The sky was clear, and the moon was just coming up. He could not see it because the trunk blocked his view, but he could see the paling of the sky. Way up, a needle shape moved across the blackness and the stars.
He shouted at Bifak, the human who had commanded the ship while the invasion of the trunk was taking place. “Where are the Dhulhulikh warriors?”
“Many apparently rammed into each other in the smoke and fell. And then the hawks got many, and many flew into each other trying to get away from them.”
That might account for heavy losses among the bat-men but it would not account for their total disappearance. Where had they gone? And why had they gone?
By then, the water from the big hole had become a trickle. The lights from the dirigible showed a logjam of bodies inside the hole and a detritus of corpses, mostly Dhulhulikh, strewn out from the hole. Bifak said there had been many more bodies, but these had been washed away with the first outflux of waters or else dragged away and thrown over the edge of the branch by the crewmen.
There must be thousands of other corpses inside, Ulysses thought.
He shouted at the survivors. They must get into the Blue Spirit immediately and prepare to take off. They could do no more here. Some day, they would return with a much larger fleet and with the men and the materials to blast down through the center of the trunk to the brain of The Tree.
In the gondola, he told the officers to start the lift-off procedures. He ordered the radio operator to check with the other ships and clarify the situation in the air.
One ship had been bombed and caught fire during the invasion of the trunk. It had fallen into the abyss and was probably half-buried in the swamp at the roots of The Tree. The two other dirigibles that had landed were getting ready to lift off also. They had lost all landing parties, the personnel of which had drowned inside the trunk or had been washed out of the holes and fallen to death.
Ulysses looked at the hole in the trunk while the crewmen got ready to cut the lines that held the vessel to the branch. It should be possible to make a substance which could be applied to the walls of the chambers inside the trunk. This would have to be quick-drying and strong enough to resist the spray of water. Perhaps some sort of epoxy glue. And the blasting would proceed from above and below with shuttles of airships bringing in tons of explosives. Maybe that laser-type device in the underground museum beneath the Temple of Nesh could be powered. If so, it might be able to drill holes through the wood, and the blasting would go much more swiftly.
He could get to the brain if he could find it. But if the brain was not in this trunk, then he might as well forget about finding it.
Yet, what about poisoning the entire Tree? Some powerful poison, tons and tons of it, placed in the roots, so that the mighty water circulation system of The Tree would draw the poison into it?
The Tree knew what it was doing when it had tried to capture and then to kill him. He was a man and so a threat to it.
“Ready to sever the lines, sir,” the lift-off officer reported.
“Sever the lines!”
There was a twanging noise, and the ship abruptly lifted. It rose swiftly toward the branch five hundred feet overhead and then began to turn as the starboard motors tilted to the horizontal and their propellers began whirling. The ship turned slowly and moved out. The four ships in the air had begun moving down to cover the others. Their searchlights probed the night, falling on the vast gray-black wrinkles and fissures of the trunk and the vegetation-covered surfaces of the branches.
Ulysses stood behind the helmsman and looked over his shoulder into the night. “I wonder where they are,” he muttered.
Awina said, “What?”
“The Dhulhulikh. Even if over half were killed, they still have a powerful force. They…”
His question was answered. Out of the mountain-sized mushroom-shaped top of the trunk above them fell a horde of batwinged men. They dropped out with wings folded, hundreds at a time, and did not open their wings until they had attained a great speed. They abruptly filled the space between the trunk top and the dirigibles; they looked like a locust plague, so numerous were they.
They had been waiting until the ships on the branches were leaving and the other ships would have come down to cover them. They were making one final all-out attack to destroy the entire fleet.
Only later did it occur to Ulysses that the winged men should not have been able to hide within the leaves of the mushroom-shaped top. This was thirteen thousand feet high, four thousand feet higher than a bat-man could fly. But the explanation of the impossible was easy. The Dhulhulikh had climbed up the trunk. With their wings flapping to half-lift their forty-five pound bodies, the bat men had swarmed up the rough side of the trunk at a pace that no other sentient, and very few monkeys, could have equaled.
