 191
“You mean they are coming here?” queried Miles. “Now?”
“Already the disks are rising above the blue towers of Neng,” came the voiceless response. “In the space of time you know as two hours, the reign of ruin will begin upon the edges of our city. Bak-Toreg has learned that we snatched you from his trap. He had waited for your death; but now he strikes without delay.”
“Already?” Miles was dumbfounded. “And our defense? What preparations are being made?”
“None. I have told you that battle, violent resistance, is impossible. We cannot even contemplate the horror of combat. All thought associated with primal violence is painful. You know that we made a knife with which you killed the scorpion-god. The one who forged it is already dead; his mind was destroyed. All the primitive emotions of hatred and cruelty are far behind us; we can cease to exist, but we cannot undo the work of evolution.”
“But surely,” protested Miles, “you can find me another weapon—my plane, perhaps, with the machine guns—the one I left at Arnac Rock. It should be possible with your mastery of space, to bring it here, even in two hours. I might get Bak-Toreg, anyhow!”
The great black eyes were filled with pain. Miles read sheer agony in them, as if his words had been torture. And the tall, green-scaled body winced and shrank from him.
“That cannot be done. Even your thoughts of violence hurt me. Ages ago this crisis was foreseen and our forefathers were nearer the primitive than are we. Violence was distasteful to them, but they could contemplate it without incurring insanity. In preparation for this moment, they built the Tower of Dread and filled it with the engines of war.
“The tower still stands above the city. But none now living has ever entered it, nor could do so and remain sane. And none know the use of the implements of destruction stored there.
“Long this hour has been foreseen, though Time to us is a book but half read. But we can do nothing. It is the end—the finish, for Lelural and for the planet. We are done.”
“This is madness!” Miles cried, unconsciously tightening his fingers upon the green-scaled arm. “Surely you can kill Bak-Toreg, or give me a chance at him. Even if it wrecks the mind of the one of you responsible, the others—”
“That cannot be,” came the silent answer as Alú again winced with pain. “We might have accomplished it, even though it would have cost the reason and the lives of many of us. But Bak-Toreg foresaw the possibility. He took precaution.”
“Precaution? What has he done?”
“The priest is flying at the head of his fleet of disks. Our power might reach him easily enough. But he has the girl, Su-Ildra, at his side, fettered to him. We could not kill the one without endangering the other.
“And he knows that to kill, or even to endanger, such an innocent is a thing that Lelural cannot do. Not even to avert its own destruction.
“The will to destroy is dead in Lelural. In a world that lives by war we cannot exist. We are done!”
“Not quite,” said Miles. “In hot water, perhaps, but by no means done. You say there are weapons? In a tower? Where?”
“None of us can enter the Tower of Dread, nor even approach it easily. None of us know what implements of ruin it may contain, nor how to use them. But if you wish to go there, I can show you the way.”
“Tell me where?” Miles implored. “Hurry!”
CHAPTER IV
The Tower of Dread
l Once more Alú expanded the color-flushed frail membranes that sprang from his shoulders. And the bright atoms dancing all about in the mist, Miles saw, condensed about them, seemed drawn into them. The gay appendages relaxed, and the thin green arm about Miles’s shoulder drew him closer.
“Come,” Alú urged silently. “We will fly.
“I see that you wonder at my powers. But we of Lelural possess bodily organs, developed through the ages by our science, that bring us in direct contact with universal energy. Space to us is not a barrier, but a bridge.”
It seemed to Miles as though an unfelt wind had picked them up. The moss-carpeted terrace dropped beneath them. They floated swiftly over the low parapet, and the white tower dropped back behind them.
They floated in the air, while the strange city fled back beneath, hills and rolling plains bright with blue-flowering moss—graceful, colossal towers of snowy white, each uplifting upon its pointed spire a swirling ball of many-hued flame from which bright atoms poured off continually into the overhanging mist.
