There was one more thing required of me before I fell back into the darkness. I dragged myself to the base of the pedestal, rose up, tottering, groped for the edge. It was too far. I sank back quivering, black lights dancing in my dimming sensory field. Beside me lay the dead alien. I groped to it, crawled up on the slumped curve of its body, tried again. Now my forelimbs reached the edge of the bowl, gripped; I pushed myself up, brought other limbs into play. Now I swung, suspended; with a final effort, I hauled myself up, groped, found a hold across the bowl—and tipped myself into the polished hollow.
* * *
From a source as bottomless as space itself, power flowed, sweeping through me with an ecstasy that transcended pleasure, burning away the dead husks of fatigue, hopelessness, pain. I felt my mind come alive, as a thousand new senses illuminated the plane of spacetime in which I hung; I sensed the subtle organizational patterns of the molecular aggregations that swirled over me, the play of oscillations all across the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, the infinity of intermeshing pressures, flows, transitions that were reality.
The scope of my awareness spread out to sense the structured honeycomb of the tower walls, the scurrying centers of energy that were living minds nested in flesh and metal; it drove outward to embrace the surrounding court, noting the bulk of cold metal in which my unconscious brain lay buried—and outward still, sweeping across the curve of the world, detecting the patterned network of glowing points scattered across the waste of lifelessness.
Now each dim radiance took on form and dimension, swelling until its inner structures lay exposed. I saw the familiar forms of human minds, each locked in a colorless prison of paralysis—and the alien shapes of demon-minds, webs of weird thought-forms born of an unknowable conception of reality. And here and there, in clusters, were other minds, beacons of flashing vitality—the remnants of my fighting Brigades. I singled out one, called to it:
“JOEL! HOW DOES THE FIGHT GO?”
His answer was a flare of confusion, question; then:
“They’re poundin’ us, Jones. Where are you? Can you send us any help?”
“HOLD ON, JOEL! I’M IN THEIR HEADQUARTERS. I’LL DO WHAT I CAN!”
“You gave me a turn, Jones. For a minute I thought you was the Over-mind, you came through so strong.” His voice was fading. “I guess it’ll all be over pretty soon, Jones. I’m glad we tried, though. Sorry it turned out like this . . .”
“DON’T GIVE UP—NOT YET!” I broke off, scanned again the array of enslaved human minds. I thought back to the frantic hour I had spent when Joel and I had freed the trapped minds of Aethelbert and Doubtsby and Bermuez . . . If I could reach them all now, in one great sweep—
I brought the multitude of dully glowing centers into sharp focus, fixed in my mind the pattern of their natural resonance—and sent out a pulse.
All across the dark face of the dead world, faint points of illumination quickened, flared up, blazed bright. At once, I fired an orientation-concept—a single complex symbol that placed in each dazed and newly-emancipated brain the awareness of the status quo, the need for instant attack on demon-brained enemies.
I switched my plane of reference back to Joel.
“HOLD YOUR FIRE!” I called. “BE ON THE ALERT FOR NEW RECRUITS COMING OVER, BY THE FULL BRIGADE!”
I caught Joel’s excited answer, then switched to Doubtsby, told him what had happened, went on to alert the others.
The pattern of the great battle changed. Now isolated demon-brained machines fought furiously against overwhelming odds, winked out one by one. Far away, in distant depots, on planet-lit deserts a thousand miles from the tower of the Over-mind, awakened slave Brigades blasted astonished Centurions, sallied forth to seek out and destroy the hated former masters.
From a dozen hidden fortresses, beleaguered demons fitted out vast siege units, sent them forth to mow broad swathes through the attacking battle units before they fell to massive bombardments. In a lull, I searched through the building below me, found and pinched out the frantic demons hiding there. Their numbers dwindled, shrank from thousands to a dozen, six, two, a single survivor—then none.
The moon was ours.
Chapter Seventeen
Joel’s great bulk, pitted with new scars bright against the old, loomed up beside me in the compound.
“All the fellows are here now, Jones—we lost seventy-one, the Major says. A couple dozen more are disabled, like you and Aethelbert, but still alive. The maintenance machines have gone to work on ’em. We got plenty of spares, anyway. We’ll have you rolling again in no time.”
