Their goal was the approximate centre of The Tree, if they could believe their informants. Pain was a great destroyer of lies, and the bat-men taken prisoners on the first and the second raids had been subjected to as much pain as their frail bodies could withstand. Two had held out until they died, but the others had finally told what they swore was the truth. Their stories agreed, which still did not mean that they were true.
The bat-men who could still talk were being taken along so that they could identify tree marks and, finally, the base-city.
Below, The Tree was a horizon-spanning tangle, a criss-cross of grey branches and sun flashing off the waterways on their branches here and there, and vivid colours of the trees and bushes which grew on The Tree. Once, a pale pink cloud rose from a dense green jungle. It was an immense flock of birds leaving the vine complex between two mighty branches. The pink cloud passed between a number of trunks and then settled down and was hidden inside another vine complex.
Ulysses turned in time to see Awina come down the ladder from the upper deck of the gondola. She was beautiful when just resting, as beautiful as a seal point Siamese in repose. But when she was moving, she was as pleasing to the eye as the wind would be if it could be seen. Now that Thebi and Phanus were not with them and she was the only one to attend to the Lord's personal needs, she was all grin and purr. He had thought of asking her to stay behind but had decided not to. She knew that their chances for coming back were about twenty to eighty, if that good. She would be hurt if he asked her to stay behind. And there was a good strong possibility that she would brood until she exploded against the two women, since she would blame them.
She wore the goggles which Ulysses had ordered made as part of the air force uniform. They would not be needed very often, if at all, but he liked them. They gave a distinct flair to the men who rode the ships of the sky, and they also gave him a pleasurable nostalgic twinge when he saw them. He had been a World War I aviation buff.
A leather chain with a bright blue symbol in the form of the Maltese cross at its end hung around Awina's neck. A belt with a stone knife was around her waist. That completed her uniform.
She looked at him to make sure that she would not be interrupting him in anything and she said, 'My Lord, this is much better than climbing up and down The Tree and riding rafts among the snoligosters and the hipporats!'
He smiled and said, 'That is true. But do not forget that we may have to go on foot on the way home.'
And consider ourselves lucky to be able to do that, he thought.
Awina moved closer until her hip was brushing him and then the side of her shoulder came into contact with his arm. The tip of her tail twitched across the back of his calves now and then. There was too much noise in the gondola for him to hear her purring, and she was not close enough for him to feel it. But he believed that she was purring.
He moved away. He had no time to think about her. Captaining ten ships was a full-time job. The officers and crews had had as much training as he could give them in the little time allowed. But they were not veterans.
So far, things had run smoothly enough. At this altitude, they had a tail wind which was upping their ground speed to fifty miles an hour. This meant that they could not return at this height; they would have been moving backward while their motors strained to go full speed. But now they could reach their target in eight hours instead of the sixteen it would have taken if the air had been still. He would let the motors rest for several hours and be pushed by the wind, so that would bring them to the Dhulhulikh city about two hours before nightfall. That would be enough time for what he had in mind.
The Tree scudded under them like a great grey-and-green cloud. Occasionally, there was a space where the branches did not cross, and he could almost see to the bottom of the abyss. What a colossal being! The world had never known its like. Not in all the four billion years of its existence. Not until about, he estimated, the last twenty thousand years. And here it was: The Tree. It seemed a shame, a tragedy, rather, to destroy such a creature.
Then he caught himself. Who was going to destroy it? How?
Now and then, he saw tiny big-winged figures that had to be Dhulhulikh. They knew that the ships of the stone god and the Neshgai were flying toward their city. Even if he had not seen any, he would have taken it for granted that there were leathery-winged pygmies hidden in the foliage, observing the ten silver needles above them. Nor did they have to send couriers. They would long ago have transmitted messages via the pulse- diaphragms and nerve cables of The Tree itself.
He supposed that they had been aware for a long long time that the ships were destined for their base-city. They had enough spies, and they doubtless had bribed slaves and perhaps even some Neshgai to spy for them. Corruption and treachery seemed to be inherent with sentiency. Humans had not had a monopoly on these.
Awina pressed up against him again, and he lost his sequence of thought.
The hours passed, eased by the demands of commanding the fleet. Below, the scene changed only slightly. There was some variety in the unity, but only in the slightly differing directions the branches took, in the varying configurations of vine-complexes, the lesser or taller heights of the trunks, and an occasional cloud of birds: pink- green, scarlet, purple, orange, yellow, that sped between the trunks and over the branches.
The sun reached its zenith, and Ulysses ordered the speed reduced to the point where there was just enough power to keep the dirigibles from losing head. It was comparatively silent than in the gondola, except for the soft voices of the petty officers talking into the radio boxes, the shuffle of a Neshgai's huge feet or squeak of air through his trunk, a Neshgai stomach rumbling, a cough from a man. There was a steady creaking sound: the movement of the tough husks holding the gondola to the main framework.
The sun went down toward the horizon, and Ulysses ordered their chief Dhulhulikh prisoner brought down. This was Kstuuvh, a scarred little man whose hands were tied behind him and whose wings were threaded together. Some of the fire that his skin had felt was reflected as heat in his eyes.
'We should be in sight of the city,' Ulysses said. 'Point it out to me.'
Kstuuvh snarled, 'With my hands tied?'
'Nod when I point to the right place,' Ulysses said.
Most of the trunks reached to ten thousand feet, where they seemed to explode in a mushroom of green. About ten miles ahead of them was a trunk that reached almost to thirteen thousand feet. This should hold the city of the Dhulhulikh, somewhere down there on a number of branches and inside the trunk and the branches themselves. From here, nothing could be seen except The Tree itself. The bat-men would, of course, be hiding until the last moment.
Ulysses said, 'That great trunk marks the city?'
'I do not know,' Kstuuvh said.
Graushpaz placed the fingers of his giant hand around the skinny neck of the bat-man and squeezed. Kstuuvh's face turned blue, his eyes bulged and his tongue shot out.
The Neshgai released his hold. The Dhulhulikh coughed and gagged, and then said, 'I do not know.'
Ulysses admired him for making another stand, even though he knew what agony would be inflicted on him. He said, 'If we don't get it out of you, we have more of your kind who are not so stubborn.'
'Use fire on me again,' Kstuuvh said.
Ulysses smiled. The bat-men knew by now how flammable the hydrogen was and how many precautions had been taken during the voyage to prevent sparks and fire.
'A needle will do as well,' he said. But he paid no more attention to the little man except to have him taken to the upper deck. Too many bat-men, including Kstuuvh, had described this treemark while under torture.
He issued the orders that would place them in bombing formation, in an Indian file. They began to lower, and then the battle-stations order went through the radio boxes of the fleet. The flagship was down to ten thousand feet by the time it had reached the great trunk. It was still out of reach of the bat-men, who could not fly any higher than nine thousand feet and that only without any excess weight.
TheBlue Spirit went past the mushroom top of the trunk on the starboard side. Some mauve-and-red, hugewinged, small-bodied birds and some thickly furred otterlike creatures stared at the silver goliath as it slid by.
Several miles past the top of the trunk, the flagship made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn on the port side and came past the trunk at nine thousand feet above ground level. It moved at a ground speed of ten miles an hour against the wind, which had dropped to fifteen miles an hour. There was still no sign of the Dhulhulikh below, though there was plenty of evidence of other life. A V-shaped flight of thousands of black-winged, green-bodied, yellow-headed flying mammals rose up toward them, veered and then swooped down into the foliage miles
