The Stone God Awakens

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 the Blue Spirit, they could not have dropped bombs on it. They had no bombs left. Even in the begi

The difficulty in defending the dirigibles rising up from the branches was the lack of perso

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 shi

Ulysses, even on the lower deck of the gondola, could hear the screams of the bat-men and the trumpetings of the Neshgai. And then, on his right, the darkness became an eye- searing flame as a dirigible exploded. Fire wrapped it around within two seconds, and the airship began to fall at once. A few figures leaped from it, mostly humans and one large Neshgai figure from the control gondola. The majority of the winged men aboard had been caught inside the fuselage. Nobody would ever know what had happened. Perhaps the Dhulhulikh had set off a rocket or lit a match too close to a hydrogen leak. Or, more likely, the captain, realising his ship was doomed, had set fire to it, incinerating several hundred Dhulhulikh along with himself and his crew.

Ulysses had groaned when he saw the ship burst into flames. Now he yelled, because the other ship was headed toward the falling craft. If it did not quickly turn, it would ram broadside into the other or be caught on its nose by the burning craft.

"Turn, you fool!" he yelled. "Turn!"

But the airship proceeded in a stately ma

A moment later, hundreds of bodies left it. They poured out of the cockpits, the domes and the holes that had been torn in the skin by bat-men who had struck it. They fell with wings half-folded and then, out of harm's way, spread their wings out.

As the Dhulhulikh left, and the weight passed, the ship lifted and quickly was above the flaming wreck. Ulysses smiled, realising that the captain had deliberately set his ship on a collision course. He and his crew would all be killed anyway by the Dhulhulikh, so he had tried to ram the other ship. But he had not really wished to do so. He must have been hoping for just what did happen. The terrified bat-men had deserted the ship and so allowed him to escape.