The Onslaught from Rigel, Fletcher Pratt [smallest ebook reader .TXT] 📗

and they may have a dictaphone stuck around somewhere."

Obediently Sherman approached the bars of the cage.

"They put me to work making those fighting-machines," she whispered, "you know, those big shiny things like we hid behind that day we tried to make the break. They had the helmets on me most of the time because I didn't know how to use their tools and machines and I got a lot of what the guy that was running me was thinking about. He was damn nervous about something, and I think it was because there are some people outside going to take a whack at these babies."

"People like—us?" asked Sherman.

"I don't know. I didn't get it very good, but I think they're ordinary flesh-and-blood people. They came and got a lot of the dopeys from the room where I lived the other day and put them in one of the new fighting-machines and took it out. It never came back."

"Mmm," said Sherman, "do you s'pose that was because it got cracked up or because they took it somewhere else?"

"Dunno. But something's stirring."

If the Lassans had set a dictaphone or some similar device to spy on them there was no sign of it in the conversation which Sherman's interrogator held with him during the next period. But when he saw the dancer again, she beckoned him silently to her side, and producing from one of her drawers a book, began to trace letters on it with a fingernail dipped in grease.

"Be careful what you say," she wrote. "They know what we're talking about. They pumped me."

He nodded. "Well, kid," he said aloud. "What do you think? Will you ever make dancers of these Lassans?"

She giggled her appreciation of this remark for their unseen audience. "I'll say I won't. They're too slow on their pins. Rather sit still and suck up that green gooey than do anything. Cheez! What would I give for some good music."

"If I had a hand-organ now—" said Sherman. "We've got the monk." He nodded toward the ape-man, while with his own fingernail he wrote. "How's chances of getting out of here? Do you know the way?"

"I'll speak to one of the big shots tomorrow," she said aloud. "Maybe we can get him to let us run a show." On the book's flyleaf appeared the words. "Only from the work-room on. It has an outside door."

"How would I do as a dancing partner?" asked Sherman. "Good," he wrote. "I've doped out how to work these cars. Are you game for a try at it?"

"You haven't got the figure," she said. "I'd rather dance with that old papa Lassan that does the questions." "Sure," she wrote, "any time you say."

They broke off the conversation at this point, and Sherman set himself to study out a plan for escape. He had watched the cars intently both inside and out. The same needle arrangement that released the cage bars, apparently, actuated the mechanism of the car doors, and it was located inside. This meant that he could secure admission to the same car that carried the girl, and with luck, would be able to get out at the same time she did. What to do after that was a matter of chance and inspiration. If only he had a weapon!... The oil and grease balls. They would do to throw—might spoil a Lassan's aim or check the rush of one of the ape-man servants.

As finally arranged between them the plan was that he was to get in the same car she did. She would tap on the back of her compartment to assure him that everything was in order, and tap again when the door opened for her to get out. He would leave her a second to get her bearings, then they would make a rush of it. He weighed the usefulness of the knife as a weapon and discarded it—too clumsy for throwing and in a close struggle with one of the ape-men slaves, made of metal like himself, it would be quite useless. But another tool, rather like a short-handled and badly shaped hammer, he did take.

At last the hour arrived. The car ran down the line of cages, paused; opened before Marta Lami's. She smiled at him, nodded, and purposely delayed getting in. He fumbled desperately with his needle, fearing he could not make it, then it went home, the little arm at the bottom of the car swung out and its door opened. As he stepped in he heard the dancer's tap of encouragement from the compartment ahead.

Evidently it was some little distance to the work room. The car made several stops on the way, but Sherman, braced and ready, listened in vain for the tap that would tell him they had reached their destination. At last it came; two soft knocks. He bent, thrust home the needle. The door slid back, and he stepped out into one of the blue-domed rooms. His eyes caught a fantastic maze of machinery, helmeted ape-men busy at it and beyond them the huge forms of several uncompleted fighting machines.

The dancer gripped his hand. "This way," she said, pointing along the wall past the machines. "Take it easy; don't run till they notice us."

A feverish passion for activity burned in him. "Hurry, hurry," called every sense, but he fought it down and followed Marta Lami down the line of machines, past the impassive ape-men.

They made over half the distance to the door before they were spotted. Then one of the Lassans, who had sauntered over to the car stop, evidently expecting Marta, missed her and looked around. The first warning the two had was a sudden flickering of blue lights here and there among the machines. "Come on," shouted Marta. "There she goes!"

Sherman looked over his shoulder, saw the Lassan tugging at his pouch for a ray-gun, and paused to throw one of the oil-balls, straight and true, as one pitches a baseball. It struck the elephant-man squarely between the eyes, at the base of his trunk. He squealed with pain and fright and dropping the ray-gun, ran behind a machine. For a second all the eyes in the room turned toward him; then with another flickering of lights, the hunt was up.

