Part 3

A designated quarter of them swooped down. From up at this height, Venta, Jim and I hovered, with the rest of the Midges in a gathered group around us. All of us staring down.

The cloud of some five hundred Midges swooped, circled, and then plummeted. For a second or two the startled Curtmann men merely seemed to stare upward. Then the Midges were upon them, fluttering into their faces, jabbing at them. The men's arms wildly failed to fend off the viciously attacking little bodies.

Some of the Midges were caught, bashed into pulp and hurled away with a single flailing blow. Some were caught in huge hands, squeezed to death and flung to the ground. The oaths of the startled men came up, mingled with the cries of the Midges, then the tiny fluttering shapes were rising again. A shot stabbed at them, its crackling bolt stabbing through a group of them. It was like a monstrous blow-torch stabbing into fluttering moths. It left a trail of wisps of light as their bodies were consumed.

The rest of them came up and joined us, panting, flopping.

"Good enough," Jim murmured. "Five minutes more and we'll see what really happened."

But I was cold inside. No more than half the Midges had come back. Two hundred or more of them gone already. And here in the air, some of them, wounded, were bravely struggling not to fall.

The men and the huge cart down in the glade had started forward again. Suddenly it was apparent that the harnessed lines of Midges on the ground were in revolt. They milled in confusion, struggling to cast off the lines that held them. We heard Curtmann roaring threats at them. And then he fired a bolt horizontally through them. It cut a ghastly swath; a burst of trailing little wisps of fire. Beside me, Venta gasped in horror; and Jim murmured,

"Fool! With what's left of those Midges that heavy cart will never move again."

The cart had stopped. Curtmann, doubtless regretting his shot of exasperation, was roaring more orders. The straggling columns of his men came toward the cart, and all of them bunched around it in a solid group, out there in the center of the open glade.

"Got them stalled," Jim said grimly. "Much better for us."

If the poison would work. But would it? At three hundred feet we were still circling in great humming sweeps while again I withheld my signal. Did I dare send the Midges down for a general attack? Every shot cut them so horribly into nothingness. Off to the side, in the direction of the Forest City, other Midges were appearing now. Little groups of them, males and females, humming toward us, joining our circling ranks. Reinforcements. In a minute or two it seemed that a new thousand were here to swell our weird little army.

"Look!" Jim suddenly cried triumphantly. "The enta-poison!"

Up to now, in these tentative exchanges, Curtmann and his men doubtless had contemptuously figured that this engagement was harassing, but certainly nothing worse. Some of his men had been stabbed by little thorns. What of it? But down there now a new confusion was apparent. One of his men on the ground beside the cart suddenly staggered and fell. Then another. In the cart a group of them called with startled questions. Two of them by the big projector abruptly slumped in their seats with their fellows bending anxiously over them.

A moment of startled confusion. A dozen stricken men. And then others. What was happening must have dawned on Curtmann. In the starlit dimness down there on the cart we saw the blob of his figure leap erect.

And then Curtmann, at last realizing the deadliness of this menace, went into action! From the cart there was a little puff, with the hissing, popping sound of it coming up to us a few seconds later. A small round blob rose toward us, went harmlessly through us and burst up in the starlight. An electrolite-flare. It glared with a lurid, prismatic splash of color in the sky, illumined brightly the tiny flying dots of our Midges.

Just that few seconds and then the great projector hurled its missile at us--a blob coming slowly up in an arc. The blob burst. It seemed as though suddenly there was an earthquake in the air-split columns of air rushing together with a deafening thunderclap. The air rocked me, hurled me sidewise; the brief roar was deafening.

"A thunder-thrower!" Venta gasped as she clung to me.

In the cataclysm of air the cloud of Midges was hurled into chaos, their bodies knocked together, whirling end over end, some of them dropping with broken wings.

Just a few seconds, and now the blue-white starlit night had been transformed into a chaos of glaring light and roaring, clapping sound. Flares were bursting everywhere; the cracking thunderclaps came one upon the other in a chaos of prismatic horror. Curtmann's hand-flashes were stabbing recklessly up through it. One of longer range burned a wide swath with the bodies of Midges bursting into a myriad pin-points of light.

In the rocking turmoil I heard Jim shouting, "Good God, we can't stay up here!"

* * * * *

Half our Midges already were gone! Everywhere little broken dots were drifting or falling down.

"Down!" I shouted. "Venta--Meeta--tell them! Everyone down. Don't come back up--everyone for himself, now!"

In the roaring chaos of pyrotechnic glare what was left of our Midges swooped to the attack. With the rocket-streams at last righting my whirling body, head down I plummeted. The glare from above revealed Curtmann's men far more plainly now. Everywhere the men were staggering. In the cart some of them had fallen, but others were still erect, frantically working the projectors and stabbing with the hand heat-flashes. Our Midges were among them now, desperate fluttering little figures, stabbing at their faces. On the ground some of the staggering men were trying to get into the forest underbrush. I plummeted toward a group of them.

I hit the ground in the midst of a staggering group, with a thump that all but knocked the breath from me. Two of the men staggered at me. I was unarmed. My fist knocked one down, and I gripped the other as he half fell upon me. He was still clutching his flash-gun. I seized it, knocked him away and rose again into the roaring tumult of the air.

"Art! You got a gun? So did I."

Jim was here with me; side by side we rose. I saw the cart directly underneath me. His figure painted lurid, the desperate Curtmann was still erect. Almost the last one now. And I saw that he was struggling with a projector which had not yet been in use. A tiny figure flapped against my face. Little Meeta. She gripped my shoulder, clung, and her tiny voice gasped in my ear.

"That weapon Curtmann has--the big molecule-melter--very long-range--the Forest City."

With a burst of numbing horror I understood it. This projector would cut the forest and the ground into a leprous molten swath, out to the Forest City itself.

I plummeted down, with Meeta still clinging desperately to my neck. Curtmann saw me coming. With a wild oath he dropped the projector and fired at me with a hand-flash. It missed. There was just a second when I leveled off, heading horizontally at him. The glare was on his sweat-bathed face, contorted with his lust; but I saw a look of despairing terror there as my flash drilled him and he fell as I swooped close over him.

We rose at last, high into the starlight. So pitifully few of us, gathering in a little broken, circling group. Beneath us now there was only a lurid red-yellow fire-pit of molten bubbling rocks where the forest glade had been. Then the heavy turgid smoke and gas-fumes settled upon it like a shroud.

Almost silently we struggled back through the starlight to the Forest City. Jim and Venta and little Meeta were here with me, but our little Midges were struggling to keep aloft. Dozens of them were clustering upon Jim and Venta and me. Their tiny, gasping voices were horrible. And we were the victors! It came to me then that surely whatever has been said and written of the futility of human killing, can never adequately picture it.

* * * * *

I think that is all I need recount. You have all heard how we returned to Earth, and the stir that my news brought. I should have been considered a charlatan perhaps, with my wild tale. But there was the spaceship; and Jim, Venta, and little Meeta. Scientists have inspected Venta now. It was an ordeal. But mostly they have been interested in Meeta.

That is passed. There are others on Venus like Venta, and others like our little Midge. We are living now on Earth, with Jim near us. Certainly neither here, nor on Venus, do we want any turmoil.

With Jim for my friend, and the adoration of little Meeta who thinks me in very truth, a God--and the love of my dear wife--certainly I am a mortal very singularly blessed.