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Call on the rebels of Dalis to help you!" "Then what of the Spokesmen of the Gens, who will be out of contact with me?" "They must stand on their own feet, must fight their own battle! Call to you the people who have passed through the white flames, and fight with the distant will of Luar and of Dalis for control of the cube-army!"
Even before he gave the signal that placed him in position to converse with them, he noted the strange coincidence. The Spokesmen who desired speech with him were tutelary heads of Gens whose borders touched the devasted area where Dalis had but recently been overlord! An icy chill caressed his spine as he signalled the Spokesmen to speak. "Yes, Vardee? Prull? Klaser? Cleric?"
Dalis found her, took an interest in her, and the very strangeness of her gave him his idea, which he brought to my father and me. "His proposal was somewhat like that which you made when we sent the Earth out of its orbit into outer space, save that Dalis' scheme involved no such program.
All his pity vanished, though he still believed he had done right in sparing Dalis' life. Suddenly there came an ominous humming in the Beryl, and simultaneously signals from the vari-colored lights on the table. Sarka whirled to the lights, noting their color, and mentally repeating the names of the Spokesmen who signalled him.
Think of a shoreline, once lined with mighty buildings, after the passage of a tidal wave greater than ever before known to man. The devastation would be indescribable. Multiply that shoreline by the vast area which had housed the Gens of Dalis, and the mental picture is almost too big to grasp. Chaos, catastrophe, approaching an infinity of destruction.
Sarka scarcely knew why he had spoken the last sentence. It was as though something deep within him had risen up, commanded him to speak, and deeper yet, far back in his consciousness, was a mental picture of the devastation he had witnessed on his flight above the area that had once housed the Gens of Dalis.
The materials of which the vast buildings, set close together, had been made, had been twisted into grotesque, nightmarish shapes, and the whole fused into a burned and gleaming mass which covered half of what had once been a mighty ocean as though a bomb larger and more devastating than ever imagined of man, a bomb large enough to rock the Earth, had landed in the midst of the area once occupied by the Gens of Dalis!
In an hour the answer came, the snarling thought-answer of Dalis. "We hear! We obey! But Dalis is never beaten while he lives! His day will come!" Sarka found himself feeling even a little sorry for sorely beaten Dalis; but his face was grim as he sent another command to the people of Dalis who had passed through the life-source of the Moon.
Draw back from your labors, and muster, not as squares, rectangles and columns, but as individual cubes, in the area already devastated by you! Rally about the glowing people who have passed through the flames which were your Moon-mother, and wait for orders! Take no further heed of commands from Dalis and Luar!"
"Luar and Dalis are no longer able to command you!" Still no sound or movement of the cubes. Then, taking a deep breath, as of a swimmer preparing to dive into icy water, Sarka gave a new command. "Dissolve! Reform on the roof of the world in globes! Roll over the face of the Earth, destroy the fire-balls of Mars and take prisoners, inside the globes, the attackers from Mars!"
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