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“There might be enough to take on both our camps at once.”
“Yes.”
Tony and Peter Vanderbilt moved toward their radio-station; and they were debating there what to do, when their dilemma was solved for them: The sound of a plane came dimly to his ears. Both stepped out of the radio-room and lay down on the ground where vision in every direction was unhampered. Tony saw Taylor slumping into an attitude of unconsciousness.
Then his eye caught the glint of the plane. A speck far away. He lay motionless, like the others, and the speck rapidly enlarged.
It was one of the Bronson Betan ships. It flew fast and with a purring roar which was caused not by its motor but by the sound of its propellers thwacking the air.
It came low, slowed down, circled.
Tony’s heart banged as he saw that one of the faces peering over was broad, bearded, strongly Slavic. Another of its occupants had close-cropped hair and spectacles. The slip-stream of the plane fanned him furiously and raised dust around him. People from earth! They completed their inspection, and rushed out of sight toward the northwest.
Tony and Vanderbilt jumped up and ran toward Jack Taylor. The three men met for a frantic moment. “They’ll be back.” Tony shook with rage. “The swine! They’ll be back to take over this camp. I wonder if they’d kill the men. We’ll be ready. I’ll take the west tube. Wait till they’re all here. Wait till the first ship lands—I can rake hell out of that field. Then get ’em all! We can’t fool. We can’t do anything else.”
They went to their positions again.
An hour later a large armada flew from the northwest. They did not fly in formation, like battle-planes. Their maneuvers were not overskillful. Some of the ships were even flown badly, as if their pilots were not well versed in their manipulation.
Tony counted. There were seventeen ships—and some of them were very large.
The three defenders acted on a prearranged plan: They did not follow the fleet with their tubes. They did not even move them from their original angles. They could be swung fast enough. They hid themselves carefully.
The ship circled the camp and the unconscious victims beneath. Then the leading ship prepared to land.
Tony fired his tube. The crackling sound rose as the blast began.
The enemy plane was almost on the ground. He could see lines of rivets in its bright metal body. He could see, through a small peephole, the taut face of the pilot. The wheels touched.
Tony heaved, and the counter-balanced weapon described an arc. There was a noise like the opening of a door to hell. The landing-field became a volcano. The plane vanished in a blistering, tumultuous core of light. The beam swung up, left the ground instantaneously molten.
It curved along the air, and broken and molten things dropped from the sky. Into that armada probed two other orange fingers of annihilation; and it melted, dissolved, vanished.
It was not a
fair fight.… It was not a fight.
The blasts yawed wide. They were fed by the horrible energy which had carried the Ark through space. Their voices shook the earth. They were more terrible than death itself, more majestic than lightning or volcanic eruption. They were forces stolen from the awful center of the sun itself.
In less than a minutes they were stilled. The enemy was no more.
Tony did not run, now. He walked back to the center of the camp. There he met Vanderbilt and Taylor.
No one spoke; they sat down, white, trembling, horrified.
Around them lay their unconscious comrades.
Here and there on the ground over and beyond the landing-place, great fragments of twisted metal glowed and blistered.
The sun shone. It warmed them from the green-blue sky of Bronson Beta.
Jack Taylor, student, oarsman, not long ago a carefree college boy—Jack Taylor sucked in a tremulous breath and whispered: “God! Oh, God!”
Vanderbilt rose and smiled a ghastly smile. He took a battered package of cigarettes from his pocket—tenderly, and as if he touched something rare and valuable. They knew he had been cherishing those cigarettes. He opened the package; four cigarettes were left. He passed them. He found a match, and they smoked. Still they did not speak.
They looked at the people who lay where they had fallen—the people who had come through that hideous destruction without being aware of it.
One of those people moved. It was Dodson.
