Chapter XII

"_You didn't succeed, Martin. Come on--wake up so I can tell it to your face. You and the rest of the apes have lost forever!_"

He stirred and gagged and then rolled on his side, feeling the pain from his shoulder lance through his body. There had been the shot and he had felt himself falling and then there had been a voice....

Tanner's voice.

His eyes jerked wide open and he sat up, wincing at another flash of pain.

"Finally awake, are you?"

He turned. Tanner was on the small pedestal that held the hoop, standing nonchalantly in front of the circle of whirling black.

"You'll be sorry you woke up, Martin. Frankly, I should think you would be wishing you were dead." He half smiled to himself. "There's knives in the kitchen, incidentally, in case you should want to do something about it. I imagine you have quite a guilt complex."

Stan whipped his head around to look at the small box-like machine that kept score of the fusion packages. Only one light was still lit.

The light for Chicago.

Tanner smiled lightly. "Don't think you've won just because there's only one light left. Fifty fusion packages was our safety factor. We actually only needed one."

Stan's face mirrored what he thought and Tanner read the look.

"That's right," he nodded. "Only one. We wanted to create panic and one will do that. When it goes off, that's all we need. The rest of the world will hear about it seconds later. And then the flight will be on." He paused. "You don't think that people--anywhere--are going to remain in their cities, do you? All the police, all the commissars in existence, couldn't make them do that. And then the air fleets will spring into action. One fleet because it demands vengeance, and the other because the only defense is a good offense, as the ape politicians are so fond of saying."

He shrugged. "You see? It really only takes one for disaster."

Stan gathered his muscles for one last lunge....

Tanner caught the movement and raised his eyebrows.

"You wouldn't want to do that, Martin. For one reason, I've got Avis. And for another, it would be too late. The blast went off ten seconds ago."

He waved and stepped into the blackness.

Stan reeled over to the set and dialed Chicago. The sheet of blackness formed, wavered, and then faded back to the edges of the hoop.

He had lost, Stan thought, dazed. The city he had been born and raised in was one with the drifting atoms of the air.

Tanner had won, completely. And Tanner had Avis.

Stan huddled in the center of the room, his mind a melee of flickering thoughts. Then a noise at the window caught his ear. The noise of doors slamming and the starting of a thousand automobiles and people running through the streets. He didn't bother to look--he knew what it was.

The exodus of a billion people from ten thousand towns and cities was on the way.

There was six hours to go before the start of the brief, abortive war. Six hours before the air fleets would arrive at their destination.

A day later the Thuscan fleet would settle from the skies to begin the mopping up operation, the operation that would change the face of a green, water world to a world that would be another colony planet for Thusca.

A world in which the human race would play no part.

_And there was the matter of the girl...._

* * * * *

The noise outside the street was a steady roar, now. The street was gorged with people on foot and on bicycles and in automobiles, fighting to get out of the city. He could hear screams and curses and over all, the faint crackle of flames.

In a few hours, the city would be a roaring inferno, he thought. There would be nobody left behind to put out the fires. And the scene would be duplicated a thousand times over before the sun went down.

And the next day there would be the final, terrible tempest when the Thuscans arrived. When humanity would go out in a short, confused struggle.

There was nothing left to do but prepare to die....

Then he thought again of Avis and knew there was one last, forlorn chance.

He raced back to the communications room and pressed the switches on the small television set with which he and Tanner used to communicate with Mr. Ainsworth on the Thuscan flag ship.

Avis had mentioned that her own fleet was standing by. A small fleet perhaps, but certainly not one without possibilities.

He waited a moment for the tubes to warm up, then dialed the frequency Avis had once mentioned. There was a pause and the screen grew bright. A face wavered on it for a moment and then grew steady. It was the face of a middle-aged man dressed in a dull blue uniform. His eyes looked like they had seen all there was to see of both heaven and hell.

Stan explained the situation urgently. The face nodded acceptance of what had happened.

"Can you get out of the city?"

The sounds outside were a steady roar now. Stan hesitated a moment, then said yes.

"We'll try to pick you up. Take the main artery out of the city to the small wooded park."

"What are you going to do?"

The lines in the man's face deepened. "Outside of pick you up, there's nothing we can do."

Stan flicked off the switch and started for the door. So there was nothing they could do. Nothing they could do to save a world or to save Avis.

Well, that remained to be seen.

* * * * *

He opened the street door and was almost swept into the tightly packed, fast moving throng. He stepped back into the doorway for a moment, letting the fighting, struggling mob sweep by. A father held a squawling baby high above his head. A woman was crying, hugging a small bundle of clothes to her as she struggled on. Suddenly she slipped and fainted and slid beneath the thousand feet of the mob. Stan didn't see her reappear.

He closed the door and ran to the back. The alley was crowded but not nearly so packed as the street.

Perhaps half an hour had passed since Tanner had appeared in the hoop, he thought. He had five and a half hours to go before the bombs started dropping.

His back pained him and he could feel the blood start to well where he had been shot. He grimaced and struggled on. A man next to him was lugging a small, portable radio and Stan could hear the frightened announcer reading off the government's mobilization orders and exhortations to remain calm.

They were useless, Stan thought bitterly. They could have no more effect on the tidal waves of humanity leaving its cities than Xerxes had on the ocean, when he had ordered it to be whipped. Humanity was leaving its huddling places and there was nothing that could stop them.

An hour later and he made two miles through the packed outskirts of the city. The crowd was thinning now and he thought he could make out the wooded sections of the park, not more than three or four blocks ahead. It couldn't be too much longer, he thought. He wasn't sure of how much more he could take....

His shirt was torn and the wound in his back was bleeding freely. Worse than that had been the sights he had seen on the way--women and children trampled underfoot, and the few neurotic souls who had given up and taken the short way out by leaping from windows.

It was slaughter, even without the war, he thought. Humanity was destroying itself in senseless panic. And then he was in the wooded area that had grown close to the city. He pushed through the brush and trees until he found a small clearing. The mass of people streamed past it, anxious to put miles between themselves and the buildings that so obviously spelled destruction.

He had waited for perhaps an hour when a small life boat rocket put down in the clearing. He looked at his watch before stepping aboard.

Time had narrowed to three hours.