CHAPTER VI
Invasion
They saw it first far off on the plain, moving toward them through the clear darkness. At first it seemed only a mist that drifted with the wind but, when the wind shifted, the grey fog came on. Its heart was thicker and dimly the eye could glimpse intricate matrices of light far inside the cloud, glittering patterns like diamond cobwebs arranged in lattice formations.
Miller and Orelle, with Llesi a bodiless awareness beside them, stood at a glass wall looking out over the plain toward Brann’s castle.
Llesi breathed softly. “I know that pattern. It’s a bad one. The thing’s brain and control and energy-source are in the bright matrix you see. Watch now.”
The lattices shifted into new geometric formations and out of the cloud rippling, soft grey tentacles thrust, thickening as they moved.
“That would be stronger than iron once it took shape,” Llesi was saying. “The pseudopod principle, of course. It will be a hard thing to fight.”
They stood watching in silence while the grey cloud flowed forward with increasing speed until it was nearly within reaching distance of the castle. Far off, across the valley, the lights of Brann’s walls watched like eyes. Miller spoke impatiently.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? Can’t you stop the thing?”
“I could. But I want to see what new ideas Brann has incorporated into this. It’s better to know than to guess. If I destroy this he’ll just send another. I’m going to let it try the gate.”
The cloud flowed up to the outer wall. . . paused . . . seemed to be considering the massive glass barrier before it. Then the lattices rearranged, glittering. A finger of greyness reached out, seeped through the crack between gate and wall.
Metal groaned in the quiet of the night. That tiny pseudopod was expanding with monstrous force. The gate shivered, crumpled—gave way.
Radiant shimmers of color flared down from the walls upon the cloudy thing as Llesi’s batteries went into action at last. In his own brain Miller could feel Llesi’s tense watchfulness as he waited to see how the creature would meet them.
Its lattice-work heart shifted like a kaleidoscope. The clouds thickened, grew dark. It shrank—expanded again—and moved on into the castle, a wreathed thing of velvety blackness that swallowed up the attacking lights and ignored them.
Now they lost sight of it but they could hear, partly through the vibrations of the castle walls themselves and partly through the confused mental cries of the people below them, the progress the machine was making. A transparent wall gave way before it and the crash of the collapse sent a terrible, ringing music all through the castle. There was the silent voiceless cry of a man caught in its unimaginable grip—a cry that shivered up to an unbearable peak in the brains of all who heard, and then went silent with a suddenness that made the listeners reel.
Orelle seized Miller’s arm in a tight grip. “Come with me,” she said. “Hurry!”
She was half-running as she led the way through the dark castle which was yet so clearly visible to the sight. The confusing halls were strange to him but before they reached their goal Miller was leading the way, Llesi in his brain sending out the mental orders that guided him, so that the corridors and doors and sloping glass ramps seemed to swing around and to fly open before him without the need of knowledge on his part.
There was pandemonium below. Miller could feel the tension in Llesi’s mind and in Orelle’s as they raced toward the breached wall of their fortress. Llesi was unsure.
“Maybe this is the one,” he said, half to himself, as the translucent walls spun past. “Maybe this one we can’t fight.”
More than one wall had been breached by the time they reached the scene of the fight. The castle was filled with the jangling, musical crashes of shattered glass and the cries—some of them vocal cries now—of the defenders. But from the attacking machine itself no sound came.
Miller saw it through jagged walls and over the heads of the castle’s men—a great coagulated cloud, velvet-soft and iron-hard, the colored lights of the defenders’ strange weapons beating upon it in vain. There were colors in the weapons such as Miller had never seen.
“Photon showers,” Llesi told him briefly. “Very high-frequency light waves with an energy increase great enough to utilize the mass of the light. Those latticed patterns would be smashed by the impact—if we could reach them.
“When you deal with anything as delicate as this you need a delicate weapon. The lattices would be impervious to heavy weapons but the mass of light itself could crush the patterns if I had some way to penetrate the cloud.”
“The photons should do it,” Orelle said in a worried voice. “Always before—”
“Brann has something new this time.”
The cloud rolled on. Through the shattered walls they saw it engulf the men in its path, moving like a velvet-soft juggernaut that crushed all before it. It pressed its misty surface against another wall—there was a surging all through the mass and, briefly, a pattern of clouded lights glimmered deep in the smoky bulk.
The castle rang with the jangled music of another falling wall.
“It’s making straight for the Power,” Orelle said, quietly now. “Llesi, you’ve got to stop it.”
Miller felt in his own brain Llesi’s rapid, orderly thoughts, marshalling the facts and measuring against them his varied resources. Then, decisively, he spoke.
“We must get to the Power first. I can stop it but we’ll have to hurry.”
