Part 2
Seizing a quirt from the stable wall, he drove the other horses ahead of him, out beyond the red markers where the world of Stormland once more brooded quietly, its landscape new and more spectacular than before.
* * * * *
_The Thing that they called Kohonnes was dead. Its metal sides and glassite screens were polished and bright. Moments before it had been living, humming and glowing with the energy that fed it, bringing the Storm and the Change across the world that held it._
_A man moved his hand on the last dial. Inside the machine something clicked. The man turned away and went slowly down the marble steps...._
* * * * *
Crouched low on the withers of the bay, Grim rode for his life. A little ahead of him, Tlokine pummeled her chestnut with sandalled heels. Grim turned in the saddle and stared behind him. There was no one in sight--yet.
Tlokine cried, "We could make better time if we knew when the storms would come. Not knowing, we have to stay close to the islands, instead of cutting across toward the Dark Temple."
"And Althaya--she knows! She can come straight for us. The warning that she gets comes in time for her to go toward an island and make it before the Change comes. Is that what you mean?"
Tlokine nodded. Grim muttered, "Our lead doesn't mean much, then. They'll round up the horses we scattered. They'll catch us before we can get to the Temple."
They urged their mounts to a faster pace. They clung to sweat-wet necks and manes as the horses flashed their hocks above the roughly humped ground. They went by one tall, metallic needle-tower after another. The towers stood like rigid fingers against the horizon as they went on and on.
Grim brooded above the whipping mane of his chestnut, "If the thing that sends the change is a machine, then it would need the towers to broadcast its force. It's limited in range, itself. The towers give it a wide radius of effectiveness. Now the question is--what operates only in a limited range?"
He thought of radio waves, but the ionized heaviside would throw them around the planet. He shook his head, whispering, "Some sort of wave-radio or energy."
Grim lifted his eyes to the next tower and scanned it. He growled, "If I still had my disintegrator I'd try a potshot at those interlacing wires on top of it. I bet that'd stop the Change. But without that--"
His mind raced as did the hooves of the chestnut. A scowl came and sat on his face. Then, after a while, his eyes brightened. He whispered, "It might work, at that--"
He reined in the chestnut; called to Tlokine, and headed for the nearest tower. She stared at him as he swung down from the horses and began to climb the tower, sliding fingers and toes into the tiny slots between the interslanted metal beams. He went up and up until he reached the round ribboned globe with the tiny wires inside it. It was fastened to the tower by slotted bolts.
Using his belt-buckle as a screwdriver, he unthreaded the bolts, found that the globe came away easily from the tower. It was composed of thin alumisteel ribbons and wires of spiderweb thinness. He tucked it under an arm and went backwards down the tower.
Tlokine said, "What are you doing?" when he knelt and fumbled at the wiring setup.
He grinned, "This thing must broadcast vibrations of some sort. In some manner, they cause the Change. If I could jam those vibrations in the same way that a radio broadcast can be jammed--maybe there wouldn't _be_ any Change to slow us down."
Tlokine looked back along the path they had come. She said, "Althaya and her men will soon be here. You are wasting time, Grim Thorssen."
He shook his yellow-thatched head. "Not the way I figure it. Soldiers marching in rhythmic steps across a bridge have been known to smash it. That's why they break step all the time. It changes the pulse of the vibration on the bridge. It jars--but does not destroy.
"Same way here. Ultrasonic vibrations can't be heard, but they can do plenty of damage. They can kill frogs and tiny fishes. They can cause heat and put out a flame--oh, and a hundred other things. But--if the vibratory rate of those ultrasonic waves can be damped by other wave-impulses--their usefulness is destroyed."
Tlokine didn't understand him, but she came closer and watched as his agile fingers toyed with the thin wires. He smiled, "This globe is tuned to the master vibrator. It picks up the waves and amplifies them. I want it to do that--but to change the wave-pulse to a different rhythm!"
Grim worked blindly, guessing. He knew his only chance for a real test would come when the Change swept across the world. He couldn't wait for that. Althaya and Black Randolph would have hunted them down by that time.
Setting the globe across the pommel of his saddle, Grim held it carefully as he thumped his heels into the horse's side. They rode swiftly out across the plain.
