Collected Short Fiction, page 221
Little more than a boy, yet the admiral had an erect pride that became the winged insignia on his cap, the slender neutron gun at his belt. His thin face, twisted with the livid disfigurement of that long scar, was firmly set, composed as if with a deep, enduring purpose.
He came forward quickly to take Ken’s hand, his dark, somber eyes warmed by a little smile.
“I remember you,” he said, in his low, even voice. “Your name is Ken Darren. You are the man from Pylos who spoke of his loyalty—love—for our lost Princess Wyndonee.”
Again the break of the low voice, the brightness of tears in those dark eyes.
And again Ken felt a quick pulse of sympathy for this straight young officer. Briefly he wondered if he, also, might not have loved Wyndonee, and with more hope than Ken. And he was puzzled again that such a man should be serving Dakkil Kun.
“I did love Wyndonee,” said Ken Darren. “I should have given my life to save her—gladly. Now I am going to offer it as I think she might have wished—in the service of mankind.
“So long as I live,” he went on, in a quiet, grim voice, “I am going to fight your master, Dakkil Kun. I am ready to die in the service of Teddu Len, to save the planets and humanity.”
A FAINT GLEAM of surprise came into the dark eyes of Lar Radnu. His firm lips opened a little. Ken thought that his dark, composed face betrayed a slight, incredulous hope.
“If you have come to parley,” Ken went on, “we can offer you this:
“The mines here are valuable. We are able to destroy them. We will surrender them to you, intact, in return for a ship and freedom to leave Kardon. But we cannot surrender the right to fight; it is more precious than our lives.” Lar Radnu seemed hardly to have heard. His sober, piercing eyes were fixed upon Ken with a singular intentness.
“Did you say”—his low voice was tensely vibrant—“that the scientist, Teddu Len, has a plan to save the planets?”
“He has,” Ken told him.
“But how?” demanded Lar Radnu. “Dakkil Kun has given the beings of flame the tensors of subspace curvature. They can, whenever they will, unlock the etheric spheres and consume the planets with the flame of the Sun.”
“His plan,” said Ken, “is to lift the planets out beyond the surface of the Sun, to safety from the xyli and the Sun’s heat.”
“He could do—that?”
The young officer was rigid with incredulous wonder.
“He has devised the necessary equipment. The thing can’t be done, however, without the use of a great okal, which I found, and Dakkil Kun stole from me.”
“Then it could never be done,” said Lar Radnu bitterly. “There is no weapon that will reach out through the dynamic space shell. The Lhundar surrendered for want of such a weapon, because he could not save his people from the heat bombs of the xyli.
“Again it would be the same. Dakkil Kun and his dread allies would destroy us before the equipment could be made and the planets moved.”
“But there is a weapon,” protested Ken. “Teddu Len’s penetrator. It is untried. But he says it would destroy this ship in an instant.”
Ken Darren was surprised at the next action of the admiral.
Quietly, with a grave, unostentatious dignity, the slender young officer removed his cap with its white-winged insignia, stripped off his belted neutron gun, and knelt to present the two to Ken.
“What,” asked Ken, “does this mean?”
“The penetrator,” said the young admiral gravely, “has conquered the fleet of the Lhundar, Dakkil Kun. I now surrender the fleet to you. If you wish to return my insignia, I shall be glad to remain in command, under your orders.”
Sudden tears glittered in his dark eyes. “I shall be glad to serve under you in the defense of humanity against Dakkil Kun and the creatures of flame.”
Ken’s throat was aching suddenly, and his lips were quivering and stiff, so that he could not reply. Silently, he returned the weapon and the cap, gripped the firm hand of Lar Radnu.
“I have been taking the orders of Dakkil Kun,” said Lar Radnu, in a shaken voice, “because there was no alternative, no opportunity to fight. I might have killed myself, as did the late Lhundar, but for some mad hope——”
His voice broke.
“Until this moment,” said Ken, when he could speak, “all our plans seemed folly. Now we have a chance to win.”
