They flapped up from among the palms; circled overhead, with their numbers augmenting until they headed away. The first platforms were now mere blobs in the starlight. A thousand girls, I estimated, were up there in flight.
We hurried to our platform. Again we were in the air. Below us still another platform was rising; around us, three or four mounted birds circled like a convoy. We took our place in the line and sped back to the city.
“Is the king dead, Sonya?”
“No. I do not think so.”
I waited a moment. “Sonya, you girls are not armed?”
She said impulsively, “No. But in the underground rooms of the castle, the science weapons are stored. Once we get control of them—” She checked herself, but she had told me what I wanted to know. An arsenal under the castle! The weapons of a half-forgotten science of this decadent race, stored there!
I shuddered at the visions which surged to my imagination. Here in the city—a government menaced by crusading girls! This was our condition, pitiable indeed, to oppose a savage, outside enemy!
Yet what was I to do? I pondered it until a vague possibility came to me. It gripped me. It seemed feasible. I believed I could accomplish it. With swiftness of action, power, dominance, I could carry it through. A grim exaltation was upon me. A man, to play a man’s part.
We landed with a swoop upon the moonlit garden sward. The girls crowded around us, with a fringe of curious, apathetic men behind them. Sonya turned to speak to Alice and Dolores. Near by was a dark path between beds of giant flowers. I slipped from the platform. With my cloak held before my face, I avoided the girls and plunged into the shadows of the flowered path.
The path was dark, cut off from the moonlight by a great bed of flowers rising high above my head. A group of men came toward me; I stepped between the flower stalks, stood enshrouded in my cloak, my figure merging with the shadows, until the men had passed.