Chapter XII: The Prisoner in the Cave

Jim had been received by the dying king. For what seemed hours he sat with Ren in a castle room waiting to be admitted to the royal bedside. To Jim it was irksome. He was afraid the king would die, afraid something would go wrong, and we would all be held as prisoners again.

But he finally saw the king. Jim took the oath of allegiance, swore he would do what he could to rescue the prince.

They started back through the city streets. At this time I was with the girls on the Island of the Virgins. The moon had just risen.

They were in the main lower street before our house. The moon was still low at the horizon; its light was cut off by the houses. The street lamp shone full on the railed flower bed, but close to the buildings, under the pedestrian levels, the shadows were black. Jim suddenly became aware of peering green eyes, a black shape that leaped at him. Other shapes, with great wobbling heads.

A giant shape of human form had knocked Ren down. Another struck Jim, bore him with its weight to the pavement. His senses faded from a blow on the head, and blackness, smothered by clanging gongs in his ears as he lost consciousness.

For a moment, after an interval of what length he never knew, knowledge that he was still alive came to him. He seemed to remember that a giant manlike shape with a bullet head had leaped upon him. It had another head, huge, wobbling like a balloon. But the large head had fallen off it; the large head lay on the ground, with tiny arms supporting it.

The phantasmagoria of a dream. But Jim’s head was clearing now, just a little. Something was holding him, and he could feel movement—a rhythmic jogging. He opened his eyes. A city street was passing. A great hairy arm was about his middle; he was being carried by something that walked; being held horizontal, his head, arms and legs dangling.

A giant, brown, hairy shoulder was over him; and above that, the great bulge of a head—a smooth, dead-white inflated membrane—a head that bounced and wobbled as the thing strode forward.

A brief consciousness, a vague, dreamlike impression, scarcely strong enough to make a memory, and Jim’s senses again faded into a black void of silence.

When Jim came fully to himself he was lying in a glow of yellow moonlight. Beneath him was a smooth, curving metal surface. His head ached horribly; a lump was upon it, and there was matted blood in his hair.

He was sore, bruised all over, but with returning strength he realized that he was not seriously injured.

He lay a moment, trying to remember what had happened, and the memory came, distorted and vague. Over him spread the canopy of stars, with a great yellow moon rising. The curving metal surface beneath him was gently swaying. Was he on a boat? He was still no more than half conscious. He murmured, “Ren! Ren!”

“Yes, Jim? Jim, is that you?”

Jim struggled up on one elbow. Ren was sitting hunched beside him. Ren—alive, seemingly uninjured.

They were on a boat, lying in its bottom, a small, narrow metal boat, six feet wide perhaps, and perhaps five or six times as long. Its gunwale curved up two or three feet over Jim’s head. They were lying in the narrowing of its bow.

Farther astern, in the yellow moonlight, were figures, brown, hairy bodies—men; or were they giant gorillas? They had small bullet-like heads, faces flat-nosed, with receding forehead and receding chin, and two small eyes that blazed green.

Jim very slowly sank back, but in a posture where he could see the length of the boat. The figures there were not animals; they were men of brute force and brute intelligence. Four of them, with powerful, hairy bodies, wide-shouldered, deep-chested, with short, thick legs and very long arms.

They were clothed in what seemed trunks of animal skin, and a skin fastened over the bulging chest to one shoulder. And each had a broad, tightly drawn belt at his waist.

To Jim came the memory of his capture. It was no fantasy, his memory of a hairy body, with a balloonlike, wobbling head. The four huge heads were here now, in a group near the center of the boat. Each was about four feet in diameter. A dead-white membrane, with bulging, distended veins on a forehead, over a grotesque flat face.

Heads, belonging to these four bodies? Jim realized it was not that. These were separate living entities, which had been riding astride the shoulders of the four.

Intelligent, reasoning beings—it seemed monstrous to call them men—beings which were nearly all brain, just as the others were nearly all body, heads so distended that they sagged of their own weight.

As he regarded them, Jim became aware that to each of the great heads a shrunken semblance of body was attached. Two tiny arms, which came out directly from the sides of the head, and were now turned down, with hands pressing the boat to give balance.

From the wide, convex face, beneath what might have been a bloated chin, a shriveled body dangled: a trunk and legs some two feet long. They lay shriveled beneath the heads. Useless appendage! But all of these shrunken, dangling bodies were clothed with colored fabric, and upon the breast of one was an ornate metal ornament.

Jim whispered: “Ren?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Something struck me. Then somebody, something was carrying me. Men! I heard their voices. I tried to scream; a hand went over my mouth. I knew we were captured. I thought—”

“Hush! Not so loud! They’re here . . . with us now.”

“I know. They were talking a while ago. They—hear them now, Jim?”

Low, gutteral voices sounded back there—the brute men. The brains, the balloon heads, were talking also, low, suave voices in a foreign tongue.

