The Earth-Tube (21 page)

He compressed his lips grimly. It would not have been useless if Diane could get the word through to the War Council. He had faith in Diane. She would get through if it were possible for her to do it. But of course she may herself have been taken captive before she escaped from the secret passage or before she had been able to reach the inscribed portal of the city to summon aid from the sky.

The reaction from the intense motion was one of discontent at the slowing speed. To King it seemed that the car had almost ceased to move, though the constant shudder as it rolled along at the side of the earth-tube told him that it was still making tremendous headway. The speed was too great, in fact, to please the Asian engineers, for there was a series of hissing noises toward the front, and the car slowed suddenly and quite perceptibly. They were firing the retarding rockets at the nose to bring the projectile more easily
and
smoothly to the landing gear.

A minute or two later the great bullet swooped out of the ground amid a tremendous burst of steam and fell into the metal basket which had been placed above the pit to catch it. King felt it pause, hang for a moment suspended, and then settle down sidewise into the ways, to await unloading. At last they had arrived in Tanlis, and he was, for the first time in his life, in the Eastern Hemisphere.

He unstrapped himself almost with a sense of elation, despite the danger which was hanging over him. In a pocket of his cloak the Asian captors had placed several food tablets. He swallowed two and almost immediately felt their exhilarating effect.

When the four guards came down the companionway and opened the door of his compartment, he was already on his feet, smiling, waiting for them.

II

The Tal Maj’od was a great ruler, and his people had spread themselves over half the earth and conquered it because he had never forgotten the teachings of his father and his grandfather. He had never forgotten that his was an empire both of metal and of blood; that it was a machine and a machine, the one of undulal, and the other of men who were but the units of a higher creation than themselves.

There was a justice to the rule of Tal Majod; his subjects knew him as the Fountain of Justice. But it was the justice of the impartial; it varied not a hairline to the one side or the other. There was the law for slaves, and the penalty for violating it; there was the law for the police, the law for the servant, the law for the guard, the law for the mechanic, the law for petty lords, and the law for the great ones; all had their codes of conduct, their duties, and their punishments. To every man there was a function, an orbit, and a sphere; and to every man there was allotted payment for transgression—a punishment calculated in advance and as certain of execution as the rising of the sun.

Thus was the Tal Majod a great ruler, for he was just to the last scruple; he knew not cruelty though to another race his whole regime was cruel. But is it cruelty in the mower, that the grass is cut away? Is it cruelty in the lathe, that the chips Hy and the wood is smoothed to other uses? Is it cruelty even in the machine, that if a cog break or fall from place, it shall be mercilessly sheared off and replaced? Tal Majod did not know cruelty, only justice.

“Where stands a ruler one half so just as Tal Majod?” sang three yellow-clad poets on the parapets at San Adel, the seat of Tal Majod.

The slow, sad waves of the Japanese Sea rolled in upon the beach and rolled out again. Bright, mottled steps in flights of four ran down from the high outdoor court to meet the sands. Upon their flanks lay silken cushions and courtiers in bright robes. Overhead towered the high battlements of San Adel, curved and fluted and of curious design; the squares and shafts and convex spears of metal chilled and molded into shape for time until the end of days. The poets sang to the harp; their voices quivered in the warm afternoon air with praises for the Tal Majod, the Great and Just.

In unseen courts the cherries bloomed, and perfumes from their blossoms lingered like distant melodies about the towers and the high seat where rested the emperor of the Eastern Hemisphere, decked in robes of glittering light, wearing upon his head a square crown of emerald and platinum, with flashing jewels that glowed in darkness brighter than the day.

“Where stands a ruler half so just as Tal Majod?” the poets sang. And then the Great and Just moved in his seat.

“Where is this prisoner that Tiplis spoke about?” he asked. “Bring him before us; let us see his face!”

Then, as if the sound of his voice had set them in motion, the great gates of the prison entrance opened to the court. A curved trumpet beat its notes upon the air, and fourteen guards walked gravely two by two before the emperor, followed by fourteen more, in robes of courtly green. Among them walked King, tired and haggard by two weeks of imprisonment, his clothing torn and soiled, his face no longer covered by the whiskers Diane had made for him, but with a stubble of his own.

