Huge rock cliffs loomed up before them, towering like a giant's twisted
play-things where he might have dropped them. Spires and points of
sandstone, ridges of granite and volcanic tuffs, rimrock and crumbled
talus; they made fantastic colors where the sun caught them. And
running straight between the boulders was a crimson road, smooth as
placid water.
Grim cried, "Go on ahead. I'll hold them off. If that Kohonnes of yours
has any power at all--tell him this is the time to use it!"
Grim brought his foot against the bay's rump, sent it racing terrified
onto the scarlet road. Clinging to the reins, Tlokine had no time to
cry her refusal to leave Grim. The bay took her away fast, leaving Grim
alone.
Randolph shouted, "I have you now, Thorssen. Don't hope for a blast of
my disintegrator, either. You're going back to that altar. Eight days I
said--and eight days it still is!"
Grim kicked his feet free of the stirrups and leaped to the rock.
Putting his hands flat on the stone, he swung himself to the first
ledge, then to the second. With booted toes and clinging fingers, he
pulled himself straight up the face of the cliff.
Randolph howled; threw himself like a madman at the cliff. He came
after the Viking, rasping spaceoaths beneath his breath. Grim caught a
blurred glimpse of Althaya spurring her roan along the scarlet roadway,
closing the distance between Tlokine and herself.
Rock shattered above him. Grim stared at a boulder coming loose under
the blast of a disintegrator pellet; came bouncing downward. Grim
flattened himself, hearing Black Randolph cry, "It'll knock you down to
my level, Thorssen."
The boulder struck on a lip of stone and went bounding beyond him. Grim
drew a breath and climbed faster. He came to a flat section that topped
the surrounding bluffs. He scrambled onto it as a blast from Randolph's
disintegrator caught the rocklip that he was on and sent it flying.
He lay dazed, knowing the pirate was climbing after him, but unable to
do anything about it. He opened his mouth and gulped in air, hearing a
steady roaring in his ears. He knelt, stood up; and still the roaring
swelled and grew. He finally recognized it as a waterfall.
Black Randolph swung over the edge of the cliff and came charging
across its flat top, head down. His fists were balled into great clubs.
Grim shook his head, got to a knee and then to both feet, waiting.
The pirate's charge was irresistible. It lifted Grim up and threw him
backwards. He pummeled at the pirate, drove hard knuckles into his jaw
and chest. But Randolph laughed in his throat and hammered back.
For one instant they stood locked, knee to knee. Their fists drove
pain and agony into each other's ribs and bellies. Then Grim weakened.
The long ride, the space crash, the wild flight took their fee. His
legs buckled under the weariness that laid hot bands around them. He
toppled, went down--
Black Randolph came for him in a low dive.
Grim closed his hand on a solid rock hump and lifted his feet. He threw
them up in the manner of the ancient savatte. His foot caught Black
Randolph in the chest and lifted him up and flung him high over him.
The pirate screamed. Grim turned; knelt on the edge of the cliff wall
and saw the pirate falling, turning and twisting, into a deep gorge
where a wide river flowed like a blue ribbon between crumpled rocks,
fed by a tumbling waterfall.
Grim drew a deep breath and got to his feet. Far beneath him, at the
end of the narrow crimson road, he could see a great black temple,
with a door like a gaping mouth. Tlokine was in that temple, and
Althaya--and the thing they both called Kohonnes.
Grim began to run.
* * * * *
_The two women faced each other at the foot of the bulking black
machine that was their god._
_"Here now you will die," breathed Althaya._
_"Kohonnes will not let me die. He will save me. It is you--who have
been traitress to him--who will pay by going back to the breath...."_
_And above them, above the black hair and the red, the hundred eyes of
the machine began to glow, and the muted throbbing went out from its
bowels and touched its metal sides; and the god Kohonnes came to life._
* * * * *
Grim slipped and staggered the last twenty feet down the side of the
sheer grey rock. He landed on the crimson road, fifty feet from the
mouthlike entrance to the Temple. He went at a lurching run, forgetting
his weariness, thinking only of a lovely girl with white skin and green
eyes and hair the color of a raven-wing.
He swung into the dark, cool interior; was dimly aware of slender black
onyx columns lifting a hundred feet toward a dark ceiling.
Grim stopped. A voice reverberated in the Temple.