“Jim! Jim, one of these men here in the boat with us—” Ren’s voice held a quiver of fear. “He’s, Jim, I can receive thoughts now . . . like Dolores did from a distance. It seemed, just a little while ago, that I was getting Len’s thoughts. He was triumphant, exulting over something. But it was gone. Then I—”

“You get the thoughts of someone here in the boat?”

“Yes. I guess so. Someone . . . the thought came to me that he called himself Talon. I just now got it again. Talon. He’s been studying thoughts from me. Putting them into my language. He’s doing it now. It’s very easy for him, studying my thoughts, our words . . . my words to you now. He can understand them.”

“Hear us now?”

“Yes. Or hear the thought of our words. We can’t escape! Can’t do anything secretly! He’s laughing at us. He—”

Jim saw one of the heads raise itself up on its hands. Its shriveled body hung limp, the body with the ornate cross on its breast. The arms bent, then straightened with a snap; the head bounded a foot or two in the air, landed again on its hands, and again leaped.

It was hitching itself the length of the boat, its shriveled body trailing after it. One of the giant, hairy brutes of men moved aside to let it pass.

Jim whispered, “It’s coming!”

A revulsion of horror swept him—a repugnance to have this great bloated head come near him. He strove to master the horror. This was a man. Strange of form, but a living, mortal being. A man—an enemy. Nothing supernatural, not gruesome, merely strange, an enemy with whom he had to cope.

Jim sat up abruptly. His shoulder touched Ren’s. From down the boat the bloated head came hitchingly forward. A few feet from Jim and Ren it stopped, rested with a slight swaying upon the tiny body hunched under it.

Jim stared into a huge, convex face: round green eyes, holes, a circular rim of them, for nostrils, a wide mouth, thin-lipped. The mouth seemed almost a human feature; it was smiling. A soft, suave voice said,

“I . . . Talon.” And corrected itself, “I mean . . . I am Talon.”

It seemed to Jim in that instant that with those few spoken words the thing itself had removed most of the horror with which its outward aspect invested it.

A sense of relief swept over Jim. His tenseness relaxed. He said slowly: “What do you want of us, Talon?”

“Yes . . . Talon.” His arm had a hand, with a sheaf of broad, flat fingers. He pointed to the ornament hanging on the chest of his shrunken body. “Talon . . . leader of my people.” He spoke haltingly, groping with the unfamiliar words, and carefully, as though to avoid error. “Called Talon. You . . . lie quiet and soon my words are more. I study. Lie quiet . . . until I speak again.” He gestured. “Lie quiet, or—”

Another more vehement gesture. It embraced Jim and Ren. Jim understood the threat. The voice repeated very calmly, “You had better lie down . . . _now_!”

The eyes seemed leaping pools of green fire.

They sank back. With his elbows slightly raising him, Jim watched the head of Talon hitching itself to the stern of the boat.

The moon had risen high above the horizon. From where Jim lay he could see its yellow, horn-shaped disk. That, and a narrow segment of the star-strewn sky, was all that showed above the gunwales of the boat. The stars rolled with a lazy swing; the boat was throbbing, propelled evidently, by some invisible engine, over a calm, rolling sea, and in the silence Jim could hear the water slipping past the boat’s smooth sides.

He wondered how far from shore they were? If he and Ren, with a leap, could plunge overboard, a mad, fool-hardy attempt, of course, but still he must see where they were, try and plan something.

“Ren?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Move over a little. I’m going to get behind you and sit up, see where we are, how far from shore.”

Jim cautiously raised his head. He half expected a command from the rear of the boat. But none came.

They were on a broad expanse of calm water. The moon made a yellow shimmering path into which they were heading. Jim sank back. It would have been folly to have attempted an escape. For a long time he and Ren lay quiet. An hour, perhaps, or more. The boat sped rapidly on.

Its invisible engine made a hiss, and a line of bubbles rose from its sides. Jim had noticed them when he sat up; the boat seemed traveling on a continuous, rising mass of bubbles. There was a queer acrid smell in the air from the gas of them.

Jim learned later from Talon the details of this boat. It was built of metal which, with its load, would barely float. Beneath its hull was a chamber through which the water circulated. A grid of wires was there; a current heated the wires, decomposed the water into its two component gases, hydrogen and oxygen.

The bubbles were buoyant. The rising flow of them lifted the boat, so that in truth it skimmed forward upon the gas bubbles beneath it. The generation of gases was controlled, so that the boat floated high or low at will. The engine was similar. The forcible ejection of gases from a tube extending under water from its stern propelled it forward. The tube was movable, like a rudder, to give direction.

An hour passed. Then the hairy brutemen who had been sitting quiet got to their feet, fumbled at the gunwales. An oval metal cover rolled from beneath the gunwales up like a canopy to enclose the boat overhead.

