Chapter IV

Back in our cave-cell, Shorty and I stared blankly after the figure of the Lei woman, Tahn, as she motioned to the Radak guards who slid our door-panel closed. Again we were alone.

"Well," Shorty murmured. "What do you make of that? The wife of some Lei named Taro, she said."

And that she would come back and try to get us out of here. That her husband had some plan--

Eagerly, Shorty and I waited. Would it be an hour, or a day? Both of us were thinking of Blaine, locked somewhere around here, perhaps in a cell like ours. Or had the Radaks killed him by now? And Vivian and Mack, wandering out there in the Realm of the Things you couldn't kill.

"Guess they're done for," Shorty said, when I mentioned them.

"Unless we can get out there to them--"

Shorty's smile was ironic. "That would fix everything, of course. Don't be an ass, Bob. If we were out there, we'd all be trying to get back. For what? So the Radaks would jump on us and kill us."

It was all so utterly hopeless. But it was queer, that instinct all five of us had, to try and keep together.

The young Lei woman had brought us food and drink. Shorty and I slumped on the earthern floor now and sampled the food. Nauseous stuff, indescribable.

"If it's been weeks since we left the Earth," Shorty said, "no wonder we're nearly starved to death."

But we managed to eat and drink some of it, and then exhausted by the nerve tension of what we had been through, we drifted off into an uneasy slumber.

The rasp of the sliding door-panel jerked us into alertness. I had the feeling that only a little time had passed. The panel slid open just a foot or two, and a figure came in. It was Tahn.

Both Shorty and I were on our feet. "You came as you hoped," I said softly. "We're ready. Just tell us what you want us to do."

She barely whispered, "The Radak guards just now are changing. There is no one outside. We go, quickly."

"Go where?" Shorty demanded.

"To my husband, Taro. He is in a corridor near here. Come now, quickly."

The faintly red corridor outside was empty. Swiftly Tahn led us along it, around several sharp bends, past a cross-corridor intersection. I was tense, expecting every moment that Radaks would leap upon us from the shadows. But so far we had escaped notice, though obviously there were many Radaks near here. Several times we passed the dim oval openings of little grottos, and often there were guttural, chattering voices from within them.

"Won't the guards discover we're gone?" Shorty murmured.

"Perhaps not for maybe much time. I am in charge of you, I bring you food and drink. The guards stay outside, should you try to break out."

Our tunnel was descending now. And suddenly from the dimness to one side, there came a murmur: "Tahn! Tahn--"

A young Lei man was crouching in a shadowed recess. It was Tahn's husband, Taro.

"She has brought you, Earthmen. That is good."

We crouched down with him. He was a youngish fellow, tall, slim and powerfully built. His single draped garment exposed one bronze shoulder. His grey-black hair was chopped at the base of his neck, with a narrow band of bright-colored fabric tied around his forehead. With his high-cheek bones, hawk-like nose and gleaming dark eyes he could have been a stalwart young savage of Earth.

"I want to help you," he was saying. "Your coming here fits my plans, and believe me I have worked on them a long time. Tahn and I, making the Radaks trust us."

"Say," Shorty murmured, "you certainly are fluent with English."

The young Lei's face wrinkled into a smile. "Why should I not, my wife and I? We Lei learn things quickly. Perhaps a different mind-quality from yours, almost at once to absorb what we hear. Ratan--he is next to the Great Mind as leader of the Radaks--he chose Tahn and me to go on the expedition to Earth. We were carefully watched, or we would have escaped to warn you. It was Tahn who took care of you on the way here."

* * * * *

He told us then of the weird Radak-gun, with its flash of mind-current--the weapon which probably just at this exact moment no more than half a mile away in this maze of subterranean corridors, Blaine was snatching from Ratan.... And Tahn told us, too, of the Radak plot to devastate Earth.

"You have some plan?" Shorty murmured.

He told us then that he knew how to get into the Cavern of Machines--a huge, guarded grotto where all the diabolic, giant mechanisms of the Radaks were housed. The power plant of little Zelos, and the source of the purple radiance which was bathing Earth.