Few indeed of the Flame Folk did Miles observe and those seemed undisturbed by the likelihood of their immediate extinction. Some were standing in little groups upon lofty narrow terraces or strolling across the mossy blue spaces beneath the towers. One, apparently a female, was performing what seemed an exotic dance with the glory of her mantling membranes flung wide. Two more were gliding peacefully, side by side, high in the mist.
“We drain the dregs from our cup of a thousand thousand years,” commented Alú. “We bid farewell to all existence. So it matters little, after all, if it costs my mind to carry you to the tower.”
“Costs your mind?” demanded Miles. “What do you mean?”
“To take you to the Tower of Dread,” replied Alú, “knowing that you plan a violent and frightful thing, outrages every law of my being. It is a situation you cannot conceive, full as you are of the tides of primal violence.”
The green arm tightened convulsively about Miles’s shoulders and he felt the bright-scaled, slender body trembling against his own.
Still they flew swiftly. Flamertipped towers were swallowed in the mist behind, others born out of it ahead.
Then came into view a pylon of a different sort. Standing upon the summit of a rounded blue hill, it was loftier than any Miles had seen, and more massive of design. No flame burned at its top; it was crowned instead with a great dome. And its material was not white, but somberly red.
Alú shuddered again.
“That is the Tower of Dread.”
Their flight became slower. Against Miles’s side, Alú‘s tense body several times went a little limp, and they fell abruptly toward the blue moss. They were no farther than the foot off the hill when the reptilian being dropped weakly to the ground, and released Miles.
“I can endure it no longer.”
The slender tall green body collapsed in an inert heap upon the moss, the flame-tints in the enfolding membranes fading to a deathly pallor.
Miles stood looking at Alú for a moment, astounded at his quite evident distress. He started to kneel beside him, and a faint thought reached him.
“Leave me. Go on.”
Thinking once more of the armada even then flying to attack this defenseless race, Miles started running up the hill.
The massive base of the red pylon was perhaps half a mile away at the summit of the low blue hill; the thick dark shaft of it plunged up until it was dim in the sparkling mist.
This was a mad thing he was doing, Miles reflected as he ran—a hopeless thing. In a space now considerably less than two hours, if Alú were right, how could he, a comparative savage, hope to learn to operate any weapons he might be fortunate enough to find in this ancient and deserted arsenal? How could he hope to fight more effectively than a Bushman suddenly put at the bridge of a submarine?
After all, how could one man hope to oppose all the maddened thralls of the Red One, led by the implacable Bak-Toreg and armed with the deadliest weapons of an ancient science of terror and destruction?
Then Miles stumbled into a deeper tangle of moss and forgot the hopelessness of his quest in the effort of his race to the tower.
The hill had obviously been long avoided, for upon the summit, the blue-flowering moss had lifted itself from a mere thick carpet to become a veritable jungle of tangled, wire-like filaments, through which Miles floundered, bewildered and exhausted, but intent upon the single desperate chance that fate had offered him.
Many precious minutes were gone, he knew, when at last he reached the vertical red wall of the tower, rising neglected out of the blue tangle, plastered with dry green lichens.
He stumbled for a few yards along the side of it, until he reached a massive ledge of dark stone, higher than his head. Leaping up against it, he hooked his fingers over the edge and dragged himself up out of the blue jungle to the surface of a broad, lichen-covered platform.
From the level of the platform, a great hall opened into the red tower. Miles entered and ran down it until he was stopped by a huge double door of some corroded, gray-white metal.
Thrust from the middle of the door was a heavy lever of the same argent-gray metal, pointing upward. After a moment’s breathless hesitation, Miles seized it, tried vainly to turn it to one side or the other, then flung his weight upon it.
For a second, the mechanism stuck; then with a harsh, grating squeal, the lever came down, and the massive doors slid unevenly back into the dark stone walls.