He cast a longing glance down the layered flights of stairs to the clean and rolling waves, then sought the eyes of the man who now controlled his destiny. Tal Majod looked sternly down upon him; the guards fell back on either side, leaving King alone. Slaves were prostrated before the throne. The guards, wary-eyed, were kneeling in reverence before the emperor. But King, defiant, stood upright amid the adulation, returning the stare of his steel-blue eyes, daring even to study the grotesque, lipless face, the smooth, white, long-fingered hands that lay effortlessly in the lap of the monarch.

The singing of the poets had ceased. The sound of the waves was far away. King heard the blood pound in his temples as the clothing of the guardsmen rustled in the trembling breeze.

“I am the American,” he said at last. “I am your prisoner. What will you do with me?”

The Tal Majod moved his right hand. He raised the forefinger.

“What was your business in our city on the Western Hemisphere?”

“I came to spy,” said King. “The Western Hemisphere is ours. not yours. The Americas are ours, not yours!”

“The Americas,” interrupted the emperor suavely, “are for whosoever can take them. The Americas are for whosoever can hold them fast; drive enemies away from sea or air or underground. There are no rights which cannot be enforced; no claims which rest on words alone, but lack the deeds to make them real.”

“Then there is neither truth nor justice in you!” cried King.

The emperor’s finger remained upraised, his face impassive; yet in his eyes at the mention of justice there came a gleam, either of anger or triumph.

“Ah. justice!” he replied. “That is another thing; all justice flows from us. There is no justice which is not in Tal Majod!”

“You have not shown it!” King exclaimed.

“It shall be shown. Have patience; it shall be shown.” He seemed to smile. His eyes gleamed brighter as he contemplated King.

The American moved wearily. “Then take your armies from our lands,” he said, “your metal fortresses and your horse-mouthed followers. Get them back into the earth-tube and underground where they belong. Take your hand off the Americas!”

The Tal Majod, moving a little forward to stare fixedly at his prisoner, arched his eyebrows ever so little. “That,” he replied, “would not be justice. That would be pity!”

“Pity!”

“Pity for your puny American race, which cannot defend itself. Barbarians, hunted into the woods!” He eased himself back into his chair and assuming sternness, continued: “But the Asian knows not pity. In years and generations he has schooled himself to justice, but never mercy. American, you will find us just, even though we hate!”

The grounds of the palace of the ruler of Asia were as broad as the sea and swept upward from the shore in magnificent undulations of artificial terrain. Here were the strangely wrought figures of the Asian landscape art. The grounds, formed of the very materials of Nature: grass and trees, and fronds and flowers, with gay-colored birds from all the world flitting between. seemed somehow inescapably machine-like. There was the spirit of the machine in everything. Here and there, in coats of scarlet or blue or emerald, the gardeners worked in squads to keep the grounds in shape, moving always in units, knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder, wheeling to command. The wild birds swung like startled souls through all the clash and rhythm. They beat their wings against the bright sun, crying harshly.

And near the middle of the grounds, on a slight elevation overlooking the sea, arose the palace; a handful of vertical crystals it appeared from a distance, as if some giant force had thrust them up like needles of granite from beneath the earth. Tremendous in height, these jagged towers dominated the countryside; they were mountains of metal, upreared in forms of Asian art and science. Fourteen towers like crystals leaned a little inward at different angles, and in the middle of them stood four greater ones. obelisks of amethyst and pale lavender, rising a third higher than all the rest. On every side the layered stairs and basins sloped away, and on the seaside was the court, beneath the highest pinnacle, flanked on two sides by rugged blocks of tinted undulal.

The very winds stood still to hear the judgment of the Tal Majod. The harpist struck three rapid notes, and quivering echoes soared like snow-birds to the deep blue sky. The emperor folded his fingers. He placed his hands upon his placid breast. A scribe in scarlet upon a cushion of deepest green took down his words, as first in Asian, and then in English, he gave his sentence and pronounced his decree:

“American, you came among us seeking truth and hunting out the science of the Asian men.