Briefly, Ulysses wondered if this plan had originated in the brain of the Dhulhulikh commander or if it had come from the vegetable brain housed in the trunk. And he wondered why the ships on the branches had not been attacked when they were in their most vulnerable position and crewed with so few.
Later on, he realized that even if they could have flown above the Blue Spirit, they could have dropped bombs on it. They had no bombs left. Even in the beginning, not more than one bat-man in fifty had had a bomb. There had not been enough time to make and transport a great number from the north. Many had been expended in the first attacks, and the others had been lost, with their carriers, when the smoke clouds were dropped and the hawks released. The Dhulhulikh commander, or The Tree, realizing this, had hidden the winged men in the immense trunk top while the smoke cloud was thick enough. The commander had bet that the ships too high to be reached would come down to protect the three on the branches, and he had won that bet.
The difficulty in defending the dirigibles rising up from the branches was the lack of personnel. Most of the crew and the soldiers had been killed inside The Tree. And so, though the three men in the cockpits and in the side domes and the archers behind the openings fought well, they were overwhelmed. Within a few minutes, the three ships were covered with little winged forms, like bugs newly crawled out of a vast egg.
To get the ship up faster, Ulysses had tilted the motor gondolas so that the propellers pointed upward. The ship rose swiftly toward the height at which the winged men could no longer fly. But that would do no good if they ripped open the big gas cells inside the fuselage. The ship would just fall to a height where they could fly again.
The four ships above them, fully crewed and armed with a good many bombs, rockets and arrows yet, had resisted more successfully. The explosives had shattered the first few ranks and, at the same time, the three craft were expelling the last of their smoke clouds. The bat-men kept on coming, but the airships were now going at thirty-five mph and when the attackers did reach the ships, they either bounced off the skin or hit it so hard they went through. Those who penetrated the skin tore off their wings or broke their fragile bones. Within a few minutes, the Dhulhulikh were lost in another cloud. They had also lost their chance to get the four upper ships.
The three lower ones, however, were heavy with the winged men. These, after killing the bomb and rocket crews and archers, swarmed through the openings into the interior. Here, for a time, they did not know what to do or where to go, since the captains of the ships had turned off all the interior lights as soon as they realized their situation. And, though weighted down, the ships slowly continued to rise, aided by the upward-tilted motors.
The Dhulhulikh, after blundering around on the catwalks and girders, and sometimes falling, finally located the main walkway and then the hatch to the control deck. This had been locked, but while some bat-men used tools they had picked up to batter at the hatch, others knocked out more holes in the skin. They let themselves out and dropped down, flapping, and then tried for the gondola. Those who had come out behind the gondola did not make it, because the ship was going too fast. Those who let themselves out of a hole in the no
se were able to attach themselves to the gondola. They beat in vain at the plastic transparent ports with their stone knives. Then Ulysses ordered the ports raised, and the winged men were stabbed and fell off into the night.
The hatch to the gondola gave way with a screech. Yelling, the little bat-men poured down the ladder and were skewered, sometimes two in a row, by crossbolts. Graushpaz then ordered the bowmen to step aside, and he and another Neshgai advanced up the ladder, their great stone axes swinging. The pygmies were crushed beneath the heavy stones. Graushpaz, the light shining from the top of his helmet, went ponderously up the ladder and onto the main walkway. The other Neshgai followed him.
Ulysses, even on the lower deck of the gondola, could hear the screams of the bat-men and the trumpetings of the Neshgai. And then, on his right, the darkness became an eye-searing flame as a dirigible exploded. Fire wrapped it around within two seconds, and the airship began to fall at once. A few figures leaped from it, mostly humans and one large Neshgai figure from the control gondola. The majority of the winged men aboard had been caught inside the fuselage. Nobody would ever know what had happened. Perhaps the Dhulhulikh had set off a rocket or lit a match too close to a hydrogen leak. Or, more likely, the captain, realizing his ship was doomed, had set fire to it, incinerating several hundred Dhulhulikh along with himself and his crew.
