Then he was snaking up through the blackness, moving amazingly fast if one thought of him as eyeless, progressing normally if one remembered he had radar cells. Dirt crashed down in handfuls, but there was no sign of a cave-in. Mayna went next with Seer, passing without notice, blending with the walls. Gone. Fish followed, then Babe, at his insistence. Hunk and he were the last. Heaving mightily, he lurched upward. He was grateful for his new and powerful body, for without it, he could never have done what was expected of him.
They broke ground in a pile of rocks just as Corgi had said. Straight ahead a clump of brush and trees loomed darkly. He wondered whether they had transferred the trees as well as the caves, then decided they hadn't. There were many other clumps of growth further out, exactly like this one, and they would not have transferred them all. Possibly, in the old city, this clump of brush and trees had been closer to the outlet. A thousand feet was a terribly long way when the guards were so close. He swiveled his head about, taking Hunk's with it, to look at the wall which was not even two hundred feet away. Once he had reached the trees where the others now waited, the growth would conceal their retreat to the meeting place the Old Man had chosen. This was the only dangerous ground, this open space. Heaving again, he cleared the rocks and began running, his ankles twisting slightly in the loose sand. But he would have made it — would have if some citizen had not been leaving the gate then. The huge portals swung open, and floodlights flashed on to show the traveler the road. The light caught him and Hunk. Plainly. Brightly. Less than half a dozen seconds passed before a stronger light snapped on, found him. The sand began boiling as near-miss laser beams splashed around him. The shrubs seemed an eternity away.
The searchlights began fanning the bushes, more than a dozen of then now, picking out darker forms that were Corgi, Babe, the others. Beams lanced in, setting the desert weed on fire. The brush erupted quickly, jumping from a tiny tongue of flame to an impenetrable wall of fire. The others were running from it. He saw Mayna fall on her belly, take aim, and laser out a searchlight. Another. Another still.
He ran, his tongue lolling from the corner of his mouth much like the tongue of a dog. He dropped onto the sand next to the others and drew his own pistol. Hunk had one clutched in his tentacle. They fired. Now and then he saw a guard slump away from the wall where he had been hiding. The majority of the Romaghins, however, were behind portions of the wall that were too well fortified and were too wary of the lasers to let themselves be injured very easily. Mayna pumped steadily at the lights, every shot counting, every shot making their hiding place a little less brilliantly illuminated. But the wall guards were searching out the source of her beam, trying to fix the exact location. Every shot she fired added to their basis for calculations, helped them vector in on her. A block of guards came through the gate, the front line blasting steadily to cover their advance.
“Run!” Corgi shouted, following his own advice.
They leaped from the sand and rounded the wall of flame, momentarily putting a barrier between themselves and the troops. But the Romaghins would soon clear it too. And suddenly they had cleared it. There was a scream. Tohm turned to his right and saw Fish grabbing at the air, his arms stroking as if he were swimming through very thick water. Then he fell, burning, rolled several times, and was still.
Tohm looked at his watch.
At first, nothing seemed to focus. Then his vision cleared through sheer willpower. There were still ten minutes until the Old Man arrived. Ten minutes, he realized, as Seer lost his head in a blaze of purple light and crashed to his knees, would be much too late. Much.
XIV
They were behind a ridge of sand, firing at the mass of Romaghin guards that had collected in the windblown dunes ahead. It was only a matter of minutes, Tohm knew, until the officers would direct their flanks to spread out and surround the Muties. And worst of all, they were too outnumbered to do anything about it. Far away, the roar of a desert tanker droned steadily forward, closer, louder. When the tanker moved in between the Romaghins and Muties and began lobbing shells, they would be dead to the last. He realized that the guards would not risk their own lives when a deadly and efficient machine like the tanker could kill for them.
Mayna was crying about Seer and Fish. It was the first time he had seen her cry real tears.
Corgi was cursing the oncoming artillery.
Just that suddenly, the thought of artillery reminded him of Jumbo Ten. Somewhere in his brain, a memory was dug out of storage and dusted off. The small communications bulb in his ear! He lifted a finger to the fleshy lobe. The bulb was still there, a little lump in the fat. He pressed it between two fingers, smashed it, activating the chemical broadcasters. Instantly, J-10 would be firing loose of the sands, homing in on the beam. Eight hundred miles at 24,000 miles an hour top speed. That meant it would be there in — he began doing some swift calculations…
But before he could even decide on a relative arrival time, he heard the roar of the mighty engines, the whine of the air being squeezed out of the way, rent in two like an old, rotten curtain. The retro-rockets fired a hundred miles off, lighting the sky. Then, abruptly, the giant machine was crashing down a hundred yards ahead, blocking his view of most of the Romaghins.
The tiny, sonic scope twiddled about, hunting his voice which it had recorded on its memory bank tapes.
“Behind and to the right,” he said. “Kill those soldiers.”
The Jumbo readjusted its position. The Romaghins, thinking at first that it was their own machine sent somehow, miraculously, to aid them, stood and began running toward it, laughing. Most ceased chuckling and guffawing when their first ranks were gunned down with laser cannon. They turned to run. But cannon beams and gas shells tore up the sand and the men indiscriminately. The armored tanker, seeing the gargantuan robot, wheeled about, tried to retreat. It made a dozen yards before the laser cannon melted it into slag.
The Muties were cheering. Babe had hold of Tohm's neck and was nearly strangling him with one arm while clubbing him with the cast of the other.
“Yours?” Corgi shouted.
“Mine!” He turned to Jumbo Ten which sat with all weapons ready. “At ease.”
The humming softened.
“We'll walk before it to where we meet the Old Man. We keep that Jumbo,” Corgi said excitedly. “We may need it before this is all over.”
“Hey!” Mayna shouted, pointing toward a sled that had drifted in low from the gate. There was a single figure on it. Small. As it came closer, Tohm could see that it was the boy with the white eyes, the albino who wan't an albino.
“Tohm!” Hunk shouted. “Order the Jumbo to—”
But then there was no Jumbo.
There was nothing for Tohm for one split second, then:
A lightningbolt smashed!
Another blasted down!
And yet another!
And out of the mists of their ozone clouds she came, faceless, moving easily, graceful, slinking…
But no face…
And no name…
He concentrated on her face, on what it should be, on what he knew it must look like…
Green eyes…
Green, green, greengreengreen…