Chapter XV: The Rescue

The small flying platform, with the girls prone upon its fur covering, sailed up from Sonya’s home and over the city. The stars were obscured by gathering black clouds, a threatening storm, but it did not break. Sonya headed the birds for the Virgins’ Island.

They passed a thousand feet above it where a barge drawn by swimming sea animals below was bringing the women and children back to Kalima. Sonya had only the general direction of where she wanted to go, the length of the Warm Sea toward the distant mountains and caves. The Nameless Horror had been seen always in that direction.

The girls lay silent. Sonya was in constant, though sometimes vague communication with Altho. She knew the captives were in a cave; then she got the thoughts clearer, and got Ren’s thoughts also. But suddenly all the thoughts were broken.

The threatening storm passed. The moon was below the horizon. But the stars came out clear and bright. The girls were calmer now, grim with purpose. Sonya began connecting their scientific apparatus, explaining it as well as she could.

The electronic needle pipe was a foot-long metallic pipe with a diameter the size of a small human finger. It had a large, round-metallic base, to be operated by two hands.

It projected a very small stream of electrons, which carried with them a tiny, sharp-pointed fragment of metal, like a needle. The needle flew with nearly the speed of light, expanding. But when it struck it solidified.

There was a range finder for aiming, and a device for curving the electronic stream, so that the beam could be sent to almost any degree of curvature. In her heart, though she did not confess it even to herself, Sonya was dubious of her ability to use the weapon.

She knew she could not aim it with any degree of skill. And she did not know its range. This needle pipe was a very small size projector, with a range, she thought, effective only a few hundred feet.

The girls were now beyond the Warm Sea, flying over a broken, mountainous country, black and desolate looking in the starlight. Altho’s thoughts were with Sonya again. They had never been as clear as this before. A fight, an escape, a dark ledge with a valley below it. There were lights in the valley.

But where, in all this dark, mountainous waste, was that valley? Sonya believed she was flying toward it. She had several times in the last hour altered the direction of the flight. Altho’s thoughts, a dim feeling of his approaching nearness, seemed to guide her.

It was very vague, an intuition more than a thought. Altho himself did not know where he was, but the bond of love between these two was very strong. Each could feel the other’s approaching presence. He had tried to warn her away, but when she persisted, he did his best to guide her.

Sonya murmured, “Now he says, _Lights in the valley—you will see the lights._”

But every desolate valley sweeping beneath them was pale and wan in the starlight. Then Sonya prepared an image-finder. She connected the batteries, the projector, and the grid of glowing wires.

Alice and Dolores held the grid between them. Sonya fired the small projectile. It sailed off, a whirling pink ball. It was in reality a small, flat disk with a lenslike eye and a whirling, pink, glowing armature on top.

Over a radius of several miles Sonya’s _raytron_ apparatus could direct its flight, and back over the invisible connecting ray came an image of all that the lens eye saw.

The pink ball of light sailed ahead and soon was lost to view. The grid of wires which Alice and Dolores held glowed pink; then suddenly glared white. A glare of white showed ahead in the sky. It was the light flare Talon had sent up to locate the fugitives.

The flare went dark. The grid was pink again. Upon it, etched in black, was a moving scene: mountains, crags, valleys, moving in slow panorama, valleys all pale and empty in the starlight. Then one showed dim, moving lights!

Alice cried, “Sonya . . . lights! We see them now!”

Sonya’s apparatus marked the position of the pink ball. She turned the birds slightly, to fly after it.

The platform was almost over the valley. Sonya sent out another pink disk. The girls bent over the grid, staring at the tiny movement image; a dim, starlit valley. At the bottom of it, a group of busy figures and a giant projector muzzle pointing vertically upward.

The girls watched the grid breathlessly. Its image, moving with constantly changing viewpoint, was clearly etched, but dim and very small: a cliff ledge with three figures upon it. From the ledge suddenly a small red ring of fire leaped out. It sped downward, struck a rock, and vanished with a puff.

It was Altho firing the weapon Jim had taken from the giant; in a moment the still distant girls heard a report, like a tiny clap of thunder, the sound of the red ring striking the rock. Down in the valley the giant muzzle of the vertical projector began issuing a stream of green light.

