Chapter IX

Jupiter dismounted the needle ray. It never had been intended to serve as a hand weapon. It was like carrying a fifty millimeter anti-aircraft gun, but on this planet of mild gravity he was able to handle it well enough.

He encased it carefully in waterproof wrappings. Then he broke out a spacesuit.

Sun up. The order was to attack at sun up! It didn't give him much time.

The Yogolians knew nothing about reducing a fortified city, but they had cut timbers for scaling ladders. The cavemen could run up them like monkeys. They should carry the walls by sheer numbers.

Lete and the Nehogan general watched him curiously as he donned the spacesuit. He picked up the unwieldy gun, started through the soft black night for the city.

They went along with him discussing their plans. He answered in grunts, his voice harshly metallic coming through the diaphragm. At the front lines he left them behind and went on alone across the level plain like a robot in the cumbersome suit.

The impulse to run was almost uncontrollable. Suppose the Anolyn were suspicious. They might have been bluffing, Tabak and Reiloc might already be dead. He began to sweat.

He plodded on steadily through soft, plowed land. He reached a pasture and a herd of the long-tailed Begans ran up sniffing him curiously. The black, hairy men followed him, grunting, among themselves, to the opposite fence where they stopped. They had been trained not to climb fences.

All at once he realized that he had come to the beach. The walls of the city loomed darkly massive above him. Stars twinkled in the velvet sky.

He waded out into the water. The stars vanished as the _Dra Dur_ closed above his helmet. He snapped on his torch.

The light drove a lance through water ahead, revealing the sandy bottom, strange submarine creatures. He struggled on and on, the pitch of the sea floor becoming steeper. It was like a fairyland of grottoes and trailing seaweed. Then the rays from his torch struck the gaping mouth of a cave.

Only it wasn't a cave at all. It was more like a tunnel--a tunnel that the ancients had driven through the mountains.

Jupiter felt his heart leap into his throat. It was what he had been searching for--the mouth of one of the canals leading beneath the city by the _Dra Dur_.

He turned into it, his light revealing smooth composition walls, green and slick with algae. He must have gone a mile before he found a ramp leading to the surface.

As his helmet broke water, he saw that his luck was still holding. He was beneath the temple of the Radiant God. The ramp which continued on up into the temple proper was deserted.

He sat down, unwrapped the needle gun, then started up the ramp like some amphibious monster of the deep. Tabak and Reiloc, he was sure, were being confined in the temple. The breeding pens more than likely, since that was where most of the human guinea pigs were confined.

He didn't encounter a single Anolyn until he reached the central courtyard.

The courtyard was divided into runs like a dog kennel. It was dark with a pitch-like blackness. He hastily shut the air intake valve on the spacesuit. The stench was terrible. He could hear grunts, soft voices. Someplace in the darkness a girl was crying.

Jupiter was revolted to the depths of his being. When he thought of Tabak being shut up here, he could feel his blood run cold.

How was he going to find her in this mess? He didn't dare use the torch and time was running out.

Overhead the stars were paling. A light appeared diagonally across the courtyard. He flattened himself against the wall.

* * * * *

It was a torch, he saw, in the hand of a pink-skinned Caligan. A dozen grotesque Anolyn followed the torch bearer, then a company of Nehogans. Jupiter watched them make their way between the runs.

His eyes suddenly narrowed. They had stopped before a cage in which he could see a girl.

The door was opened, the girl dragged out, hustled toward a pen of long tailed Begans. The smoky light of the torch glared briefly on her face.

Tabak! They had taken away the girl's sarong, caged her like a wild animal.

Jupiter swung up the needle ray. He could see them leading Reiloc from the next cage.

He yelled: "Tabak! Reiloc! To me!" and flicked on the ray gun.

The disruptive beam of force touched one of the guards. There was a brief, brilliant flash. Then another and another as the ray fingered guard after guard.

The yard went from light to dark to light again, freezing the action. Jupiter saw Tabak break away, sprint toward him down the corridor between the runs. Reiloc was directly behind her. The giant Nehogan had snatched a sword from one of the guards whom Jupiter had rayed down. He brandished it over his head, yelled savagely.

More Nehogans poured into the courtyard, summoned telepathically by the Anolyn. Then Reiloc and Tabak were crowding beside him.

"The city gates!" Jupiter barked. "We've got to reach them before dawn!"

"This way," Tabak cried. She plunged into a passage leading from the court.

"Not so fast," Jupiter grunted. "I can't keep up in this damned suit."