Before Miles, the hall ran straight into the heart of the tower It was very dark at first and he stood uncertainly just within the doors, overcome again with the hopelessness of his quest. Dead air breathed upon his face, laden with the dust of many thousands of years, and he laughed bitterly aloud at the insane futility of his design.
Then lights snapped on through the length of the hall; huge, curved tubes suspended from the high ceiling burst into greenish incandescence, evidently set in operation by some automatic mechanism connected with the door.
Hundreds of feet in length, the hall reached before him, lofty and wide. A score of gigantic and unfamiliar mechanisms of gray metal, mounted on caterpillar tracks, all apparently identical, stood in two rows along the walls, grimly glistening in the greenish light.
Miles started toward the nearest and stopped in dismay.
Roughly, the machine resembled an armored telescope mounted on the tractor tank. But it was a huge affair, the great metal tracks lying along the floor for fifty feet. It was ridiculous to think of learning in an hour to operate such a machine; a moment’s inspection convinced him that at least a score of men would be required for a crew.
Biting his lip, he paused a few seconds and then ran on down the hall. Surely there would be smaller, simpler weapons, that he might have some chance to understand and use.
A cross-passage appeared. He looked hopefully along it, saw that it was lined with huge gray machines, exactly similar to the others.
He neared the end of the hall. A tiny open door caught his eye. He ran to it, darted through, and found himself in a small square room, metal-walled and windowless, also illuminated with a greenish tube in the ceiling. It was completely vacant, and he turned back to the door.
The door had closed behind him.
l A trap! Miles moved toward the metal panel with a swift stride, his heart contracting in panic. It glided open, and he saw the crouching grim mechanisms in the green-lit hall. He stopped and laughed at himself.
“An automatic elevator, eh? These old boys must have been primitives sure enough, compared with Alú, to need elevators. Wonder what makes it go?”
In vain he looked for buttons on the door or beside it. But in a few seconds he found a row of black studs projecting from the floor, in a little niche in the wall.
Experimentally he pressed one of them with his toe.
The little room leapt upward breath-takingly.
Miles stood waiting, his heart thudding with excitement, just within the door. He felt the cage stop; the door slid silently open.
Beyond was a second hall, ablaze with greenish light. The floor was stacked with featureless black cylinders twice the size of gasoline drums, one upon another. Numberless thousands of them the hall contained, walling narrow corridors. What they were Miles could only guess. Explosive? Gas? Fuel for the great machines below? At any rate, in his present plight they meant nothing.
He pressed the next stud.
The door flung shut, the car mounted, it opened again.
He looked out into a space vast as an airship hangar and evidently of similar purpose, for within its dusky, green-lit cavern loomed four gigantic mechanisms, looking a little like airplanes and somewhat more like submarines.
Shaking his head, he returned to the car and touched the next stud, the one at the end of the row.
Emerging again, he found himself beneath a hundred-foot dome of polished silvery-gray metal that was shimmering in glaring greenish light. Above him loomed a huge black tube, mounted like a telescope in massive cymbals. At the end of it next to the floor was a seat attached to the tube, surrounded with levers and dials and hand-wheels.
“A telescope, eh?” Miles muttered. “But what for, with miles of solid rock between here and the stars?”
He was turning back to the cage when a chiming musical note caught his ear. Stopping, he saw that the sound had come from a curious tall metal cabinet at the side of the dome.
As he looked at the cabinet, the front of it was suddenly illuminated like a cinema screen and he saw upon it a picture of the dome’s interior and of the enigmatic great machine behind him.
Wonderingly, he moved closer.
A green-scaled being somewhat resembling Alú, though shorter, heavier of build, and completely lacking the flame-hued membranes, had entered the pictured dome. He seated himself at the end of the great tube and began moving wheels and levers. The tube moved, lifting him on the seat, and he put his eyes to a hooded instrument above the massive cylinder.
That picture then vanished abruptly from the screen, and in its place was one of the red tower, standing alone above blue hills, with a strange flying machine sweeping down toward it. Evanescent light shimmered about the dome, and the machine disintegrated, fell in a rain of dust and crumbling fragments.
