“Sprinkle that damned stuff!” he roared over his shoulder at Nancy. “Get busy!”
Kelly was already at it. Sam brought down a robed overseer, and a slave darted forward to get his weapons. A ruhk pounced from behind a tree-trunk—and then could not attack as the odor reached its nostrils. The slave squirmed over and fired upward. The beast screamed.
And then, strangely, even the slaves not yet redolent of divinity ceased to be attacked. There was the master-scent about this spot. The ruhks drew off, whimpering, and the overseers commanded them to attack, and they yelped and whined. Then Kelly ran out from the knot of slaves. Godhead was upon him. He reeked of deity to the beasts. He commanded attack upon the overseers, waving on the animals with gestures.
That did it. Where a knot of naked slaves had fought despairingly, resolved only to fight until they were killed, and where robed men had angrily but still cautiously pressed upon the rebels, now the tide turned abruptly. Nancy ran about among the slaves, incongruously slapping at them with a scent-drenched lacy handkerchief. Dick groped to understand her panted, inadequate explanation, and suddenly caught her meaning. He bellowed to his followers and led a furious charge.
The retreat that had been almost a rout became an attack again. This time the ruhks were with the slaves. They flung themselves upon the robed men—all the robed men not infallibly declared by ruhk nostrils to be divine. The overseers knew terror and horror akin to madness. They broke and ran, and those whom the slaves did not overtake the ruhks did. With each dead overseer there was another slave armed with spear or pistol or both, and the flight of the overseers ended before the swiftest of them could reach the slave pen again.
There were more overseers there, but not many, and there were robed men among those who approached. The disguise of the slaves had seemed vain, before, but it was not vain now. Approaching, with ruhks fawning upon them, they entered the barred gate. They left the ruhks outside. They killed the overseers who had remained at the slave camp. The ruhk guards inside the pen groveled before them. They killed those, too. And they let in other humans who went about among the stupefied slaves, sprinkling them with sweet-smelling stuff until every slave reeked of the odor which to ruhks was sanctity.
Then they let in the ruhks—and killed them. For five thousand years the ruhks had been the victims of a discovery made when magicians first moved between worlds. The scent had ensured their absolute loyalty to a race which ruled over ruhks and overseers and human slaves alike. And now they could not believe that men with the smell of the gods upon them could destroy them. Some whimpered as the slaves stabbed and shot. A few fought half-heartedly, almost paralyzed by the instinct five thousand years had made immutable. Some seemed to go insane at the impossibility they saw and smelled, their own massacre by men who smelled like those they must worship. But they died. All of them.
Night had fallen, now, and great fires blazed in the slave pen. In their crimson light, hordes of more than half-naked men and women howled and leaped and gloried in the havoc that had been wrought. Some of them prowled among the dead bodies of the ruhks, clubbing and stabbing the dead things when they could persuade themselves that a spark of life remained in a furry carcass.
But Dick rounded up the men who on the galley had seemed instinctively leaders. There was a man with a scarred face, and a short and brawny man, and one who had been a professor of physics.
Dick found Maltby and freed him and Nancy doused him with scent. They found the spidery device that no slave should ever see—and Sam knew something of it. So Dick told his followers what he wanted to do next, and they scattered and rounded up suitable men from the rejoicing mob. It was a still-shouting gang which went back through the jungle toward their ship. They carried torches, and they pushed and pulled and wrestled through the jungle the device by which anything at all that was desired by the masters of this world could be brought here from Earth. Sam Todd had even found on a dead overseer a curious pair of goggles which he recognized.
He marched through the jungle with those goggles in place over his eyes, and he was able to see at the same time the flame-lit trunks of mighty trees as bare-bodied men swaggered through the jungle, and the electric-lit streets and motor traffic of crosstown streets in that Manhattan Island which was on Earth.
The triumphant men reached the river, and torches flared upon its flood. They got the cutters ashore, made a platform of oars between them, wrestled the spidery device upon it, and the double canoe towed it out to the galley. By main strength they loaded it on the galley, and then it was up anchor and down the long, moonlit jungle shore of Manhattan Island. Sam Todd returned the alloy peephole to Dick. With the goggles from a dead overseer which looked more efficiently between two worlds, he conned the galley through the night, guided by the lights on Earth.
The galley beached alongside a barren rock at midnight, and men sweated and strained to get the spidery thing ashore on what should have been Governor’s Island. Sam led men off into the darkness, again guided by lights on another planet which happened to be the twin of this. Because, of course, Governor’s Island on Earth is an army post and an air field, and in these days it is kept equipped for any emergency. There would be guns and ammunition and hand grenades and other things more precious than fine gold to the men of the galley and cutters. The Army lost valuable equipment that night, before Sam Todd came back and gleeful men made trip after trip to load their booty on the galley and in the smaller craft.
Dick did not share in that. He had to talk to Nancy, to suggest anxiously that, as soon as the loading of the galley was finished, she let him put her back on Earth down by the Battery, which was just across the stream from here. Of course the place that should have been the Battery on the Other World was dark forest from which eerie cries and a curious semblance of the sound of bells came faintly. But she resolutely refused to go back to Earth. When he told her why neither he nor any other man from the galley would go back to Earth to stay, just yet, she shuddered and seized upon the explanation as an additional reason why she should remain.
They were a little awkward with each other because Dick had merely resolved that nobody else could possibly be allowed to marry Nancy, and had not explained the matter to her. But suddenly he said anxiously, “Of course we’ll have to slip back long enough to get married—”
And then that was all right too.
When the galley’s oars spread out and she and the cutters went on through the dark once more, Dick had things to do. He called each cutter’s crew alongside and gave specific instructions. Then the expedition really began.
The moon sank low, though the waters were still streaked with flashes of its light. All three craft hugged the Manhattan shore, at first. When the dim lights of the villa first became visible, though, one of the cutters turned and streaked straight across to the Brooklyn shore. Lest any ruhks sight them and give the alarm, men landed and marched along the shore so that ruhks would sight them and creep up to spring—and remain to grovel and to die.
The galley made fast at the wharf on the Manhattan shore where Dick had killed his first overseer and taken the first cutter. A scented, murderous band of armed men marched along the trail to the slave pen inland from it. Nancy, for once, willingly stayed behind. She talked to Maltby, bringing him up to date on her adventures.