And above the city swirled a swarm of aircraft. Tommy counted three of the clumsy ornithopters, high and motelike. There were twenty or thirty of the small, one-man craft. There were a dozen or more two-man planes. And there were at least forty giant single-wing ships which looked as if they had been made for carrying freight. They soared and circled above the city in soundless confusion. Before each of them glittered something silvery, like glass, which was not a screw propeller but somehow drew them on.
The Council was massed two hundred yards away. A single-seater dived downward, soared and circled noiselessly fifty yards overhead, and its pilot shouted a message. Then he climbed swiftly and rejoined his fellows. The men about Tommy looked stunned, as if they could not believe their ears. Aten seemed stricken beyond the passability of reaction.
“I got part of it,” snapped Tommy, to Evelyn’s whispered question. “I think I know the rest. Aten!” He snapped question after question in his inadequate phrasing of the city’s tongue. Evelyn saw Aten answer dully, then bitterly, and then, as Tommy caught his arm and whispered savagely to him, Aten’s eyes caught fire. He nodded violently and turned on his heel.
“Come on!” And Tommy seized Evelyn’s arm again.
They followed closely as Aten wormed his way through the crowd. They raced behind him downstairs and through a door into a dusty and unvisited room. It was a museum. Aten pointed grimly.
Here were the automatic pistols taken from those of Jacaro’s men who had been killed, a nasty sub-machine gun which had been Tommy’s, and grenades—Jacaro’s. Tommy checked shell calibres and carried off a ninety-shot magazine full of explosive bullets, and a repeating rifle.
“I can do more accurate work with this than the machine gun,” he said cryptically. “Let’s go!”
It was not until they were racing away from the Council building in one of the two-wheeled vehicles that Evelyn spoke again.
“I—understand part,” she said unsteadily. “Those planes overhead are from Rahn. And they’re threatening—”