The Fifth-Dimension Tube Part 9

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 ga.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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. "Ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sed 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.

"h.e.l.lo!" 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 mult.i.tude 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 h.e.l.l!"

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 d.a.m.n fools back on Earth," he observed impa.s.sively, "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.

"We're marooned," Tommy was saying crisply, "and for the time being we've got to throw in with these people. I believe they came from Earth originally. Four, five thousand years ago, perhaps. Their tale is of a cave they sealed up behind them. It might have been a primitive Tube, if such a thing can be imagined."

Denham filled his pipe and lighted it meditatively.

"Half the American Indian tribes," he observed drily, "had legends of coming originally from an underworld. I wonder if Tubes are less your own invention than we thought?"

Tommy shrugged.

"In any case, Earth is safe."

"Is it?" insisted Denham. "You say they understood at once when you talked of dimension-travel. Ask the old chap there."