“There is nothing you can do,” the Oblique Entity said.
When Brourne’s troops finally broke into the space-time observatory they found Leard Ascar still sitting in the transparent sphere of the all-sense transceiver.
After a matter of minutes they contrived to open the hatch. Ascar appeared not to see them. He sat muttering unintelligibly to himself, offering no resistance when they grabbed him by the arms and hauled him out.
“This must be Ascar,” the sergeant said. “If you ask me these Chink gadgets have driven him out of his mind!”
“Maybe he’s fallen foul of a Chink puzzle,” a trooper offered helpfully.
“Eh? What?” Ascar began to come round, peering at the trooper with narrowed eyes.
“Let’s get him away from here,” the sergeant ordered. “Major Brourne wants to see him right away.”
They steered Ascar out of the observatory. And then an unexpected sound caused them all at once to come to a stop and gaze at one another wonderingly. For some hours the city had been quiet, but now, from the distance, came, the sudden, continuous eruption of heavy gunfire.
Heshke accepted a tobacco roll, inhaling the fragrant smoke with a sense of special pleasure.
It was, in the fullest sense, a farewell party. They all knew that the Titans would come rolling into the reservation tomorrow, or at the latest the day after. Herrick had called together a few of his friends, as he put it, to “celebrate the end of the species”.
The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial. Heshke couldn’t help but admire the calm way the Amhraks were accepting the inevitable. Perhaps, he thought, it was the inevitability that lent such dignity. If there had been any hope at all, that might have led to panic.
Much of the conversation was in Amhrak, at which Heshke was not as yet very skilled. However, out of politeness, enough Verolian – the main language of white men that was used all over the Earth now – was spoken so that he felt by no means left out.
A lanky Amhrak girl chatted to him, sipping a glass of wine synthesised by a newly perfected process. “You must find our village rather dull after Pradna,” she said, smiling.
“I wasn’t actually in Pradna,” he told her. “I spent most of my time in the field, working on alien ruins. Pradna is a pretty ghastly place anyway, to tell you the truth. I like it much better here… in spite of what’s happening.”
As he spoke the last words he had the sinking feeling of having committed a faux pas. These people could have a taboo about speaking of… that, he thought timidly. But the girl merely laughed, quite without strain.
“It must be really awful in Pradna,” she joked, “to prefer that.”
Herrick had opened the double doors of his workshop and was fiddling with his transmitterless television receiver. To hide his embarrassment Heshke joined him, and for some minutes Herrick phased through the magnetowaves, seeking coherent visuals and gaining more than the usual number.
“Conditions are remarkably conducive tonight,” Herrick commented with some surprise. “The nodes are particularly strong. Here comes a good one.”
The view, as most of them were, was from the air. It showed the outskirts of a town of moderate size, judging by the layout of the buildings. The angle of the sun revealed the time to be midafternoon.
“Do you recognise it?” Herrick asked him.
Heshke shook his head. It could have been any of a thousand such towns.
Instead of dissipating after a few seconds, which was what normally happened, the picture lingered. Herrick managed to steady it further, until the quality was almost of commercial standard.
“At last I’m getting somewhere,” Herrick said sadly. “It seems a pity to – what’s that?”
The frame of the picture itself remained steady and bright; but certain elements in it were fading. While the two men watched (Heshke was vaguely aware of other eyes peering over his shoulder through the double doors) all the buildings in the picture seemed to melt away, leaving a bare background. Not only that, but a grove of trees also vanished, together with a stretch of grass.
What remained was bare, arid soil.
“Some effect of the system?” Heshke suggested mildly.
“I don’t see how,” Herrick muttered. “There are television systems that could produce this effect – systems employing a memory bank to hold persistent elements in the picture, so that it’s built up piece by piece – but I rely on a simple scanning procedure. Look, you can see the places where those buildings had stood. It’s just as if the whole town had disappeared into thin air.”
“Then you must have been picking up two different images superimposed,” Heshke said. “One faded out and you’re left with the other.”
“Yes, that might explain it.” Herrick nodded reluctantly. “That must be it. But as to how they came to blend so perfectly – and I thought I’d licked the tuning problem, too.”
Heshke wandered out of the room, leaving Herrick still absorbed in his apparatus.
He went onto the verandah and looked out over the desert. The night sky seemed to hold a strange, flickering light, as if lightning was playing somewhere beyond the horizon.
The attempted return to Brourne’s HQ was hectic.
They’d gone about half a mile in the squad’s armoured runabout – the Titans scorned to use Retort City’s own public transport system – when they came upon one of the main arteries that had been cleared to give the city’s new masters easy access. The highway was thundering with traffic, all of it heading toward the sound of bombs and gunfire that came from the city’s bottleneck end.
“Toward the front,” muttered the sergeant.
The wild looks on the faces of the Titans who clung to the swaying gun carriages told them that the situation had more than a measure of desperation. No natives were in sight: presumably they were all huddling somewhere, terrified of Titan savagery when the going got tough. A Titan soldier, for example, would shoot anyone who happened to be standing in his way when a sense of urgency overtook him.
“What in the Mother’s name is going on, sarge?” one of the troopers asked.
“Must be something big.” He ruminated. “Maybe the Chinks were holding onto their defences.” He nudged the driver. “Our job is to get this man to HQ. Get across the highway when there’s a gap and go by way of the secondary route.”
The highway came in from the main supply dump, close to the dock. HQ was in a central part of the city. Eventually they crossed the busy viaduct and continued, past empty tiers, galleries and plazas.
“This place gives me the creeps,” someone grumbled. “I’ll be glad to get back to Pradna.”
Ahead of them was a machine gun post. Troopers yelled at them, brought them to a halt.
“You can’t go up there,” a corporal told them, “it’s cut off.”
“Cut off by who?”
“The Chinks have an army,” the corporal said stolidly. “Everything’s in chaos.”
Suddenly the machine gun gave out a short stuttering burst. “Here they come!” yelled the man firing it.
The sergeant reached into the runabout and brought out his burp gun. He could see them, too, now, emerging from the end of a tree-lined avenue. They wore rough, blue uniforms and wide-brimmed dome helmets.
He rapped out orders. The armoured runabout proceeded slowly up the avenue, its occupants firing from its slits. He stayed with the machine gun crew, down on one knee, peering over the barricade and fingering his burp gun.
And then, without any warning, the Chinks were upon them: all around them, as if they’d dropped from the nonexistent sky.