"Open the door," Jimmy whispered. "Let's get out of this.
Order us to land." Roc nodded. "Our interior air pressure is a little low.
In a moment." Beneath my window I saw a great spread of naked landscapethe Light Country, fairest region of the planet! The daylight glistened on the naked surface of bleak, metallic hills. There had recently been a storm; the bumished hillsides were wet with moisture, and little rills and pools of water filled the rock depressions.
Desolate spread of landscape I No soil, no blade of vegetation. The convexity of this small world was obvious. An undulating metallic plain, and off to one side a range of naked little hills, with buttes, square-sided, flat-topped, and spires like pointed minarets rising against the flat monochrome background of the sky.
We fell lower, swept on at an altitude of not over fifteen hundred feet. Tama stood beside me. She gestured. "The Hill City is not far. And the Water City is ahead of us.
They have had a black storm not long ago. See the water on the rocks." We passed almost over a valley. Soil was there. Porouslooking trees, suggesting a mushroom growth, fringed a little lake. There were small areas with a red soil plowed up.
And set in a long strip at the bottom of one of the enclosing hillsides was a collection of little hutscrude habitations built* of the porous treetrunks, thatched with huge, dried leaves.
A deserted camp. There seemed a litter of equipment lying abandoned. Agricultural implements stood in the fields where a vegatation growth had come up, unharvested, and died again... . We passed on in a moment once more over the metallic desert.
"That was one of our girls' camps," Tama said. "Abandoned when we returned to the Hill City. You remember it, Roc? You ought toyou drove us there."
"The camp of the flying virgins. Guy had told us of those events. Only the women of Mercury were endowed vidth wings, and the men, by instinct, were jealous. Man-made laws decreed that at marriage the wings of a virgin should be clipped.
The revolt of the virgins, smoldering for years, had come at last. Led by Tama, they had pleaded for different laws.
Instead of which, led by the sly Roc, the government had passed a new, more drastic law. Even before marriage, at the age of sixteen, the virgins were ordered to accept the mutilation. They had revolted, flown from the Hill City, the Water City and elsewhere, and established this camp in the desert. And then when Roc had proved a traitor, stolen the government secrets of war and joined his outlawed father in the Cold Country, the Hill City government had been repentant. Alarmed at the lengths to which it had forced the young girls, it had begged them to come back, promising them new laws.
They had gone back, just before Tama and Guy had left for Earth. That was the situation, all we knew of it, save that here in the silver ball we had learned of the coming invasion of the Light Country by the Cold Country barbarians.
Whether the Hill City government was prepared for it or not we could not say. Our duty now was to get to the Hill City and warn them.
The welfare of our own Earth was at stake as well. The present Hill City government would never make a raid on Earth. But if the barbarians were victorious here on Mercury, raids upon Earth were inevitable.
Rowena touched me. "Look off there!" Against the distant sky little moving dots were visible: a group of flying girls winging off toward the Hill City. And down on the naked plateau, a few miles away, men were moving.
We came over the horizon to a new vista. Human figures moved on foot. Several groups at intervals, hastened laboriously forward. They were fairly distant, mere dots. But there seemed to be men, and women and children as well. A cart or two drawn by peculiar long creatures close to the ground.
It seemed like a flight, a routas though these were refugees, with belongings hastily gathered in the face of some disasterall heading toward the Hill City.
Then the horizon rim showed othersa line of tiny dots.
Then several distant group of girls, coming from the Hill City, circling over the figures on the ground, and winging back.
They had doubtless seen our vehicle, and fearing it, kept well away.
This had come upon us all in a few moments as our flyer sped forward. I saw that Tama was white and grim. She stood clutching at Rowena, whispered to her. Horror swept Rowena's face.
Jimmy whispered, "What in the devil, Jack" Roc had not been looking out of the window. He said abruptly, "Our pressure is right. I shall open the door." Dorrek was not here. Muta made no move. Roc unclamped the mechanism; the thick little panel slid aside. The air of Mercury surged in with a gust upon us: Moist, heavy air, with the smell of rain and a hint of sulphur in it from the recent storm.
The change of pressure appraised Dorrek that the door was open. He appeared at once and stood gazing at us.
The open doorway was near us allsix feet high, and half as widea threshold with a fifteen hundred drop down to the rocky plain beneath us.
Dorrek made no move. There came a cry from Tama.
"Roc-look! The Water Cityl" Ahead of us at the horizon a low-hanging murky cloud had appeared over a range of hills, with what I assumed was the Water City still hidden behind them. In a moment we could see clusters of figures on the distant hilltops.
A little blob of light rose in an arc, went over the line of hills and fell into the still hidden city. A rocket bomb! This was an attack! We all forgot Dorrek and Muta behind us.
Tama cried, "Roc, this is the invasionalready started! You have tricked ustricked me again!"
"No, Tama. I swear I had no idea of this!" He seemed speaking the truth. He swung around. "Look at Dorrek, Tama! If you think I lie, look at Dorrekl He is as surprised as I am." The giant had glimpsed the scene through the window near him. He called Muta. Momentarily ignoring us, they flung open the breast-high circular pane and stood gazing with obvious astonishment.
The sphere swept on, rising to a higher altitude to pass over the line of hills. Presently the stricken Water City lay beneath us.
Fantastic, ghastly scenes unrolled to our horrified gaze.
VIII WASTE THE LITTLE LINE of jagged hills had behind it a sheer drop of perpendicular copper walls, clean as though cloven by Titan's knife. Beyond them the contour was a wide-spreading, shallow oblong bowl, with gentle slopes undulating upward to other heights at the distant horizon.
A small inland sea had once been here. It was gone now but, at the bottom of the depression, water still collected, making a little lake some two miles wide, with the city houses built on stilts and water treesa spring-fed lake of turgid, warm water rising from the fire-heart of the planet.
The copper precipice stood against the lake; to the left it straggled into a marsh as the land rose up. There were fields on the terraced hillsides off there, spreading in a great semicircle beyond the laketerraces of water and mud in which something like rice might be growing. To the right the lake drained in a slow-moving, sluggish little river that wound off into the distance between canyon walls.
We stood gazing from the window of the silver ball at a height of some two thousand feet. Gray-black clouds were over us; the scene was flat and dim in the half light of day.
And the murk of gas fumes and smoke clung to the city, hiding it. A murk of horror! We passed along the peaks of the rim at the top of the.
precipice walls. The figures of men were massed down there.
A flare burst momentarily to illumine them. Men garbed in animalskins; men like Dorrek and his fellows of the Cold Country.