Chapter 26: Power!

A girl whose creamy body was strangely unsoiled by smoke or grime, whose jeweled breast-plates flashed in the light of her torch while the loose wrappings about her waist whipped against her as she ran. And Rawson, naked but for the golden loin cloth, running beside her. Then Smithy, and ten others in the khaki uniform of the service--it was all that was left of the fifty who had dared the depths. And now all of them were harried and driven like helpless animals in the burrows and runways of that under-world.

But not entirely helpless. Colonel Culver had been right: their rifles outranged the flame-throwers. And Rawson, looking past that first burst of rifle fire, saw the one flame that had reached them whip upward as its owner fell. Others of the Reds came crowding in after, and the jets of their weapons made little areas of light as they crashed to the floor. Then Colonel Culver took charge of the retreat.

Ahead of them and behind them was impenetrable darkness; only the nearby walls were illumined by the torch that Loah had been forced to turn on. And out of that darkness at any moment might come devastating flames. Culver detailed two men as a rear guard and two others to run ahead a few paces in advance. At intervals of a minute or two their rifles would crack, and the echoes would be pierced by the whining scream of ricochets, as their bullets glanced from the walls.

“We may not need them up ahead,” Culver shouted to Rawson. “I don’t understand it. The place seems deserted--there were plenty of them here before!”

“They’ve got something else to think of,” Rawson shouted in reply. “I killed Phee-e-al--he was their leader. But they’re after us now. They’ll be running through other passages, cutting in ahead of us.”

The tunnel turned and bent upward. For a full half mile they ran straight in a stiff climb. Between gasping breaths Colonel Culver shouted hoarsely: “Won’t it ever turn? If they bring up their damned heat-ray machines they’ll get us on a straightaway like this!”

Then Smithy’s voice outshouted his with a note of hope: “We’re almost there; I remember this place. There’s where we mounted the searchlight. They’ve ripped everything out. Up ahead, one turn to the right, then a quarter mile, then a turn toward the crater. That runs straight for a mile, but there’s a field gun at the bottom of the volcano. We’ll be safe when we’re on that last stretch.”

Ahead of them the rifles of the two who ran in advance crashed out in a fury of fire as a green glow appeared. But this time the flame did not die; and Rawson, staring with hot, wide-opened eyes, saw that the ribbon of green swept transversely across the tunnel.

He could hardly stand when he came to a stop. Beside him Loah was swaying with weariness. The walls echoed only the hoarse, panting breath of the men. Then they crept slowly forward, where the passage went steadily up. Loah’s light was out; she had slipped the cap on the torch at the first sight of that green.

They stopped but ten feet short of the deadly blaze. From a narrow rift in the left wall it streamed outward, the rock at the edges of that crack turning to red at its touch. It beat upon the opposite wall, where already the stone was melting to throw over them a white glare and the glow of heat. And, like a shimmering, silken barrier, whose touch could mean only instant death, it reached across the wide tunnel at the height of a man’s waist and moved slowly up and down. The heaviest armor plate ever rolled could have formed no more impenetrable a barrier.

“And we almost made it,” said Smithy slowly. “Look, beyond there--another hundred feet. There’s the bend in the tunnel, a sharp turn--and we almost got around!”

Rawson reached for Loah’s light. In the wall where the flame was striking, only a dozen steps back, he had seen another dark mouth, a ragged crack in the rock. He sprang to the entrance; it might be there was another way around. His first glance told the story, for he saw the walls draw together again not a hundred feet off.

“A blind alley,” he groaned.

One of the two who had been their advance guard snapped his rifle to his shoulder. He was aiming at the glowing crack where the green light was issuing.

“A ricochet,” he growled. “It may go on in and mess ‘em up.” But there was no whine of a glancing bullet that followed his shot; the softened wall had cushioned the impact.

Another man sprang beside him. He was shouting at the top of his voice while one hand reached into a bag that hung at his waist. “Get back, everyone,” he said. “If I miss...” He did not finish the sentence, but pulled the pin from a hand grenade, then took careful aim and threw.

It went high--thrown there purposely; he had not dared aim it into the flame. But it struck the crevice fairly, and they heard it rattle on inside. The next instant brought the crack and roar of its explosion.