To Miller it seemed as if the castle spun around him again as, in obedience to the orders in his brain, he whirled and ran with Orelle at his heels. The corridors opened up before them, unfamiliar pathways looking strangely familiar to the double vision in his mind. Another wall smashed into ringing fragments behind them as they ran.
With his new night-sight Miller could see a long way through the translucent walls of the glass castle. Lights had been kindled through the building now so that the glimmers, far and near, reflecting beyond intervening barriers, made the whole castle glow bewilderingly.
But ahead of them, growing larger as they neared, was one part of the building that even this new sight could not penetrate. It was a great cube whose walls gave back the vision opaquely, as it loomed before them.
Orelle pushed past him as they reached it, spread both hands flat upon the dark surface. It parted before her, melting away as the other walls melted to admit entry, and she pressed through into the hidden room. Miller followed her, his brain spinning with his own curiosity and the complicated planning of Llesi who shared it.
Afterward Miller could never remember clearly what he had seen in that great dark room. He had only an impression in retrospect of an immense number of delicate shining things that might have been instruments—of countless rows of containers over which light seemed to ripple and play from within the colored holders, like votive lights seen far off down the aisle of a cathedral—of things without name or recognizable shape. . . .
In the center of the room, hanging in the heart of a filligreed framework which it did not seem to touch anywhere, a clear transparent cube three feet through floated free. Within it a tilted halo of—of stars?—rotated slowly through the solid substance of the block. And very faintly, Miller thought he could hear music as it turned, the same music he had caught from the night sky, subsonic but still perceptible to his new senses.
“The Power,” Orelle said, nodding toward the cube.
Miller went forward slowly until he stood by the delicate framework within which the block floated. He could feel a slight pressure constantly beating out from the rotating stars, and at the same time a slight equal suction—an impossible sort of double force that did not equalize itself but kept him in a continual state of muscular readjustment to balance the opposite pulls while he stood within its range.
He was trying to control the excitement that poured through him at his nearness to this unimaginable thing he had come so far to find. Slade would give all he had to possess it for, inexplicable as it was, there was a harnessed power in the mysterious thing unlike any power at man’s disposal in the lower world beyond Peak Seven Hundred.
Then, in his brain, Llesi said impatiently, “Later you can examine it. I need you now, if we’re going to stop Brann’s beast. Turn around—go to the far wall, reach up to that container of blue light and. . . .”
Miller’s conscious mind ceased to make sense out of the orders Llesi gave it but his body was obedient. He did not try to resist. He relaxed his own will and allowed Llesi full control, so that he was only dimly aware of what his body did in the next few minutes. His hands were busy, and there was an intense, quiet activity in his mind.
An activity that gradually began to slow. Lights swelled and sank beneath his busy fingers. Heat and cold and other stranger sensations he could not name bathed his hands and arms, beat against his intent face bent above them. But into his mind slowly a sense of frustration crept.
He made an effort to bring his own mind back into focus and asked Llesi a quick mental question.
“I don’t know,” Llesi’s mind replied. “It isn’t easy. I think I can stop the thing but at a cost we can scarcely afford. And I could only do it once. Brann will know that. He’ll have only to send another just like it and—” The thought blanked out as if even in his subconsciousness Llesi did not want to shape the end of that idea.
Miller put forth greater effort and shrugged off the inertia of his mind which had been necessary while Llesi worked. He was keenly alert now. He had a job to do.
“Will you listen to me?” he asked. “I think I’ve got an answer—if you’ll trust me.”
Llesi’s reply was wary but there was eagerness in it too. “What do you want us to do?”
“Tell me first—can you duplicate this Power source?”
With a double accord both Llesi and Miller turned to gaze at the floating cube with its lazily rotating halo of glittering light.
“I can, yes,” Llesi said. “Why?”
“Easily? Soon?”
“Not in time to stop Brann’s creature, no. It would take several hours.”
“Then,” Miller said, bracing himself for the storm he knew must follow his suggestion, “then I think you’ll have to let the thing downstairs take your Power and carry it back to Brann.”
There was a mental explosion of fury and refusal.
After it had died down, while Orelle still gazed at him with burning dark eyes full of distrust and hatred, and Llesi still smouldered angry thoughts in his brain, Miller went on.
“I know—I know. In your place I’d feel the same. But look at it dispassionately if you can. Brann has you where he wants you now. You can only drive off this mechanism downstairs once and Brann can send another to take the Power source anyhow. If you stay passive you’re beaten. But listen to me—and maybe you can still win. Attack! Let the Power go—but follow it.”