“Yet it is a slender chance,” reminded Lar Radnu. “Dakkil Kun still guards the great okal in the fortresses of Nydron. The black ships of the flame creatures are still at his command. And the xyli have still the power, whenever they will, to flood all the planets with heat.
“For all we have done and all we can do, mankind may perish yet, like midges in a furnace.”
VI.
THE MASS of the fortress fell away. It became a white polygon against the dark waste of Kardon’s burned, lifeless landscape. Against the white flame of the pitiless sky, nine geodesic ships floated upward, enveloped in the argent, shimmering bubbles of their dynamic space shells.
“A black ship!” The warning electrified the fleet. “A spy!”
But the briefly glimpsed flier of the xyli was gone when the fleet slipped through the eon-weakened, gradually collapsing etheric sphere in which Kardon had been born and came again into the solar photosphere.
An unreal globe of burning silver, the prison planet fell away behind. The fleet swept onward through the Sun—through a featureless void of golden flame, measured in millions of miles. Through a sea of fire, torn by the terrific scarlet storms of Sun-spots, broken only by the minute islands of the planets, it drove toward Nydron.
Days went by. The mother planet swam at last into view—a white spark wrapped in xanthic flame. It grew to be a gigantic globe of polished silver. Then the ultrawave operator brought Ken Darren a message that ended all hope of surprising Dakkil Kun.
To Ken Darren, slave, and the vermin with him:
My greetings, and make yourselves ready to die. For your rebellion and the treason of Lar Radnu have been anticipated, and the xyli, my loyal allies, are prepared to defend the planets they have purchased and paid for.
Dakkil Kun, Lhundar of the Planets.
Another hour, and the black ships followed.
Standing in the long control room, Ken Darren was watching one of the great vision disks. An abyss of hot, golden radiance filled it—the illimitable fiery sea of the Sun. Nydron, within the silvery splendor of her protecting etheric sphere, hung like a white bubble in that gulf of flame.
Out of that bubble came the ships of the xyli.
They were black specks, scores of them. They grew into the arrows of slender, tapering vessels. Their glinting, dark sides were marked with rows of ports. At the sharp stern of each flickered the hot violet of its propulsion disk. They were gigantic, and they moved with the grace and the swiftness of a strange, incredible power.
Watching them, Ken drew in his breath with awe-struck, unwilling admiration.
“They are beautiful,” he whispered, “and dreadful. Like the patterned serpents of the hills of Pylos. And the builders of them are to be the masters of the planets when mankind is dead.” Then a faint and misty cone of light reached out from the bow of one black ship. The color of it was a deep orange, verging upon redness. It fastened upon one geodesic flier, the Explorer. The attacked ship veered back and forth a little. But its movements were clumsy; it quickly became helpless.
The cone seemed to thicken; it darkened, curdled. And the silvery envelope of the dynamic space shell abruptly vanished from the Explorer.
Its naked, riveted hull was at first starkly black against the golden flame of the Sun. But it began to glow quickly and increasingly red, heated by the terrific radiation. Abruptly it sagged off its course and fell toward the fiery core of the Sun.
In a frantic voice, Ken spoke into the tube which connected with Teddu Len. The old scientist was with his penetrator which had been installed in a turret in the hull.
“Teddu!” he cried. “Do you see the Explorer? It is falling.”
A thinned, metallic rasp—the old man’s voice—came back from a vibrating diaphragm:
“Yes, Ken, I see. The orange ray breaks up the space shell with the interference of a heterodyning field. Power of propulsion is lost with the tripolar field, and the ship is shielded no longer from the solar gravitation——”
Maddened by the detached, scientific calm of the old man’s voice, Ken broke in: “Can’t you do something? The heat will be through her hull in moments——”
Horror choked off his voice as he watched the falling flier. The orange cone had swung down to follow its plunging flight. Its doomed hull was a vivid, canary yellow, now. He shuddered, picturing the oven within it, its crew shrieking, dying, roasting.
“No, I can’t save it,” rasped the old voice from the diaphragm.
And beneath its calm, Ken now sensed the agony of sympathy; he realized that the scientist, for all his cool self-control, was suffering with those tortured men.
