CHAPTER V
An hour later, Tommy took his eyes away from the dimensoscope eyepiece. He could not bear to look any longer.
«Why don’t they kill him?» he demanded sickly, filled with a horrible, a monstrous rage. «Oh, why don’t they kill him?»
He felt maddeningly impotent. In another world entirely, a mob of half-naked renegades had made a prisoner. He was not dead, that solely surviving man from the Golden City. He was bound, and the Ragged Men guarded him closely, and his guards were diverting themselves unspeakably by small tortures, minor tortures, horribly painful but not weakening. And they capered and howled with glee when the bound man writhed.
The prisoner was a brave man, though. Helpless as he was, he presently flung back his head and set his teeth. Sweat stood out in great droplets upon his body and upon his forehead. And he stilled his writhings and looked at his captors with a grim and desperate defiance.
The guards made gestures which were all too clear, all too luridly descriptive of the manner of death which awaited him. And the man of the Golden City was ashen and hopeless and utterly despairing- and yet defiant.
Smithers took Tommy’s place at the eyepiece of the instrument. His nostrils quivered at what he saw. The vehicle from the Golden City was being plundered, of course. Weapons from the dead men were being squabbled over, even fought over. And the Ragged Men fought as madly among themselves as if in combat with their enemies. The big golden weapon on its cart was already being dragged away to its former hiding place. And somehow, it was clear that those who dragged it away expected and demanded that the solitary prisoner not be killed until their return.
It was that prisoner, in the agony which was only the beginning of his death, who made Smithers’s teeth set tightly.
«I don’t see the Professor or Miss Evelyn,» said Smithers in a vast calmness. «I hope to Gawd they-don’t see this.»
Tommy swung on his heel, staring and ashen.
«They were near,» he said stridently. «I saw them! They saw what happened in the ambush! They’ll-they’ll see that man tortured!»
Smithers’s hand closed and unclosed.
«Maybe the Professor’ll have sense enough to take Miss Evelyn- uh-where she-can’t hear,» he said slowly, his voice level. «I hope so.,,
Tommy flung out his hands desperately.
«I want to help that man!» he cried savagely. «I want to do something! I saw what they promised to do to him. I want to-to kill him, even! It would be mercy!»
Smithers said, with a queer, stilly shock in his voice, «I see the Professor now. He’s got that gun-thing in his hand… Miss Evelyn’s urging him to try to do something… He’s looking at the sky. -.. It’ll be a long time before it’s dark… He’s gone back out of sight…
«If we had some dynamite!» said Tommy desperately, «we could take a chance on blowing ourselves to bits and try to fling it through and into the middle of those devils. -.
He was pacing up and down the laboratory, harrowed by the fate of that gray-faced man who awaited death by torture; filled with a wild terror that Evelyn and her father would try to rescue him and be caught to share his fate; racked by his utter impotence to do more than watch… Then Smithers said thickly, «God!»
He stumbled away from the eyepiece. Tommy took his place, drythroated with terror. He saw the Ragged Men laughing uproariously. The bearded man who.was their leader was breaking the arms and legs of the prisoner so that he would be helpless when released from the stake to which he was bound. And if ever human beings looked like devils out of hell, it was at that moment. The method of breaking the bones was excruciating. The prisoner screamed. The Ragged Men rolled upon the ground in their maniacal mirth.
And then a man dropped, heaving convulsively, and then another, and still another… The grim, gaunt figure of Denham came out of the tree-fern forest, the queer small golden-metal truncheon in his hand. A fourth man dropped before the Ragged Men quite realized what had happened. The fourth man himself was armed-and a flashing slender body came plunging from the forest and Evelyn flung herself upon the still-heaving body and plucked away that weapon.
Tommy groaned, in the laboratory in another world. He could not look away, and yet it seemed that the heart would be torn from his body by that sight. Because the Ragged Men had turned upon Denham with a concentrated ferocity, somehow knowing instantly that he was more nearly akin to the men of the Golden City than to them. But at sight of Evelyn, her garments rent by the thorns of the forest, her white body gleaming through the largest tears, they seemed to go mad. And Tommy’s eyes, glazing, saw the look on Denham’s face as he realized that Evelyn had not fled, but had followed him in his desperate and wholly hopeless effort.
Then the swarming mass of Ragged Men surged over the two of them. Buried them under reaching, hating, lusting fiends who fought even among themselves to be first to seize them. Then there was only madness, and Denham was bound beside the man of the Golden City, and Evelyn was the center of a fighting group which was suddenly flung aside by the bearded giant, and the encampment of the Ragged Men was bedlam. And somehow Tommy knew with a terrible clarity that a man of the Golden City to torture was bliss unimaginable to these half-mad enemies of that city. But a woman- He turned from the instrument, three-quarters out of his head. He literally did not see Von Holtz gazing furtively in the doorway. His eyes were fixed and staring. It seemed that his brain would burst. Then he heard his own voice saying with an altogether unbe lievable steadiness, «Smithers! They’ve got Evelyn. Get the submachine gun.»
Smithers cried out hoarsely. His face was not quite human, for an instant. But Tommy was bringing the work bench on which he had installed his magnetic catapult, close over by the dimensoscope.
«This cannot work,» he said in the same incredible calmness. «Not possibly. It should not work. It will not work. But it has to work!»
He was clamping the catapult to a piece of heavy timber.
«Put the gun so it shoots into the first magnet,» he said steadily. «The magnet windings shouldn’t stand the current we’ve got to put into them. They’ve got to.»
Smithers’s fingers were trembling and unsteady. Tommy helped him, not looking through the dimensoscope at all.
«Start the dynamo,» he said evenly-and marveled foolishly at the voice that did not seem to belong to him at all, talking so steadily and so quietly. «Give me all the juice you’ve got. We’ll cut out this rheostat.»
He was tightening a vise which would hold the deadly little weapon in place while Smithers got the crude-oil engine going and accelerated it recklessly to its highest speed. Tommy flung the switch. Rubber insulation steamed and stank. He pulled the trigger of the little gun for a single shot. The bullet flew into the first hollow magnet, just as he had beforehand thrust an iron wire. It vanished. The series of magnets seemed unharmed.
With a peculiar, dreamlike steadiness, Tommy put his hand where an undeflected bullet would go through it. He pressed the trigger again. He felt a tiny breeze upon his hand. But the bullet had been unable to elude the compound-wound magnets, each of which now had quite four times the designed voltage impressed upon its coils.
Tommy flung off the switch.
«Work the gun,» he ordered harshly. «When I say fire, send a burst of shots through it. Keep the switch off except when you’re actually firing, so-God willing-the coils don’t burn out. Fire!»
He was gazing through the dimensoscope. Evelyn was struggling helplessly while two Ragged Men held her arms, grinning as only devils could have grinned, and others squabbled and watched with a fascinated attention some cryptic process which could only be the drawing of lots…
Tommy saw, and paid no attention. The machine gun beside him rasped suddenly. He saw a tree-fern frond shudder. He saw a gaping, irregular hole where a fresh frond was uncurling. Tommy put out his hand to the gun.