It mounted a hundred feet, sprayed out like a fountain column of water. From the ground, huge black figures tossed a balloon head into the column of light. The head rose, surged upward, until at the top it hung in the light spray, balancing itself like a ball held at the top of a jet of water.

It was all very swift, a moment or two while the girls stared at the glowing grid. The head was nearly level with the ledge. In the green light Altho’s figure showed plainly; he was standing at the ledge, firing his red rings of flame.

But they were futile now. They floated slowly, and from below, some hidden marksman was catching each of them with an upflung pencil point of black light, a narrow beam, so dead black that it showed clearly in the night. It caught the red fire rings; its rays exploded them harmlessly in the air.

The grid went dark; the second lens disk had burned out. But the platform itself now swept over the valley. The reality of the image scene was spread beneath the girls. Sonya saw the ledge was large enough to land upon; she guided the birds toward it.

She raised the electronic needle projector, fired it with a futile aim and then cast it away. There was no time for her to attempt to use it further. Her birds were swooping for the ledge, and they needed her guidance. A moment, and they would be there.

But too late! The head in the fountain of green light held something in his hands. A hum rose over the valley. Altho, standing on the ledge, suddenly flung up his arms. His weapon fell from him. He toppled, seemed trying to draw himself backward. But could not.

And then, forward from the ledge his struggling figure floated into the air. On the ledge, Ren and Jim were frantically clinging to avoid being drawn after him. The hum rose to a shrill whine.

In what seemed a whirlpool of air, or the levitation of an invisible magnetic stream, Altho was drawn to the head on the supporting green light beam. The green light slowly diminished.

The head, with arms holding Altho’s unconscious body, was lowered to the ground. A voice down there shouted hurried commands. The lights all went out sharply. In the starlight, Altho’s body was surrounded by dark surging figures, and dragged away.

The platform swooped to the ledge, landed with a thump.

“Jim! Jim! Are you all right?” It was Dolores’s anxious voice. But Sonya was cold, shuddering. All her hopes were vanished. She knew that they could not go down into the dark valley, with all those armed figures entrenched in the caves. Altho was lost to her.

Jim and Ren rushed to the platform. There was a moment of confused greeting. Jim never knew how it quite happened, but from the other ledge, ten feet above them, a head like Talon suddenly leaped down. It flashed to Jim that the head must all this time have been laboriously climbing in the darkness. Or perhaps had followed some underground passage to the cave up there.

Dolores was standing slightly apart from the others. The head seized her. On the upper ledge a giant bruteman was leaning down; the head tried to lift Dolores to where the dangling arms of the bruteman could reach her, arms which would have pulled her and the head both up to the upper ledge.

It happened so quickly, it was so utterly unexpected, that Jim and the other two girls were for an instant stricken with surprise. Dolores screamed. It was the first that they knew of her peril. She called, “Jim! Jim!”

But Ren was closer. He leaped before Jim, leaped in the dark for the girl’s terrified voice. He struck the head with his shoulder. His groping arms tore Dolores away.

There was a spurt of flame from some weapon the head was carrying. It caught Ren in the chest, drilled him. He fell backward, lay motionless. But he had saved Dolores from her captor. Jim and Alice had reached her.

The bruteman leaned swiftly down. The head held up one of its small arms. The bruteman drew his master to the upper ledge, with a jerk as though he were raising a large, light ball. In the valley they were trying to raise another beam of the green light.

Jim was carrying Dolores; he threw her to the platform and dragged Ren’s inert body aboard, with Alice grimly helping him. Sonya screamed at the birds.

From above, the head was sending down tiny spurts of flame. They struck the fur coverings with the acrid smell of burning hair. Jim flung the girls behind him; every moment he expected that the flame jets would strike him.

It was only an instant, then the platform lifted, sailed away. The ledge dropped beneath it. The dark, seemingly deserted valley dropped and merged into the tumbled mountain waste.

The platform struggled on, sailing low. It was the Virgins’ Island now. The moon was rising again with its flood of yellow radiance. Ahead, toward Kalima, they saw a blob in the sky.

It was the large flying platform I had hastily equipped and armed, coming out over the city to seek them.

But Ren was dead.