He did not smile when Shegnif continued his policy of overloading the dirigibles with Neshgai officers. Despite Ulysses’ high standing with the ruler and the high priest, he was not entirely trusted by the Grand Vizier. His attitude was understandable in view of the revolt that had occurred ten days before in a border town. The Vroomaw soldiers had refused to obey orders that they live in the slave barricades. Apparently, they felt that it was a disgrace to be quartered with slaves. When the Neshgai moved in other troops to deal with them, the new troops had sided with the rebels. Neshgai soldiers had been brought in, and there had been a battle. The slaves had taken advantage of this to massacre some of their Neshgai masters. Eventually, the Neshgai had called in more of their ponderous forces and had crushed the revolt.
News of this had spread to the entire human population. There was so much tension, and so many precautions by the Neshgai in the capital, that Ulysses’ work was seriously delayed.
Then the situation eased for him when an army of about three hundred bat-men made a raid on the airfield. This time they were detected by the scouts Ulysses had stationed on the edge of The Tree. He had a chance to send up five of his dirigibles with their load of archers, ballista men and hawks. The hawks got their first taste of blood, and the air force found out how much good its training and discipline had done it. They suffered some casualties, but all ships returned. The bat-men, after suffering heavy casualties, flew away.
Ulysses’ credit went up even higher. The main effect of the raid, however, was to cause the humans to realize that they must fight on the side of the Neshgai, not against them, for the time being. The bat-men had dropped messages to the effect that they intended to exterminate both Neshgai and their human allies.
It was a cool dawn with a clear sky and a six-mph breeze from the sea when the first of the ten dirigibles rose into the air. The flagship, the Veezhgwaph (Blue Spirit), was four hundred and thirty feet long and had a diameter of sixty feet. Its skin was silver, and on its bow a hideous demon was painted in blue. The control gondola was suspended underneath the bow, and three motor nacelles hung from each side. Its hollow interior contained a skeleton made of very lightweight vegetable husks stitched together, the keel, main walkway, catwalks, storage cells and ten gigantic gas ballonets. On its top were four cockpits with archers, catapult men, rocketeers and hawk trainers. Along each side, at the midline, were blisters in which sat catapult and rocket men. Other openings gave access to arrows and bombs to be shot out, and to hawks. The tail structures contained several cockpits and there were openings along the bottom of the dirigible behind which were more projectile men and bird handlers.
There were also bomb hatches and hatches for releasing anchors and grappling hooks.
Ulysses stood on the bridge, the lower deck of the control gondola, behind the helmsman. The radiomen, the navigators, the officers responsible for relaying orders from various parts of the ship, and several archers were also in the gondola. If there were not so many Neshgai, Ulysses thought sourly, they would have had more room on the bridge.
He walked through the crowd to the rear of the gondola and looked out. The other ships were behind him but drawing up swiftly. The last was only a round glitter in the blue, but it would catch up within an hour, and they would then proceed in formation.
The beauty of the great ships of the air, and the idea that they were his creation, made his breast ache. He was very proud of them, even if he knew that they were now more vulnerable than he had originally thought. The batmen could fly above the dirigibles and drop bombs on them. They would not be able to do that, however, until he went down to a lower altitude. The ships were climbing now and would not stop until they reached thirteen thousand feet. The air was too thin here for the bat-men to fly. They would not be able to get close to the dirigibles until these descended over their target.
Their goal was the approximate center of The Tree, if they could believe their informants. Pain was a great destroyer of lies, and the bat-men taken prisoners on the first and the second raids had been subjected to as much pain as their frail bodies could withstand. Two had held out until they died, but the others had finally told what they swore was the truth. Their stories agreed, which still did not mean that they were true.
The bat-men who could still talk were being taken along so that they could identify tree marks and, finally, the base-city.