There was silence for a moment, while the two others digested this idea. Then Orelle said, “We could only follow to Brann’s walls. We’ve never been able to get into his castle and—”
“Don’t you see, this is the only way! He’ll have to make room for the cube of the Power to enter. If we follow, there ought to be a way for us to force an entry too. Especially if he doesn’t suspect. Oh, I know—you think I am Brann. I wish there were some way to—wait! Could you read my mind if I opened it to you? Would you believe me then?”
Slowly Orelle said, “I think it might be possible. Are you willing to let me try?”
Miller hesitated for a moment. There is a curious reluctance in the human mind to strip aside the last dark barrier that separates each individual from the world he lives in. The privacy of the mind is so jealously guarded a secret that not even if a man wills it can he wholly bare his thoughts to another. But unless Miller let Orelle into those innermost chambers there was little hope of success for any of them.
“If I don’t,” he thought, “Brann will win, in the end. And if he wins—well, I have more to lose than anyone here.” Aloud, in his mental voice, he said to Orelle, “Yes—try if you’re able.”
She smiled a little. “Let your mind go blank. Don’t offer any resistance—no, none at all—you are resisting me, Miller. Let me have the truth. Brann—Brann . . . are you Brann? I must know. . . .”
Her eyes held his and, as they had done once before, began to grow larger and larger until they blotted out the room and were a dark pool in which his consciousness was sinking. . . .
“Thank you,” Orelle said quietly. “I’m sorry. You were telling me the truth all along—unless you’re more cunning than I think you are and know how to hide your secrets even deeper than the unconscious mind. I see that you mean us well. I see another thing, too—why you came here.”
“Yes. You had to know that anyhow. It was why I asked about duplicating the Power cube.”
“He wants to take it away with him, Llesi,” Orelle said and for the first time Miller realized that Orelle had been in even closer communion with his mind than Llesi himself, who dwelt in its very center. For Llesi had not seen the depths of it—he did not know what Orelle knew now.
“To take it away?” Llesi demanded, incredulity in his thought. “But—”
“Yes,” Orelle said quickly. “We could arrange for that, Llesi. If this plan works well owe him more reward than that.”
“But Orelle,” Llesi persisted, “doesn’t he understand? Doesn’t he know that—”
The thought ceased abruptly, and Miller had the uneasy feeling that the two were communicating on some higher plane of silence where he could not follow them. He was suddenly uneasy. There was something here he didn’t understand. The two of them knew something—about himself?—that he did not yet know, something that affected his future intimately.
“What is it?” he demanded. “If I help you, I’ve a right to know.”
Orelle turned to him, her dark eyes gentle now, the hatred and mistrust gone out of them. “There isn’t time,” she said. “Listen.”
Far off, but audible through the opaque walls, the tinkle of falling glass came clearly to them.
“It’s the machine,” Llesi said. “We haven’t time to waste now. If we follow your plan we mustn’t let it win too easily or Brann will suspect. Do you have any ideas of what to do after we enter Brann’s castle?”
“Not yet,” Miller said almost absently. He was thinking hard about the strange little passage just ended. Until this moment he had not dared offer to open his whole mind for their inspection, because he had had nothing to bargain with. Inevitably Orelle would have seen that he wanted the Power and he had nothing to offer in return—until now.
Well, it was a success in one way, but in another—failure? He couldn’t be sure. Oddly the balance had shifted and it was he who mistrusted his companions and they who believed at last that he could be depended on. Certainly they were hiding something vital from him.
“Not yet,” he said again, forcing his mind to take up the immediate problem as the jangle of another falling barrier came more loudly through the walls. “I only know it’s easier to work on inspiration when you’re on the offensive—and once in Brann’s castle, we’ll need inspiration!
“Brann’s—unbalanced. We know that. Push him farther off balance by attacking and maybe we’ll have an advantage. You know, there must be something important he’s hiding or he wouldn’t operate from the dark as he does. If we can see him face to face—well, who knows?”
“When you say ‘we’,” Orelle interrupted, “whom do you mean?”
“Myself. Llesi and me.”
“And Orelle,” the girl said quietly.
“Of course not! It’s going to be dangerous. Besides—”
“No more dangerous to go than to wait for Brann’s vengeance if you fail. Tsi is my sister. I think I can control her and that should be a weapon you may need. You can’t take more than one or two with you if you hope to get in secretly so an army would do no good. But one companion—I think I could be useful to you, Miller.”
“Llesi,” Miller said to the voice in his brain, “what do you think?”
There was silence for a moment. “Let her come,” Llesi said. “What she says about Tsi is true enough. We may need her.”
In the quiet a musical ringing of more breaking glass sounded clearer than before.
“It’s coming,” Llesi said. “Now we have work to do. Are you ready, Miller? Take down that lens mounted on the tesseract and do as I tell you. We mustn’t let the machine win without a struggle. . . .”