The Princess of the Atom by Ray Cummings

Drake leaped to his feet. "But this must be stopped! Good God, this is madness!"

An hour or more had passed. The brief night was more than half over. Drake had sat in the palace with the harassed council. Night of turmoil! This brief night, preface to the end.

It seemed as though all the city sensed it. The crowds were in a wild chaos, surging everywhere throughout the city. Aimless, leaderless mobs.

The government, too, was in chaos, striving to do a multiplicity of abnormal things at once. A welter of official activities was around Drake. He sat watching and listening, waiting an opportunity to take his part in the one thing most vital to him -- the expedition which soon was to start upon the rescue of the Princess Dianne, and the capture of the Togarites.

The whereabouts of the enemy was known now. The island at the near-by horizon held them. It was no more than three miles away across the water. A public garden and park occupied this small island. No one lived there, but pleasure parties often went to spend a few hours. The island had been searched many times and nothing found.

Yet it was Togaro's headquarters, quite evidently. His giant form had been seen wading out there. He was there now. Drake from the palace balcony had stood and seen the towering figure in the moonlight. And then it had dwindled. In smallness there, beyond doubt, the Togarite ship was hidden. He and his leaders were there.

Drake listened to the council making its plans. An expedition of young men who had been trained in the use of the drugs was now being assembled. They were coming into the palace now, in groups, as the messengers sought them out in the city and brought them.

There seemed only one way to get to the island unperceived by Togaro. The space-ship in which Drake had arrived was being hastily repaired. In an hour or two it would be ready. A hundred young men, and Drake with his automatics, would board it. The ship would then dwindle to a size very small. It would seem a flight of miles to the island -- but the ship could do that in a brief time. And in such a small size could land unobserved.

The cause of the turmoil in the city was puzzling and disturbing to the council. The arrival of Togaro had created an excitement almost verging upon panic. But the excitement had started before Togaro's arrival. All during the three-hour daylight preceding, and the night before that, a strange air of unrest had been apparent among the people. There were fifty thousand of them here. The near-by rural districts held another fifty thousand. There was an influx from the country into the city. No one knew why. Whole families coming in their carts, then abandoning the carts, and mingling with the city crowds.

Messengers arriving from other cities reported the same conditions. The people everywhere were frightened, acting strangely. The small government flyer came on its four-hundred-mile voyage from the other side of the globe. It was mostly water in that hemisphere; but there was one island -- one large city. It, too, was in a turmoil.

A strange restlessness, which the panic here in the Shore City over Togaro's arrival could not explain, pervaded Mita. To Drake it was as though by some occult force the knowledge was spreading throughout the world of impending doom. But he knew it was nothing occult. Might it not be that Togaro's followers were dispersed widely over this little globe, mingling with the people, spreading insidious, frightening propaganda?

The minutes passed while Drake sat watching the arriving men whom he was to lead. The council room was in the upper story. The men came up, were checked and given instructions, and then taken to the lower floor to be equipped with belts and the drugs.

Word came that the space-ship was not badly damaged. The repairs were progressing. It would be ready for the voyage by dawn.

All this time, in the garden of the palace the mob had stood unnaturally silent, watching the building as though trying to guess what activities were going on inside. Messengers were constantly arriving and departing. Police were bringing in the young men whom Drake was to take into smallness. The airship from the other hemisphere came and landed near by; its officials hurried in through the police cordon at the palace doorway.

As though nature were conspiring with a premonition of what the future might hold, a cloud lifted above the horizon across the city and passed near the moon; a cloud at a considerable altitude, tinged with red from the coming sunrise. It threw a red cast upon the moon. The moonlight suddenly seemed drenching all the scene with blood. An omen? Drake shuddered. He turned from the window. But the murmur down there grew to a shouting. It brought his gaze back. A rhythmic shouting -- the repetition of a few words over and over. It may have started with a single voice, and the crowd took it up like a chant.

"Alt, what is that?"

Alt was near Drake. He listened. But Ahlma caught it first.

"They say, '_The world ends tonight! Give us the drugs! _"

Like a chant the crowd was all shouting it now. "_The world ends tonight! We want the drugs! _"

The council heard it. A silence fell upon the room as they listened. Then from the palace doorway, the police began shouting. A new turmoil, then the sound of thuds upon the front palace walls -- missiles were being thrown. A chunk of rock came hurtling through the window. It narrowly missed Drake and fell with a crash in the midst of the sitting councilmen.