Below, The Tree was a horizon-spanning tangle, a crisscross of gray branches and sun flashing off the waterways on their branches here and there, and vivid colors of the trees and bushes which grew on The Tree. Once, a pale pink cloud rose from a dense green jungle. It was an immense flock of birds leaving the vine complex between two mighty branches. The pink cloud passed between a number of trunks and then settled down and was hidden inside another vine coplex.
Ulysses turned in time to see Awina come down the ladder from the upper deck of the gondola. She was beautiful when just resting, as beautiful as a sealpoint Siamese in repose. But when she was moving, she was as pleasing to the eye as the wind would be if it could be seen. Now that Thebi and Phanus were not with them and she was the only one to attend to the Lord’s personal needs, she was all grin and purr. He had thought of asking her to stay behind but had decided not to. She knew that their chances for coming back were about twenty to eighty, if that good. She would be hurt if he asked her to stay behind. And there was a good strong possibility that she would brood until she exploded against the two women, since she would blame them.
She wore the goggles which Ulysses had ordered made as part of the air force uniform. They would not be needed very often, if at all, but he liked them. They gave a distinct flair to the men who rode the ships of the sky, and they also gave him a pleasurable nostalgic twinge when he saw them. He had been a World War I aviation buff.
A leather chain with a bright blue symbol in the form of the Maltese cross at its end hung around Awina’s neck. A belt with a stone knife was around her waist. That completed her uniform.
She looked at him to make sure that she would not be interrupting him in anything and she said, “My Lord, this is much better than climbing up and down The Tree and riding rafts among the snoligosters and the hipporats!”
He smiled and said, “That is true. But do not forget that we may have to go on foot on the way home.”
And consider ourselves lucky to be able to do that, he thought.
Awina moved closer until her hip was brushing him and then the side of her shoulder came into contact with his arm. The tip of her tail twitched across the back of his calves now and then. There was too much noise in the gondola for him to hear her purring, and she was not close enough for him to feel it. But he believed that she was purring.
He moved away. He had no time to think about her. Captaining ten ships was a full-time job. The officers and crews had had as much training as he could give them in the little time allowed. But they were not veterans.
So far, things had run smoothly enough. At this altitude, they had a tail wind which was upping their ground speed to fifty miles an hour. This meant that they could not return at this height; they would have been moving backward while their motors strained to go full speed. But now they could reach their target in eight hours instead of the sixteen it would have taken if the air had been still. He would let the motors rest for several hours and be pushed by the wind, so that would bring them to the Dhulhulikh city about two hours before nightfall. That would be enough time for what he had in mind.
The Tree scudded under them like a great gray-and-green cloud. Occasionally, there was a space where the branches did not cross, and he could almost see to the bottom of the abyss. What a colossal being! The world had never known its like. Not in all the four billion years of its existence. Not until about, he estimated, the last twenty thousand years. And here it was: The Tree. It seemed a shame, a tragedy, rather, to destroy such a creature.
Then he caught himself. Who was going to destroy it? How?
Now and th
en, he saw tiny big-winged figures that had to be Dhulhulikh. They knew that the ships of the stone god and the Neshgai were flying toward their city. Even if he had not seen any, he would have taken it for granted that there were leathery-winged pygmies hidden in the foliage, observing the ten silver needles above them. Nor did they have to send couriers. They would long ago have transmitted messages via the pulse-diaphragms and nerve cables of The Tree itself.
He supposed that they had been aware for a long long time that the ships were destined for their base-city. They had enough spies, and they doubtless had bribed slaves and perhaps even some Neshgai to spy for them. Corruption and treachery seemed to be inherent with sentiency. Humans had not had a monopoly on these.
Awina pressed up against him again, and he lost his sequence of thought.
The hours passed, eased by the demands of commanding the fleet. Below, the scene changed only slightly. There was some variety in the unity, but only in the slightly differing directions the branches took, in the varying configurations of vine-complexes, the lesser or taller heights of the trunks, and an occasional cloud of birds: pink, green, scarlet, purple, orange, yellow, that sped between the trunks and over the branches.