Ulysses had groaned when he saw the ship burst into flames. Now he yelled, because the other ship was headed toward the falling craft. If it did not quickly turn, it would ram broadside into the other or be caught on its nose by the burning craft.
“Turn, you fool!” he yelled. “Turn!”
But the airship proceeded in a stately manner toward a fiery collision.
A moment later, hundreds of bodies left it. They poured out of the cockpits, the domes and the holes that had been torn in the skin by bat-men who had struck it. They fell with wings half-folded and then, out of harm’s way, spread their wings out.
As the Dhulhulikh left, and the weight passed, the ship lifted and quickly was above the flaming wreck. Ulysses smiled, realizing that the captain had deliberately set his ship on a collision course. He and his crew would all be killed anyway by the Dhulhulikh, so he had tried to ram the other ship. But he had not really wished to do so. He must have been hoping for just what did happen. The terrified bat-men had deserted the ship and so allowed him to escape.
The Blue Spirit, however, was in grave danger. It was so burdened down that it could rise no higher. And the Neshgai, though they might be waging a homeric battle, would inevitably be overcome by sheer numbers. They had been able to keep fighting so far only because the pygmies were not carrying bows and poisoned arrows. Within a few minutes, the survivors would be charging down the ladder again.
Ulysses said, to the helmsman, “Tie the wheel down. But keep the motors turned vertically. And then fall in with the others.”
The helmsman did not ask why he should leave his post. But he was aware that every man was needed.
Ulysses, standing on the upper deck, his feet soaked in the blood of Dhulhulikh, counted his “men.” He had three Wufea, two Wagarondit and one Alkunquib. One of the Wufea was Awina, but she would be a deadly fighter against the tiny bat-men. These were all that were left of the two hundred who had set out with him to enter The Tree on its northern side. And he had six Vroomaw “humans.”
“We have one chance,” he said. “Kill or drive out every Dhulhulikh. Follow me!”
He went up the steps with a flint-tipped club in one hand and the other on the guide rail of the ladder to keep from slipping in the blood. He wore his full armor still, and the light on top of his helmet was on. But this was for emergency only, because he had turned the lights back on when the Neshgai charged into the fuselage.
No one opposed him at first. The Dhulhulikh were too concentrated on the Neshgai even to see him. They swarmed about the sole Neshgai on his feet, hopping on the main walkway before and in back of him and fluttering down from girders to lash out at the giant as they went by. The way was strewn with mangled corpses, and on both sides torn and crushed bodies lay on the skin.
Ulysses ran as swiftly as he dared, stepping over the bodies, until he got to the fight. He smashed in three skulls and broke the bones of two pairs of wings before the little men even knew that help had come for Graushpaz. The Neshgai, trumpeting, summoned new strength to smash out anew. His quilted armor and plastic faceplate were splashed with blood, some of which was his own. His trunk had been deeply gashed near the tip, and two-thirds of a short spear stuck out of his back. Some bat-man had dived down from a catwalk near the top of the ship and driven the spear through the armor and halfway into his body.
There were about forty Dhulhulikh still able to fight. They came down on the ten newcomers with maniacal fury, losing many but stabbing all ten. A Wufea, two Wagarondit and three Vroomaw were dead within sixty seconds. But Graushpaz, relieved of the full onslaught, cracked three heads with one sweep of his ax, reached out and grabbed a wingtip with one bloody hand and tore the wing off, sending the shrieking little man off the catwalk. He wheeled, and trumpeting wildly, charged those around the newcomers. His flailing ax crushed two more and he plucked a winged man off Ulysses’ back and squeezed once, crushing the windpipe.
Suddenly, the survivors had run off toward the holes in the skin. They had had enough. But before they reached the holes, they stopped. And then they turned around with a wild exultant cry. Fresh Dhulhulikh were coming in through the holes.
Graushpaz screamed, “Dump the bodies off! Get the ship up where they can’t reach us!”
