every form of sentient life would become a destroyer of life. Intelligence had to be something besides just a vehicle for advancing the interests of greed.
He tapped, 'Call off your servants, the Dhulhulikh, and we will discuss our aims. Perhaps we can arrive at a peaceful understanding. We can then live side by side. There is no reason for us to war against each other.'
'Men have always been destroyers!'
Ulysses spoke to Wulka. 'Put those bombs by this diaphragm. We'll start work here.'
The bombs were stacked against the big disk and abacuses were piled against them. Several fuses were lit, and the entire party retreated from the great room to the next. When the explosion had ceased reverberating through the room, and the smoke had cleared away, they went back into the disk room. The diaphragm was gone. In the centre of the area where it had stood was a round whitish fibre about three inches across. This had to be the nerve cable.
'Start digging around it,' Ulysses said. 'Let's see if it leads downward.'
He had taken the precaution of stationing some men with rockets outside the doorway. Since there had been no reaction to the blasting of the diaphragm, it seemed likely that this chamber did not have the defences that the chamber of the Wuggrud had. Perhaps The Tree had not thought it necessary to grow them here, where there was such a strong force of Dhulhulikh.
He was wrong.
The moment that the chipping at the medium-hard wood around the nerve fibre began, reaction came. Perhaps The Tree had been stunned by the blast and had only just recovered. Perhaps. who knew what had caused the delay? Whatever it was, The Tree was fully recovered. The spray of water from a thousand hitherto unseen holes in the walls was enough to knock even the elephantine Neshgai off their feet. Ulysses felt as if a number of clubs swung by giants had hit him. He was hurled sideways and then rolled over and over to fetch up against a pile of squirming kicking bodies at the doorway.
Or at what had been the doorway. There was a thick semitransparent membrane over it now. It had dropped down from what had been a solid wall.
The water was up to their knees within a minute. They had managed to extricate themselves and to stand up, though it was a fight to maintain their upright positions. Fortunately, the water rapidly rising around them kept sprays from striking their legs. Nevertheless, standing up, or down on the floor, they would soon drown.
At that moment, the membrane bulged and then fell inward over them. The men on the other side had blown it from the doorway with bombs.
Ulysses pushed aside the heavy glassy-feeling skin, rose from the water, now up to his waist, and then was carried forward as it rushed out through the doorway. He was caught in another tangle of bodies, but the men on the other side pulled them out one by one and helped them to their feet.
Awina, looking like a sick wet cat, got his hand and yelled at him above the roar of the spraying water. 'The other exit's closed! By something like a honeycomb!'
He walked toward the other doorway, which was filled up with a mass of pale-yellow, heavily flowing stuff inside which was a whitish, semi-rigid, somewhat flexible stuff in the form of open boxes joined together.
Before he reached the other end of the room, he was smashed into by several sprays from different directions. He was hurled forward, knocked back, turned around, and then battered off his feet. He rolled over and over, banged into Awina's wet and soft body, was carried along, struck the quilted back of Graushpaz, and then was buried under four or five Wufea.
The floor trembled under him. Even with the yells, and the thrashings around in the water already up to their knees, and the roar of escaping water from the tiny apertures in the walls, he could feel the floor shake.
And then the water was running out of the chamber, and he was crawling over a slippery mess of fragmented honeycomb into the corridor.
The respite was brief. Water was hosing out of the walls of the corridor and out of the walls of the open cubicles of the levels along the corridor. Shrieking, winged women and children were hurled from their rooms into the corridor and then washed away. Some fell on the invaders, knocking them down.
The rocket men lost their bazookas and missiles and the bombmen let loose of their bombs. Nobody kept hold of their weapons. They needed their hands to scramble, to shove away other bodies, to protect themselves against the sprays.
Ulysses got down on his hands and knees after being bowled over six times. The water was almost up to his nose, but it kept the sprays from being effective at that level. However, he had crawled along for perhaps fifty yards when he had to stand up. The water had risen too high to crawl. A moment later, it was up to his chest.
By then the corridors were jammed with tangled bodies, Dhulhulikh fighting for survival and corpses floating along, face-down or up, their leathery wings outspread.
The Tree's weapons were effective, but they were not specific. To drown the enemy, it would also drown its allies.
Ulysses hoped The Tree would drop no more membranes or honeycombs. If it did, they were done for. Their explosives were lost somewhere in the water.
He looked around for Awina and, for a moment, thought she was lost or drowned. Then he saw her hanging onto the belt of Graushpaz. The huge Neshgai was wading through the water, which was up to his waist, his arms crossed to protect his face from the buffeting of the sprays. He rocked back and forth but he did not go down, as some of his fellows had. Ulysses could see only six other Neshgai, and only about twelve of his own people and ten humans seemed to be on their feet.
Then he began swimming, stopping to hammer at the little bat-women if they got in his way. He went faster then, since there seemed to be a slight dip to the floor, causing the water to flow outward to the great entrance.
He passed Awina and Graushpaz, and he shouted at her to swim after him. She released her grip and came after him.
The nightmare in the corridors came to an end a minute later. He rammed into the first narrow curving hall, was carried away and around the corner and into the next curve. Abruptly, the water level fell, and he swam out onto the branch and, a few seconds later, was beached like a fish. The water still flowed around him and moved him on gently, but he could rise to his feet.
Hands helped him then. The men from the dirigible had left their stations. He shouted at them to get back to the ship, but they ignored him. They left him to help others being swept out.
Awina was lifted to her feet, and she staggered to him. 'My Lord, what shall we do next?'
Graushpaz waded out and stood to one side. Five other Neshgai came out within two minutes. The sixth failed to show.
Ulysses looked upward into the night. The remnants of a large smoke cloud were drifting by.
The sky was clear, and the moon was just coming up. He could not see it because the trunk blocked his view, but he could see the paling of the sky. Way up, a needle shape moved across the blackness and the stars.
He shouted at Bifak, the human who had commanded the ship while the invasion of the trunk was taking place. 'Where are the Dhulhulikh warriors?'
'Many apparently rammed into each other in the smoke and fell. And then the hawks got many, and many flew into each other trying to get away from them.'
That might account for heavy losses among the bat-men but it would not account for their total disappearance. Where had they gone? And why had they gone?
By then, the water from the big hole had become a trickle. The lights from the dirigible showed a logjam of bodies inside the hole and a detritus of corpses, mostly Dhulhulikh, strewn out from the hole. Bifak said there had been many more bodies, but these had been washed away with the first out flux of waters or else dragged away and thrown over the edge of the branch by the crewmen.
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
