Chapter 18: Besieged!

“I’ve felt it for some time,” Chet confessed. “I’ve wakened and known I had been dreaming about that damnable thing. And, although it sounds like the wildest sort of insanity, I have felt that there was something--some mental force--that was reaching out for our minds; searching for us. Well, if there is anything like that--”

He was about to say that the trail made by Kreiss and the apes who tracked him would have given this other enemy a direction to follow, but Kreiss himself dropped down beside Chet where he and Walt sat before the front of Diane’s shelter. The pilot did not finish the sentence. Kreiss had meant it for the best; there was no use of rubbing it in. But that thing in the pyramid would never be fooled as Schwartzmann and the apes had been.

Chet had told Kreiss of the attack and had shown him the body of the ape-man. “Council of war,” he explained as Kreiss rejoined them, but he corrected himself at once. “No--not war! We don’t want to go up against that bunch. Our job is to plan a retreat.”

Harkness turned to look inside the hut. “Diane, old girl,” he asked, “how about it? Are you going to be able to make a long trip?”

Within the shelter Chet could see Diane’s hands drawn into two hard little fists. She would force those tight hands to relax while she lay quietly in the dark; then again they would tremble, and, unconsciously, the nervous tension would be manifested in those white-knuckled little fists. For all of them the shock had been severe; it was hardest on Diane.

She answered now in a voice whose very quietness belied her brave words.

“Any time--any place!” she told Walt. “And--and the farther we go the better!”

“Quite right,” Harkness agreed. “I am satisfied that there is something there we can never combat. We don’t know what it is, and God help anyone who ever finds out. How about it, Chet? And you, too, Kreiss? Do you agree that there is no use in staying here and trying to fight it out?”

“I do not agree,” the scientist objected. “My work, my experiments I have collected! Would you have me abandon them? Must we run in fear because an anthropoid ape has come into this clearing? And, if there are more, we have our barricade; our weapons are crude, but effective, and I might add to them with some ideas of my own should occasion demand.”

“Listen!” Chet commanded. “That anthropoid ape is nothing to be afraid of: you’re right on that. But he came from the pyramid, Kreiss, and there’s something there that knows every foot of ground that messenger went over. There’s something in that pyramid that can send more ape-men, that can come itself, for all that I know, and that can knock us cold in half a second.

“It’s found us. One arrow went straight, thank God! It has given us a stay of execution. But is that damnable thing in the pyramid going to let it go at that? You know the answer as well as I do. It has probably sent twenty more of those messengers who are on their way this minute, I am telling you; and we’ve got two days at the most before they get here.”

Kreiss still protested. “But my work--”

“Is ended!” snapped Chet. “Stay if you want to; you’ll never finish your work. The rest of us will leave in the morning. Towahg will be back here to-night.

“Nothing much to get together,” he told Harkness. “I’ll see to it; you stay with Diane.”

Their bows, a store of extra bone-tipped arrows, and food: as Chet had said there was not much to prepare for their flight. They had spent many hours in arrow making: there were bundles of them stored away in readiness for an attack, and Chet looked at them with regret, but knew they must travel fast and light.

Out of his rocky “laboratory” Kreiss came at dusk to tramp slowly and moodily down to the shelters.

“I shall leave when you do,” he told Chet. “Perhaps we can find some place, some corner of this world, where we can live in peace. But I had hoped, I had thought--”

“Yes?” Chet queried. “What did you have on your mind?”

“The gas,” the scientist replied. “I was working with a rubber latex. I had thought to make a mask, improvise an air-pump and send one of us through the green gas to reach the ship. And there was more that I hoped to do; but, as you say, my work is ended.”

“Bully for you,” said Chet admiringly; “the old bean keeps right on working all the time. Well, you may do it yet; we may come back to the ship. Who can tell? But just now I am more anxious about Towahg. Right now, when we need him the most, he fails to show up.”

The ape-man was seldom seen by day, but always he came back before nightfall; his chunky figure was a familiar sight as he slipped soundlessly from the jungle where the shadows of approaching night lay first. But now Chet watched in vain at the arched entrance to the leafy tangle. He even ventured, after dark, within the jungle’s edge and called and hallooed without response. And this night the hours dragged by where Chet lay awake, watching and listening for some sign of their guide.

Then dawn, and golden arrows of light that drove the morning mist in lazy whirls above the surface of the lake. But no silent shadow-form came from among the distant trees. And without Towahg--!

“Might as well stay here and take it standing,” was Chet’s verdict, and Harkness nodded assent.

“Not a chance,” he agreed. “We might make our way through the forest after a fashion, but we would be slow doing it, and the brutes would be after us, of course.”