The captain sat up and flexed his arms.
“Stop!”
On the street the captain reappeared, raised his gun and fired. Smith fell, a bullet in his heart.
The other men turned.
The captain ran to them.
“That fool! Afraid of a city!”
They looked at the body of Smith at their feet.
They looked at their captain, and their eyes widened and narrowed.
“Listen to me,” said the captain. “I have something important to tell you.”
Now the city, which had weighed and tasted and smelled them, which had used all its powers save one, prepared to use its final ability, the power of speech. It did not speak with the rage and hostility of its massed walls or towers, nor with the bulk of its cobbled avenues and fortresses of machinery. It spoke with the quiet voice of one man.
“I am no longer your captain,” he said. “Nor am I a man.”
The men moved back.
“I am the city,” he said, and smiled.
“I’ve waited two hundred centuries,” he said. “I’ve waited for the sons of the Sons of the sons to return.”
“Captain, sir!”
“Let me continue. Who built me? The city. The men who died built me. The old race who once lived here. The people whom the Earthmen left to die of a terrible disease, a form of leprosy with no cure.
And the men of that old race, dreaming of the day when Earthmen might return, built this city, and the name of this city was and is Revenge, upon the planet of Darkness, near the shore of the Sea of Centuries, by the Mountains of the Dead; all very poetic.
This city was to be a balancing machine, a litmus, an antenna to test all future space travelers. In twenty thousand years only two other rockets landed here. One from a distant galaxy called Ennt, and the inhabitants of that craft were tested, weighed, found wanting, and let free, unscathed, from the city. As were the visitors in the second ship.
But today! At long last, you’ve come! The revenge will be carried out to the last detail. Those men have been dead two hundred centuries, but they left a city here to welcome you.
“Captain, sir, you’re not feeling well. Perhaps you’d better come back to the ship, sir.”
The city trembled.
The pavements opened and the men fell, screaming. Falling, they saw bright razors flash to meet them!
Time passed. Soon came the call:
“Smith?”
“Here!”
“Jensen?”
“Here!”
“Jones, Hutchinson, Springer?”
“Here, here, here!”
They stood by the door of the rocket.
“We return to Earth immediately.”
“Yes, sir!”
The incisions on their necks were invisible, as were their hidden brass hearts and silver organs and the fine golden wire of their nerves. There was a faint electric hum from their heads.
“On the double!”
Nine men hurried the golden bombs of disease culture into the rocket.
“These are to be dropped on Earth.”
“Right, sir!”
The rocket valve slammed. The rocket jumped into the sky. As the thunder faded, the city lay upon the summer meadow.
Its glass eyes were dulled over. The Ear relaxed, the great nostril vents stopped, the streets no longer weighed or balanced, and the hidden machinery paused in its bath of oil.
In the sky the rocket dwindled.
Slowly, pleasurably, the city enjoyed the luxury of dying.
The End
