In all our wandering, I saw no trace of kon deposits.”
“We can’t build the weapon, then,” Aladoree said slowly.
“Not here.
If we could only get back to the System.”
“The ship is lying wrecked, somewhere on the bottom of the ocean.”
Numbed with bleak despair they stood there, shivering in the chill wind that came up across the river.
Over the dark thorn-jungle they stared, at the walls and towers and unguessable mechanisms of the dark metropolis.
Old before the dawn of man, it would stand invincible when the last man was gone.
From those far walls and towers, abruptly, green flame burned.
They saw titanic forms rising, the black spider-shapes of the Medusae’s interstellar fliers.
A monstrous swarm rose up as the far thunder of green-flaring rockets rolled over the jungle and the river, and vanished at last in the blood-red sky.
“Their fleet!” whispered Aladoree.
“Flying away to the System, with all their hordes, to occupy our planets.
Their fleet, already gone!
If we had found a bit of iron———But it’s too late.
We’ve already failed.”
25 Wings Above the Walls
“All for the want of a mortal nail!” commented Giles Habibula, in a voice that might have softened the heart of a statue of iron.
“Ah, me!
That the lack of a blessed nail could mean so much!”
He was huddled on the black sand, a heap of dejection, carelessly holding a smoking piece of meat on a stick, above the sheltered driftwood fire.
“Poor old Giles Habibula!
Ah, that he should live to see such a fearful day!
Better—ah, sweet life knows, far better—that he should have died as a blessed babe!
Better that the law should have taken its cruel, pitiless course, that time on Venus!
“A fearful reward it is, in dear life’s name, mortal fearful, for twenty years of loyal service in the Legion.
Accused for a precious pirate.
Imprisoned and starved and tortured!
Ah, yes, driven out of his own native System, to this hideous world of frightful horror!
“Poisoned by the very mortal air, doomed to howling insanity and death by slow green rot.
Hunted by a million mortal monsters.
Forced to scuttle like a rat through the wicked black city.
Driven like a miserable rat to drown in the stinking sewers.
Now face to face with a fearful death, in the cold of the dreadful night.
And the one bottle of wine on the whole black continent smashed before he’d had a taste of it!
“Mortal me!
It’s more than a man can endure.
Too mortal much, in life’s dear name, for a poor old soldier of the Legion, sick and lame and feeble, with his wine spilled under his very eyes!
“And now, for the want of a nail, the whole human System is lost!
Ah, me, for the lack of one precious bit of iron, all humanity doomed to die before the invasion of the monstrous Medusa!
Ah, good life knows, it’s a mortal evil time!
A mortal bitter time!
Poor old Giles Habibula———”
There was a crackling sound from the driftwood fire, a whiff of bitter smoke.
He stirred himself abruptly, rose with a final doleful wail:
“Ah, me!
Misfortunes never come alone.
Now the mortal meat is burned!”
And he went back to the bright-winged thing that John Star had killed, to cut another steak from its furry body.
By the glittering, sapphire-and-ruby wings that lay forlorn on the black sand, the others were standing in a dispirited little group, shivering hi the increasing cold wind that blew out of the deepening red twilight. From the river bar they were staring, beaten and beyond hope, at the walls and towers and machines of the black metropolis, looming weird against the darkling scarlet sky, above the dark thorn-jungle.