“You came among us of your own accord, humbly, thirsting for knowledge which we alone could give.“

The Tal Majod paused magnificently, raising an amber hand, while slaves and guards, courtiers and artisans and musicians alike, waited in breathless silence for the rest. King stood defiantly on two firm feet, amid the twenty-eight bowed guards. Alone he stared unflinching at the high-throned monarch of the Eastern Hemisphere, and Tal Majod went on.

“Therefore, American. you shall learn the things you sought. You shall learn the secret of the undulal;

the mysteries the Asians knew in the infancy of their race. And you shall even know what Asia learned when she pierced the heart of the rolling earth, to strike America!”

Sharply he clapped his hands. “Gun-Tar!”

A tall man, in the somber robes of the Mui Salvos, approached slowly, in measured steps. He came up and stood beside the American.

“Gun-Tar,” directed the Tal Majod, “you shall take this man, this American; you shall teach him whatsoever secret of science he should wish to know, and he shall learn that which he would between the passing of the earth-car hence at noon to-morrow, and the passing of it hence at noon the seventh day. Then, after the earth-car has commenced its return from Tip-lis to Tanlis, you shall without fail conduct him to the earth-shaft in garments of flaming red, and in the presence of my people assembled in the chamber you shall hurl him downward after the car, that he may see and learn as well our secrets of the earth’s interior.

“Mark this, and do not fail!”

The Mui Salvo bowed low.

“My judgment is ended,” said the Tal Majod.

Mounting against the amethyst towers the twanging notes of the wild harp drowned his ashen voice. The three poets, rising together on an eminence, sang in a long-held nasal chant of justice and of Tal Majod. The bright-billed birds with legs of saffron flew about the court, crying out harshly over the heads of the courtiers gathered there to worship the Great and Just, the ruler of the Eastern World.

“You shall go back to Tiplis at the passing of the earth-car to-morrow noon,” repeated Gun-Tar to King as they passed out into the high-walled prison together, surrounded by the guards. King knew that there would be no escaping this black-robed man; his grip was steel, his mind was steel. The sentence would be fulfilled to the letter. and at the end. !

King had been sentenced to death by heat and falling.

He clutched the tall, bright bars of his prison cell. He had not cringed before the ruler of all Asia; nor had he weakened in the seven days of imprisonment in Tanlis before his trial. It would be something to remember when they brought him to the great curbed hole in the earth, to push him into it, that he had faced this demon, and he had not flinched.

But what of Diane? Had they captured her? Tortured her, perhaps?

He hoped fervently that she had escaped. with his message. America could be saved from the Asians yet if Diane had gotten through!

Diane. Diane. ! He could not take his mind from her. Diane, the white slave of the Asians. she was beautiful!

And in eight more days King would die. He had been gone from America two long weeks. They had given up hope for him in Washington. New York would never know him any more.

Diane he would not see again. He hoped that she was safe.

III

In Dr. Scott’s library in New York, where the aged scientist had first given warning of the approach of the Asians, the three remaining members of the War Council were discussing the situation at the end of the second week after King Henderson had entered Tiplis. Before the President was a voluminous pile of reports; at his right a private telephone connected directly with his offices in Washington. He spread his hands over the pile of yellow telegrams, pressing down on them as if by some unconscious urge he hoped to push them out of existence and the news they carried with them.

It was apparent that all of South America would finally go before the relentless forward pushing of the tanks. There was nothing that the armies of defense could do to hold them back. Slowly, stubbornly, the retreat had continued. And each day the tanks, running more and more swiftly, approached nearer the bottle-neck of Panama. Bogota and Caracas had gone and with them the government of South America.

In addition, the Asians had begun to consolidate their positions on the continent to the south. Earlier they had been content to lay waste the land and to enslave or kill the inhabitants. Now three great metal cities had begun to grow; one where Buenos Aires had stood, another across the continent at Valparaiso, and a third at Rio, which had been razed to the ground after the defenders had hastily evacuated it.