“Good work, Joel.” I widened my contact to take in all of the hundred and eight intact survivors of the original group of freed slaves.
“Every one of you will have his hands full, rounding up the new men and organizing them. We have no way of knowing how soon our late enemies’ home base will start inquiring after them—and when they do, we want to be ready.”
“What about going home, chief?” called a man who had taken a bullet in the knee at the Hurtgen Forest. “How we going to get back?”
“You off your onion, mate?” a one-time British sailor growled. “What kind o’ show you think we’d make waltzing into Piccadilly in these get-ups?”
“We got to go back, to kill off the rest of these devils, haven’t we?”
“Mum, my masters,” Thomas interrupted. “Hear out our captain.”
“Two days ago I used the aliens’ equipment to call Earth,” I told them. “I managed a link-up to the public visiscreen system, and got through to the Central Coordinating Monitor of an organization called the Ultimax Group. I gave them the full picture; they knew what to do. The aliens are outnumbered a million to one down there; a few thousand troops wearing special protective helmets and armed with recoilless rifles can handle them.”
“Yeah, but what about us?” the soldier burst out. “What are we going to do—stay on this godforsaken place forever? Hell, there’s transports at the depots; let’s use ’em! I got a wife and kids back there!”
“Art daft, fellow?” a dragoon of Charles the Second inquired. “Your chicks are long since dust, and their dam with them—as are mine, God pity ’em.”
My old woman’s alive and cursing yet, no doubt,” said a Dutch UN platoon leader. “But she wouldn’t know me now—and keeping me in reaction mass’d play hell with her household budget. No, I can’t see going back.”
“Maybe—they could get us human bodies again, some way . . .”
“Human body, indeed!” the dragoon cut him off. “Could a fighting man hope for a better corpse than this, that knows naught of toothache, the ague nor the French disease?”
Another voice cut into the talk—the voice of Ramon Descortes of the Ultimax Group, listening in from Earth on the circuit I held open.
“General Bravais,” he said excitedly—and I channeled his transmission through my circuitry, broadcasting it to every man within range—”I’ve been following your talk, and although I find it unbelievable, I’m faced with the incontrovertible evidence. Our instruments indicate that your transmissions are undoubtedly coming from outside the Solar System—how and why you will explain in due course, I hope. You’ve told me that you and the others have been surgically transplanted into robot bodies. Now you wish to be restored, naturally. Let me urge you to return—and we will have for each of you a new body of superb design—not strictly human, admittedly—but serviceable, to say the least!”
I had to call for order to quell the uproar.
“Some kind of android?” I asked.
“We have on hand a captive—an alien operative of the humanoid type. We will capture more—alive. They will be anesthetized and placed in deep freeze, awaiting your return. According to the present estimate, there are some ten thousand of them working here on Earth—sufficient for your needs, I believe.”
“Say, how’s the fighting going there?” someone called.
“Well. The first Special Units have gone into action at Chicago, Paris, and Tamboula, with complete success. Governments are falling like autumn leaves, well-known figures are suiciding in droves, and mad dogs are reported everywhere. It is only a matter of hours now.”
“Then—there’s nothing to stand in the way—”
“Broadway, here I come—”
“Paris—without a king? Why—”
“An end to war? As well an end to living—”
“What about you, General?” someone called, and others joined in.
“I’ll order the transports made ready immediately,” I said. “Every man that wants to go back can leave in a matter of hours.”
“Jones—I mean, General—” Joel started.
“Jones will do; I won’t need the old name any more.”
“You’re not going back?”
“We fought a battle here,” I said. “And we won. But the war goes on—on a hundred worlds; a thousand—we don’t know how many. The demons rule space—but Man is on his way now. He’ll be jumping off Earth, reaching out to those worlds. And when he reaches them—he’ll find the armored brigades of the aliens waiting for him. Nothing can stand against them—except us. We’ve proved that we can outfight twice our number in slave machines—and we can free the minds that control those machines, turn them against the aliens. The farther we go, the bigger our force will be. Some day, in the far future, we’ll push them off the edge of the galaxy. Until then, the war goes on. I can’t go home again—but I can fight for home, wherever I find the enemy.”