Филип Фармер - The Stone God Awakens

There must be thousands of other corpses inside, Ulysses thought.

He shouted at the survivors. They must get into theBlue Spirit immediately and prepare to take off. They could do no more here. Some day, they would return with a much larger fleet and with the men and the materials to blast down through the centre of the trunk to the brain of The Tree.

In the gondola, he told the officers to start the lift-off procedures. He ordered the radio operator to check with the other ships and clarify the situation in the air.

One ship had been bombed and caught fire during the invasion of the trunk. It had fallen into the abyss and was probably half-buried in the swamp at the roots of The Tree. The two other dirigibles that had landed were getting ready to lift off also. They had lost all landing parties, the personnel of which had drowned inside the trunk or had been washed out of the holes and fallen to death.

Ulysses looked at the hole in the trunk while the crewmen got ready to cut the lines that held the vessel to the branch. It should be possible to make a substance which could be applied to the walls of the chambers inside the trunk. This would have to be quick-drying and strong enough to resist the spray of water. Perhaps some sort of epoxy glue. And the blasting would proceed from above and below with shuttles of airships bringing in tons of explosives. Maybe that laser-type device in the underground museum beneath the Temple of Nesh could be powered. If so, it might be able to drill holes through the wood, and the blasting would go much more swiftly.

He could get to the brain if he could find it. But if the brain was not in this trunk, then he might as well forget about finding it.

Yet, what about poisoning the entire Tree? Some powerful poison, tons and tons of it, placed in the roots, so that the mighty water circulation system of The Tree would draw the poison into it?

The Tree knew what it was doing when it had tried to capture and then to kill him. He was a man and so a threat to it.

"Ready to sever the lines, sir," the lift-off officer reported.

"Sever the lines!"

There was a twanging noise, and the ship abruptly lifted. It rose swiftly toward the branch five hundred feet overhead and then began to turn as the starboard motors tilted to the horizontal and their propellers began whirling. The ship turned slowly and moved out. The four ships in the air had begun moving down to cover the others. Their searchlights probed the night, falling on the vast grey-black wrinkles and fissures of the trunk and the vegetation-covered surfaces of the branches.

Ulysses stood behind the helmsman and looked over his shoulder into the night. "I wonder where they are," he muttered.

Awina said, "What?"

"The Dhulhulikh. Even if over half were killed, they still have a powerful force. They. "

His question was answered. Out of the mountain-sized mushroom-shaped top of the trunk above them fell a horde of batwinged men. They dropped out With wings folded, hundreds at a time, and did not open their wings until they had attained a great speed. They abruptly filled the space between the trunk top and the dirigibles; they looked like a locust plague, so numerous were they.

They had been waiting until the ships on the branches were leaving and the other ships would have come down to cover them. They were making one final all-out attack to destroy the entire fleet.

Only later did it occur to Ulysses that the winged men should not have been able to hide within the leaves of the mushroom-shaped top. This was thirteen thousand feet high, four thousand feet higher than a bat-man could fly. But the explanation of the impossible was easy. The Dhulhulikh had climbed up the trunk. With their wings flapping to half-lift their forty-five pound bodies, the bat-men had swarmed up the rough side of the trunk at a pace that no other sentient, and very few monkeys, could have equalled.

Briefly, Ulysses wondered if this plan had originated in the brain of the Dhulhulikh commander or if it had come from the vegetable brain housed in the trunk. And he wondered why the ships on the branches had not been attacked when they were in their most vulnerable position and crewed with so few.

Later on, he realised that even if they could have flown above theBlue Spirit, they could not have dropped bombs on it. They had no bombs left. Even in the beginning, not more than one bat-man in fifty had had a bomb. There had not been enough time to make and transport a great number from the north. Many had been expended in the first attacks, and the others had been lost, with their carriers, when the smoke clouds were dropped and the hawks released. The Dhulhulikh commander, or The Tree, realising this, had hidden the winged men in the immense trunk top while the smoke cloud was thick enough. The commander had bet that the ships too high to be reached would come down to protect the three on the branches, and he had won that bet.

The difficulty in defending the dirigibles rising up from the branches was the lack of personnel. Most of the crew and the soldiers had been killed inside The Tree. And so, though the three men in the cockpits and in the side domes and the archers behind the openings fought well, they were overwhelmed. Within a few minutes, the three ships were covered with little winged forms, like bugs newly crawled out of a vast egg.

To get the ship up faster, Ulysses had tilted the motor gondolas so that the propellers pointed upward. The ship rose swiftly toward the height at which the winged men could no longer fly. But that would do no good if they ripped open the big gas cells inside the fuselage. The ship would just fall to a height where they could fly again.

The four ships above them, fully crewed and armed with a good many bombs, rockets and arrows yet, had resisted more successfully. The explosives had shattered the first few ranks and, at the same time, the three craft were expelling the last of their smoke clouds. The bat-men kept on coming, but the airships were now going at thirty-five mph and when the attackers did reach the ships, they either bounced off the skin or hit it so hard they went through. Those who penetrated the skin tore off their wings or broke their fragile bones. Within a few minutes, the Dhulhulikh were lost in another cloud. They had also lost their chance to get the four upper ships.

The three lower ones, however, were heavy with the winged men. These, after killing the bomb and rocket crews and archers, swarmed through the openings into the interior. Here, for a time, they did not know what to do or where to go, since the captains of the ships had turned off all the interior lights as soon as they realised their situation. And, though weighted down, the ships slowly continued to rise, aided by the upward-tilted motors.

The Dhulhulikh, after blundering around on the catwalks and girders, and sometimes falling, finally located the main walkway and then the hatch to the control deck. This had been locked, but while some bat-men used tools they had picked up to batter at the hatch, others knocked out more holes in the skin. They let themselves out and dropped down, flapping, and then tried for the gondola. Those who had come out behind the gondola did not make it, because the ship was going too fast. Those who let themselves out of a hole in the nose were able to attach themselves to the gondola. They beat in vain at the plastic transparent ports with their stone knives. Then Ulysses ordered the ports raised, and the winged men were stabbed and fell off into the night.

The hatch to the gondola gave way with a screech. Yelling, the little bat-men poured down the ladder and were skewered, sometimes two in a row, by crossbolts. Graushpaz then ordered the bowmen to step aside, and he and another Neshgai advanced up the ladder, their great stone axes swinging. The pygmies were crushed beneath the heavy stones. Graushpaz, the light shinning from the top of his helmet, went ponderously up the ladder and onto the main walkway. The other Neshgai followed him.