Like a winking signal light the green barrier vanished. Where it had been was only blackness and the dying glow of molten rock. Then, a hundred feet beyond, up close to the roof, the bend of the tunnel turned red; it seemed bursting into flame. Far back of them, down the long sloping way where they had come, shrill voices were screaming--and still there was no green flame to account for that tunnel end flaming red.

Rawson stood motionless. Loah, and the others beside him, seemed likewise petrified, until the voice of Culver jarred them into action.

“The ray!” he shouted. “It’s the heat ray, damn them! Quick, jump into that cave!”

They had all retreated through fear of the grenade; they were opposite the black place into which Rawson had looked. Loah was close beside Dean; he threw her with all his strength into the black mouth of the cave, then he was one of a crowding, stumbling mass of men who followed after, and their going was lighted by a terrible torch of flame.

One man had stood apart from the others, farther across the wide corridor. His khaki-clad body flashed suddenly to incandescence, then fell to the floor. And inside the cave, where the walls came abruptly together to cut off any further retreat, Colonel Culver spoke softly.

“One more gone,” he said. “That was Oakley. Well, he never knew what it was that hit him--and it looks as if we’ll all get the same.”

Through it all, Rawson had clung to his flame-thrower; unconsciously his hand had held fast to the bent handle of the cylindrical weapon. Now he set it down slowly upon the floor, then straightened his aching body laboriously.

Loah’s light was still gleaming. He saw her eyes searching for his, half in terror, half in wonderment. Strange men with strange thundering weapons--he knew she was wondering if they still dared hope, wondering if these warriors of Rawson’s race might be able to work further magic.

Dean put one arm tenderly about her and drew her close and his other hand came to rest upon Smithy’s shoulder.

“It’s the end, dear,” he told the girl softly. “It’s the end of our journey. You’ve been so dear and so brave. Pretty tough to lose out when we’d almost fought clear.” Then, to Smithy: “Loah came back to save me--refused to go when she could have got away and been safe.”

Already the air was stifling. The tunnel beyond the mouth of the cave was hot, though only at its end, where the invisible ray struck the rock surface squarely, was there red, glowing heat. Rawson suddenly saw none of it. He was seeing in his mind the world up above, his own world of great, free, sunlit spaces. Suddenly he was hungry for some closer link, no matter how slight, to bind him to that world.

“What day is it?” he asked. “Have you kept track of time?”

Smithy looked at him wonderingly. “Yes,” he said, then added: “Oh, I see. You want to know what day this is when we die. It’s the twentieth, Dean”--he looked at the watch on his wrist--”just two o’clock, the afternoon of the twentieth.”

Within him, Rawson felt a dull resentment. He was being denied even this last trifling solace. “You’re wrong,” he said sharply. “You slipped up on your count.”

“It doesn’t make any real difference,” Smithy said. But Rawson went on:

“We left the inner world on the nineteenth. At noon on the twentieth Gor was to cut loose the flame-throwers, melt a hole in the floor of the ocean. But it didn’t work. I had hoped I could wipe out the mole-men, turn a solid stream of water down a shaft for over six hundred miles. It would have gone through the Zone of Fire, come flooding up into the mole-men world and spread out all over down deep where it’s hot. It would have hit the Lake of Fire--all that!”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, Dean.” Smithy’s voice was intentionally soothing; he knew Rawson was talking wildly. “But I know I am right on the time. We’ve kept track of it every hour since--”

Rawson’s talk had sounded like insanity in Smithy’s ears. He would have gone on--he didn’t want to see Dean Rawson go out like that--but now he stopped. The rock was quivering beneath his feet.

And now Rawson, with a wild wordless cry, threw himself toward the flame-thrower on the floor. His voice rose to what was almost a scream. “It’s worked!” he shouted in a delirium of joy. “It’s the end of the brutes!”

Then, in words which the others could not comprehend but which somehow fired them with his own emotion: “Gor has cut it loose! Water, millions of tons of it! The Zone of Fire--steam!...” He threw himself flat on the floor as close to the hot mouth of the cave as he dared go, and the green flame of his weapon ripped outward and up as he aimed it.