CHAPTER XXXIV
_Invisible Assailants_
We did not locate the source of the bomb, and no others rose to assailus. The mountain defiles, so far as our lights could illuminate them,seemed deserted. We passed over the Divide, and on the plateau beyond,we landed. A region of rolling country beneath its snow and ice. Themountains came down sharply to the inner plain--a crescent of mountainrange stretching off into the dimness of distance, half encircling thiswhite plateau in the center of which stood the City of Ice. We couldjust see it at the horizon, the glittering spires of its Ice Palace.
Around the city, completely enveloping it, was a thick circular wall ofice twenty times the height of a man. We were too far away to see itplainly--a turreted wall doubtless armed with projectors throughout itscircular length. Our finders would not show it, for it was insulatedagainst them. It stood there grey-white, bleak and apparently deserted.
Georg said: "It's the man's accursed inactivity! Is he going to donothing?... Our power plant has landed, Jac--there in the foothills--seeit drop?" A call from Rhaalton took his attention.
We landed our entire force in the foothills of the mountains. The powerplant was there; it looked like a squat industrial building set upon aledge of ice--a shining cliff-face behind it, a precipice in front. Atthe foot of the precipice our other vehicles were clustered.
We were there throughout three entire times of sleep, hours strangelythe same in that unaltered polar twilight. During them, with the towerplatforms set in a ring about us to make an armed camp, we unloaded ourapparatus, erected our power controls, prepared the individual circuits,making ready for our offensive. And still--though we, were alert forit--no move from Tarrano.
They were hours during which, with my lack of technical knowledge, Ifound myself often with nothing to do. Our camp was bustling withactivity, but among the now idle girls and many of the young men, therewas an air of gayety. They laughed, shouted, played games amid the rocksfrom which we had long since melted the snow. Once, in what would havebeen early evening had not the Sun in these latitudes held level like aburned-out ball near the horizon, Elza and I wandered from the camp toclimb the cliffs nearby.
Beyond the circle of the camp's heat, the deadly cold of the regionassailed us. We had not wished to equip with the individual heating,which for battle would leave us free of heavy garments; instead weswathed ourselves in furs, with the exercise of climbing to aid us inkeeping warm.
It was wonderful to be again alone with Elza. Even with what wasimpending we were young enough to put it momentarily from our minds.Like young lovers clandestinely stealing away to a tryst, we left thecamp and hand in hand, climbed up amid the crags. A few hundred feet toone side of the power house, and about the same distance above it, wesat down at last to rest.
The scene from here was picturesque in the extreme. Across the flat,shadowless snowy plain was the wall of ice with the city behind it. Allin the far distance, this city wherein our enemy was entrenched; andthere were no lights, no movement that we could see. In that drabtwilight, it seemed almost unreal.
The plain too, was empty. A few palpably deserted huts, nothing else.Beneath us, snugly anchored there on the ledge, was our power house. Nounreality here. Its aerials were mounted; its external dynamos werevisibly revolving; from its windows blue shafts of light slanted out;and from it rose the low hum of active power.
Below it, spread over the slightly sloping area of foothill beneath us,lay our encampment. A ring of our tower vehicles, with their projectorsmounted and ready, their colored search-beams slowly sweeping the whiteplain and the dead grey sky. Within their ring, the camp itself. Lightedby the blue-white tubes set upon quadrupeds at intervals; heated bystrings of red-glowing wire and the red wire-balls used on Venus. Thesnow and ice on the ground within the camp had melted, exposing thenaked rock.
A scene of blue and red lights and shifting shadows; bustling withactivity--figures, tiny from this height, hurrying about. The soundsfrom it rose to us; the low hum and snap of the weapons being tested;the shouted commands; and sometimes, mingled with it, the laughing shoutof a light-hearted girl.
Elza clung close to me. "Everything will be ready soon."
I nodded. "They're going to mount a ray up here on the cliff. Grolierwas telling me, for permanent protection--to stay here with the powerhouse when we go out to the attack."
