Harassed officials scuttered everywhere, shepherding men into guard positions. Caradine found himself one of a company of ten men detailed off to cordon the entrance to a long passageway leading deeper into the heart of the building. A tall window gave a glimpse of a courtyard. In that yard Caradine saw armored flying tanks taking off from an underground hangar, one after the other, their dark-green hulls sheening and grim with weapons. Fully armored soldiers poured from doors and raced away beyond his vision. He stilled the smile on his lips.
All this preparation, all this chaos, wasn’t for him.
No wonder he hadn’t been caught easily. Behind all the gaiety of comedy day and the exotic flowers and strange animals, lying darkly hidden under the facade of carefree life on this floating palace platform, the moguls were facing a threat to their existence. What that threat was, Caradine had an inkling. He had once thought impossible what had happened very soon afterwards. He no longer thought it amazing that he could contemplate the current impossibility and know it in sober truth very likely.
Damn young Carson Napier, anyway!
But, even so…
At the first opportunity afforded by a slight change of guard position in the continual fussing that went on, Caradine slipped away, assumed a very important face and bearing, and strode with firm and heavy footfalls down the corridors deep into the heart of the building. This was the final payoff. He was not challenged. All about him he could hear the murmur of machinery. Worried-looking officers passed him. He was meeting more and more soldiers and space navy men. Yet still, in the security of his scarlet uniform, he was not stopped. Of course not—he was carrying a private message, wasn’t he? How long that story would last he didn’t know.
When at last he was stopped by a posse of black-clad men, he found the story wouldn’t stand up at all. It gave him just time to pull and toss a nerve-grenade.
This far in, the resultant shambles must draw attention. Whatever was happening in the galaxy couldn’t distract all attention from this.
He started to run on. From somewhere a streak of light passed over his left shoulder making him wince from the heat of it, struck a far cornice and brought down in thundering destruction and melting ruin the whole wall and ceiling. Raw metal paneling showed beyond.
Hell! They were so jumpy they weren’t acting as he had expected. The fear that he had been containing so well boiled in him now. He got a bad attack of the shakes, running with thumping heart and wheezing lungs away from that deadly gun. Hell and damnation! If he got out of this alive he’d say something to young Napier. By hell he would!
He was approaching a double-valved door whose leaves must have been a good fifty feet high. The men guarding them looked like midges in a frieze along the bottom. He flung a nerve-grenade with all his strength, and plunged on after it too fast so that he felt the searing scorch of its back blast.
But he cleared the door, one leaf of which sagged from broken hinges after the blast.
He went through. Another nerve-grenade cleared the way.
Directly ahead, through a colossal archway soaring up for two hundred feet, he saw a blaze of illumination. When he went through the arch the size of the room beyond appalled him. On its tessallated floor men looked like ants. High above, chandeliers the size of two-story buildings hung from a roof swathed in convoluted groining. Not a single pillar in the entire expanse supported that ceiling. Along both sides stood rows of guards, motionless, at attention, reduced in size by distance to rows of dolls.
The room was so large it was indecent.
A man’s insignificance in this room was thrown up in his face.
Caradine began the long journey across the marble floor to the group of men and women clustered around the screens at the far end. No one tried to stop him. The rows of immobile guards were merely adornment leaving all work of security to ubiquitous police and plain-clothes men. His footfalls echoed from the marble, died and were lost in the vastness in a whimper. Ostentatiously, he took his gun out and let it dangle, gripped by the barrel. He could sense and appreciate the subtle understanding that now existed between himself and the moguls; he had beaten their security network, and so now they were waiting to see what he wanted.
No other method would have brought him, a mere civilian from an insignificant stellar grouping, into the inmost sanctum of proud and mighty Horakah.
This he had understood from the beginning. This he had worked for, and for this he had nearly died. The fear was still in him, a black tide lapping at the borders of his sanity. But he had to suppress it now, he had to maintain a brain so calm and cool that he could meet and match these coldly waiting moguls.
Two gaudily attired officers approached him and he handed over the Beatty with an air of condescension. He did not stop walking forward.
On those sprawling screens covering one end of the chamber he saw star patterns, etched segments of the galaxy. The men and women looking at the screens turned as he approached.
They were much as he had expected. Big men, fleshy, with powerful, ruthless faces, men cast from the same mold of power. Men like this had been used by him in the old days, used as his tools.
The shock of seeing Hsien Koanga and Allura was only slight. The moguls would bring those two here with amusement, interested to see his reactions.
He noticed the guards near them. He looked for Harriet.
She was there.
His blood gave an almighty thump through his veins as she stepped forward. She was looking perfect. A golden sheath covered her glorious body and her hair had been sprayed into a silver tumble of curls. Her red lips smiled.
“At last you arrive, John Carter. We have been waiting for you.”
Caradine paused. A confusing welter of dismay, fear, black anger and pitiful self-reproach grew and died in him. “I thought—” he began.
“Before we kill you, John Carter,” Harriet Lafonde said with stroking feline savagery, “we would like to know why you have done what you have done.”
XIV
“What I did I did partly because of you,” Caradine said. “I had the crazy and moon-struck notion that you might be in trouble. You could say I was attempting to rescue you.” It sounded infantile.
Hsien Koanga started. Allura, standing beside him, looked ill and defeated, her auburn hair heavy about her shoulders, her face masklike in indifferent hurt. Looking at her, Caradine made the mental comparisons and thought to ask after the third of these women so disastrously injected into his life.
“Those?” The man who spoke was merely one of the moguls; a man habituated to running the destinies of solar systems. “Watch. It may amuse you.”
Caradine had been gazing at a tall wall screen where stars showed against blackness. Thinly setded, then. The air of expectant waiting was strong and he knew that these moguls were toying with him as the greater drama out there in the galaxy unfolded. Now he had only to turn his head to see the indicated screen.
Greg Rawson’s face showed on the screen. He was shouting in horror. Then his head disappeared and left only a charred, blood crisped stump of neck. Caradine could not be moved by crudities like that.
The screen shifted focus and he saw Sharon Ogilvie. She was falling. Her mouth was open but no sound came from it. Her long silvery hair streamed in the wind of her fall.
“They had been clumsily trying to enter a starship yard.”
Sharon fell past rows of dark windows, past the upraised jibs of cranes like solemnly transfixed storks. Caradine was not prepared. Sharon fell on and then, abruptly, she had struck the hook of a crane which ripped into her stomach and left her dangling.
Allura gave a choked scream. Harriet turned to Caradine.