I stood with a small group of our men beneath the dome, where Lembken’s gardens had been. The havoc that had been wrought is almost indescribable. The beauty molded by the most cunning hands in Europe had been obliterated in one short hour. The gardens were a waste of uprooted trees and trampled earth, while from the broken conduit a dozen muddy streams were pouring like high waterfalls upon the courts below. The Palace was a mass of wreckage, in which the mob still moved, shouting for fire to finish the work of destruction.
I had been recognized at last, and we were searching for our men among the rabble, gathering the nucleus of a force to render aid to our party, hard-pressed, below. I had managed to achieve something at last: I had detailed a dozen men with Ray rods to guard the women. That was all I could accomplish.
The ground about the Temple was already strewn with blackened, twisted figures. From the conical Ray guns on the enclosing walls swept sheets of blinding flame, a soundless cannonade that pecked at the interstices in the walls of the Temple and of the Airscouts’ Fortress, seeking for some unpainted spot between the blocks of stone, some small, abraded surface where the cold Rays might find lodgment. I heard the crumbling of disintegrating mortar and saw fragments of stone flying from cornice and pediment. Soon gaps would open and the whole splendid pile tumble into a heap of shapeless ruins.
The Rays flashed to and fro like brilliant lightning. I was half blinded; all I could discern was that Sanson still held the Science Wing, from whose windows the Guard were picking off our men beneath them. I surmised from the shouting that we were attacking the Wing from the ground floor of the Temple.
We had gathered most of our men together, and we plunged for the elevator shafts and scrambled down. My pulses hammered with fear as I entered the corridor below. But there stood David, and Elizabeth kneeled beside him, with Esther’s head in her lap. She looked at me and smiled with so brave an effort that I realized her own anxiety. Somewhere in the deadly tumult Paul was fighting, unless, indeed, he lay among those shapeless masses that strewed the courts.
Our men swept by me and poured along the corridor toward the bridge.
“I have fulfilled my promise, Arnold,” said David. “Now I must take Elizabeth within the shelter of the Airscouts’ Fortress, and you will follow with Esther. Then each of us must do his best to rally parties to the assault. All is not going well, Arnold. Our Ray rods are emptying fast, and the storage batteries within the Airscouts’ Fortress have been destroyed, so that we cannot recharge them; the attack upon the lower level of the Wing has failed. Sanson has placed a Ray gun there. All hangs upon the battleplanes, and they have not returned.”
He put his arm about his daughter and hurried her toward the bridge, while I picked up Esther, still plunged in that first sleep, and followed him. I saw him lead Elizabeth to safety, but as I was about to follow, a sheet of purple light swept past me, tearing a stanchion from the bridge and knocking down a part of the brick house on the wall above, where Lembken had taken me that night of our first meeting.
A gun was playing on the bridge. It was impossible to cross at present. I drew back, waiting.
Then a babel of cries broke out on the opposite side, so fierce and wild that, grasping Esther more tightly, I rushed to a window at the further end of the corridor, commanding a view of the exterior courts. The long bridges were packed with our men, making a mad sortie to scale the enclosing walls. Streaks of light, pitiably thin, flashed from their Ray rods, and, with exultant shouts, the Guard sprang forward to meet them. They were dragging lighter Ray guns behind them. For an instant it seemed as if the revolutionists would scale the walls before the heavy Ray artillery could be reaimed at them. The foremost files of the opposing forces clashed and surged and swayed in a rain of meteor flashes. The blackened corpses heaped the bridges, hung, toppled over, and went to swell the heaps below. Then, with a renewed outburst of shouting, the Guard drove back the attack and placed their guns.