“Is he coming out of it?”
“He’s far under now,” Vanderbilt commented. “If he’s been further under, who can say?”
“Let’s look at the next!”
Near by lay two women; the three men examined them together. They were limp like Jeremiah Post, and like him, lying in a strange, profound stupor—like anesthesia, as Vanderbilt had said. The sleep of one of them seemed, somehow, less deep than that which held Post insensible; but neither of the women could be roused from it more than he.
“Feel anything funny yourself?” Tony challenged Taylor across the form of the girl over whom they worked.
“No; do you?”
“No.… It was gas, I believe; but now it’s dissipated—but left its effect on everybody that breathed it.”
“Gas,” said Vanderbilt calmly, “from where?”
Tony’s mind flamed with the warning of Kyto’s words. A third Ark from the earth had reached Bonson Beta bearing a band of fanatic, ruthless men who would have the planet for their own, completely. They had brought with them some women, but they wished for many more in order to populate it with children of their own bodies and of their own fanatic faiths. These men already had obtained the Lark planes of the Other People, and mastered the secrets of their operation. These men long ago had entered some other Sealed City and had begun an exploration into the science of Dead People. Perhaps they had found some fomula for a gas that stupefied, but was harmless otherwise.
Their plan and their purpose, then, would be plain. They would spread the gas and render Hendron’s people helpless; then they would return to the camp and control it, doing whatever they wished with the people, as they awoke.
Tony scanned the sky, the surrounding hills. There was nothing in sight.
Yet he leaped up. “Peter! Jack! They’ll be coming back! We’ll be ready for them!”
“Who? Who are they?”
“The men who did this! Come on!”
“Where?”
“To the tubes!” And Tony pointed to them, aimed like cannon into the air—the huge propulsion-tubes from the Ark, which Hendron and he had mounted on their swivels at the edges of the camp. From them could be shot into the air the awful blast that had propelled the Ark through space, and which melted every metal except the single substance with which they were lined.
The nearest of these engines of flight, so expediently made into machines of defense, was a couple of hundred yards away; and now as the three made hastily for it, they noticed a grouping of the limp, unconscious forms that told its own significant story.
Several of the men seemed to have been on the way to the great tube when they had collapsed.
“You see?” gasped Tony; for the three now were running. “It was an attack! They saw it, and tried to get the tube going!”
Two men, indeed, lay almost below the tube. Tony stared down at them as his hands moved the controls, and felt them in order.
“Dead?” Tony asked of Taylor, who bent over the men.
Jack shook his head. “Nobody’s dead. They’re all the same—they’re sleeping.”
“Do you see Dodson? Have you seen Dodson anywhere?”
“No; you want Dodson, especially?”
“He might be able to tell us what to do.”
Tony threw a switch, and a faint corona glowed along a heavy cable. The air crackled softly. “Our power-station’s working,” he said with satisfaction. “We can give this tube the ‘gun’ when we want to. You know how to give it the gun, Peter?”
“I know,” said Vanderbilt calmly.
“Then you stand by; and give it the gun, if anything appears overhead! Jack, see what you can do with that tube!” Tony pointed to the north corner of the camp. “I’ll loo
k over some more of the people; and see what happened to Hendron—and Eve—and Ransdell and Dodson. Dodson’s the one to help us, if we can bring him to.”
He had caught command again—command over himself and his companions; Taylor already was obeying him; and Vanderbilt took his place at the tube.