Silent with her thoughts she did not answer me. Sidewise, I regarded hersolemn little face encased in its hood of fur. And then clumsily, forour furs were heavy and awkward, I put my arm about her.
"I love you, Elza. It's worth a great deal to be here alone with you."
"Jac, what will he do?" Her gaze was to the far-off City of Ice. "Itseems so--so sinister, Jac, this silence from him. This inactivity. Itis not like him to be inactive."
"He's there," I said. "Rolltar the Mars man--boastful fellow,blow-hard--he was telling some of us that in his opinion Tarrano hadalready run away."
"Never!" she exclaimed. "This is his last stand. He'll make ithere--defeat us here--"
"Elza!"
She glanced momentarily at me, smiled a queer smile, and then gazed oncemore over the distant plain. "I do not mean I think he'll defeat us,Jac. I mean, that is his reasoning--make his last stand here--"
"He hasn't run away," I repeated. "I told Rolltar so. We got an outlawconnection into the Ice Palace today. For a moment only, and then it wasdiscovered and broken off. But we had the image for a moment--it chancedto show Tarrano himself. But he's isolated now. Bretan said hisisolation power--around the Ice Palace and the wall anyway--is greaterthan any image-ray we can send against it."
My heart leaped suddenly, for I saw Elza's eyes widen, fear spring toher face; heard the sharp intake of her breath, and felt her hand gripmy arm.
"Jac! There's something wrong! See there? And you hear it?"
From the instrument room I heard a vague drumming. A hiss, and then adrumming growing louder. It was not a new sound, for now I remembered Ihad been conscious of it for several moments past. Our encampment wasawake to it! A confusion down there; people running about; a figuredashing wildly into the instrument room. And the aerials on the powerhouse began to snap viciously.
"Jac! What is it?"
"I don't know. See there, Elza? The sub-ray lights!"
The search-beams from our towers were inordinately active. Sweeping theempty snow-plain and the empty sky. Empty? To my fevered imaginationthey were peopled with enemies. And then one of the towers flashed on asub-ray--the dull infra-red for envisaging the slow rays below the powerof human sight. And another tower with its faint purple beam was usingthe ultra-violet.
"That drumming, Elza! That's a microphone--the big one they just erectednear the instrument room. There's something coming! That's the magnifiedsound of some distant rush of air. Very faint sound, but they must haveheard it on the ear-phones long ago. That microphone must have just beenconnected--"
Something coming? We could see nothing.
"Let's go down, Jac! We must get back--"
"I've got infra-red glasses--" I fumbled beneath my furs. But I did nothave them.
"Jac--"
"Wait, Elza."
My glasses would have been useless, for the sub and ultra beams from thetowers were disclosing nothing. I could tell that by the hasty searchingsweeps they made. And then from the big Wilton tower, the newlyconnected Zed-ray flashed on, I could hear the load of it in thedeepened, throaty hum from the power house. Its dirty brown beam sprayedout over the plain; then swung to the sky, caught something, hungmotionless, narrowed into great intensity. The powerful Zed-ray,capturing the visibility of dense solids only.[24]
[Footnote 24: Similar doubtless to our present-day X-ray.]
There was something up there in the sky! The Zed-ray met resistance; wecould see the sparks, and hear the snap of them coming like a roar fromthe microphone above the drumming. Met the resistance and conquered it;gradually the snapping roar died away.
"Jac! I see som
ething! Something there--don't you see it?"
A luminous blur became visible in the nearer sky--moving blobs of silverluminosity in the mud-brown light of the Zed-ray. A hundred or moremoving silver blobs. They were taking form. The silvery phosphorescentlook faded, became grey-white. Took definite shape. Waving arms andlegs! Bones bereft of flesh. Human skeletons! Limbs waving rhythmically.Bony arms, with fingers clutching metal weapons. Assailants coming at usthrough the air, stripped by the Zed-ray of clothing, skin, flesh,organs, to the naked bone. Skeletons with skulls of empty eye-socketsand set jaw-bones to make the travesty of human faces grim with menace!