Ziliah conceived the idea of our subverting the reigning government as quickly as we had reached the same conclusion, and Hopkins was not slow to sharpen her perceptions. But she formed the plan of our coup d’etat. We had thought (and the Professor was as deeply implicated as any of us, he realized our plight and for once worldly aims gripped and diverted his mind) to make a public appeal to the people or else insidiously foment discontent, lead an attack on the now defenceless governors, seize the throne, as it were, and establish the dynasty of Hlmath Bjornsen the First.
At first blush the Professor seemed greatly puzzled and unwilling, and his bulging eyes stared at us with blank misgivings. But when the rigor of our situation was forced upon him, with the compelling suadente potestas of his red hair, and its felicitous conjunction with aboriginal prophecy, he worked himself into a real glee over it that was delightful. To Hopkins there was something so macaronic and side-splitting about this role of the Professor’s, that he could scarcely look at his half rueful, absorbed expression, his odd mouth, the prodigious ears, and the coronal splendor of his hair, without being overcome with a badly concealed merriment that might have turned our plans awry with anyone less essentially good-natured than the Professor.
Of course we improved our popularity, and we put the Professor through ambulatory excursions that must have tired his legs. From the first the people had “cottoned” to him (fide Hopkins), and we wanted them to become intimate with their future KING. Certainly it seemed like a huge joke.
Everything was coming our way. The governors had actually become afraid of us. We were no longer confined to the Capitol. We fascinated our guards by giving them all the trinkets we could find about us, and Goritz and I talked constantly with the people. The Sanhedrin might have turned the people against us by revealing our thefts, but somehow they did not try it. They did not even enter our rooms for proof. I think we began to despise them. They had a secretive, feeble way that too plainly advertised their impotence. It was evident indeed that some fatal collapse in their authority was imminent, and they did not have the miraculous tubes to reinstate themselves. Nothing could have withstood them then. Between the prophecy and the loss of the tubes they were desperate. Our sedition prospered in the meanwhile.
Suddenly it occurred to me that their apathy and shrinking avoidance of a collision meant mischief. It might be ominous. Were they—the thought transfixed me with horror—were they secretly at work repairing their loss, MAKING OTHER TUBES? Of course they were; in the light of this suggestion their apparent timidity was explained. It was not timidity. Nay, it was just a delicate, artful duplicity that was fooling us. Ziliah must find out and then one way or another we must test the situation. Of course the prophecy that Ziliah had recounted to us was constantly the keynote of our plans. To lose our chance now would be madness.
And Ziliah? She wheedled Javan and Put, and Cush, and Hul, and the rest successfully. They thought she was keeping us quiet, and they thought too their own inoffensiveness was blinding us. Ah ha! It was—while they contrived their devilish weapons anew. They had made no outcry when they found them gone. That might have liberated the people of their fear for themselves. But was Ziliah possibly playing us false? There was or certainly had been a countermine at work and she had failed to detect it. These foxy patriarchs were fooling our own spy in their camp, or again—was Ziliah false?
Well sir, Ziliah was “straight as a string and true as gold,” to quote Hopkins. She knew nothing about the making of the new tubes, but she would find out. Her terror over this new turn in the affair was greater than our own, her surprise too. Ah, sir, she knew what those tubes meant, what they could do!
She soon returned to me—it was easy enough, and it was easy to do it unnoticed. Javan trusted her implicitly, and indeed she and I had been somewhat hoodwinked by him. Ziliah confirmed my suspicions. The new tubes were indeed under way. The eukairia, the “nick of time,” had come. We must strike. Then it was that Ziliah told us HOW.
We were to take on the grand air, assert our provenance from Heaven, repeat the prophecy from the tablet, call the Professor Shamlah, and threaten destruction if the Sanhedrin did not receive us at once, see that our thunder bolts were ready, and use them. The message, to be taken by Ziliah, would admit that our manners had been humble and that Shamlah had concealed his mission. But delay would be cut short. The time for his royal assumption was at hand. We would come to them with our thunder tubes and talk with them; and if our overture was rejected we would go to the people and show our power.
That was our ultimatum; batteries on both sides were now unmasked and the issue defined. What we needed just then were theatrical properties, some chromatic detonating explosions, fireworks, skyrockets, roman candles, flower-pots, fire-fizzes of any sort that would give us a supernatural flavor. As Hopkins said, just one night’s Coney Island Payne’s Fireworks outfit, and what wasn’t ours in the joint, wouldn’t be worth having. But—we had only our guns. That however was a good deal.