Jim had taken a last swift look outside, before the arched metal cover rolled and closed them in. The boat was now making for a sheer wall of cliff that lay directly ahead.

But in one place, for which they were steering, the cliff dropped sheer, unbroken into the water. Above the cliff, behind it, a jagged mountain range stood yellow in the moonlight, tumultuous, naked crags.

The cover closed overhead. A tiny green light winked on. Within the boat, lurid in the green glow, the four brutemen moved about with swift activity; the soft voice of Talon was directing them; his great head was raised on his hands as he followed their movements.

They bolted the metal over, adjusted other mechanisms which now came into use at the stern. A lessening of the flow of gas from beneath the hull; the water filled the chamber there. The rear power tube now pointed downward, to dip the bow. Other tubes, one on each side below the water line, pointed upward, with powerfully ejected streams of gas.

The bow of the boat dipped; it sank beneath the surface. Jim had no idea then of the mechanisms, but he knew the boat was under water. One of the great heads was busily adjusting a mechanism to purify the air they were breathing. Another was seated at what seemed a mirror; gazing ahead through the water, steering the boat with his fingers on a row of buttons which governed the controls.

Another hour. Jim and Ren whispered occasionally. The boat was speeding uninterruptedly beneath the surface. At last Jim called,

“Talon?”

“Yes. What is it?” the head of Talon answered him.

“Come here. You can talk better now, can’t you?”

Talon evidently was amused at the imperative tone. “Yes. I can talk better now.”

He came hitching forward; his great face was broken by a grotesque grin. “What is it?”

“Who are you?” Jim demanded. “What do you want of us? Where are you taking us?”

Talon was willing to talk. He sat, his fingers toying with the metal ornament, his head resting against the side of the boat for support. He and his fellows were of a race which he called the Intellect. They came from a distant world in the sky, a dark planet, satellite of one of the remote suns up there.

Five thousand or more of them, adventurous Intelligences like himself, had built a great ship and come to this foreign world. They had landed in mountains, a wild, desolate country. Their ship had been destroyed, irreparably broken in landing. They could not get back.

There were, he explained, in this distant world two distinct races of beings, those like himself, for countless ages bred to develop the intellect so that their bodies shriveled and dwindled from disuse, all their physical powers nearly gone. And another, quite opposite race, bred for physical strength and power, the brutemen, of slight mental capacity but powerful of body.

He gestured. “You see four of them? They do our bidding unquestioned. They supply the body for us; we are the mind.”

“You ride on their shoulders,” said Jim.

Talon’s eyes gleamed. “We more than ride on them.” He showed Jim where from beneath his head a ropelike sinew depended. “This we fasten upon a nerve-center of their backs. Their little brain is dulled, unconscious then of existence. Our brains take command.

“The body is ours, for the time! We can feel its physical power; our brain animates it. We are one being. One entity when that connection is made.”

Ren spoke up softly, “Why did you go to that city where you captured us? Those people there haven’t harmed you. But you captured their prince and princess.”

The huge face grinned with a look of cunning. “We cannot get back to our world. We do not like these bleak mountains, these dark caves where we have been living. We must have a better land, and other people; we want to establish our own race. And there is little food, here in the mountains. We began wandering, searching. We brought this one boat with us from our own world.” He described the workings of the boat, and went on. “One day I came upon that man and that woman you call prince and princess. He says he is called Altho. They escaped from me, climbed to a cliff. But we caught them again finally.”

He paused. Then he added slowly: “The princess is dead now. I did not want her to die . . . but the prince killed her.”

It brought a shudder to Jim. He said, cautiously, “What are you going to do now? What do you want of us?”

“I was thinking that if you were important, like Prince Altho, to this other world, I might offer to release all of you, not kill you, if they would let us live among them in the city. But I have decided now not to bother with that. I think, if you annoy us too much, we shall kill you before we start.”

“Start where?” Ren demanded. His voice was steady.

“Start upon our attack. We brought little with us from our world, a few devices and scientific supplies; but for all this time since we arrived we have been manufacturing. It is difficult with so few materials at hand. But we are nearly ready. When I return now, we will start our last preparations.”

His voice rose to a sudden grim power, “We have prepared well for this conquest. It is a beautiful land down there; the women, so many of them like the princess, are very beautiful. The men, they are not like you two—they are already afraid of us. Some have seen us wandering near the cave entrances. They always run in terror.”

His chuckle had a horrible gloating. “They will be easy to kill. A swift attack upon the city; we are almost ready for it now!”

The boat at last came to the surface; the cover rolled back; the stars gleamed overhead as before, but the yellow moon had crossed the sky and was falling to the horizon behind them. Jim saw that they had come to the surface of a very small lake.

