“If I could banish fear from the hearts of Humans?” said Kane softly.
“I would have New York by dawn. But it would take a miracle.”
“Perhaps! Do you think you can get through the cordon and reach your men?”
“I could if I had to. What are you going to do?”
“You will know when it happens.” Kane was smiling fiercely. “And when it does happen, strike!”
There was a Tonite gun in Tymball’s hand suddenly, as he backed away. His plump face was not at all gentle, “I’ll take a chance, Kane. Good-bye 1”
The captain strode up the deserted marble steps of the Memorial arrogantly. He was flanked on each side by an armed adjutant.
He paused an instant before the huge double-door that loomed up before him and stared at the slender pillars that soared gracefully upwards at its sides.
There was faint sarcasm in his smile, “Impressive, all this, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Captain!” was the double reply.
“And mysteriously dark, too, except for the dim yellow of their Flame. You see its light?” He pointed toward the stained glass of the bottom windows, which glinted flickeringly.
“Yes, Captain!”
“It’s dark, and mysterious, and impressive-and it is about to fall in ruins.” He laughed, and suddenly brought the butt end of his saber down upon the metal carvings on the door in a clanging salvo.
It echoed through the emptiness within and sounded hollowly in the night, but there was no answer.
The adjutant at his left raised his televisor to his ear and caught the faint words issuing therefrom. He saluted, “Captain, the Humans are crowding into the sector.”
The captain sneered, “Let them! Order the guns placed in readiness and aimed along the avenues. Any Human attempting to pass the cordon is to be rayed mercilessly.”
His barked command was murmured into the televisor, and a hundred yards beyond, Lhasinuic Guardsmen put guns in order and aimed them carefully. A low, inchoate murmur went up-a murmur of fear. Men pressed back.
“If the door does not open,” said the captain, grimly, “it is to be broken down.” He raised his saber again, and again there was the thunder of metal on metal.
Slowly, noiselessly, the door yawned wide, and the captain recognized the stem, purple-clad figure that stood before him.
“Who disturbs the Memorial on the night of the Guarding of the Flame?” demanded Loara Paul Kane solemnly.
“Very dramatic, Kane. Stand aside!”
“Back!” The words rang out loudly and clearly. “The Memorial may not be approached by the Lhasinu.”
“Yield us our prisoner, and we leave. Refuse, and we will take him by force.”
“The Memorial yields no prisoner. It is inviolate. You may not enter.”
“Make way!”
“Stand back!”
The Lhasinu growled throatily and became aware of a dim roaring. The streets about him were empty, but a block away in every direction was the thin line of Lhasinuic troops, stationed at their guns, and beyond were the Humans. They were massed in noisy thickness and the whites of their faces shone palely in the Chrome-lights.
“What,” gritted the captain to himself, “do the scum yet snarl?” His tough skin ridged at the jaws and the scales upon his head uptilted sharply. He turned to the adjutant with the televisor. “Order a round over their heads.”
The night was split in two by the purple blasts of energy and the Lhasinu laughed aloud at the silence that followed.
He turned to Kane, who remained standing upon the threshold. “So you see that if you expect help from your people, you will be disappointed. The next round will be aimed at head level. If you think that bluff, try me!”
Teeth clicked together sharply, “Make way!” A Tonite was leveled in his hand, and thumb was firm upon the trigger.
Loara Paul Kane retreated slowly, eyes upon the gun. The captain followed. And as he did so, the inner door of the anteroom swung open and the Hall of the Flame stood revealed. In the sudden draft, the Flame staggered, and at the sight of it, there came a huge shout from the distant spectators.
Kane turned toward it, face raised upwards. The motion of one of his hands was all but imperceptible.
And the Flame suddenly changed. It steadied and roared up to the vaulted ceiling, a blazing shaft fifty feet high. Loara Paul Kane’s hand moved again, and as it did so, the Flame turned carmine. The color deepened and the crimson light of that flaming pillar streamed out into the city and turned the Memorial’s windows into staring, bloody eyes.
Long seconds passed, while the captain froze in bewilderment; while the distant mass of Humanity fell into awed silence.
And then there was a confused murmur, which strengthened and grew and split itself into one vast shout.
“Down with the Lhasinu!”