“I had not anticipated that they could strike so quickly—so dreadfully,” said that dull voice of pain. “The penetrator wasn’t ready. The deflector fields are building up now, with the subelectronic wave. The atomic power is so intense that no metal can withstand it. It must be generated and directed past the dynamic shell by curves in space itself. The subelectronic wave creates a tube field through hyperspace——”
The words ended in a sob of pain.
Ken was watching the Explorer. Her hull was blue-white now, and swiftly dwindling far below, as it hurtled down into the Sun’s intolerable abyss. The orange ray suddenly left it, flickered out. And the doomed flier flattened, collapsed, and melted into a brief flare of colored flame.
An instant, and no trace remained of the ship within the xanthic void.
“The deflector fields are generated,” rasped the voice of Teddu Len. “In a moment—now——”
AS that quiet, deadly word whispered from the speaker, Ken looked back into the golden disk of the screen. His eye caught the briefest flash, as if a needle-thin, white blade had darted from the Victory, his own ship, toward the long, black cylinder of the murderer.
Immediately, where that instantly vanishing white needle had touched, the black hull glowed with intolerable whiteness. A disk of white radiance spread, inconceivably hotter than the golden flame of the Sun. The black hull, crushed by terrific forces, its fragments fusing, crumpling, was swallowed in that expanding brightness.
The white glow slowly faded against the golden gulf. And when it was gone, no trace remained of the black vessel, marvelously refractory to heat though the alloys of its hull had been.
While that whiteness still flamed, the calm voice of Teddu Len spoke again:
“The penetrator is successful. The effect exceeds my expectations. It is equivalent to the instantaneous atomic disruption of half a pound of copper within the enemy hull. The accumulators can be charged and discharged every fourteen seconds, so long as our supply of copper lasts.”
His voice was still vibrating from the diaphragm when that white, blinding needle of light stabbed briefly out again, and another black arrow was converted into an orb of white flame.
“Now,” the thin voice rasped again, “they will attack the Victory. They must realize that we carry the only weapon.”
True, from the four nearest of the black ships, the misty, expanding cones of orange radiance reached out. Their meshing funnels caught the Victory. Each of them thickened toward redness.
Instantly, above Ken, the vision screens blazed with white light, and then went black. He knew that the shielding space shell was already gone, that it was the full impact of the Sun’s radiation which had burned out the amplifiers.
Warning lights sprang out, many-colored, in the sudden darkness. Alarm gongs clanged. The tortured ship was protesting the consuming breath of the Sun against her naked hull. She was blind, disabled.
Ken felt the ship veer and plunge, as a voice quavered out of the dark, thin with terror: “The drive field is gone! We’re falling after the Explorer.”
Teddu Len, in his exposed turret, would be helpless, first to perish.
From somewhere came a thick, sobbing scream: “The heat—heat—killing me!”
Ken Darren staggered blunderingly forward through the confusing darkness, then stopped himself, trembling. This, he knew, must be the end. Oddly, it mattered little that it was the end of himself. It was the end of the plan to save the planets, that was what counted. It was the end of mankind.
He stood there in the dark, helpless, momentarily expecting the hot breath of death. His personal regrets were two:
He was sorry that he should never again know the beauty of the great okal. And he regretted the murdered loveliness of the lost Wyndonee.
Then out of the darkness came the rasp of Teddu Len’s voice:
“That is the fourth. Restore the space shell before the hull is too hot. Fortunately, I had set up a secondary shell to shield my turret. That kept them from blinding me or interfering with the penetrator.”
Men were suddenly busy in the darkness; panic became efficient order. The vision screens flashed back into radiance. And Ken knew that death was put away again.
Above the argent bubble of Nydron still hung the black arrows—most of them. But the nearest five now, were merely fading disks of white flame. As he looked, another was consumed.
“That,” said Teddu Len, “should be enough.”
And Ken saw, in a moment, that the black arrows were wheeling, retreating. Two more were caught as they fled away into the higher levels of the photosphere, toward the weird, colossal flying cities of the xyli.