The Caligan girl slowed down. Behind them the pandemonium from the breeding pens became fainter and died away. Reiloc, pounding along at Jupiter's elbow, said:

"Has the city been attacked?"

"No. Sun up. We've got to open the main gate."

They burst from the temple into the street. The guard at the entrance was caught flatfooted. Reiloc laid him out with a blow of his sword, and they ran on down a strangely deserted street.

"Where's everybody?" Jupiter panted.

Tabak said over her shoulder. "There's only a skeleton force in the city. Most of the Nehogans were in the army they sent after us."

Red was streaking the East, when they reached the gate. It was guarded by a lone Anolyn and a dozen Caligans.

Jupiter rayed the octopod and the Caligans scattered like frightened birds. Reiloc started the mechanism that rolled back the massive, circular gate. No one tried to stop them.

Jupiter continued to wait tensely, covering the street with the needle ray. He was still waiting when the advance body of the encircling Nehogan army poured through the entrance.

He stood there--a scowl on his lean brown face as the Nehogans continued to trot into the city. They were veterans. They fanned up the streets, searched the buildings as they went. There were a few sharp clashes, but that was all.

In less than an hour, the city by the _Dra Dur_ had fallen.

The Anolyn had retreated silently into the sea from whence they had arisen.

* * * * *

As the last chunk of the Radiant God went into the fuel hoppers aboard the Mizar, Jupiter realized that there was nothing left to hold him on the planet.

The Yogolians were busy organizing themselves into a cohesive people. Outside the city walls, the horde was camped. Lete was high in the council of chiefs and an expedition was being planned against a second town further up the coast.

They were a resilient race, these Yogolians. Now that they had the means to combat the Anolyn, it wouldn't be long before the last of the octopods were driven back into the _Dra Dur_. They didn't need him any more.

Jupiter climbed the ladder to the control blister. It was night, the bluish pallor of the riding lights illuminating the instruments. All about him rose the dark spires of the city by the _Dra Dur_.

He stared upward through the blister. The huge, dark nebula seemed to cut a hole in space.

He felt a tingle in his nerve ends. He was sure Earth lay on the other side of that hundred-and-twenty-light-year long stretch of blackness. A sudden wave of homesickness gripped him.

Why not blast off now--this minute?

He could feel his heart pump a little faster. The ship was fueled up, ready to go. He had told Reiloc only a little while ago that he might leave any time--tonight even.

He hadn't seen Tabak since the fall of the city. He had tried to find her, asking questions of everyone, but nobody seemed to know anything about her. The Caligan girl obviously was avoiding him.

Jupiter swore under his breath. His fingers touched the controls. Flame rumbled suddenly in the jets, rebounded in orange billows past the blister.

As soon as Jupiter was beyond Yogol's gravitational field, he switched to the inertialess stellar drive, turned the ship over to "George". He leaned back in his seat. It was good to feel the weightless buoyancy of deep space again.

Someone said: "Dinner is being served in the galley, sir!"

Jupiter shot out of his chair, banged his shoulder against the overhead, forgetting all about his lack of weight. He rebounded helplessly to the deck, squirmed around.

"Tabak!" he gasped.

The Caligan girl stood beside the ladder leading below. She was dressed in Brigg's olive-green uniform, her eyes dancing.

"But I thought you'd gone away!"

Her face softened. "I couldn't. It--it's too strong for me, Jupiter. I've been in Brigg's cabin all the time. I knew that was one place you'd never go."

He said: "Then it was me?" his eyes slowly kindling.

Tabak nodded.

Jupiter shoved off from the back of the shock absorber, grabbed the girl in his arms. "You're crazy," he said, "you didn't have to stow away."

"But you said you wouldn't take anybody with you when you left."

The tube began to buzz angrily; the red light winked on. Jupiter stiffened.

"Who's _that_?"

Then Reiloc's voice sounded in the communicator.

"Will you come down here and show me how to eat?" he demanded in an aggrieved voice. "My coffee is floating in a ball around the ceiling!"

Tabak giggled.

Jupiter couldn't believe it. He said, "Who else is aboard?"

"No one. Just Reiloc and me. You're not angry, are you? He was wild to come. I never could have stayed hidden if it hadn't been for him. He brought me food and--"

"You mean he knew where you were all the time?"

"Yes," she said meekly.

"Are you coming down?" Reiloc bellowed; "or must I starve?"

"Go ahead and starve," said Jupiter, "we're busy."