The sun reached its zenith, and Ulysses ordered the speed reduced to the point where there was just enough power to keep the dirigibles from losing head. It was comparatively silent then in the gondola, except for the soft voices of the petty officers talking into the radio boxes, the shuffle of a Neshgai’s huge feet or squeak of air through his trunk, a Neshgai stomach rumbling, a cough from a man. There was a steady creaking sound: the movement of the tough husks holding the gondola to the main framework.
The sun went down toward the horizon, and Ulysses ordered their chief Dhulhulikh prisoner brought down. This was Kstuuvh, a scarred little man whose hands were tied behind him and whose wings were threaded together. Some of the fire that his skin had felt was reflected as heat in his eyes.
“We should be in sight of the city,” Ulysses said. “Point it out to me.”
Kstuuvh snarled, “With my hands tied?”
“Nod when I point to the right place,” Ulysses said. Most of the trunks reached to ten thousand feet, where they seemed to explode in a mushroom of green. About ten miles ahead of them was a trunk that reached almost to thirteen thousand feet. This should hold the city of the Dhulhulikh, somewhere down there on a number of branches and inside the trunk and the branches themselves. From here, nothing could be seen except The Tree itself. The bat-men would, of course, be hiding until the last moment.
Ulysses said, “That great trunk marks the city?”
“I do not know,” Kstuuvh said.
Graushpaz placed the fingers of his giant hand around the skinny neck of the bat-man and squeezed. Kstuuvh’s face turned blue, his eyes bulged and his tongue shot out.
The Neshgai released his hold. The Dhulhulikh coughed and gagged, and then said, “I do not know.”
Ulysses admired him for making another stand, even though he knew what agony would be inflicted on him. He said, “If we don’t get it out of you, we have more of your kind who are not so stubborn.”
“Use fire on me again,” Kstuuvh said.
Ulysses smiled. The bat-men knew by now how flammable the hydrogen was and how many precautions had been taken during the voyage to prevent sparks and fire.
“A needle will do as well,” he said. But he paid no more attention to the little man except to have him taken to the upper deck. Too many bat-men, including Kstuuvh, had described this treemark while under torture.
He issued the orders that would place them in bombing formation, in an Indian file. They began to lower, and then the battle-stations order went through the radio boxes of the fleet. The flagship was down to ten thousand feet by the time it had reached the great trunk. It was still out of reach of the bat-men, who could not fly any higher than nine thousand feet and that only without any excess weight.
The Blue Spirit went past the mushroom top of the trunk on the starboard side. Some mauve-and-red, huge-winged, small-bodied birds and some thickly furred otter-like creatures stared at the silver goliath as it slid by.
Several miles past the top of the trunk, the flagship made a three hundred and sixty-degree turn on the port side and came past the trunk at nine thousand feet above ground level. It moved at a ground speed of ten miles an hour against the wind, which had dropped to fifteen miles an hour. There was still no sign of the Dhulhulikh below, though there was plenty of evidence of other life. A V-shaped flight of thousands of black-winged, green-bodied, yellow-headed flying mammals rose up toward them, veered and then swooped down into the foliage miles away.
The city was well hidden. The observers on the ships could see nothing but the usual jungle and the waterways.
Yet the Dhulhulikh, under torture, had said that there must be thirty-five thousand living beings there. They had sworn that six thousand and five hundred warriors could swarm up from The Tree to defend the city.
The flagship continued to sink and then, carried toward the trunk by the wind piling against its massive broadside, it moved over a branch five hundred feet below.
Ulysses said, “Bombardiers, fire when ready!”
He glanced at his port. The trunk seemed to be rushing toward them so swiftly that he had to repress a desire to order the ship to turn away. He had made his calculations, and they should be past the trunk by a hundred yards before the wind took them northward.
The bomb hatches had been opened, and the bombardiers, all humans, waited until their sights were on the target.