There was the purple flash of a Tonite from somewhere high above, and the captain came to life an instant too late. Caught squarely, he bent slowly to his death; cold, reptilian face a mask of contempt to the last.
Russell Tymball brought down his gun and smiled sardonically, “A perfect target against the Flame. Good for Kanel The changing of the Flame was just the emotion-stirring thing we needed. Let’s go!”
From the roof of Kane’s dwelling he aimed down upon the Lhasinu below. And as he did, all Hell erupted. Men mushroomed from the very ground, it seemed, weapons in hand. Tonites blazed from every side, before the startled Lhasinu could spring to their triggers.
And when they did so, it was too late, for the mob, white-hot with flaring rage, broke its bounds. Someone shrieked, “Kill the lizards!” and the cry was taken up in one roaring ululation that swelled to the sky.
Like a many-headed monster, the stream of Humanity surged forward, weaponless. Hundreds withered under the belated fury of the defending guns, and tens of thousands scrambled over the corpses, charging to the very muzzles.
The Lhasinu never wavered. Their ranks thinned steadily under the deadly sharp-shooting of the Tymballists, and those that remained were caught by the Human flood that surged over them and tore them to horrible death.
The Memorial sector gleamed in the crimson of the bloody Flame and echoed to the agony of the dying, and the shrieking fury of the triumphant.
It was the first battle of the Great Rebellion, but it was not really a battle, or even madness. It was concentrated anarchy.
Throughout the city, from the tip of Long Island to the mid-Jersey flatlands, rebels sprang from nowhere and Lhasinu went to their death. And as quickly as Tymball’s orders spread to raise the snipers, so did the news of the changing of the Flame speed from mouth to mouth and grow in the telling. All New York heaved, and poured its separate lives into the single giant crucible of the “mob.”
It was uncontrollable, unanswerable, irresistible. The Tymballists followed helplessly where it led, all efforts at direction hopeless from the start.
Like a mighty river, it lashed its way through the metropolis, and where it passed no living Lhasinu remained.
The sun of that fateful morning arose to find the masters of Earth occupying a shrinking circle in upper Manhattan. With the cool courage of born soldiers, they linked arms and withstood the charging, shrieking millions. Slowly, they backed away; each building a skirmish; each block a desperate battle. They split into isolated groups; defending first a building, and then its upper stories, and finally its roof.
With the noonday sun boiling down, only the Palace itself remained. Its last desperate stand held the Humans at bay. The withering circle of fire about it paved the grounds with blackened bodies. The Viceroy himself from his throneroom directed the defense; his own hand upon the butt of a semiportable.
And then, when the mob had finally come to a pause, Tymball seized his opportunity and took the lead. Heavy guns clanked to the front Atomos and delta-rays, from the rebel stock and from the stores captured the previous night, pointed their death-laden muzzles at the Palace.
Gun answered gun, and the first organized battle of machines flared into desperate fury. Tymball was an omnipresent figure, shouting, directing, leaping from gun-emplacement to gun-emplacement, firing his own band Tonite defiantly at the Palace.
Under a barrage of the heaviest fire, the Humans charged once more and pierced to the walls as the defenders fell back. An Atomo projectile smashed its way into the central tower and there was a sudden inferno of fire.
That blaze was the funeral pyre of the last of the Lhasinu in New York. The blackening walls of the palace crumbled in, in one vast crash; but to the very last, room blazing about him, face horribly cut, the Viceroy stood his ground, aiming into the thick of the besieging force. And when his semi-portable expended the last dregs of its power and expired, he heaved it out the window in a last futile gesture of defiance, and plunged into the burning Hell at his back.
Above the Palace grounds at sunset, with a yet-roaring furnace as the background, there floated the green flag of independent Earth.
New York was once more Human.
Russell Tymball was a sorry figure when he entered the Memorial once more that night. Clothes in tatters, and bloody from head to foot from the undressed cut on his cheek, he surveyed the carnage about him with sated eyes.
Volunteer squads, occupied in removing the dead and tending to the wounded had not yet succeeded in making more than a dent in the deadly work of the rebellion.
The Memorial was an improvised hospital. There were few wounded, for energy weapons deal death; and of these few, almost none slightly. It was a scene of indescribable confusion, and the moans of the hurt and dying mingled horribly with the distant yells of celebrating war-drunk survivors.