He brushed by them on the walkway, almost knocking them off. He bent over, groaning with the pain of the spear in his back, and rolled the great bodies of his friends off title walkway. The dirigible’s skin broke wherever the corpses fell through. More air whistled through the breaks but that did not matter. Air was whistling through a hundred holes.
Ulysses shouted at the others to throw the rest of the bodies off. They lifted up their dead comrades and dropped them over the rail, and then began on the bat-men. The reinforcements had continued to come in through the holes, but these were not the overwhelming number he had expected. There were about fifty. Added to those who had been here, sixty in all. Enough, however, to kill the thirteen survivors a dozen times over.
He ran down the walkway until he was past the hatch that led to the control gondola. He went to his right on a walkway to a defense station, and here he looked for a bomb. He planned on lighting the fuse and standing by a gas cell. The bat-men would see what he meant; they would understand his gestures. Either they got off or he threw the bomb against the cell, and they would all die instantly. Perhaps they were fanatical enough to let him do it, but he had only this one chance. Either way, if he threw the bomb, or if he refused to throw it at the last second, he and his men were doomed. But the bat-men just might be frightened enough to take off.
There were no bombs or rockets. They had all been expended.
That was just as well. Otherwise, some bat-man would have taken one, lit it, and all the attackers would have flown away before the dirigible went up in flames.
Ulysses whirled around and ran back on the walkway until he came to a girder. He leaped upon this and climbed up it until he stood on the framework at the base of a towering gas cell. He shouted until every one’s head was turned toward him, and he slashed the cloth bag with his switchblade knife.
The rent was a tiny one. Hydrogen shrilled out of it and blew over his head. He stepped back and then pulled a box of matches out of his pocket. He held it up so all could see what he had, and he made motions of striking it. He hoped that the bat-men knew what matches were. Otherwise, his gesture was meaningless.
There was a horrified cry from the winged men and his own people alike.
He yelled, “Dhulhulikh, leave this ship at once! Or I kill all of us! Now! You will burn like moths in a cooking fire!”
There was a crash. Graushpaz had fallen o
ver the guard rail of the walkway and toppled onto the skin below. His body crashed through the paper-thin shell and was gone. He had paid his debt; he knew he had only a few minutes of life; he had jumped to give the ship more lift.
The people on the main walkway and the Dhulhulikh on the girders, struts and catwalks on the starboard side were frozen. They had not moved even when Graushpaz had let himself fall over the rail. They stared at his hands, at the match box and the match.
The Dhulhulikh commander wore a scarlet leather helmet, emblem of a rank equivalent to a colonel. He was crouched on a catwalk, a short thin spear in one hand, the other holding onto the guard rail, his face twisted. He was in an agony of indecision.
Then Awina stooped slowly and straightened up with a club in her hand. She threw it and it spun toward the commander and struck him in the face. He fell without a sound.
The others looked at each other. Their leader was dead, and the next in command had to make up his mind whether they should all die in a holocaust in the next few seconds or retreat. By refusing to leave they would ensure that the prime enemy would die also. But…
Ulysses could appreciate what they were going through. Their life was so short. Even if miserable, it was the only one they would have. And if they ran away, they could fight again. That cliché was as true and as persuasive as twenty million years ago.
Holding the match box in his left hand, Ulysses applied the tip of the match to the side of the box.
“One little flame!” he shouted. “That’s all it takes! And we all burn to death!”
A Dhulhulikh wearing a greenish helmet, indicating a rank equivalent to a major, shouted back in a thin piping voice, “Then we all die!”
He waved the slender spear and said, “Attack them!”
Without waiting to see if he was being followed, he launched himself from the girder, wings flapping, at Awina. But the air was thinner here, and he did not glide at quite the correct angle. He struck the rail full in the middle and Awina hit him over the head with her tomahawk. Fast on his heels came about twenty more, some of whom made the same error as their commander and slammed into the railing. The others were met with the weapons of the remaining twelve defenders, who stood back to back, six facing one way and six the other.