unchallenged this long. However he took precautions against surprise. Wedged into the latch of the door, the knife locked it to all but a battering down.
He returned to the plane nearest him. It moved into the open under his pushing, proving to be a light craft, easily handled. He pulled up a panel in its stub nose and inspected the motor within. It was unlike any he had seen before, and he was neither engineer nor mechanic.
But he had confidence enough in the efficiency of those below to believe that it could fly — if he were able to control it.
Before he explored farther Simon examined the four other machines, using the butt of one of the dart guns to smash at their motors. If he did have to trust to the air he did not want to be the target for an attack-chase.
It was when he raised his improvised hammer for the last time that the enemy struck. There had been no battering at the wedged door, no thunder of guard feet on the stairs. Again it was the silent push of that invisible force. It did not strive to hold him helpless this time, but to draw him to its source. Simon caught at the disabled plane for an anchor. Instead he drew it after him out into the open — he could not halt his march down the roof.
And it was not taking him back to the door! With a stab of panic Simon realized now that his destination was not the dubious future of the levels below, but the quick death which awaited a plunge from the roof!
With all his will he fought, his reluctant steps taken one at a time, with periods of agonizing struggle between. He tried again the trick of the symbol in the air which had served him before. Perhaps because he was not now fronting the person of his enemy it gave him no relief.
He could slow that advance, put off for seconds, minutes, the inevitable end. A try for the doorway failed; it had been a desperate hope that the other might take his action for a gesture of surrender. But now Simon knew they wanted him safely dead. The decision he would have made had he commanded here.
There was the plane he had meant to use in a last bid. Well, now there was no other escape! And it was between him and the roof edge towards which he was urged.
It was such a little chance, but he had no other.
Simon yielded two steps to the pressure, he gave another quickly as if his strength were waning. A third — his hand was on the opening to the pilot’s compartment. Making the supreme effort in this weird battle he threw himself within.
The pull brought him against the far wall and the light craft rocked under his scrambling. He stared at what must be the instrument board. There was a lever up at the end of a narrow slot, and it was the only object which seemed to be movable. With a petition to other Powers than those of Estcarp, Simon managed to raise a heavy hand and pull that down its waiting slot.
IV
CITY OF DEAD MEN
He had perhaps childishly expected to be whisked aloft, but the machine ran straight forward, gathering speed. Its nose plowed across the low parapet with force enough to somersault the whole plane over. Simon knew he was falling, not free as his tormenter had intended, but encased in the cabin.
There was another swift moment of awareness that that fall was not straight down, that he was descending at an angle. Hopelessly, he jerked once more at that lever, pulling it halfway up the slot.
Then there was a crash, followed by nothing but blackness without sight, sound, or feeling.
A spark of red-amber watched him speculatively out of the black. It was matched by a faint repetitive sound — the tick of a watch, the drip of water? And thirdly there was the smell. It was that latter which prodded Simon into action. For it was a sweetish stench, thick and sickening in his nostrils and throat, a stench of old corruption and death.
He was sitting up, he discovered, and there was a faint light to show the wreckage which held him in that position. But the hounding pressure which had battered him on the upper roof was gone; he was free to move if he could, to think.
Save for some painfully bruised areas, he had apparently survived the crash without injury. The machine must have cushioned the shock of landing. And that red eye out of the dark was a light on the board of the lever.
The drip was close by. So was the smell. Simon shifted in his seat and pushed. There was a rasp of metal scraping metal and a large section of cabin broke away. Simon crawled painfully out of his cage. Overhead was a hole framed with jagged ends of timbers. As he watched, another piece of roofing gave way and struck on the already battered machine. The plane must have fallen on the roof of one of the neighboring buildings and broken through that surface. How he had escaped with life and reasonably sound limbs was one of the strange quirks of fate.
He must have been unconscious for some time as the sky was the palid shade of evening. And his hunger and thirst were steady pains. He must have food and water.
But why had not the enemy located him before this? Certainly anyone on the other roof could have spotted the end of his abortive flight. Unless — suppose they did not know of his try with the plane — suppose they only traced him by some form of mental contact. Then they would only know that he had gone over the parapet, that his fall had ended in a blackout which to them might have registered as his death. If that were true then he was indeed free, if still within the city of Sippar!
First, to find food and drink, and then discover where he was in relation to the rest of the port.
Simon found a doorway, one which gave again on stairs leading downward toward the street level, as he had hoped. The air here was stale, heavily tainted with that odor. He could identify it now and it made him hesitate — disliking what must lie below to raise such a stench.
But down was the only way out, so down he must go.
The windows here were unsealed and light made fading patches on each landing. There were doors, too, but Simon opened none of them, because it seemed to him that around them that fearsome, stomach-churning smell was stronger.
Down one more flight, and into a hall which ended in a wide portal he thought must give on the street. Here Simon dared to explore and in a back room he found that leathery journey bread which was the main military ration of Estcarp, together with a pot of preserved fruit still good under its cap. The moldering remains of other provisions were evidence that no one had foraged here for a long time. Water trickled from a pipe to a drain and Simon drank before he wolfed down the food.
It was difficult to eat in spite of his hunger for that smell clung to everything. Although he had been only in this one building outside the citadel Simon suspected that his monstrous suspicion was the truth; save for the central building and its handful of inhabitants, Sippar was a city of the dead. The Kolder must have ruthlessly disposed of those of the conquered of no use to them. Not only slain them, but left them unburied in their own homes. As a warning against rebellion of the few remaining alive? Or merely because they did not care? It would appear that the last was the most likely, and that odd feeling of kinship he had for the flat-faced invaders died then and there.
Simon took with him all the bread he could find and a bottle filled with water. Curiously enough the door leading to the street was barred on the inside. Had those who had once lived here locked themselves in and committed mass suicide? Or had the same pressure methods driven them to their deaths as had been used to send him over the upper roof?
The street was as deserted as he had seen it from that same roof. But Simon kept close to one side, watching every shadowed doorway, the mouth of every cross lane. All doors were shut; nothing moved as he worked his way to the harbor.
He guessed that if he tried any of those doors he would find them barred against him, while within would lie only the dead. Had they perished soon after Gorm had welcomed Kolder to further the ambitions of Oma and her son? Or had that death come sometime later, during the years since Koris had fled to Estcarp and the island had been cut off from humankind? It would not matter to anyone save perhaps a historian.
