Polly said: “Hullo, Varnat. Don’t give up hope yet. Mister Crane has joined us — and he has a rifle—”
“Thank you, my child, for your wise attempt to comfort us. But what do the Loti know of rifles, or weapons of murder and maiming? If we were given to remorse we would rue the day Trangor set foot aboard our ship for our high venture among the stars. But it is too late for that now.”
“What bothers me,” Gould put in, “is McArdle’s strong-arm stuff. He doesn’t know how weak the Loti are now; he’ll come busting in here with his tanks and rupture the wall’s defenses. He sent you in first to draw their fire, skipper. He anticipated you’d be taken up by the Loti almost as soon as you’d set foot inside — why weren’t you, anyway?”
Varnat answered, his purple-lidded eyes heavy with weariness. “Crane possesses the Amullieh — or enough of it to prevent our transporting him. Trangor for all his wickedness was a master craftsman.”
“I have abhorred violence,” Crane said softly. “But it has been forced upon me again. If McArdle comes into my sights I shall shoot—”
“Trangor no longer understands.” Varnat waved a pencil thin hand towards the horizon.
“When he left us all that land was calm, cultivated, ready to accept the gracious villas we would build for our children and give to them the new life and new world we had planned. Now, look!”
Crane took his eyes away quickly. The ground beyond the immediate circle around the city heaved like a stew, gouting and roiling, hideous.
He looked again at the Loti. Withered and old Varnat appeared; but he recalled old Liam and guessed that disappointment and the burning out of a dream had ravaged the Loti past endurance.
Sorrow for him welled up — and then the building shuddered again.
“He is burrowing in,” Varnat said calmly. But his hands played across those confusing controls with nervous vagueness.
“From the face screen above Varnat’s face a golden light issued. Like a genie from a bottle it grew, wavering upright and growing until it parted from its source. Crane stared fascinated as a lozenge of living light soared out and over the wall, swooped away towards the distant trees. Varnat pulled the face mask down over his eyes and sat, entranced.
“So that’s how they do it,” Crane whispered.
“McArdle knows the Loti won’t fight.” Gould shaded his eyes and peered over the golden, writhing landscape. “But he also knows the strength of the defenses against chaos. He thought you’d help to smash them for him. And he’s hurling the Wardens in attack and burrowing in below. He’s really hurling in a terrible force, although to ordinary eyes it is not impressive. But — what he doesn’t know is the true weakness of the Loti. He’s using a bulldozer to shift an anthill.”
“It can only be a matter of an hour or two.” Polly turned bright eyes on Crane. “And, my dear, I think your rifle will prove of no avail.”
“Faith, if we’re to die,” Colla said with true Irish pugnacity, “I’ll take a few o’ the spalpeens with me, surely I will!”
“There is only one,” Polly reminded him gently.
And Crane thought of her saying “my dear” and in that moment of bitter acceptance of defeat her words were of far more importance.
And then, shockingly, a bestial wave of violence surged through Crane’s mind. His fingers gripped on the rifle savagely. “He’s only one! And he can be killed in a human body! By God! I’ll blow him to hell and gone!”
Turning and beginning to run so abruptly he collided with Colla and sent the Irishman staggering, Crane ran clattering down the stairs and escalators, leaping four treads at a time. He’d ask Polly why the Loti needed stairs some other time. Probably for their kids before they grew old enough to graduate to one of those marvellous chairs. His feet slammed the marble paving. Behind him he heard the rest of the Earth-people in full cry after him. The time for questions and answers was over. Ahead lay only the promise of action that would end, it seemed, in the inevitable death of them all.
And the destruction of the Earth he called home; that, too, would follow as Trangor’s evil plans succeeded.
Crane shouted back over his shoulder, harshly, and the light glanced from the planes of his face, gave him a wolfishly devil’s look of evil intent. “Keep back! If McArdle fires that damn great cannon of his he’ll blow you all up! I’ll tackle him by myself!”
Varnat’s chair atop its shining bowl skimmed lightly down. “If many explosions tear at the foundations of this place, weakened as it is by the slackening grip of the forces holding chaos at bay, the whole will crumble and fall.”
Before the Loti had finished the walls and floor shook to a subterranean rumble; pieces of marble facing fell and splintered in icy shards.
“Sounds as though he’s doing all right already.” Crane motioned to Varnat. “You know the way down to the vaults. Take me there. Pronto.” And Crane flung himself up onto the rear of Varnat’s bowl, grasped the seat in his left hand, pressed himself to the chair back. “Get moving!”
Down through the giddy perspectives of giant halls and the cyclopean architecture of a race of master builders, Varnat’s chair flitted, leaving Allan Gould’s cry dissipating on the air: “Hey! Skipper! Wait for me!”
Past marvel after marvel Varnat took Crane, skimming through a wonderland of scientific equipment so that Crane’s mind reeled, stunned. He was roused as the Loti’s quiet controlled voice spoke to him: “As death for us all is so close I am doing as you wish. For there seems nothing else to do… I am old and weary… I shall not be sorry to leave this sphere and—”
“Forget that sort of talk, Varnat. We’re not licked yet. Okay, so we’re going to die; but I’m an Earthman and until I’m good and dead I won’t believe it! You know where McArdle — that is, Trangor — is heading for down here. Whistle us to it, fast. He took a shot at me when I couldn’t do anything about it. But” — Crane hefted the rifle — “this time I can!”
And so, like a phantom rider in an hallucinatory dream, Crane rode the back of an alien other-dimensional chair skimming ever deeper into the depths of another earth.
McArdle had planned his campaign well — against a foe who had mighty defenses to resist him. Against the pitiful cobwebs remaining to the Loti, McArdle had knifed through like a scalpel opening a boil. Long before Crane reached the lowest level of the vaults the sound and fury of McArdle’s breaching machines reached up, and smoke and fumes roiled up the descending spirals. He slipped off Varnat’s chair as the Loti coughed and slammed down his face mask. The oldster couldn’t take the fumes.
“Thanks, Varnat. You go back. I’ll tackle McArdle from here.”
“Wait, Crane—” The voice whispered from the mask, “Look — beyond the crystal screen…”
Crane looked.
Set in a twenty-foot high alcove in the wall, ringed in purple shadow and yet haloed in silver light, like an alien and evil eye, a Loti sat slumped in his bowl-chair. Light splintered from an impermeable barrier before him. Away beyond the alcove the passageway wandered off into the bowels of the earth, lights dimming fainter and fainter with distance. In the air ozone stung the unexpecting nostril, and rivulets of black earth ran from cracks slowly widening in the ceiling.
But Crane, backed off against the far wall, riveted his eyes on the lone Loti, sitting his chair, immobile and silent in his tomb of crystal.