And then, as Tlokine turned in her saddle, she saw them.
* * * * *
Althaya and Black Randolph rode before a dozen men, stooped low over the necks of their straining mounts. They could hear the pirate's bellowing, triumphant laughter.
"No use," whimpered Tlokine. "They'll catch us now."
But Grim saw Althaya point toward a needle-towered island, heard her call out imperiously. The Viking jabbed his heels into the chestnut. He yelled, "The Change! She senses that it's coming!"
"We're too far from the islands! It will catch us--kill the horses, then us!"
Grim fiddled desperately with the wiring of the ribboned globe. He whispered prayers as he recircuited.
It was no use.
The pain came and crumpled him up and toppled him from the saddle. He struck the ground and rolled, but his hands held to the globe. Lying flat on his belly, teeth drawing blood from his lips with the pain that wracked him, he drove his fingers into the meshed wires and tugged and rearranged them.
A hump of ground rose between his hands; flung the ribboned globe from him, sent it rolling like a rubber ball on the trough of sea-waves. Whimpering, Grim went after it, dragging himself along.
He caught it, held it close to his chest. His hand grabbed a wire--
The pain was gone. Grim lay panting, grinning. Tlokine knelt, staring, whispering, "The Change--it's all around us--but where we are, there isn't any Change!"
There was a radius of thirty feet where the ground lay frozen in its strange formations, an island in the midst of the hub that was the globe. Grim got to his feet. He held the globe in hands that shook weakly with the reaction. Tlokine went to the horses, soothed and stroked them. After a while the horses got to their legs.
They mounted. From the distant island where they watched, Althaya and Black Randolph screamed their rage. But Grim only laughed and waved an arm. With the globe in his hands, he rode the chestnut over the motionless ground, while all around him the earth rocked and bubbled and thrust itself upward into terrible contortions.
"It's like a magic symbol," whispered Tlokine, staring at the ribboned globe.
"People would have called this a magic land, once," said Grim. "But it's sheer science that makes the Change--and sheer science that knows the key to counteract it."
They went straight across the magic land, riding without fear of the Storm that swept outside the circumference of their enchanted circle. As they moved, the circle of safety moved with them, with the globe as its hub. The faster they went, the faster moved the circle.
Grim flung a hoarse laugh between his white teeth. He said, "At this rate, we'll leave Randolph so far behind, he'll never get us."
He turned in his saddle to look behind him--
* * * * *
And saw the pirate and the redheaded priestess scarcely five hundred yards away, flying after them. Black Randolph held a disintegrator in his hand. As he came within the radius of a needle-tower, he took careful aim at it and blasted the ribboned globe atop it into drifting powder.
Tlokine cried out, pointing, "The path to the Dark Temple!"
Huge rock cliffs loomed up before them, towering like a giant's twisted play-things where he might have dropped them. Spires and points of sandstone, ridges of granite and volcanic tuffs, rimrock and crumbled talus; they made fantastic colors where the sun caught them. And running straight between the boulders was a crimson road, smooth as placid water.
Grim cried, "Go on ahead. I'll hold them off. If that Kohonnes of yours has any power at all--tell him this is the time to use it!"
Grim brought his foot against the bay's rump, sent it racing terrified onto the scarlet road. Clinging to the reins, Tlokine had no time to cry her refusal to leave Grim. The bay took her away fast, leaving Grim alone.
Randolph shouted, "I have you now, Thorssen. Don't hope for a blast of my disintegrator, either. You're going back to that altar. Eight days I said--and eight days it still is!"
Grim kicked his feet free of the stirrups and leaped to the rock. Putting his hands flat on the stone, he swung himself to the first ledge, then to the second. With booted toes and clinging fingers, he pulled himself straight up the face of the cliff.
Randolph howled; threw himself like a madman at the cliff. He came after the Viking, rasping spaceoaths beneath his breath. Grim caught a blurred glimpse of Althaya spurring her roan along the scarlet roadway, closing the distance between Tlokine and herself.
Rock shattered above him. Grim stared at a boulder coming loose under the blast of a disintegrator pellet; came bouncing downward. Grim flattened himself, hearing Black Randolph cry, "It'll knock you down to my level, Thorssen."