Ulysses waited. Graushpaz, behind him, shifted. His stomach rumbled, and his proboscis, waving nervously, touched Ulysses’ shoulder with its two wet tendrils. Ulysses shuddered.
“Bombs away,” the bombardier reported. The ship immediately lifted as the weight fell out. Ulysses looked out of the side port. The dark teardrops were still falling. Some missed the branch and continued on to the one below it. About ten struck. Fire gouted up, and great chunks of wood came flying through the fire and the black smoke. There were sections of the smaller trees that grew on The Tree, and some things that could have been small bodies. But whether they were animals or winged men could not be determined.
The two ships behind them also dropped their load and at once danced upward with relief. Enough of their bombs struck at the same place as the first load to dig huge holes into the branch. But the limb was a long way from being weakened enough to break off. Besides, even if it was severed, it would not fall. There were too many vertical branches growing beneath it. It was possible that it would have remained suspended if all its vertical growths had been taken away. The vine complexes linking it to other branches and to trunks might have held it up. However, the chunks blasted out had opened the way for the riverlet, which now spilled out and over the sides, down the trunk and on to a branch about three hundred feet below it.
Ulysses had known that the entire fire-bomb power of the fleet would be required to sever a branch. He was not after that. He only wished to shake out the hidden Dhulhulikh. Once he knew where they were hidden, he would attack those places.
The big dirigible made a wide circle around the trunk and entered into the pattern just after the final ship of the ten had released its bombs. This time, he gave the orders that dipped the nose of the craft and sent it under the blasted branch. The men in the cockpits on top of the vessel reported that the water from the riverlet was falling down on them. And then the ship had passed under and there was, a moment later, a number of explosions as bombs struck the branch beneath the ship. Some of these were composed of jellied alcohol and burned furiously, sending up a huge cloud of smoke.
There was still no sign of the Dhulhulikh.
Ulysses gave the order to save the bombs for a while. He took the flagship around again, this time flying it even lower, though at a greater distance from the trunk. The wind was much reduced here, and so the airship could maneuver with more safety. But even so th
e distance between the two branches through which the Blue Spirit slid was only two hundred feet. No bombs were released. Ulysses did not want the ship to lift up and possibly rub against the upper branch.
At this point, the air was alive with birds. The explosions and the great droning vessels had scared out all the animal life for miles around. A number of the birds hit the propellers, and blood was splattered over the sides of the ship in the immediate neighborhood. Other birds rammed into the skin of the ship or into the glass of the control gondola ports.
Ulysses was too intent on the steering of the ship to inspect the intensely convoluted and wrinkled surface of The Tree for opening to the city. But as the ship began to turn in a relatively wide space between trunks, he heard Awina gasp.
“There’s an opening!” she said.
“Steady as she goes,” he told the steersman.
Under the branch ahead was a cavernous hole. It was oval and about a hundred feet across. Shadowed by the branch, its dark interior seemed empty. But Ulysses was sure that there must be many bat-men crowded into it. They would be waiting, until they were sure that the entrance had been detected, and then they would act. Or their commander might decide it would be better to take the offensive.
Graushpaz said, “There’s another hole!”
He pointed at a dark oval under a branch in the trunk on their right.
The ship would be passing between the two holes, which meant that it could be attacked from both sides simultaneously.
Ulysses had this information transmitted to the other ships and then ordered them not to follow the flagship but to rise and circle. He was taking a chance by bringing his vessel to a place where the bat-men could get above him. They had bombs now, and it would only take one to blast a hole in the thin skin and another through the hole to turn the Blue Spirit into a burning, falling wreck.
He spoke again into the radio box to the rocketeers stationed on the blisters on the sides of the craft and in the cockpits on top. A minute later, as the airship slid by the holes at ten miles per hour, dark objects spurting flame and smoke soared toward the holes from the dirigible. Several struck outside the entrances, but five went into one and three into another. Each had a warhead of ten pounds of plastic explosive and one pound of black gunpowder and a detonating cap of picric acid.