"If we can kill the guards and get into the Cavern--only the Great Mind himself--or Ratan--will be there. No one else but those two are allowed there. No one else knows the secrets of the mechanisms to operate them."

"So we just get in and overcome the Great Mind himself," Shorty commented. He gave a mock shudder with an attempt to be humorous. "All right. Figure that's done. Then what?"

Taro's plan was certainly desperate, but at least it promised the possibility of success. "Do you know where the Earthman Blaine is?" I demanded.

Tahn said, "He is in a cave-cell. I am ordered to take him food and drink very soon."

"What weapons have you got?" Shorty asked. "Say, if you could get one of those brain-paralyzing guns--"

Taro shook his head. "Never could I even get near one. The Great Mind always carries one--and so does Ratan. But there is no chance--"

"We must get to Blaine," I said. "And then try and find Vivian and Mack. We've all got to be together--"

We planned it for a few moments more. Then cautiously Taro and Tahn led us to a corridor intersection. "We will hide here," he said, gesturing to another shadowed recess where the ragged rocks of the wall jutted out in an overhang. "Tahn can go best." The young Lei turned to his wife. "Tahn, listen. You get food and drink. You take it to Blaine's cell. There are not always guards perhaps. You watch your chance--"

"Listen!" Shorty suddenly interjected. "Maybe I'm crazy, but there's some kind of commotion around here."

We could all hear it now--a distant murmur of turmoil down one of the side corridors. Taro nodded. "Something is wrong. And Blaine's cell is down that way. You Earthmen wait here! I will go with Tahn. Then we come back to you."

* * * * *

They were gone only a few moments. From a little distance they had stood unnoticed, watching and listening. Blaine had escaped! He had seized Ratan's thought-gun; turned it upon Ratan and one of the guards; had stricken them. And had knifed another guard, and vanished.

"Well! Good for Blaine," Shorty murmured. "He's smarter than all the rest of us put together! And he's got one of those guns! Where'd he go--"

"They think perhaps out to the outer surface," Taro said. "He ran that way."

"To find Mack and Vivian!" I exclaimed. "Well, that's what we want to do. Show us that exit, Taro."

"I will go with you," the young Lei said quietly. But there was no mistaking his shudder and the grim look on his face. "Tahn, you stay here."

"I will go with my husband," she retorted. "Taro, please--"

We took her. It seemed that the commotion at Blaine's cell must have drawn all the Radaks from these other passages. We were not discovered as we threaded our way back, until presently we were ascending a winding tunnel which ended at the crimson upper surface. How long it took us to sight Mack, Vivian and Blaine I do not know. It seemed an eternity of apprehension, as Taro and Tahn cautiously led us along winding rocky defiles and past patches of that weird, fantastic forest. Shorty and I saw none of the monsters. But there were many times when suddenly, without explanation, Taro turned us from where we would have wandered.

Then we were far enough from the tunnel entrances so that we dared talk without possibility that the Radaks would hear us.

"Blaine! Blaine--where are you?"

"Mack! Vivian--are you here?"

It was Tahn who first saw them. We were in a cluster of rocks with a brink ahead of us. I could see lower ground perhaps fifty feet down--a precipitous descent close ahead of us. It chanced that Tahn was leading, and suddenly she turned, gave a cry, and then pointed over the brink.

"There they are! Down there! Look--look at them--"

We crowded to the brink. Fifty feet down this ragged wall, Blaine, Vivian and Mack stood backed against it. An abyss was near them. And in front of them a great crimson, python-like thing was slithering, almost upon them now, with Blaine futilely firing his gun at it!

There was nothing we could do; and for those seconds all four of us stood staring, mute, numbed with horror. The scene on the ledge below us was clear as though on a little stage. The monster in another second would be upon its victims. I saw Blaine throw down his gun in despair. His voice floated up to us.