The boulder struck on a lip of stone and went bounding beyond him. Grim drew a breath and climbed faster. He came to a flat section that topped the surrounding bluffs. He scrambled onto it as a blast from Randolph's disintegrator caught the rocklip that he was on and sent it flying.
He lay dazed, knowing the pirate was climbing after him, but unable to do anything about it. He opened his mouth and gulped in air, hearing a steady roaring in his ears. He knelt, stood up; and still the roaring swelled and grew. He finally recognized it as a waterfall.
Black Randolph swung over the edge of the cliff and came charging across its flat top, head down. His fists were balled into great clubs. Grim shook his head, got to a knee and then to both feet, waiting.
The pirate's charge was irresistible. It lifted Grim up and threw him backwards. He pummeled at the pirate, drove hard knuckles into his jaw and chest. But Randolph laughed in his throat and hammered back.
For one instant they stood locked, knee to knee. Their fists drove pain and agony into each other's ribs and bellies. Then Grim weakened. The long ride, the space crash, the wild flight took their fee. His legs buckled under the weariness that laid hot bands around them. He toppled, went down--
Black Randolph came for him in a low dive.
Grim closed his hand on a solid rock hump and lifted his feet. He threw them up in the manner of the ancient savatte. His foot caught Black Randolph in the chest and lifted him up and flung him high over him.
The pirate screamed. Grim turned; knelt on the edge of the cliff wall and saw the pirate falling, turning and twisting, into a deep gorge where a wide river flowed like a blue ribbon between crumpled rocks, fed by a tumbling waterfall.
Grim drew a deep breath and got to his feet. Far beneath him, at the end of the narrow crimson road, he could see a great black temple, with a door like a gaping mouth. Tlokine was in that temple, and Althaya--and the thing they both called Kohonnes.
Grim began to run.
* * * * *
_The two women faced each other at the foot of the bulking black machine that was their god._
_"Here now you will die," breathed Althaya._
_"Kohonnes will not let me die. He will save me. It is you--who have been traitress to him--who will pay by going back to the breath...."_
_And above them, above the black hair and the red, the hundred eyes of the machine began to glow, and the muted throbbing went out from its bowels and touched its metal sides; and the god Kohonnes came to life._
* * * * *
Grim slipped and staggered the last twenty feet down the side of the sheer grey rock. He landed on the crimson road, fifty feet from the mouthlike entrance to the Temple. He went at a lurching run, forgetting his weariness, thinking only of a lovely girl with white skin and green eyes and hair the color of a raven-wing.
He swung into the dark, cool interior; was dimly aware of slender black onyx columns lifting a hundred feet toward a dark ceiling.
Grim stopped. A voice reverberated in the Temple.
"You have disobeyed, Althaya. You--"
"Don't threaten me, Kohonnes! At this moment my people are coming. They will attack when I give the word. They will come in here and kill the girl and make you yield your secret to me. Then Althaya will have power unimaginable. Black Randolph--"
"--is dead," said Grim. "He fell into the gorge."
Grim stared upward. A black machine bulked huge and dark in the shadows. From a hundred facets, green bulb-lights glowed. Grim heard the machinery moving, saw the bulbs grow brighter as power poured into the thing.
"Who are you, Kohonnes?" he cried out in space _patois_.
"Eh? What's that? Who's out there?... It isn't--can't be! Grim Thorssen?"
Grim laughed. He knew that voice anywhere.
"You old spacedog! What're you trying to do--ruin the Unions Council?"
"The Council? What have I to do with them?"
"The force this machine applies escapes into space. It bends the Caravans and the Fleet cruisers. It smashes them--sends them flying on into the void like so many wrecked planets. They'll go on and on--until they find a planet to crash on or make an orbit around."
There was a pause. Althaya cried out harshly; whirled and fled toward the mouthlike door where light filtered in in grey beams.
The machine stopped humming. A door opened in it. A man with white hair and a smooth, shaven face stepped onto the floor of the temple. He grinned at the Viking, threw both arms high into the air.
Grim said, "Jasper Jones! I knew you'd gone into retirement--but I never thought you'd set yourself up as a god."
