"Oh-yes, Roc." He and Roc hurried away, leaving Jimmy alone, nursing his leg, pondering his plan.
And he was still pondering it, when in the midst of the cloud of flying girls, he rode the platform with Rocthe metallic desert beneath them, and overhead the lowering black sky. A black storm was coming.
Roc was stretched now at the platform stem; Jimmy was fa front. At the handles, jutting out, their girls flew, seven on each side. Only one of them spoke English, and hers was very limited. A girl named Grazia. She flew at the lefthand leading position, her wing-stroke setting the beat for the others. Her small, earnest face, flushed with exertion, was only a few feet from Jimmy's. Occasionally, as she turned to glance at him, he would smile and nod to her, or call a chasing jovial encouragement. The girls of this crew all seemed to like Jimmy. But they obviously did not like Roc.
At last, far ahead against the dark horizon, the black peaks of the mountains loomed up.
Like a great gash in the tumbled mountainous ridge wound the black canyon. Its smooth metallic walls were for the most part sheerly perpendicular, a thousand feet high. It was narrow, frequently curving in broad sweeps, or again turning sharply. In places it was five hundred feet wide, in others less than two hundred.
The walls were eroded with lateral ridges, one above the other as though left by nature to mark the ages of the drying river which once had surged through here. In the heart of the Dark Mountains, the canyon widened abruptly into a great irregularly shaped bowl, where once a lake must have been. Nearly circular, it was some six miles in diameter: A broken, ridged floor of strewn boulders, gullies and ravines, surrounded by sheer circular walls like a crater rim, broken and jagged on top.
In this great bowl, Dorrek had set his encampment. His forces were arriving from the upper canyon entrance at the Cold Country side; and it was from the lower canyon entrance that Grenfell and his army approached. Grenfell learned afterward that Dorrek's force was already almost complete. What few came later, seeing the distant conflict, undoubtedly turned back and fled.
As Jimmy rode his swaying platform, winging low over the narrowing black canyon, he could see very little of the region's formation. It was now almost black night. The Cube had sailed ahead. Twenty girls had gone cautiously with the Cube. They came winging back, flying in broken formation, scattering to the flying platforms and to the leaders of the various crops of girls with Grenfell's orders.
Jimmy and Roc saw the alarm given long before their platform arrived upon the scene. Light flares bursting in the distance, illumed the black sky and the towering jagged mountain peaks. The steady, rumbling hiss of giant projectors.
Jimmy thought that the attack had already begun. The Cube came sailing back, high overhead, turned in a tenmile semicircle, and swept forward again.
One of the largest platforms carrying a huge projector with four men to operate it dropped down and landed upon the canyon rim at the entrance to the six-mile bowl. The canyon here was no more than two hundred feet wide. The projector, mounted upon the rim, would dominate this exit.
Half of Grenfell's force landed at this point. The other half, including Jimmy and Roc, swept a mile back to the left, avoiding the open bowl. Jimmy saw great shafts of blue-green light rays standing like searchlight beams into the air. A cir-ular curtain of deadly hght in the center of the bowl.
Jimmy and Roc, following orders, flew in a wide detour to the left and landed on the crater rim, where the canyon stretched off toward the Cold Country. There were a few of Dorrek's guards on the top of these walls, but at once they scattered and fled.
Dorrek was now trapped in the rocky bowl. As Grenfell had foreseen, he went instantly on the defensive. When the alarm came, the silver ball had been resting at the bottom of the valley near one of its side walls. Dorrek immediately moved it to the center of the bowl, three miles from the nearest enclosing cliffs.
Two hours passed, which were horribly irksome to the waiting Jimmy.
Near the top of the thousand-foot precipice at the opening to the valley, Grenfell's encampment was springing into existence on a boulder-strewn plateau. The Cube had landed on a nearby rocky eminence which dominated the scene.
The men and the four hundred girls unloaded the Cube's supply of tents, lights, cables, batteries and light mechanisms; the food supplies; weapons and defensive armament.
Within an hour the tents and lights were erecteda little huddled group of dark-fabric shelters, strewn amid the rocks.
Tiny hooded green lights dotted it, their dim radiance disclosing the figures of the winged girls moving busily about The first meal was in preparation.
Jimmy called to Roc as the Mercurian laboriously hauled the base section of a projector to a spot where someone had said it should be taken.
"How far is the brink from here? I'm going there." Roc answered his smile. "Of course, Turk." He called a passing' girl, instructed her to have the projector assembled.
very well, Turk. Come put your arm on my shoulder." Jimmy found that he could almost hobble. He weighed hardly sixty pounds here on Mercury. With his arm over Roc's shoulders, they made a fair speed, passing beyond the lights of the camp, heading to the nearby brink where they could see over the valley.
Fragments of information which Roc had picked up he now gave Jimmy. Dorrek was caught in the valley. His m."" and brues were dovm there clustered around the silver ba~ In all, they occupied a space of about a mile-wide circle, out in the center of the valley. There was no projector in either camp which could reach the other.
On the heights of the lower canyon entrance, Grenfell's second camp was being established. There was no way for Dorrek's men and brues to get out of the valley without passing through one of these two narrow gorges, both of which Grenfell's projectors now dominated.
Across the dark rocky distance, in the direction of the Light Country, Jimmy thought he could distinguish the tiny lights of the other camp six miles away. Overhead a small group of girls winged off in that direction.
"Look!" exclaimed Roc suddenly.
They turned. Behind them, in the darkness a mile back on this upper plateau, was turmoil. Vague blurred sounds in the heavy, motionless night air. Tiny flashes of blue-green lightlittle beams leaping down, crossing with others leaping up. It lasted only a moment or two. The beams were extinguished; the sounds died. Jimmy learned afterward that a small group of armed girls, flying to investigate the surrounding country, had come upon a few of Dorrek's lurking men. And a brue. The men and the brue were killed, and three of the girls.
Grenfell now established patrols for all this neighborhood.
At intervals they passed overhead, flying low with their searchbeams sweeping the crags.
It was a painfully long hobble for Jimmy, but at last he and Roc came to the brink of the cliff. In the center of the valley Dorrek had set up a ring of giant projectors, a mile in diameter, within which his army was enclosed. They were pointed directly upward, spreading beams of blue-green. At a few hundred feet above the ground they crossed, mingled into a solid curtain of light, a circular, mile-wide upstanding funnel.
It was queerly non-radiant, this barrage; inherently bluegreen, but it did not illumine the valley. The rocky floor, even close to where the projectors were set, was solid black. Nor did it radiate much heat. Within the beams of that thin, glowing curtain, the temperature must have been several thousand degrees centigradeforty times the boiling point of water perhaps. But twenty feet away, its heat could scarcely be felt.