Suddenly his smile broadened, and he pointed out the forward window.
"Our city is behind that next range of mountains!"
They were flying at a height of twenty miles, and the range Torlos indicated was far off in the blue distance, almost below the horizon. As they approached them, the mountains seemed to change slowly as their perspective shifted. They seemed to crawl about on one another like living things, growing larger and changing from blue to blue-green, and then to a rich, verdant emerald.
Soon the ship was rocketing smoothly over them. Ahead and below, in the rocky gorge of the mountains, lay a great cone city, the largest the Earthmen had yet seen. As they approached, they could see another cone behind it--the city was a double cone! They resembled the circus tents of two centuries earlier, connected by a ridge.
"Ah--home!" smiled Torlos. "See--that twin cone idea is new. It was not thus when I left it, years ago. It is growing, growing--and in that new section! See? They have bright colors on all the buildings! And already they are digging foundations out to the left for a third cone!" He was so excited that it was difficult for Arcot to read his thoughts coherently.
"But we won"t have to build more fortifications," Torlos continued, "if you will give us the secret of the rays you use!
"But, Arcot, you must hide in the hills now; drop down and deposit me in the hills. I will walk to the city on foot.
"I will be able to identify myself, and I will soon be inside the city, telling the Supreme Three that I have salvation and peace for them!"
"I have a better idea," Arcot told him. "It will save you a long walk.
We"ll make the ship invisible, and take you close to the city. You can drop, say ten feet from the ship to the ground, and continue from there.
Will that be all right?"
Torlos agreed that it would.
Invisible, the _Ancient Mariner_ dove down toward the city, stopping only a few hundred feet from the base of the magnetic wall, near one of the gigantic beam stations.
"I will come out in a one-man flier, slowly, and at low alt.i.tude, toward that mountain there," Torlos told Arcot, pointing. "Then you may become visible and follow me into the city.
"You need fear no treachery from my people," he a.s.sured them. Then, smiling: "As if you need fear treachery from the hands of any people!
You have certainly proven your ability to defend yourselves!
"Even if my people were treacherously inclined, they would certainly have been convinced by your escape from the Satorians. And they have undoubtedly heard all about it by now through the secret radios of our spies. After all, I was not the only Nansalian spy there, and some of the others must surely have escaped in the ships that ran away after I destroyed the city." Arcot could feel the sadness in his mind as he thought of the fact that his inadvertent destruction of the city had undoubtedly killed some of his own people.
Torlos paused a moment, then asked: "Is there any message you wish me to give the Supreme Council of Three?"
"Yes," replied Arcot. "Repeat to them the offer we so foolishly made to the Commanding One of Sator. We will give them the molecular ray which tore the city out of the ground, and, as your people have seen, also tore a mountain down. We will give them our heat beam, which will melt anything except the material of which this ship is made. And we will give them the knowledge to make this material, too.
"Best of all, we will give them the secret of the most terrific energy source known to mankind; the energy of matter itself. With these in your hands, Sator will soon be peaceful.
"In return, we ask only two things. They will cost you almost nothing, but they are invaluable to us. We have lost our way. In the vastness of s.p.a.ce, we can no longer locate our own galaxy. But our own Island Universe has features which could be distinguished on an astronomical plate, and we have taken photographs of it which your astronomers can compare with their own to help us find our way back.
"In addition, we need more fuel--lead wire. Our s.p.a.ce control drive does not use up energy except in the presence of a strong gravitational field; most of it is drained back into our storage coils, with very little loss. But we have used it several times near a large sun, and the power drainage goes up exponentially. We would not have enough to get back home if we happened to run into any more trouble on the way."
Arcot paused a moment, considering. "Those two things are all we really need, but we would like to take back more, if your Council is willing.
We would like samples of your books and photographs and other artifacts of your civilization to take back home to our own people.
"That, and peace, are all we ask."
Torlos nodded. "The things you ask, I am sure the Council will readily agree to. It seems little enough payment for the things you intend to do for us."
"Very well, then. We will wait for you. Good luck!"
Torlos turned and jumped out of the airlock. The ship rose high above him as he suddenly became visible on the plain below. He was running toward the city in great leaps of twenty feet--graceful, easy leaps that showed his tremendous power.
Suddenly, a ship was darting down from the city toward him. As it curved down, Torlos stopped and made certain signals with his arms, then he stood quietly with his hands in the air.
The ship hovered above him, and two men dropped thirty feet to the ground and questioned him for several minutes.
Finally, they motioned to the ship, which dropped to ten feet, and the three men leaped lightly to its door and entered. The door snapped shut, and the ship shot toward the city. The magnetic wall opened for a moment, and the ship shot through. Within seconds, if was out of sight, lost in the busy air traffic above the city.
"Well," said Arcot, "now we go back to the hills and wait."
XX
For two days, the _Ancient Mariner_ lay hidden in the hills. It was visible all that time, but at least two of the men were watching the sky every hour of the day. Torlos himself was, they knew, perfectly trustworthy, but they did not know whether his people were as honorable as he claimed them to be.
Arcot and Wade were in the control room on the afternoon of the second day--not Earth days, but the forty-hour Nansalian days--and they had been quietly discussing the biological differences between themselves and the inhabitants of this planet.
Suddenly, Wade saw a slowly moving speck in the sky.
"Look, Arcot! There"s Torlos!"
They waited, ready for any hostile action as the tiny ship approached rapidly, circling slowly downward as it came nearer. It landed a few hundred feet away, and Torlos emerged, running rapidly toward the Earth ship. Arcot let him in through the airlock.
Torlos smiled broadly. "I had difficulty in convincing the Council that my story was true. When I told them that you could go faster than light, they strongly objected. But they had to admit that you had certainly been able to tear down the mountain very effectively, and they had received reports of the destruction of the Satorian capitol.
"It seems you first visited the city of Thanso when you came here. The people were nearly panic-stricken when they saw you rip that mountain down and uproot the magnetic ray station. No one ship had ever done that before!
"But the fact that several guards had seen me materialize out of thin air, plus the fact that they knew you could make yourselves invisible, convinced them that my story was true.
"They want to talk to you, and they say that they will gladly grant your requests. But you must promise them one thing--you must stay away from any of our people, for they are afraid of disease. Bacteria that do not bother you very much might be deadly to us. The Supreme Council of Three is willing to take the risk, but they will not allow anyone else to be exposed."
"We will keep apart from your people if the Council wishes," Arcot agreed, "but there is no real danger. We are so vastly different from you that it will be impossible for you to get our diseases, or for us to contract yours. However, if the Council wants it, we will do as they ask."
Torlos at once went back to his ship and headed toward the city.
Arcot followed in the _Ancient Mariner_, keeping about three hundred feet to the rear.
When they reached the magnetic screen of the city, one of the beam stations cut its power for a few moments, leaving a gap for the two ships to glide smoothly through.
On the roofs of the buildings, men and women were collected, watching the shining, polished hull of the strange ship as it moved silently above them.
Torlos led them to the great central building and dropped to the huge landing field beside it. All around them, in regular rows, the great hulls of the Nansal battleships were arranged. Arcot landed the _Ancient Mariner_ and shut off the power.
"I think Wade is the man to go with me this time," Arcot said. "He has learned to communicate with Torlos quite well. We will each carry both pistols and wear our power suits. And we"ll be in radio communication with you at all times.
"I don"t think they"ll start anything we don"t like this time, but I"m not as confident as I was, and I"m not going to take any useless chances. This time I"m going to make arrangements. If I die here, there"s going to be a very costly funeral, and these men are going to pay the costs!