The old man laughed, keen blue eyes dancing. "I was always interested in sound, Grim. I had some theories, theories that my colleagues said were crazy, impractical. So when I retired I came to this little planet that I'd discovered a long time ago--and set myself up in comfort.
"I took amnesiac men and women from the space hospitals and gave them a new life. I let them build a new civilization for themselves, a new life. Where they would have had to spend the rest of their useless lives in sanatoriums, I gave them freedom, fresh air and a new world. Was that wrong?"
Grim said dryly, "Not the way you put it. But you could have established dams--something to keep that hellish force in place. And while we're on it--what in the name of the Empire is the thing?"
Jasper Jones waved at the machine. "Let's go inside. I'll tell you about it as we go. Come, Tlokine.
"I said I was interested in sound. Perhaps I should say, vibratory impulses. You know Tyndal's experiments--sand figures on a vibrating plate, the motion of the plate along a nodal line. The sand on the plate rearranges and groups itself into regular patterns. Some of them are beautiful."
"You mean the method devised by Chladni? Where sand is put on a thin metal plate and a violin bow is scraped across its side?"
"Exactly. The sand is tossed away from the vibrating sections of the plate. It collects in areas of calm, undisturbed by the vibrations."
"You mean to tell me that's what this entire planet is--a vibrating plate?" wondered Grim.
"A hundred years or more after Chladni, Dr. Fredericka Blankner advanced the theory that all life, all matter in the universe, followed a pattern somewhat similar to the dancing sands on a Chladni plate. Even human bodies vibrate at a certain impulse.
"I studied for years on that theory. Then when I found this planet, I fitted it out during my vacations. When I retired and brought the spaceshock cases here--I was ready to follow and prove those theories."
A deep, sullen roar grew into a thundering volcano of sound, beyond the Temple gateway. Grim cried, "Althaya and her people. They've come to learn your secret, Jones. Quick, man--some weapons! We can hold them off easily enough if--"
Jasper Jones smiled and shook his head. "Outside of the vibration machine, I have no weapon. And that is not a weapon. I have used it--sending the Changes and the Storms across the planet--to check on reactions and nodal results."
Grim laughed harshly. "Man, you've unleashed something with that machine. The redhead is desperate. Black Randolph gave her ideas. She won't know where to stop if _she_ gets hold of the machine. We have to stop her."
"With what? The people have learned that the calm areas on the planet exist inside red markers. We can't catch them napping."
* * * * *
Grim grabbed the old man and shook him. He rasped, "Maybe you don't mind getting a couple of barbed knives stuck in your hide, but _I do_. Where are your plans for this--this machine?"
Jones led him to a _selassi_-metal desk, pressed a stud; a thin, flat drawer slid into view. Grim drove his hands into the mass of blueprints and specifications. He dragged them out and spread them on the floor in front of him. He ran his grey eyes over print after print.
He grinned, "Maybe we can stop them at that, Jasper."
"Sound is no weapon. Oh, it's been used against frogs and the lower vertebrate forms, but--"
A shower of arrows made a clanking noise against the face of the machine. Grim could hear Althaya screaming, "It is only a _man_ inside it. I heard his voice. He knew the golden-hair. Break the god, my people." Something thumped into the machine; shook it wildly.
Jasper Jones screamed. "They will smash the bulbs if they keep that up!"
Grim grabbed him, shook him. "Listen to me! I don't want to hurt your people ... but we have to stop them. We must rewire the machine--reduce the frequency of the vibrations into audible pitch--step up the decibels to two hundred or more."
"But that would be intense sound--painful!"
"You bet it would. It would give those howling babies out there the sweetest case of what used to be called "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" you ever saw. But--it's our only chance!"
Jones stared at him, touching his lips with a dry tongue. He whispered, "Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. But--"
The battering ram thumped the machine. The floor under their feet shook. Jones nodded hastily. "Yes, I'll do it. I'll hurry."
He went to a round opening in the floor, caught a metal rod protruding through it, and swung himself down. Grim caught Tlokine and drew her to the _selassi_-metal table and hunted in its drawers. He found cotton and tore loose several strips. He crumpled the cotton into tiny balls.