The eight surviving geodesic fliers drove on, presently, toward the silvery envelope of Nydron.
“Without the xyli, Dakkil Kun is doomed,” Ken Darren told Teddu Len, drunk with the elation of victory. “The people will surely rise to aid us. When Dakkil Kun is crushed, and the okal recovered, every man will work to help build the field units for the planets. We’ll have them driving up out of the Sun before a hundred days have gone.
“And Dakkil Kun,” he muttered grimly, “will pay for what he did to Wyndonee.”
Teddu Len, standing over his penetrator, rubbed his lean chin, doubtfully.
“The xyli retreated,” he said slowly. “But they aren’t conquered. They might have destroyed us in a concerted attack. They simply chose to wait. They must still desire the planets, with their safety from the solar storms.
“No,” he repeated, “we shall meet the flame creatures again. Nor, I suspect,” he added, “has Dakkil Kun shot his last bolt.”
His gloomy predictions were justified, a day later, when the eight ships descended into their cradles upon the great field by Kothri.
No attempt had been made to oppose the landing. Teddu Len’s long vigil by the penetrator had been needless. When the Victory’s air-lock opened, Ken hastened out to meet a group of officers on the field.
THAT MOMENT, when he should set foot on Nydron, was one that long had lived before him. He was elated with victory, proud of the fleet and the hardy men behind him.
The sky of Nydron was a pale dome of silver; the cool air refreshed him with the tonic of eternal spring. Ken stood for a moment, filling his lungs joyously and looking across the great field where the Titanic reddish globes of geodesic fliers lay motionless in their cradles.
Beyond the field he could see the towers of Kothri—slender, fluted columns of argent, resting upon broad, truncated pyramids that were terraced with greenery and vivid bloom. Tears started into his eyes; the tension of emotion closed over his chest. Always he had desired to come to Kothri, so.
A shadow darkened his face, then, and bitterness lined it. And he shuddered with the sudden agony gnawing in his breast. For the slender, blueeyed loveliness of Wyndonee had come back to him, and the soft huskiness of her voice had whispered at his ear.
And he knew, abruptly, that he had wished to come to Kothri because it was her home. And all his elation turned to corrosive bitterness because her loveliness was dead.
He stood there, lost in pain. And bleak centuries seemed to flow past him. Despair sank its cold fingers into his throat. Then he flung his head, seeking to recover himself, and strode forward to meet the group of eager, welcoming officials.
“I am Marron Blen, Underlord of Kothri,” began one portly personage. He was gaudy in colored silks; his voice had an oily thickness. “On behalf of my city, I thank you for repelling the fleets of the xyli, and for ridding us of our oppressor, the tyrant Dakkil Kun who——”
“Where is Dakkil Kun?” Ken’s sharp question cut in.
“Dakkil Kun is gone,” said Marron Blen, a little affronted at the interruption. “The dictator has fled.”
“Fled?” rapped Ken. “Where?”
“A private geodesic flier had been built for him in the yards here,” said the official. “The largest ever built. It is armed with the weapons of the xyli. It carries supplies enough to last generations. Everything——”
“He has escaped?” Ken again interrupted. “In that?”
“He has gone. All was ready. When you defeated his allies in the battle beyond the etheric sphere, the tyrant knew that all was lost. He went aboard with the criminal gang he brought from the prison planet, with their slaves and women——”
“Where did he go?”
“Who knows?” Marron Blen shrugged, obviously displeased at Ken’s incisive manner. “At full power, they drove out through the etheric sphere. They were moving in the direction of the cities of the xyli, above.”
Ken looked back toward the looming, rugged, copper-red hull of the Victory.
“We must pursue—if it isn’t already too late.”
“But why?” demanded the piqued official. “You have delivered us. We are well rid of Dakkil Kun.”
“He has a jewel of okal,” Ken explained swiftly. “We must take it back from him. If we fail to recover it, it means the death of every planet, by fire.”
“Nonsense!” puffed the portly Marron Blen. “The xyli wanted the planets for themselves—but they are defeated. You routed their black fleet. We are safe.”
