"We want--I can"t hold the thing. We have been trying to find a way to you these three days."
"Is it rescue?" whispered Graham. "Escape?"
"Yes, Sire. If you will."
"You are my party--the party of the Sleeper?"
"Yes, Sire."
"What am I to do?" said Graham.
There was a struggle. The stranger"s arm appeared, and his hand was bleeding. His knees came into view over the edge of the funnel. "Stand away from me," he said, and he dropped rather heavily on his hands and one shoulder at Graham"s feet. The released ventilator whirled noisily.
The stranger rolled over, sprang up nimbly and stood panting, hand to a bruised shoulder, and with his bright eyes on Graham.
"You are indeed the Sleeper," he said. "I saw you asleep. When it was the law that anyone might see you."
"I am the man who was in the trance," said Graham. "They have imprisoned me here. I have been here since I awoke--at least three days."
The intruder seemed about to speak, heard something, glanced swiftly at the door, and suddenly left Graham and ran towards it, shouting quick incoherent words. A bright wedge of steel flashed in his hand, and he began tap, tap, a quick succession of blows upon the hinges. "Mind!"
cried a voice. "Oh!" The voice came from above.
Graham glanced up, saw the soles of two feet, ducked, was struck on the shoulder by one of them, and a heavy weight bore him to the earth. He fell on his knees and forward, and the weight went over his head. He knelt up and saw a second man from above seated before him.
"I did not see you, Sire," panted the man. He rose and a.s.sisted Graham to arise. "Are you hurt, Sire?" he panted. A succession of heavy blows on the ventilator began, something fell close to Graham"s face, and a shivering edge of white metal danced, fell over, and lay flat upon the floor.
"What is this?" cried Graham, confused and looking at the ventilator.
"Who are you? What are you going to do? Remember, I understand nothing."
"Stand back," said the stranger, and drew him from under the ventilator as another fragment of metal fell heavily.
"We want you to come, Sire," panted the newcomer, and Graham glancing at his face again, saw a new cut had changed from white to red on his forehead, and a couple of little trickles of blood starting therefrom.
"Your people call for you."
"Come where? My people?"
"To the hall about the markets. Your life is in danger here. We have spies. We learned but just in time. The Council has decided--this very day--either to drug or kill you. And everything is ready. The people are drilled, the wind-vane police, the engineers, and half the way-gearers are with us. We have the halls crowded--shouting. The whole city shouts against the Council. We have arms." He wiped the blood with his hand.
"Your life here is not worth--" "But why arms?"
"The people have risen to protect you, Sire. What?"
He turned quickly as the man who had first come down made a hissing with his teeth. Graham saw the latter start back, gesticulate to them to conceal themselves, and move as if to hide behind the opening door.
As he did so Howard appeared, a little tray in one hand and his heavy face downcast. He started, looked up, the door slammed behind him, the tray tilted sideways, and the steel wedge struck him behind the ear. He went down like a felled tree, and lay as he fell athwart the floor of the outer room. The man who had struck him bent hastily, studied his face for a moment, rose, and returned to his work at the door.
"Your poison!" said a voice in Graham"s ear.
Then abruptly they were in darkness. The innumerable cornice lights had been extinguished. Graham saw the aperture of the ventilator with ghostly snow whirling above it and dark figures moving hastily. Three knelt on the fan. Some dim thing--a ladder was being lowered through the opening, and a hand appeared holding a fitful yellow light.
He had a moment of hesitation. But the manner of these men, their swift alacrity, their words, marched so completely with his own fears of the Council, with his idea and hope of a rescue, that it lasted not a moment. And his people awaited him!
"I do not understand," he said, "I trust. Tell me what to do."
The man with the cut brow gripped Graham"s arm.
"Clamber up the ladder," he whispered. "Quick. They will have heard--"
Graham felt for the ladder with extended hands, put his foot on the lower rung, and, turning his head, saw over the shoulder of the nearest man, in the yellow flicker of the light, the first-comer astride over Howard and still working at the door. Graham turned to the ladder again, and was thrust by his conductor and helped up by those above, and then he was standing on something hard and cold and slippery outside the ventilating funnel.
He shivered. He was aware of a great difference in the temperature. Half a dozen men stood about him, and light flakes of snow touched hands and face and melted. For a moment it was dark, then for a flash a ghastly violet white, and then everything was dark again.
