The towering Neshgai leader raised his ponderous stone axe, trumpeted shrilly and roared. "For Nesh and our ruler and Shegnif!"
He ran swiftly forward with the twenty giants behind him. Ulysses counted to ten and gave the order for his men to follow him. Behind was Awina and then the Wufea, Wagarondit and Alkunquib. After them came the Vroomaw soldiers. The only ones who did not go into the hole were the bombmen and rocketeers in the cockpits and the side domes. All his party wore quilted armour and faceplates. The Dhulhulikh were forty-pound pygmies, but their tiny arrows carried a deadly poison. One prick, and a six-hundred-pound Neshgai would be dead in ten seconds, a hundred-fifty-pound man in two.
"Follow me!" Ulysses shouted, and walked swiftly into the cavern. It was dark at first, but after the second turn in a tunnel wide enough for two men abreast, he came to the first of the internal chambers. This was lit with hundreds of clusters of some vegetable growths that gave a cold light. The light shone on the bloody and dismembered pieces of females, children and old men. There were also a few bodies the heads of which had been smashed by the stone axes or clubs of the Neshgai.
After this chamber, they entered a large one consisting of a twenty-foot-wide street with four levels of open chambers on each side. Apparently, the chambers were occupied by families. Light was provided by the same vegetable growth, which had spread out vine fashion everywhere. There were more dead and mangled females and children on the street, and some frightened faces peering out of the open doorways of the chambers above.
So far, the evidence indicated that the entire adult male population had swarmedout to attack the invaders.
Ulysses made a quick decision. He split his forces into half and left one party at the first turn in the wall. They would hold this if the males tried to re-enter while a messenger came after the other half. All the rockets except three were left with the holding party.
If it had not been for the directions of the Dhulhulikh prisoners, they would have been lost. Corridor after corridor, many of them as wide and high as the one they were on, branched out. Looking down these, Ulysses could see other corridors. The trunk — and the branches radiating from it — was honeycombed. There was room for far more than the thirty-five thousand the prisoners had estimated as the population.
They passed chambers where animals were penned up, and others where strange plants grew in the cold light of the vegetable lamps. They saw many more tiny faces of women and children looking from the open doorways. Infrequently, Ulysses halted the party and sent a scout up to inspect the rooms above them. He did not want to be ambushed. Each time, the scout reported that the majority of the rooms were empty.
The party pushed on, and then they came to the section which Ulysses had hoped they would find. There were about forty mangled corpses of Dhulhulikh males here. They had fought bravely but futilely against the giants. Two of these lay dead, their once-grey skins purple. The little archers had sent their arrows under the faceplates into the skin; they must have stood at the feet of the elephantine men and fired upward just before the axes smashed their heads in.
They had been defending a huge chamber which had to be the main centre of communication for the Dhulhulikh. Around the walls, on three levels, were at least a hundred huge diaphragms. And there were about fifty more corpses and three more dead Neshgai. The chamber floor was inches deep in blood.
Graushpaz, seeing Ulysses, lifted his trunk and snorted shrilly. He said, "This has been too easy. I do not think I have redeemed myself."
"This is not over yet by a long way," Ulysses said. He stationed guards outside the entrance to the great chamber, and then he approached one of the diaphragms. He reached out and tapped it three times quickly, and the diaphragm vibrated and boomed out three times.
Ulysses had availed himself of the knowledge forced from the bat-men prisoners. Though his time had been so limited while building his ships, he had given up hours of sleep to become proficient in the pulse-code.
Now he tapped on the diaphragm, "This is the stone god in the city of the Dhulhulikh."
He had been told that The Tree was an entity and the Dhulhulikh were its servants. And the Book of Tiznak had told him much the same. But he still could not believe.
"The last of the humans!" the diaphragm vibrated in answer.
Could there be some vast vegetable brain somewhere in this colossal trunk? Or perhaps away off in another trunk, in the deep heart of The Tree itself? Or was there a little pygmy winged man squatting before another diaphragm in a buried chamber? A little man determined to maintain the myth of the thinking Tree?
"Who are you?" Ulysses tapped out.
There was a pause. He looked around. The Neshgai standing in the middle of the dome-shaped chamber were grotesque shadowy figures, their skins purple-bluish in the light. Awina was, as usual, beside him. The white parts of her fur looked icy bluish, and her eyes were so dark they seemed empty holes. The Wagarondit and Alkunquib looked like half-cat, half-burglar surrealist statues. The abacus machines with their squares of upright strings and beads were pale subterranean robots. The bat-men prisoners were hunched together in one corner, their brown skins now black in the light and their faces reflecting the knowledge of their sure death.
Ulysses lifted his hand to signal the men carrying the bombs to come to him. At that moment, the diaphragm vibrated.
"I am Wurutana!"
"The Tree?" Ulysses tapped back.
"The Tree!"
The code for the exclamation mark came through seemingly louder. So the vegetable entity, if it was one, could have emotion; in this case, pride. And why not? It was not possible for sentient life to exist without emotion. Emotion was as natural and as vital for sapiency as intelligence. Those science-fiction stories with unemotional, extraterrestrial sapients were based on an unrealistic premise. A life form needed emotion to survive as much as it needed a thinking mind. No living creature could thrive, or even exist, on logic alone. Not unless it was a protein or vegetable computer and, therefore, not self-conscious.
"I learned about you many thousands of years ago," the diaphragm pulsed.
He wondered how this entity could have any sense of time. Did it sense each year by some subtle internal change responding to the change of seasons? Or did it have some internal clock placed in it by the geneticists who had designed it?
"Those who must die told me about you."
Those who must die. Thus it designated the little forms of mobile life that communicated with it.
"Those who must die can nevertheless kill," Ulysses tapped.
He got back the answer he expected.
"They cannot kill me! I am immortal! And invincible!"
"If that is so," Ulysses tapped, "why do you fear me?"
There was another moment of silence. He hoped that the vegetable brain was quivering with shock. It gave him a perverse pleasure to upset the creature, though there was no other profit in it for him.
Finally, the diaphragm boomed, "I do not fear you, one who must die!"
"Then why did you try to have me captured? What had I done to you to warrant your hostility?"
"I wanted to talk to you. You were a strange thing, an anachronism, a species that has been extinct for twenty million years."
It was Ulysses' turn to be shocked. So the time was twenty, not ten, million years. Twenty million years!
He told himself that there was no reason to be startled. Twenty million years meant no more than ten.
"How do you know that?" he tapped.
"I was told so by my creators. They put an enormous amount of data into my memory cells."
"Were your creators human?"
The diaphragm did not move for several seconds and then, "Yes."
So this was why, despite its denial, it feared him. Men had created it, and so a man could destroy it. That must be its logic. What it probably did not know was that this man was an ignorant savage in comparison with the creators of The Tree. Still, he was not ineffectual. If he could get the proper metals, he could eventually make an atom bomb. Even The Tree could not stand up to a dozen fission devices.