Then the green-scaled being was again upon the screen, still sitting at the end of the cylinder, now seeming much enlarged.
“The thing is a weapon!” Miles breathed eagerly to himself. “And some weapon! If I can just see how he operates it! And that’s what the picture’s for, in case somebody forgot!”
Intent, he dropped on his knees in front of the bright screen.
Eagerly he watched, as the claw-like hands of the reptilian being moved each lever, and then pointed out the appropriate result. One wheel moved the ponderous tube vertically, another horizontally. The mark appeared to be found by peering into the hooded instrument, which was itself adjusted by a dial above it. The unknown energies of the weapon were released by pressure upon a certain key, and a brief series of operations sufficed to set it again for a new discharge.
The illustrated lesson was ended. For a moment the screen was dark. Then the gong rang musically again and it brightened. The same series of pictures was repeated. Miles watched them again, and a third time.
Then he mounted the seat behind the heavy cylinder and put his hands to the controls.
The thick tube swung noiselessly as he touched the wheels. He was lifted far from the floor.
Eagerly he put his eyes to the hooded device before him. Somewhat to his surprise, he saw as through an oval window the base of a white tower and the flank of a blue hill beyond. The instrument, as if using the principle of television, penetrated the dome and the shrouding bright mist without.
It was telescopic, the degree of its magnification regulated by a dial above it.
Once more he touched the controls and the outside world glided past the oval window. He followed the blue slope to a broad placid stream and traced the stream to the shore of the purple sea.
In the center of the oval, remaining stationary as the picture moved, was a little green cross. That, he knew, must be the sight.
Then he gasped in alarm.
A long line of violet flying specks had entered the oval panel. Quickly he increased the magnification, holding the instrument upon the foremost. Sharp and distinct as if in the field of a powerful telescope,-he saw the flier from Neng—a railed disk of violet metal. Five gigantic Amazonian women, red-skinned, violet-armored, stood behind its rail. A dwarfish, black-robed priest of the Red One leaned over the controls. Piled upon the deck were the ominous black cylinders of bombs.
He moved the instrument back along the line of fliers that were descending upon Lelural with their burdens of ruin and death. Eagerly, yet filled with dread, he scanned each until he found the sight he feared.
One disk-flier raced a little above the others. At its controls stood Bak-Toreg in the loose black robes of his priesthood, his seamed yellow face hideous with triumphant passion that was only accentuated by the benevolent mildness of his golden eyes.
Su-Ildra was at his side, head hanging wearily, face hidden by the disarray of her lustrous coppery hair. Her wrists were fettered behind her back and fastened to the yellow priest’s belt with a short chain of violet metal.
A gigantic scarlet Amazon was near him, thumbing the edge of a violet sword. And a second dwarfish orange-skinned priest bent intently over a small cubic black box.
Miles’s heart sank at seeing Su-Ildra thus carried in the midst of the enemy. Even if this ancient weapon responded to the uncertain skill of his tyro’s hand, after its numberless centuries of disuse, never could he hope to destroy Bak-Toreg with it, without sweeping the lovely girl also to death.
CHAPTER V
The Forgotten Weapon
l “Now, does it?” muttered Miles. “Or doesn’t it?”
Again he examined the control wheels, rehearsed in his mind the series of operations he had learned from the picture lesson on the little screen.
“Eh? What was that?”
The tower had been shaken by a sudden tremor; the air throbbed with a dull reverberation.
Miles put his head back to the hooded vision panel.
Precious time had been consumed by his climb through the moss-jungle on the slope of the hill, by his search of the tower and his study of the picture on the screen. Had the abrupt vibration been the tremor of a bomb? Had the attack already begun?
The disk-fliers had been lost from the oval view-plate. Miles manipulated the unfamiliar controls, decreasing the magnification until he could see a wide area.