He saw he had come out upon the roof of the vast city structure which had replaced the miscellaneous houses, streets and open s.p.a.ces of Victorian London. The place upon which he stood was level, with huge serpentine cables lying athwart it in every direction. The circular wheels of a number of windmills loomed indistinct and gigantic through the darkness and snowfall, and roared with a varying loudness as the fitful white light smote up from below, touched the snow eddies with a transient glitter, and made an evanescent spectre in the night; and here and there, low down! some vaguely outlined wind-driven mechanism flickered with livid sparks.
All this he appreciated in a fragmentary manner as his rescuers stood about him. Someone threw a thick soft cloak of fur-like texture about him, and fastened it by buckled straps at waist and shoulders. Things were said briefly, decisively. Someone thrust him forward.
Before his mind was yet clear a dark shape gripped his arm. "This way,"
said this shape, urging him along, and pointed Graham across the flat roof in the direction of a dim semicircular haze of light. Graham obeyed.
"Mind!" said a voice, as Graham stumbled against a cable. "Between them and not across them," said the voice. And, "We must hurry."
"Where are the people?" said Graham. "The people you said awaited me?"
The stranger did not answer. He left Graham"s arm as the path grew narrower, and led the way with rapid strides. Graham followed blindly.
In a minute he found himself running. "Are the others coming?" he panted, but received no reply. His companion glanced back and ran on.
They came to a sort of pathway of open metal-work, transverse to the direction they had come, and they turned aside to follow this. Graham looked back, but the snowstorm had hidden the others.
"Come on!" said his guide. Running now, they drew near a little windmill spinning high in the air. "Stoop," said Graham"s guide, and they avoided an endless band running roaring up to the shaft of the vane. "This way!" and they were ankle deep in a gutter full of drifted thawing snow, between two low walls of metal that presently rose waist high. "I will go first," said the guide. Graham drew his cloak about him and followed.
Then suddenly came a narrow abyss across which the gutter leapt to the snowy darkness of the further side. Graham peeped over the side once and the gulf was black. For a moment he regretted his flight. He dared not look again, and his brain spun as he waded through the half liquid snow.
Then out of the gutter they clambered and hurried across a wide flat s.p.a.ce damp with thawing snow, and for half its extent dimly translucent to lights that went to and fro underneath. He hesitated at this unstable looking substance, but his guide ran on unheeding, and so they came to and clambered up slippery steps to the rim of a great dome of gla.s.s.
Round this they went. Far below a number of people seemed to be dancing, and music filtered through the dome.... Graham fancied he heard a shouting through the snowstorm, and his guide hurried him on with a new spurt of haste. They clambered panting to a s.p.a.ce of huge windmills, one so vast that only the lower edge of its vans came rushing into sight and rushed up again and was lost in the night and the snow. They hurried for a time through the colossal metallic tracery of its supports, and came at last above a place of moving platforms like the place into which Graham had looked from the balcony. They crawled across the sloping transparency that covered this street of platforms, crawling on hands and knees because of the slipperiness of the snowfall.
For the most part the gla.s.s was bedewed, and Graham saw only hazy suggestions of the forms below, but near the pitch of the transparent roof the gla.s.s was clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down upon it all. For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his guide, he gave way to vertigo and lay spread-eagled on the gla.s.s, sick and paralysed. Far below, mere stirring specks and dots, went the people of the unsleeping city in their perpetual daylight, and the moving platforms ran on their incessant journey. Messengers and men on unknown businesses shot along the drooping cables and the frail bridges were crowded with men. It was like peering into a gigantic gla.s.s hive, and it lay vertically below him with only a tough gla.s.s of unknown thickness to save him from a fall.
The street showed warm and lit, and Graham was wet now to the skin with thawing snow, and his feet were numbed with cold. For a s.p.a.ce he could not move.
"Come on!" cried his guide, with terror in his voice. "Come on!"
Graham reached the pitch of the roof by an effort.
Over the ridge, following his guide"s example, he turned about and slid backward down the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little avalanche of snow While he was sliding he thought of what would happen if some broken gap should come in his way. At the edge he stumbled to his feet ankle deep in slush thanking heaven for an opaque footing again. His guide was already clambering up a metal screen to a level expanse.
Through the spare snowflakes above this loomed another line of vast windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical shrilling of extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from every point of the compa.s.s.
"They have missed us already!" cried Graham"s guide in an accent of terror, and suddenly, with a blinding flash, the night became day.
Above the driving snow, from the summits of the wind-wheels, appeared vast masts carrying globes of livid light. They receded in illimitable vistas in every direction. As far as his eye could penetrate the snowfall they glared.
"Get on this," cried Graham"s conductor, and thrust him forward to a long grating of snowless metal that ran like a band between two slightly sloping expanses of snow. It felt warm to Graham"s benurrled feet, and a faint eddy of steam rose from it.