"I'm going to put these in your ears, Tlokine. You won't be able to hear much, then. Just sit still. Jones and I--we're going to do our best to stop those babies outside. When we do, things are going to happen in a hurry. I want you to be prepared."
He put the cotton tabs in her ear, whispered, "I love you, darling," and caught the sliding rod in his hands and swung down.
Grim walked the cat-walks between the throbbing engines in the dim light of myriad bulbs set in plastic casings. He saw the enclosed dynamos that forced the incredible vibrations outward to the needle towers that picked them up and threw them around the planet.
On a metal floor below him, old Jasper Jones was disconnecting terminals and re-hooking them. Grim joined him. It was close, hot work inside the huge machine. Sweat dripped down Grim's forehead and ran into his eyes and mouth. With the back of his forearm he swabbed at his face and worked on.
He heard the boom of the improvised battering ram thud into the metal wall; saw the great tubes shake and flicker. The metal floor quivered under his feet.
A woman screamed. Grim came to his feet, incredulous, hearing Tlokine cry, "It's Black Randolph! He's coming through the back way--"
Grim whispered, "He's dead. I saw him fall from the cliff."
He leaped; came up short as Jasper Jones clawed at his arm with aged hands. The old man babbled, "The machine is our only chance."
Randolph was roaring in triumph, "I have your girl, Thorssen. Come out of there or I'll give her a disintegrator pellet. Ha! You didn't watch me long enough, Thorssen. I missed the rocks--went into the water. It carried me under the temple, to stone steps. They led me--here! You hear me, Thorssen? Come out of there!"
"I hear you. I'm coming."
Instead he turned and looked at the wiring terminals where Jasper Jones toiled, his hands a blur of movement and his white hair wet with sweat. The old man's panting made a harsh sound in the fetid air.
"We almost through?" Grim whispered.
"Almost ... just these, now ... another turn to tighten them--there!"
A switch with a glittering red handle was a foot above Jones' bent head. Grim went for it in a flying leap. His hands came up and the switch went down and--
Hell broke loose.
* * * * *
Sound welled up, pitched high and keening and almost inaudible. What was heard, was jarring and maddening. It took a man's nerve-ends out and scratched on them until his entire body was dancing. Grim stood shivering, trying to lift his hands to shelter his eardrums; discovering this his arms were jumping free of his will.
He whispered, "I can't do it. I can't turn it off." Something rolled against his leg. It was old Jasper Jones, eyes rolling in his head, a bubbly white froth at his mouth.
Grim's knees shook. They went in different directions and he pitched to the metal floor. His body danced a weird saraband against the metal. He thought, 'If something doesn't happen, we'll all go _mad_!' He knew that sound could crush them; that this sound that was jumbling their brains was enough for that, given the time to build itself.
His hands shook. His body quivered. His brain throbbed, and blackness swept down and blinded him.
* * * * *
The sound was gone. Someone was shaking him by the shoulder, urgently. Grim opened tired eyelids. Tlokine bent over him, fright making her red nails dig deep into his shoulder.
Grim said words, but he did not hear them. He put hands to his ears, found them plugged with cotton. The sound came through, a little, but it was muffled, ineffective.
He got up and took the wad of cotton that Tlokine still held and forced two balls of it into old Jasper Jones' ears. After a while the old man sat up and looked at them.
Grim said, even though he knew they could not hear him, "I'm going up and tie up Black Randolph for once and all. Then we'll turn this thing off and parley with the others."
The pirate was in even worse state than Grim had been; he had been nearer to the vast loudspeakers, had felt the numbing shock of those sound-waves. Like a man in water, close to an explosion, his brain and lungs had hemorrhaged. His chest was bloated, swollen. Grim covered him, turned to the lovely Althaya; covered her quickly, too.
He turned off the machine and stood in a silence that was almost as dreadful as the sound had been. Jasper Jones and Tlokine came up the floor opening, removing their earplugs.
"They got it the worst. They were right on top of the high pressure waves coming from the speaker," Grim said, gesturing at the covered bodies. "The others, outside--they were further away, as we were. They'll be all right, in a little while."
Jones said, "It was horrible."