"You have disobeyed, Althaya. You--"
"Don't threaten me, Kohonnes! At this moment my people are coming. They
will attack when I give the word. They will come in here and kill the
girl and make you yield your secret to me. Then Althaya will have power
unimaginable. Black Randolph--"
"--is dead," said Grim. "He fell into the gorge."
Grim stared upward. A black machine bulked huge and dark in the
shadows. From a hundred facets, green bulb-lights glowed. Grim heard
the machinery moving, saw the bulbs grow brighter as power poured into
the thing.
"Who are you, Kohonnes?" he cried out in space _patois_.
"Eh? What's that? Who's out there?... It isn't--can't be! Grim
Thorssen?"
Grim laughed. He knew that voice anywhere.
"You old spacedog! What're you trying to do--ruin the Unions Council?"
"The Council? What have I to do with them?"
"The force this machine applies escapes into space. It bends the
Caravans and the Fleet cruisers. It smashes them--sends them flying
on into the void like so many wrecked planets. They'll go on and
on--until they find a planet to crash on or make an orbit around."
There was a pause. Althaya cried out harshly; whirled and fled toward
the mouthlike door where light filtered in in grey beams.
The machine stopped humming. A door opened in it. A man with white hair
and a smooth, shaven face stepped onto the floor of the temple. He
grinned at the Viking, threw both arms high into the air.
Grim said, "Jasper Jones! I knew you'd gone into retirement--but I
never thought you'd set yourself up as a god."
The old man laughed, keen blue eyes dancing. "I was always interested
in sound, Grim. I had some theories, theories that my colleagues said
were crazy, impractical. So when I retired I came to this little planet
that I'd discovered a long time ago--and set myself up in comfort.
"I took amnesiac men and women from the space hospitals and gave them
a new life. I let them build a new civilization for themselves, a new
life. Where they would have had to spend the rest of their useless
lives in sanatoriums, I gave them freedom, fresh air and a new world.
Was that wrong?"
Grim said dryly, "Not the way you put it. But you could have
established dams--something to keep that hellish force in place. And
while we're on it--what in the name of the Empire is the thing?"
Jasper Jones waved at the machine. "Let's go inside. I'll tell you
about it as we go. Come, Tlokine.
"I said I was interested in sound. Perhaps I should say, vibratory
impulses. You know Tyndal's experiments--sand figures on a vibrating
plate, the motion of the plate along a nodal line. The sand on the
plate rearranges and groups itself into regular patterns. Some of them
are beautiful."
"You mean the method devised by Chladni? Where sand is put on a thin
metal plate and a violin bow is scraped across its side?"
"Exactly. The sand is tossed away from the vibrating sections of the
plate. It collects in areas of calm, undisturbed by the vibrations."
"You mean to tell me that's what this entire planet is--a vibrating
plate?" wondered Grim.
"A hundred years or more after Chladni, Dr. Fredericka Blankner
advanced the theory that all life, all matter in the universe, followed
a pattern somewhat similar to the dancing sands on a Chladni plate.
Even human bodies vibrate at a certain impulse.
"I studied for years on that theory. Then when I found this planet,
I fitted it out during my vacations. When I retired and brought the
spaceshock cases here--I was ready to follow and prove those theories."
A deep, sullen roar grew into a thundering volcano of sound, beyond the
Temple gateway. Grim cried, "Althaya and her people. They've come to
learn your secret, Jones. Quick, man--some weapons! We can hold them
off easily enough if--"
Jasper Jones smiled and shook his head. "Outside of the vibration
machine, I have no weapon. And that is not a weapon. I have used
it--sending the Changes and the Storms across the planet--to check on
reactions and nodal results."
Grim laughed harshly. "Man, you've unleashed something with that
machine. The redhead is desperate. Black Randolph gave her ideas. She
won't know where to stop if _she_ gets hold of the machine. We have to
stop her."
"With what? The people have learned that the calm areas on the planet
exist inside red markers. We can't catch them napping."
* * * * *
Grim grabbed the old man and shook him. He rasped, "Maybe you don't
mind getting a couple of barbed knives stuck in your hide, but _I do_.
Where are your plans for this--this machine?"
Jones led him to a _selassi_-metal desk, pressed a stud; a thin, flat
drawer slid into view. Grim drove his hands into the mass of blueprints
and specifications. He dragged them out and spread them on the floor in
front of him. He ran his grey eyes over print after print.