"Yes, Great Master."
"You will be housed in this city, Wor, in the dwelling-globe you occupied before. Keep your prisoners with you, if you like."
"These two Earthmen...." began Molo, but he was interrupted.
"Settle that later. I do not want the annoyance."
I was dimly conscious of a great clanging, coming through the curtain of barrage which was over us.
The brain added, "Keep Wyk with you, to guard the prisoners; he will also attend your needs. In the battle, Martian, I expect great things of you and your _Star-Streak_."
"Great Master, you will not be disappointed."
"And prisoners, but not too many. Bring me a few young specimens like these, representative of Venus, Mars and the Earth. I want both of the s.e.xes, an equal number of each."
"Yes, Great Master."
"The warning signal is coming. You will now see our first contact."
The light at our feet was fading. It clung last by the gruesome face of the huge brain; the goggling eyes shone green, and as the light in the little mound-room dimmed there was in a moment nothing left but those lurid green pools of the brain"s eyes.
Then I was aware that the aperture at our feet had closed. Over us, the barrage curtain was dissipating, sight and sound coming in to us.
The huge ball-shaped conclave room again became visible, the audience crowding its entire inner surface.
I suddenly felt Anita"s fingers twitching at my sleeve.
"Gregg, darling, can you hear me?"
"Yes. Be careful."
But Molo was gazing up over our heads. The crowd was shifting, bending so that they all seemed gazing at their feet. A dim white radiance, seeming to come from down here somewhere near us, lay in a splotch on a segment of the throng overhead. Molo was watching.
I whispered, "All right, Anita. Quick, what is it?"
"The great control station is not far from here. Venza and I have been trying to find out where it is exactly."
She stopped, evidently fearful of Meka. Then she added:
"Gregg, we haven"t been guarded very closely; they"re not suspicious of us."
"Later, Anita. Can"t talk now."
"No. Watch our chance. Later."
I turned toward Molo. "What"s that up there?"
"The transparent ray is opening the top of the globe."
The clanging signal gong had stilled. The audience was hushed and expectant. The white patch of light overhead spread until it encompa.s.sed all the top of the globe. The whole area was glowing. The people were white, spectral shapes, transparent! And the top of the globe was transparent; I saw the night sky, with the gleaming reddish stars.
It was, in a moment, as though we were staring up at a huge square window orifice cut in the top of the room. A broad vista of cloudless sky and stars was visible. Across it, like a shining sword, was a narrow, opalescent beam.
"The Earth-beam which I planted," Molo whispered triumphantly. "Our control station will contact with it now. The first contact!"
Earth was below our angle of vision, but the beam from Greater New York, sweeping the sky with the Earth"s rotation, was pa.s.sing now comparatively close to Wandl.
There was an expectant moment. Then into the sky leaped another ray, narrow, luridly green. It swung up from Wandl and darted into s.p.a.ce.
The hissing, agonized electrical scream from it as it burst through the Wandl atmosphere was deafening. I saw it strike the Earth-beam, grip it with a blinding burst of radiance up there in the sky, clinging, pulling against the rotation of the Earth with a lever sixty million miles long.
A moment of screaming sound in the atmosphere around us, and that conflict of light in the sky. Then the screaming suddenly stilled. The Wandl beam vanished.
The Earth-beam still swept the heavens like a stiff, upstanding sword.
But in that moment when Wandl gripped it, the axis of the Earth had been changed a little. The rotation was slowed. By a few minutes, the day and the night on Earth were lengthened.
It was the beginning of Earth"s desolation.
11
"But when do we eat?" Snap demanded.
"Soon," said Molo.
"I hope so."
We were leaving the great room as we had come. Walking? I can only call it that, though the word is futile to describe our progress as we made our way to the lighted esplanade, across its side and into what might have been called a street. Globular houses, single, or one set upon another, or half a dozen swaying on a stick, gardens of vegetables and flowers. I saw what seemed to be a round patch of hundred-foot tree-stalks, like a thick batch of bamboo. It was laced and latticed thick with vines.
"A house," Snap murmured. "That"s a house."
Another type of dwelling. This patch of vegetable growth, so flimsy it was all stirring with the movement of the night breeze, was woven into circular thatched rooms, birds" nests of little dwellings. Staring up, I seemed to see a hundred of them. Rope-vine ladders; flimsy vine platforms; tiny lights winking up there in the trees.
On a platform twenty feet above us a group of tiny infant brains sat in a gruesome row, goggling down on us.
We pa.s.sed the tree patch; again the city seemed all a thin, flexible metal. The ground was like a smooth rock surface, alternating with small patches of soil where things were growing.
We walked in a slow, unsteady line. Molo led. Behind Snap and me came the girls, ignoring us; and at the rear, the brown-sh.e.l.led giant guard stalked after us.
Molo stopped at a large globe-dwelling. "We rest here. I will go see that our rooms are ready." He gestured to his sister. "Meka, you come with me. Wyk will guard them."
We stood at an oval doorway. A worker came out, stared at us, then went back. On an upper balcony, a brain was gazing down at us.
I caught Molo"s brawny arm. "Won"t you tell us what"s going on?"
"Rest here with Wyk."
"What are you going to do?" asked Snap.