Sherman saw a helmeted ape-man at a machine just ahead turn slowly round, gazing vacantly, and then fling himself at Marta. As she side-stepped to avoid his rush, Sherman swung his left from the heels. The metal fist took the slave flush on the jaw, and down he went with a crash. The dazzling spout of a ray-gun shot past them, spattering against the wall in a shower of stars, and they had reached the exit.

"Come, oh come!" shouted Marta, tugging at the heavy door. Sherman pulled with her, and at that moment another ray-gun flash struck it, just over their heads. The door gave suddenly; they tumbled through.

Into a gray twilight they struggled, shot with little dashes of rain that had beaten the valley to mud.

"Cheez!" said Marta, struggling through the gelatinous stuff. "If I live through this, I'll live to be a million."

"No, not that way," called Sherman. "They'll look for us down the valley. Come on, up the hill."

He pulled her upward. They slipped, stumbled, slid, gripped the stump of a tree, then another. Below and behind them came a confused rumble and they heard the great door swing open again. A burst of light, like a star in the cloudy dark, broke out, and Sherman pulled the girl down behind the stump of a huge tree.

"What do you s'pose they'll bring after us?" he whispered, his lips close to her ear.

"Dunno. One of the little machines maybe. Look."

Sherman peered cautiously round his side of the stump. In the valley beneath them, shining brilliantly in the pure white light it had released, was one of the metal fish—but a smaller one than the usual fighting machine, and without the projecting trunk.

"We've been working on them for a while," the girl whispered. "I don't know what they're for, but they aren't fighting machines."

Remembering how the vision plate of the fighting machine he had controlled had reflected every object within range, Sherman made himself small behind the stump. The machine below was probably trying to locate them in the light it had released.

"Wonder they don't bring the birds out," he thought, and as if in answer to this idea, one of the four-winged creatures strutted around the machine, blinking in the light, then took off with a whir of wings, and spiralled upward. The light went out, reappeared as a beam, pointing down the valley and the machine moved off, slowly sweeping the sides of the hills with its pencil of illumination. He could see the multiple glow of the tubes at the stern, greenly phosphorescent, as the machine progressed. High above the bird screamed shrilly.

CHAPTER XVII Marta's Sacrifice

Progress up the hillside was slow. It had become completely dark; they were without any means of making a light and would not have dared to make one if they could. The mud was tenacious, the constant contact with stumps and rocks both irritating and difficult. But at last in their fumbling way, they reached a spot where the denudation gave place to a line of trees, looming dark and friendly overhead against the skyline, and after that they went faster. Where they were or what route to take neither had any idea. That portion of the Catskills is still as wild as in the days of the Iroquois, save for the few thin roads along the line of the valleys and these they dared not seek.

They solved the difficulty by keeping to the hillcrest till it ran out in a valley, then rapidly climbing the next hill and proceeding along that in the shelter of the forest. Though they necessarily went slowly they did not halt; neither felt the need of rest or sleep, their metal limbs took no serious bruises, and the slip of the hill kept them from running in circles as people usually do when lost in the woods.

Just as the eastern sky began to hold some faint promise of dawn they came upon a farmhouse in a clearing at the top of a hill. It was an unprepossessing affair with a sagging roof, but they burst in the door and went through it in the hope of finding weapons and perhaps an electric battery, for both were used to the bountiful electric meals of the Lassans and were beginning to feel the lack.

The best the place afforded, however, was a rather ancient axe, of which Sherman possessed himself, and a large pot of vaseline with which they anointed themselves liberally, for the continued damp was making them feel rusty in the joints.

They pressed on, and did not halt to consider the situation till full day had come.

"Where do we go from here?" asked Marta, perching herself on a tree-bole.

"South, I guess," offered Sherman. "They may be looking for us there, but we got to find a city and get some things."

"There's Albany," she suggested.

"Yes, and Schenectady and they have a lot of electric power there we could use. But I vote for New York. If we head in there I can pick up a plane at one of the airports and walk right away from them."

"Well, it's a chance," she said, "but anything is. Come on...." and as they forced their way through the underbrush, "You know, from what I understood of those Lassans' thoughts, they've got something hot cooking up. I'm almost sure there are other people in the world and they're getting ready to fight them."

"Let 'em come," said Sherman grimly. "That light-ray won't stand the chance of a whistle in a whirlwind when they get after them with heavy artillery and airplane observation."

"That's just where you're all wet," replied the dancer. "They've been figuring on that for a long time. They got a gun from somewhere, and they've had all their fighting machines out, shooting it at them, and then armoring up the fighting machines to stand it. And they're building guns of their own to shoot those light-bombs. I ought to know. I was on the job."

Sherman cursed himself inwardly. So that had been the result of his exchange of information with the old Lassan who was so anxious to know about guns.

"How do they get away from it?" he asked.

"Well, I don't know quite," she said. "I'm a sap about stuff like that. All I know is what the guy that was controlling me thought about and let me have without knowing it. But I got this much out of it—that the outside of these fighting machines is coated with this 'substance of life' they talk about some way, so it's a perfect mirror, and reflects everything that hits it,