He could see all around its shore, a circular lake of black, cold-looking water. It lay unrippled, smooth as polished black stone, unbroken except as the boat’s gas bubbles rose, and by the V-shaped waves the boat left behind it.

Around the shore was a ring of mountains. Bleak, naked cliffs of rocks came down sheer to the water; behind them the mountains rose in tumbled, serrated ranks, naked crags and spires, snow-capped with yellow snow where the moonlight struck them.

Here in the remote mountain fastness, Talon had established his stronghold. This was an isolated lake, which a subterranean boat had been plowing.

At Jim’s elbow, Talon said, “These mountains seem to extend back endlessly. But I have another base already established on the Warm Sea, and from there I will make my attack. I have planned well.”

Ahead of them, in one small place the mountains were broken. A narrow canyon-like valley was open to the water, with a fringe of black-sand beach. Cave mouths showed along the sloping valley sides. Lights moved. The mouths of the caves were outlined by a green-white glare from within.

The boat landed on the black beach. Brute figures crowded around it in the fading moonlight, sinister giant figures. Huge gruesome heads came bouncing forward over the sand. Voices sounded. Questions. The voice of Talon shouted commands.

Half a hundred of the brutemen lifted the boat bodily from the water, deposited it on the beach. Jim and Ren were carried up the valley, and into the green glow of a cave mouth. Ren seemed entranced.

Prince Altho faced Jim and Ren in the dimly lighted cave. Talon had left them. At the cave-mouth, barely beyond sight and hearing around an angle of its narrow entrance passage, two of the brutemen stood on guard. Altho’s cave had been his home during most of his captivity. Jim saw it as a small room of glittering black rock, dimly lighted with pale green radiance from a ceiling tube from which green-glowing wires depended.

There was a bed of skins, crude stone furniture, a mere slab of rock for a table, upon which food now lay. Draped skins walled off a corner where the bed was placed.

Altho could not talk with Jim, but he very soon established that he was friendly. He was a man about Jim’s height, this prince, but delicate, almost frail of build. A handsome square-jawed face, had the delicacy of royalty stamped upon it. A high, white forehead was topped with curly hair like pale gold.

He smiled and shook his head at Jim’s voluble words. He shook hands with smiling puzzlement at Jim’s insistence. He seemed to understand Ren’s condition.

They sat, earnestly trying with gestures and words to make each other understand. Hours passed. Altho prepared some skins for beds, and gestured that they should sleep. Ren lay down, but Jim refused.

Another interval. A bruteman came with food. One of the heads, like Talon, came hitching itself in, looked around, spoke to Altho, and withdrew.

Jim ate some of the food. He had thought Ren was asleep, but when he questioned him, Ren sat up at once.

“Jim, what are we going to do?”

Jim was wondering that himself, and wondering also what fate Talon had in store for them. Abruptly Ren murmured,

“Awhile ago, Jim, I was sure I was getting someone’s thoughts. Not Talon’s; he’s hiding them from me now. Someone like Len, or Dolores. Or perhaps it was Sonya.”

Jim’s heart leaped. Something was impending! He sat between them tensely; his hand touched Altho’s arm; his eyes flashed at Altho with eager questioning.

Ren murmured, “I’ve got it now, Jim! It’s Sonya! She says, _I am Sonya. We know you are with Altho. I am getting his thoughts too!_”

A silence. Altho sat cross-legged on the stone floor, as Jim and Ren were sitting, with the stone slab of table before them; the green glow of light nearby threw shadows behind them. Altho was sitting with closed eyes, his hands to his temples. He looked up momentarily; his gaze rested on Jim and Ren with a new understanding, a new friendship.

Ren murmured, “She’s telling Altho about us. She says, _Hold connection! I’m telling him . . . he’s telling me_—”

Altho’s lips were moving with his thoughts to Sonya. The girl, over all this distance, was translating from the universal language of thoughts for these two strangers at Jim’s elbow.

Ren added, “Altho says to us in his thoughts, Talon had promised not to kill him; Talon now thinks he will be useful after our city of Kalima is conquered. But one of Talon’s men—that head who was in here a while ago—he said they had decided we all three were to die. I’m asking Altho what he thinks we can do to escape.”

Altho raised his head at the question; his eyes searched Ren’s face. His lips moved.

“Jim! Jim, she says, _We are coming to try and rescue you! If you or Altho can direct us . . . we’re coming . . . in the air now._”

Altho was on his feet. He seemed to be warning Sonya back.

“No!” cried Ren. “Altho says no, they must not come! But they’re coming! Sonya and . . . she doesn’t say who’s coming.”

“What’s that?”

Altho and Jim stiffened. From the entrance passage a figure had emerged, a giant, hairy bruteman. He stood with swaying, dangling arms, green eyes blazing in the pale green cave light; a leer on his small flat face, a black tongue like an animal’s, licking his black lips with murderous anticipation!