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“But,” said Tony, “you found no actual diagram of the engineering arrangements under the cities?”
“At the time in which I now find myself,” said Philbin, “these cities existed only in Lagon Itol’s fancy. His diary either was missed by our friends the Midianites, when they tried to remove all diagrams that would have been useful to us; or else they considered this book harmless.”
No one found more useful diagrams, during the days which swiftly were becoming colder.
Steadily the sun diminished in size; blue shadows stole across the plains of the adopted planet as the long, late afternoons dwindled to dark, and in the night, the outer temperature dropped far below zero.
Under the shield of the city, heat remained, and was renewed from the huge transformers fed from impulses far away.
By mercy of the Midianites!
By mercy, or by policy?
They argued this under the great glass shield of the city of Hendron—known to its builders long ago as Khorlu—while their world slipped farther and farther from the sun.
Hourly they argued this, especially at night, when the needed lights burned bright, and the ventilators spun, circulating the warmed currents of air to combat the bitter cold that settled on the shield. And machinery moved, because the power impulses sent from the station in control of the Midianites continued.
The enemy made no attack. Indeed, only at a distance did they reappear at all; and then it was in the sky. Larks hovered but far away—watching; that was all. And Tony told his pilots, who also were flying larks, not to molest them, or even appear to attack them.
What if they sent down a few flyers from the sky? Attack upon the city with a few planes would be absurd; attack from the ground would be fantastic. The defense, established in any of these great metal cities, must be impregnable; the advantage of cover was overwhelming. The Midianites themselves appreciated this. After the pursuit of Von Beitz, they made no move which even suggested an attack upon Hendron. To the contrary, they continued to send through the conduits under the ground the power-impulses which kept lighted and warm the city of Hendron, much as it had been when it was Khorlu, a million years ago.
Khorlu, Wend, Strahl, Gorfulu, and Danot—so the Other People had named the five cities they had built in defiance of the destruction stealing upon them—the five cities forecast in the sketches of Lagon Itol.
Wend was the great shielded metropolis which Tony and Eliot James first had visited; Strahl and Danot were the two similar cities seen, and mapped, to the south.
Gorfulu was the greatest; and not only that—it was the control-city of the group; for it dominated the underground works which generated the power for the entire group of cities. It was Gorfulu that the Midianites had seized for themselves, and to which they had brought the survivors of the English space-ship, as captives.
It had been easy enough to promise to the English girl who had escaped—Lady Cynthia, met on the road to Hendron-Khorlu—that Hendron’s people would rescue the English from the Midianites. But that promise appeared only more and more wild and fantastic as the new inhabitants of Hendron-Khorlu became more familiar with the peculiar strength of the shielded cities.
Attack upon the city, with the weapons at hand and transportable, would be folly; every feature and material of construction of the cities gave overwhelming advantage to the defense.
No one offered any scheme of attack that suggested any chance of success.
Jack Taylor and Ransdell, and Tony and Eliot James and Peter Vanderbilt (for though he was not of the younger men, he remained of the boldest) met often and planned attack; but while they talked, they knew they were helpless.
“The fact is,” said Eliot James once, putting frankly in open words what they all were feeling, “so far from being able to conquer them, we’re at their mercy this minute; and they know it.”
Peter Vanderbilt nodded. “And as regards them, I have little illusion that the quality of mercy is much strained. Let us adjourn for a walk in the square, or—what have you?”
“Tony, did you know that the portrait bust near the north gate is of Lagon Itol? Philbin assured me of it, quite positively, yesterday. He looked a good deal like Goethe, don’t you think?”
“I’ll take another look at it,” said Tony; but he did not go out with the others. He sought Eve in the delightful apartment fitted for other lovers a million years ago, and lighted by the small distant sun whose heat was reinforced by warmth from power-impulses from machines engineered and prepared by the minds and hands of a million years ago, which had been repaired and were operated by the Midianites.
For the power-impulses continued to come; and this fact persuaded many, in the city of Hendron-Khorlu, that a change of heart must have affected the party of men from earth who held control of the capitol of the Vanished People.
They had come to their senses, some were sure as they worked, under the shield of the city of Hendron-Khorlu, at the emergency measures which the council of the Central Authority had ordered.
But if some believed in the mercy of the men who had taken over the capital that controlled the conditions in all the cities, others did not become so credulous.
“When are they going to shut us off?” they asked each other; and when they did not utter the words, they wanted to. The waiting had become an obsession.
They felt themselves teased and tantalized by this unceasing, silent provision of light and heat and power which kept them comfortable—indeed in luxury—under the dome of the great transparent shield when the world without was frozen.
The long rivers had turned to ice; the lake became a sheet of ice which the sun at noonday scarcely affected. Floes filled the seas, the pilots of the larks reported. Frequently at noonday, when the small sun stood nearly overhead, surfaces thawed, but when the world began to turn away, and long before the darkness, it was bitter cold again.
It was at night that It came—at dinner-time.
The company under Tony’s command were assembled in the great hall where meals were served. A few of the men stood at salient posts, always on watch. There was a watch at the top of the tallest towers, and at the eight gates. Guards were posted also at the passages to the chief channels below the city.…
