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Hendron considered silently. “There was no way for us to avoid that hate. And there is no hate like that of men who have lost their morale, against those who have retained it.”
Tony looked away. “If they get in, we’ll see something new in savagery.”
The attack began on the following night. It began with gunfire, raking the barriers. A siren on top of the powerhouse sounded a wholly unnecessary warning. “Women to cover! Men to arms!”
Low on the horizon that night, which was speckled here by gunfire, shone two new evening stars. They were the Bronson Bodies which now had turned about the sun and were rushing toward their next meeting-place with the earth: one of them to offer itself for refuge, the other to end the world forever.
CHAPTER 18—THE FINAL DEFENSE
TONY, directing the disposal of his men, longed for the moon—the shattered moon that survived to-night only in fragments too scattered and distant to lend any light. The stars had to suffice. The stars and the three searchlights fixed on the roofs of the laboratories nearest to the three fronts of the encampment.
One blazed out—and instantly became a target for a machine-gun in the woods before it. For a full minute, the glaring white beam swung steadily, coolly back and forth, picking out of the night men’s figures, that flattened themselv
es on the ground between the trees as the searchlight struck them.
Then the beam tipped up and ceased to move. The next moment, the great glaring pencil was snuffed out. The machine-gun in the woods had got the light-crew first, and then the light itself.
Other machine-guns and rifles, firing at random but ceaselessly, raked the entire camp. Tony stumbled over friends that had fallen. Some told him their names; some would never speak again. He recognized them by flashing, for an instant, his pocket-light on their still faces. Scientists, great men, murdered in mass! For this was not war. This was mere murder; and it would be massacre, if the frail defenses of the camp failed, and the horde broke in.
A defending machine-gun showed its spatter of flashes off to the right; Tony ran to it, and dropped down beside the gun-crew.
“Give me the gun!” he begged. He had to have a shot at them himself; yet when he had his finger on the trigger, he withheld his fire. The enemy—that merciless, murderous enemy—was invisible. They showed not even the flash of gunfire; and outside the wire barriers, there was silence.
The only firing, the only spatters of red, the only rattle, was within the defenses. It was impossible that, so suddenly, the attack had ceased or had been beaten off. No; this pause must have been prearranged; it was part of the strategy of the assault.
It alarmed Tony far more than a continuance of the surrounding fire. There was more plan, more intelligence, in the attack than he had guessed.
“Lights!” he yelled. “Lights!”
They could not have heard him on the roofs where the two remaining searchlights stood; but they blazed out, one sweeping the woods before Tony. The glare caught a hundred men before they could drop; and Tony savagely held the trigger back, praying to catch them with his bullets. He blazed with fury such as he never had known; but he knew, as he fired, that his bullets were too few and too scattered. His targets were gone; but had he killed them? The searchlight swept by and back again, then was gone.
Machine-guns were spitting from the woods once more, and both lights were blinded.
A rocket rasped its yellow streak into the air and burst above in shower of stars. A Fourth of July rocket, unquestionably a signal!
Tony fired at random into the woods; all through the camp, rifles and machine-guns were going. But no attack came.
A second rocket rasped up and broke its spatter of stars. Now the camp held its fire and listened. It heard—Tony heard, only a whistle, like a traffic whistle, or the whistle that summoned squads to attacking order.
A third rocket went up.
“Here they come!” some one said; and Tony wondered how he knew it. Soaked in perspiration, Tony glared into the blackness of the woods. He longed for the lights; he longed for military rockets. But there never had been any of these. Hendron, in making his preparation, had not foreseen this sort of attack. He had imagined vagrants in groups, or even mobs of desperate men, but nothing that the wire would not stop or a few machine-guns scatter. That is, he had imagined nothing worse until it was too late to prepare, adequately, for—this.
Now machine-guns in the woods were sweeping the camp enclosure. The fire radiated from a few points; and as it was certain the attackers were not in the path of their own fire, but were in the dark spaces between, Tony swept these with his bullets.
The gun bucked under his tense fingers. Yells rewarded him. He was wounding, killing the attackers—units of that horde that had sent that murderous fire to mow down the men, the splendid men, the great men who had whispered their names quietly to Tony as he had bent over them before they died.
Shouts drowned the yells of the wounded—savage, taunting shouts. There must be a thousand men on this bit of the front alone, more than all the men in the camp. Tony heard his voice bawling over the tumult: “Get ’em! Get ’em! Don’t let ’em by!”
His machine-gun was overheating. A little light came from somewhere; Tony could not see what it was, except that it flickered. Something was burning. Tony could see figures at the wire, now. He could not reckon their numbers, did not try to. He tried only to shoot them down. Once through that wire,—that wire so weak that he could not see it,—and that thousand with the thousand behind them would be over him and the men beside him, they would be over the line of older men behind; then they would reach the women.
Tony’s lips receded from his teeth. He aimed the gun with diabolic care, and watched it take effect as wind affects standing wheat. The attackers broke, and ran back to the woods.
In the central part of the cantonment the growth afforded better cover and gave the assault shorter range. Men went in pairs to the tops of the buildings, and through loopholes which had been provided for such a contingency began sniping at those who moved in the territory around the buildings.
Every one was overmastered by the same sort of rage which had possessed Tony. The reason for their existence had been to them a high and holy purpose. They defended it with the fanaticism of zealots. They could not know that the flight of their planes to and from the Ransdell metal-supply had indicated to the frantic hordes that somewhere human beings lived in discipline and decency. They could not know how for weeks they had been spied upon by ravenous eyes. They could not know how the countryside around, and the distant cities, had been recruited to form an army to attack them. They could not know that nearly ten thousand men, hungry, desperate, most of them already murderers many times over, armed, supplied with crafty plans which had been formulated by disordered heads once devoted to important, intelligent pursuits—how these besieged them now, partly for spoils, but to a greater degree in a fury of lust and envy. They had traveled on broken roads, growing as they marched. It was a heathen horde, a barbaric and ruthless horde, which attacked the colony.
The siege relaxed to an intermittent exchange of volleys. At this machine-gun station, Tony, suffering acutely from thirst, with six of his comrades lying dead near by, fought intermittently.