"Damn thing won't work! Got to--try to run--"

Then, suddenly we saw Mack leap forward, not toward where he might have a wild chance of climbing up our ragged little cliff-wall, but the other way--toward the brink that dropped down to another terrace, between the brink and the monster's slithering length. His intention was obvious--to lead the monster over that other brink after him.... To sacrifice himself so that his companions might escape.

In the chaos of that second we saw Mack get past the monster's head and neck. Its head turned. And then, before Mack could hurl himself down the hundred-foot drop, a loop of the great crimson body lashed out. It seemed that a tentacle whipped separate from the undulating snake-like body--a tentacle that seized Mack, looped around him and flung him into the air.

Just a ghastly second or two as Mack's whirling body came up diagonally toward us in the air, and then fell back, into a ragged cluster of rocks beyond the monster's tail. Horribly we could hear the thud as it struck. For another second the great crimson head of the monster seemed to rear, with swaying eye-beams searching. But Mack's body was hidden by the rock-cluster.

* * * * *

Then, suddenly the gruesome python shape, head down, began oozing over the brink beside it. Flowing mass of protoplasm. It thinned out as it sagged down the hundred-foot drop--thinned until it was a narrow ribbon--a blood-red rivulet of waterfall. Then it was all on the lower level, gathering itself together until in a moment it was a great congealed, quivering crimson ball with the head in the center. For another instant it pulsated; then it bumped and rolled down a ragged slope, reached a little patch of distant vegetation where we could dimly see it spreading itself thinly out.... Spread like a blood-red pool, quiescent, waiting.

With Taro and Tahn, Shorty and I climbed down the ragged little descent, joined Vivian and Blaine.

"He tried to save us," the white-faced Vivian murmured.

"Yes," I agreed. "We saw it."

We found his broken body in the cluster of rocks fifty feet away. He was still conscious but we thought he was dying. One of his arms hung limp. Blood was coming from a head wound. But his pallid face was trying to smile.

"My leg and arm," he mumbled. "Can't move them."

One of his legs undoubtedly was broken. As we told him that the monster had gone his gaze seemed only on Vivian.

"Thought it would kill you, Viv," he muttered. "Didn't want that." Then he fainted. He had been trying to get up on one elbow as Vivian knelt with an arm under his head. Then his eyes closed, and he sagged, went limp.

"We must stop that blood from his head," Tahn murmured. "And then try and get him into one of the tunnels."

Vivian jumped up. "Here's what we need--bandages." She flashed us a little twisted smile as she tore off her waist and skirt and ripped them into strips. "Here--bandages." She handed the strips of fabric to Tahn. Then she grinned at me. "This underdress--not too becoming, is it?" She gestured at the brief undergarment that now partly covered her, and her whimsical smile broadened. "Well this time, anyway, I had a good motive, didn't I?"

Shorty and I carried the still unconscious Mack back to one of the tunnel entrances. And Taro led us to a shadowed, cave-like little place where we laid him down. Good luck seemed with us. We had encountered, so far, no Radaks.

"You and Tahn will stay with him," I told Vivian. And Shorty and I had decided that Blaine had best stay also. For once Blaine had to do something against his will.

"Think I'm too old to help you young fellows now?" he said. "All right, maybe I am."

Certainly he was in no physical condition to be much help in the desperate venture we were planning. He handed me the Radak-gun, showed me how to use it. I dropped it in my pocket.

"Good luck to you," Blaine said.

"Thanks. We'll need it," I acknowledged.

Then Shorty, Taro and I left them. Taro had hidden the only weapons he could get, near here. We found them--sheathed knives that the Lei used in the underground fields. They were odd-shaped knives; they seemed made of a highly polished, metallic stone. I thumbed one. It was sharp.

"Very handy," Shorty commented. "Come on, Taro, let's go. Where is this Cavern of Machines?"

It was perhaps half an Earth-mile, low down in the maze of underground passages. Shorty clutched his knife; I held the Radak-gun as we followed Taro down the dim, descending crimson tunnel.