Chapter XXIII: First Retreat

I must recount now what Elza later told me, going back to those moments when Elza sat upon the balcony watching Tarrano and the Red Woman. The significance of what had been transpiring at the Water Festival was not clear to Elza; she did not know what was impending, but as she sat there with Tarrano beside her, a sense of danger oppressed her. Danger which lay like a weight upon her heart. Yet several times she found herself laughing--hilarious; and from Maida’s warning glance, and the steadying odor which Maida wafted to her, she knew that Tarrano was using the alcholite fumes to intoxicate her.

The Red Woman and Tarrano were upon the dais. There came a flash; then darkness. Elza went cold with terror. She sat stiff and silent, while around her surged that turmoil of confusion. The smell of chemicals was in the air; her skin prickled as with a million tiny needles where sparks now began to snap against it.

How long she crouched there, or what was happening, Elza did not know. But presently she heard Tarrano’s voice in her ear.

“Come, Lady Elza, I must get you out of this.” In the darkness his face glowed wraith-like. Then she felt his hand upon her arm.

“Come, we must leave here. I would not have you endangered.”

With a haste and roughness that belied the calm solicitude of his words, he pulled her to her feet. There was light in the pavilion now. Elza saw dimly the turmoil of struggling figures; and then she saw the scene duplicated--saw it shift and sway in crazy fashion. Though she did not know it, she was looking out along the curved rays which Tarrano was sending from them. Sparks were snapping everywhere. A second image of Tarrano appeared to the left of her--she saw it in a mirror nearby--yet he was at her right, gripping her arm.

“Hurry, Lady Elza.”

She found herself being dragged along the balcony; stumbling over a body lying there; feeling a surge of heat and electric disturbance beat against her face. Then Tarrano had her in his arms, carrying her. She heard him curse as a sudden wave of fire seemed to strike them--hostile rays bringing a numbness to muscles and brain. Tarrano was fumbling at his belt; and through a shower of sparks he stumbled onward with his burden.

Elza’s senses were fading. Vaguely she was conscious that Tarrano was carrying her down an incline to the ground. Grateful, cool air. Stars overhead. Trees; foliage; shimmering water. The screams and confusion of the pavilion growing fainter...

When Elza regained consciousness, she was lying in the bottom of a little boat, Tarrano beside her.

“So? You have awakened? We are quite safe, Lady Elza.”

She and Tarrano were alone in the boat. It was long and very narrow, with its sides no more than a foot above the water. Tarrano sat at its chemical mechanism. A boat familiar to us of Earth. A small chemical-electric generator. The explosion of water in a little tank, with the resultant gases ejected through a small pipe projecting under the surface at its stern. The boat swept forward smoothly, rapidly and almost silently, with a stream of the gas bubbles coming to the surface in its wake.

“Quite safe, Lady Elza.”

She saw that Tarrano’s face was blackened with grime. His garments were burned, and hers were also. He was disheveled, but his manner was as imperturbable as ever. He made her comfortable on the cushions in the boat; drew a robe closer around her against the rush of the night air.

Elza was unhurt. She saw now, with clarifying senses, that they were plying along a narrow river. Banks of foliage on each side; the auroral lights in the sky; occasionally on the hillsides along the river, the dim outlines of a house.

It was all a trifle unreal--like looking through a sunglass that was darkened--for around the boat hung always a vague pall of gloom. Tarrano spoke of it.

“Our isolation barrage. It is very weak, but the best I can contrive. From these hills the naked eye, now at night could hardly penetrate it ... A precaution, for they will be searching for us perhaps ... Ah!...”

A white search-ray sprang from a house at the top of a hill nearby. It leaped across the dark countryside, swept the water--which at that point had broadened into a lagoon--and landed upon the boat. It was a light strong enough to penetrate the barrage--the boat was disclosed to observers in the house. But Tarrano raised a small metal projector. A dull-red beam sprang from it and mingled with the other. A surge of sparks; then Tarrano’s red beam conquered. It absorbed the white light. And Tarrano’s beam was curved. It lay over the lake in a huge bow, bending far out to one side. Yet its other end fell upon the hostile house. The white search-ray from the house was submerged, bent outward with Tarrano’s beam. From the house, the observer could only gaze along this curved light. He saw the image of the boat--not where the boat really was--but as though the ray were straight.

Elza, staring with her heart in her throat, saw a ball of yellow fire mount from the house. It swung into the air in a slow, lazy parabola, came down and dropped into the lake. But it fell where the marksman saw the boat, a safe distance to one side. A ball of fire dropping into the water, exploding the water all around it for a distance of a dozen feet. Like a cascade, the water mounted.

Tarrano chuckled. “A very bad marksman.”

Other bombs came. It turns me cold when I think how orders like this could have come from the Great City--these bombs which had they found their mark would have killed Tarrano, but at the expense of the life of Elza. They did not find their mark. Tarrano continually changed the curve of his beam. The image of the boat shifted. A few moments only; and riding the waves of the bomb-tossed water, they rounded a bend, back into the narrow river and were beyond range.

Tarrano snapped off his ray. “Quite safe, Lady Elza. Do not be alarmed. I doubt if they will locate us again. They should be very busy now in the Great City. I’m surprised they could even think to notify this Station we have just passed.”

We were indeed very busy in the Great City during those hours, as you shall presently hear.

Tarrano and Elza were not again disturbed. How far they went in the boat she does not know, but at last they landed in a sheltered cove. An air vehicle was there. Tarrano transferred Elza to it, and in a moment more they were aloft.

The vehicle was little more than an oblong platform, with a low railing. A platform of a substance resembling glascite-transparent; and with a glascite shield V-shaped in front to break the rush of wind and yet give vision. A mechanism, not of radio-power, but of gravity like the space-flyers. Such platforms had been, but were no longer in use on Earth. Elza had never seen one. It was a new experience for her, this flying with nothing above one, nothing to the side, or underneath save that transparent substance. To her it was like floating, and at times falling headlong through the air.

They rose no more than a thousand feet at first, and then swept parallel with the ground. At a tremendous speed; even at this height the forests seemed moving backward as the ground moves beneath a surface vehicle.

Dark, somber forests of luxuriant tropical vegetation. It was now nearing dawn; the auroral lights were dropping low in the sky; the great Venus Cross of Dawn was rising, its first two stars already above the line of hills to one side.

Then the sky out there flushed red; a limb of the glorious Sun of Venus came up. A new day. And even though the air was warm, within Elza was ashiver.

“It is very wonderful to me, my Elza, this being alone with you.”

He sat beside her, gazing at her with his calm, impenetrable eyes. It was near noon of that day following their escape from the Water Festival. They had flown possibly two thousand miles. The Sun had risen, but after a time--since their enormous speed and change of latitude had affected the angle at which they viewed it--the Sun now was hanging almost level, not far above the horizon.