And then the water was running out of the chamber, and he was crawling over a slippery mess of fragmented honeycomb into the corridor.
The respite was brief. Water was hosing out of the walls of the corridor and out of the walls of the open cubicles of the levels along the corridor. Shrieking, winged women and children were hurled from their rooms into the corridor and then washed away. Some fell on the invaders, knocking them down.
The rocket men lost their bazookas and missiles and the bombmen let loose of their bombs. Nobody kept hold of their weapons. They needed their hands to scramble, to shove away other bodies, to protect themselves against the sprays.
Ulysses got down on his hands and knees after being bowled over six times. The water was almost up to his nose, but it kept the sprays from being effective at that level. However, he had crawled along for perhaps fifty yards when he had to stand up. The water had risen too high to crawl. A moment later, it was up to his chest.
By then the corridors were jammed with tangled bodies, Dhulhulikh fighting for survival and corpses floating along, face-down or up, their leathery wings outspread.
The Tree's weapons were effective, but they were not specific. To drown the enemy, it would also drown its allies.
Ulysses hoped The Tree would drop no more membranes or honeycombs. If it did, they were done for. Their explosives were lost somewhere in the water.
He looked around for Awina and, for a moment, thought she was lost or drowned. Then he saw her hanging onto the belt of Graushpaz. The huge Neshgai was wading through the water, which was up to his waist, his arms crossed to protect his face from the buffeting of the sprays. He rocked back and forth but he did not go down, as some of his fellows had. Ulysses could see only six other Neshgai, and only about twelve of his own people and ten humans seemed to be on their feet.
Then he began swimming, stopping to hammer at the little bat-women if they got in his way. He went faster then, since there seemed to be a slight dip to the floor, causing the water to flow outward to the great entrance.
He passed Awina and Graushpaz, and he shouted at her to swim after him. She released her grip and came after him.
The nightmare in the corridors came to an end a minute later. He rammed into the first narrow curving hall, was carried away and around the corner and into the next curve. Abruptly, the water level fell, and he swam out onto the branch and, a few seconds later, was beached like a fish. The water still flowed around him and moved him on gently, but he could rise to his feet.
Hands helped him then. The men from the dirigible had left their stations. He shouted at them to get back to the ship, but they ignored him. They left him to help others being swept out.
Awina was lifted to her feet, and she staggered to him. "My Lord, what shall we do next?"
Graushpaz waded out and stood to one side. Five other Neshgai came out within two minutes. The sixth failed to show.
Ulysses looked upward into the night. The remnants of a large smoke cloud were drifting by.
The sky was clear, and the moon was just coming up. He could not see it because the trunk blocked his view, but he could see the paling of the sky. Way up, a needle shape moved across the blackness and the stars.
He shouted at Bifak, the human who had commanded the ship while the invasion of the trunk was taking place. "Where are the Dhulhulikh warriors?"
"Many apparently rammed into each other in the smoke and fell. And then the hawks got many, and many flew into each other trying to get away from them."
That might account for heavy losses among the bat-men but it would not account for their total disappearance. Where had they gone? And why had they gone?
By then, the water from the big hole had become a trickle. The lights from the dirigible showed a logjam of bodies inside the hole and a detritus of corpses, mostly Dhulhulikh, strewn out from the hole. Bifak said there had been many more bodies, but these had been washed away with the first out flux of waters or else dragged away and thrown over the edge of the branch by the crewmen.
There must be thousands of other corpses inside, Ulysses thought.
He shouted at the survivors. They must get into theBlue Spirit immediately and prepare to take off. They could do no more here. Some day, they would return with a much larger fleet and with the men and the materials to blast down through the centre of the trunk to the brain of The Tree.
In the gondola, he told the officers to start the lift-off procedures. He ordered the radio operator to check with the other ships and clarify the situation in the air.
One ship had been bombed and caught fire during the invasion of the trunk. It had fallen into the abyss and was probably half-buried in the swamp at the roots of The Tree. The two other dirigibles that had landed were getting ready to lift off also. They had lost all landing parties, the personnel of which had drowned inside the trunk or had been washed out of the holes and fallen to death.
Ulysses looked at the hole in the trunk while the crewmen got ready to cut the lines that held the vessel to the branch. It should be possible to make a substance which could be applied to the walls of the chambers inside the trunk. This would have to be quick-drying and strong enough to resist the spray of water. Perhaps some sort of epoxy glue. And the blasting would proceed from above and below with shuttles of airships bringing in tons of explosives. Maybe that laser-type device in the underground museum beneath the Temple of Nesh could be powered. If so, it might be able to drill holes through the wood, and the blasting would go much more swiftly.
He could get to the brain if he could find it. But if the brain was not in this trunk, then he might as well forget about finding it.
Yet, what about poisoning the entire Tree? Some powerful poison, tons and tons of it, placed in the roots, so that the mighty water circulation system of The Tree would draw the poison into it?
The Tree knew what it was doing when it had tried to capture and then to kill him. He was a man and so a threat to it.
"Ready to sever the lines, sir," the lift-off officer reported.
"Sever the lines!"
There was a twanging noise, and the ship abruptly lifted. It rose swiftly toward the branch five hundred feet overhead and then began to turn as the starboard motors tilted to the horizontal and their propellers began whirling. The ship turned slowly and moved out. The four ships in the air had begun moving down to cover the others. Their searchlights probed the night, falling on the vast grey-black wrinkles and fissures of the trunk and the vegetation-covered surfaces of the branches.
Ulysses stood behind the helmsman and looked over his shoulder into the night. "I wonder where they are," he muttered.
Awina said, "What?"
"The Dhulhulikh. Even if over half were killed, they still have a powerful force. They. "
His question was answered. Out of the mountain-sized mushroom-shaped top of the trunk above them fell a horde of batwinged men. They dropped out With wings folded, hundreds at a time, and did not open their wings until they had attained a great speed. They abruptly filled the space between the trunk top and the dirigibles; they looked like a locust plague, so numerous were they.
They had been waiting until the ships on the branches were leaving and the other ships would have come down to cover them. They were making one final all-out attack to destroy the entire fleet.
Only later did it occur to Ulysses that the winged men should not have been able to hide within the leaves of the mushroom-shaped top. This was thirteen thousand feet high, four thousand feet higher than a bat-man could fly. But the explanation of the impossible was easy. The Dhulhulikh had climbed up the trunk. With their wings flapping to half-lift their forty-five pound bodies, the bat-men had swarmed up the rough side of the trunk at a pace that no other sentient, and very few monkeys, could have equalled.