Part 27 (1/2)
”If Towahg could tend the fire,” suggested the scientist, ”I could fire my little catapult with one hand. I think I could do some damage.” But Chet shook his head and answered gently:
”I'm afraid Towahg's the better man to-night, Kreiss. You can help best by giving us light. That's the province of science, you know,” he added, and grinned up at the anxious man.
Each moment of this companions.h.i.+p meant much to Chet. It was the last conference, he knew. They would be swamped, overwhelmed, and then--only the pistol with its six sh.e.l.ls was left. But he drew his thoughts back to the peaceful quiet of the present moment, though the hush was ominous with the threat of the approaching storm and of the other a.s.sault that must come in the storm's concealing darkness. He looked at Diane and Walt--comrades true and tender. The leaping flames from the rocks above made flickering shadows on their upturned faces.
The moment ended. A growl from where Towahg was on guard brought them scrambling to their feet. ”Gr-r-ranga!” Towahg was warning. ”Granga come!”
They fired from their platforms as before, then raced for the rocks and the elevation they afforded, for the black bodies had reached the stockade quickly in the half light. But they came again from one point--the farthest curve of the U-shaped fence this time--and though a score of black animal faces showed staring eyes and snarling fangs where heavy bodies were drawn up on the barricade, no one of them reached the inside.
”We're holding them!” Chet was shouting. But the easy victory was too good to believe; he knew there were more to come; this force of some thirty or forty was not all that Schwartzmann could throw into the fight. And Schwartzmann, himself! Chet had seen the bronzed faces of Max and another standing back of the a.s.saulting force, but where was Schwartzmann?
It was Kreiss who answered the insistent question. From above on the rocks, where he had kept the fire blazing, Kreiss was calling in a high-pitched voice.
”The water!” he shouted, ”they're attacking from the water!” And Chet rushed around the broken rock-heap to see a lake like an inky pool, where the firelight showed faint reflections from black, s.h.i.+ning faces; where rippling lines of phosph.o.r.escence marked each swimming savage; and where larger waves of ghostly light came from a log raft on which was a familiar figure whose face, through its black beard, showed white in contrast with the faces of his companions.
Still a hundred feet from the sh.o.r.e, they were approaching steadily, inexorably; and the storm, at that instant, broke with a ripping flash of light that tore the heavens apart, and that seared the picture of the attackers upon the eyeb.a.l.l.s of the man who stared down.
From behind him came sounds of a renewed attack. He heard Harkness: ”Shoot, Diane! Nail 'em, Towahg! There's a hundred of them!” And the wind that came with the lightning flash, though it brought no rain, whipped the black water of the lake to waves that drove the raft and the swimming savages closer--closer--
Chet glanced above him. ”Come down, Kreiss!” he ordered. ”Get down here, quick! This is the finish. We could have licked them on land, but these others will get us.” He stood, dumb with amazement, as he saw the thin figure of Kreiss leap excitedly from his rocky perch and vanish like a terrified rabbit into the cave in the rocks.
”I didn't think--” he was telling himself in wondering disbelief at this cowardice, when Kreiss reappeared. His one hand was white with a rubbery coating that Chet vaguely knew for latex. He was holding a gray, earthy ma.s.s, and he threw himself forward to the catapult where it stood idly erect in the wind that beat and whipped at it.
”Help me!” It was Kreiss who ordered, and once more he spoke as if he were conducting only an interesting experiment. ”Pull here! Bend it--bend it! Now hold steady; this is metallic sodium, a deposit I found deep in the earth.”
The gray ma.s.s was in the crude bucket of the machine. Kreiss' knife was ready. He slashed at the vine that he'd the bent sapling, and a gray ma.s.s whirled out into the dark; out and down--and the inky waters were in that instant ablaze with fire.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The inky waters were ablaze with fire._]
Fire that threw itself in flaming b.a.l.l.s; that broke into many parts and each part, like a living thing, darted crazily about; that leaped into the air to fall again among ape-men who screamed frenziedly in animal terror.
”It unites with water,” Kreiss was saying: ”a spontaneous liberation and ignition of hydrogen.” The white-coated hand had dumped another ma.s.s into the primitive engine of war. ”Now pull--so--and I cut it!” And the leaping, flas.h.i.+ng fires tore furiously in redoubled madness where a shrieking mob of terrified beasts, and one white man among them, drove ash.o.r.e beyond the end of a barricade.
Chet felt Harkness beside him. ”We drove 'em off in back. What the devil is going on here?” Walt was demanding. But Chet was watching the retreat of the blacks straight off and down the sh.o.r.e where the sand was smooth and neither gra.s.s nor trees could hinder their wild flight.
”You've got them licked,” Harkness was exulting: ”and we've cleaned them up on our side. Just came over to see if you needed help.”
”We sure would have,” said Chet; ”more than you could give if it hadn't been for Kreiss.”
”We've got 'em licked!” Harkness repeated wonderingly; ”we've won!” It was too much to grasp all at once. The victory had been so quick, and he had already given up hope.
The two had clasped hands; they stood so for silent minutes. Chet had been nerved to the point of destroying his companions and himself; the revulsion of feeling that victory brought was more stupefying than the threat of impending defeat.
Staring out over the black waters, he knew only vaguely when Harkness left; a moment later he followed him gropingly around the jagged rocks, while there came to him, blurred by his own mental numbness, a shouted call.... But a moment elapsed before he was aroused, before he knew it for Walt's voice. He recognized the agonized tone and sprang forward into the clearing.