CHAPTER XXXI

_Industriana_

It must have been two days later when at last we were rescued by the

_Rhaal_ patrol and taken to Industriana. Back there in the forest I had

suddenly remembered that the mate to the thing I had killed would

doubtless be lurking in the vicinity. We fled. Subsisting on what food

of the wilds we could find, at last we were picked up and taken to the

City of Work.

The Great City had been destroyed. Wanton capital of the Central State,

we learned now that it lay dead. To outward aspect, unharmed. Fair,

serene, alluring as ever it lay there on its shimmering waters; but the

life within it, was dead. Refugees--a quarter perhaps of the

inhabitants--had escaped; hourly the search patrols were picking them

up, bringing them to Industriana. Rescue parties were searching the

city, to find any who might still be alive.

And out in the forest lay a great pile of ashes, still exhaling a thin

wisp of its deadly breath--where Tarrano had created the Black Cloud;

lost his captive Elza, but doubtless had escaped himself back to his

City of Ice.

We found Georg and Maida safe at Industriana. Marvelous city! Elza had

never seen it before. She sat gazing breathless as from the air on the

patrol vessel, we approached it.

The land of this region was a black, rocky soil upon which vegetation

would not grow. A rolling land, grimly black, metallic; with

outcroppings of ore, red and white and with occasional patches of thin

white sand whereon a prickly blue grass struggled for life.

Rolling hills; and then places where nature had upheaved into a turmoil.

Huge naked black crags; buttes; hills with precipitous black sides of

sleek metal; narrow canyons with tumultuous water flowing through them.

In such a place stood Industriana. The City of Work! Set in an area

where nature lay scarred, twisted in convulsion, its buildings clung to

every conceivable slope and in every position. Many-storied

buildings--residences and factories indiscriminately intermingled. All

built in sober, solid rectangles of the forbidding black stone.

A long steep slope from an excavated quarry deep in the ground, ran

straight up to a commanding hilltop--the slope set with an orderly array

of buildings clinging to it in terraces. Buildings huge, or tiny huts;

all anchored in the rear to the ground, and set upon metal girders in

the front. Bisecting the slope was a vertical street--a broad escalator

of moving steps, one half going upward, the other down. Beside it, a

series of other escalators for the traffic of moving merchandise.

Cross streets on the hill were spider bridges, clinging with thin, stiff

legs. And at the summit of the hill stood a tremendous funnel belching

flame and smoke into the sky.

To one side of the hill lay a bowl-like depression with a single squat

building in its center--a low building of many funnels; and about it the

black yawning mouths of shafts down into the ground--mines vomiting ore,

broken chunks of the metallic rock coming up as though by the invisible

magic of magnetism, hunting through the air in an arc to fall with a

clatter into great bins above the smelter.

In another place, at the bottom of a canyon roared a surging torrent of

river. A harnessed river; plunging into turbines; emerging to tumble

over a cascade, its every drop caught by turning buckets spilled again

at the bottom. Water pursuing its surging course downward, its power

used again and again. The canyon dry at one place near the lower edge of

the city, the water all electrified, resolved into piped hydrogen and

oxygen. Like a tremendous clock ticking, the water, momentarily dammed

back, was released in a torrent to the electrolysis vats. The hissing

gases, under tremendous pressure, raised up the heavy-weighted tops of

two expanding tanks. Another tick of this giant clock--the gases

released, were merged again to water. The tops of the tanks lowered,

each in turn, one coming down as the other went up--hundreds of tons of

weight--their slow downward pull geared to scores of whirling

wheels--the power shifted to dynamos scattered throughout the city.

It was the twilight of nightfall when we arrived over Industriana. A

thousand funnels and chimneys belched their flame and smoke--the flame

tinting the sky with a lurid yellow-green glare, the smoke hanging like

a dim blue gauze through which everything seemed unreal, infernal.

From the city rose a roar--the myriad sounds of industry mingled by the

magic of distance. And as we got closer, the roar resolved into its

component parts; the grinding of gears; clicking of belts and chains;

whirring of dynamos and motors; shrill electrical screams; the

clattering of falling ore; clanking of swiftly moving merchandise, bound

in metal, magnetized to monorail cars shifting it to warehouses on the

nearby hills. And over it all flashed the brilliant signal lights of the

merchandise traffic directors whose stentorian electrical voices

broadcasting commands sounded above the city's noises.

An inferno of activity. A seeming confusion; yet the aspect of confusion

was a fallacy, for beneath it lay a precision--an orderly precision as

calm and exact as the mind of the Director of a Signal Tower counting

off the split seconds of his beams.

An orderly precision--the brain of one man guiding and dominating

everything; at his desk alone for long hours throughout the days and

nights. A quiet, grey-haired gentleman; unhurried, unharassed, seemingly

almost inactive; always seated at his empty desk smoking endless

arrant-cylinders. The dominating business brain of Industriana.