Myra puffed out her cheeks in mock anger, then smiled.
"You know," she said, "I feel the same way."
They didn't see the two creatures that stood outside the ship, watching
them through the transparent door.
Myra's eyes opened. She looked over her husband's shoulder.
"Steve," she whispered.
"Mmmm?" he said dreamily.
"Remember your American history? Apaches, Utes and Algonquins?"
"You mean the good old days, before spaceships and the machine age?"
"Yes. And we're back in it. Look."
Steve turned around.
"Good grief!" he said. "Indians!"
For a long time the two parties stared at each other without moving.
Gradually their faces broke into smiles, the natives' of polite
interest and the Horns of relief at having found the "spider people" of
Peachy's description to be simply human beings like themselves.
Finally the two outside came a little closer. The older one raised his
hand, palm outward.
Steve, hoping it meant friendship, did the same. He opened the door of
the ship.
The men outside were about six feet tall and burned a deep copper color
by the planet's bright sun. They wore breech clouts of soft leather and
moccasins of the same material. Their faces were fine and intelligent,
with high brows and prominent noses. The elder had a shock of stiff,
gray-white hair, while the hair of the younger was black. Their bodies,
even in the older man, were muscular and powerful-looking.
Steve and Myra hopped to the ground. Now that the possibility of being
captured and enwebbed by giant red spiders had been discarded, Steve's
spirits soared. He addressed the younger native jocularly:
"You don't happen to know of a good hotel around here, do you?"
The young man evidently understood the tenor of the question, for his
face broke into a smile and he rattled off a string of gutturals in a
speech that was reminiscent of something Steve had heard, but no more
understandable than the voice of the wind soughing through the trees
above them.
The elder of the two had more sense than any of them. Evidently he
realized that these one-sided conversations might go on all day. He
motioned to the rest to follow him.
Steve, with a look at the ship, hesitated a moment. Then he remembered
Peachy and his mechanical mace. He made a grimace of distaste, took
Myra's arm and followed.
* * * * *
There were no walls around the village. It began abruptly in a
semi-cleared space half a mile from where their ship had landed.
Dwarfed by the huge trees that surrounded it, it looked like something
a gifted child might have built with a mechanical construction set.
The houses were mostly two and three room affairs, one-storied and
square, all made of green steel. From a distance, the village blended
perfectly with the surrounding forest, making it invisible from the air.
The houses had been set up in no preconceived pattern and gave a
pleasant, haphazard effect to the scene. Nowhere had a tree been felled
to make way for a house. Here nature and man shared a sylvan paradise,
nature always given preference.
Steve and Myra had been led to one of the larger buildings which
consisted of one huge dining room with tables and chairs of the same
green steel and here they were given food and drink not unlike what
they had known on Earth. Myra's very faint misgivings about the quality
of the food were allayed when their two hosts sat down to eat with them.
At the conclusion of the meal, Steve was somewhat astonished when the
two accepted the cigarettes he offered and smoked them with apparent
enjoyment.
A tour of the village impressed the visitors with the ease and
contentment in which these simple people lived. Men and women worked in
their gardens, or sat in the doorways of their houses fashioning the
soft, leather garments that seemed to be their sole articles of dress.
Children played between the trees, and in them, shrieking with young
laughter. Many of the people showed curiosity about the visitors, but
respectfully kept at a distance.
Their hosts led Steve and Myra to a tiny building that looked like
an old subway kiosk. With no thought of being on their guard, they
entered, and were taken by surprise when the floor dropped away beneath
them.
"My astral aunt!" exclaimed Myra. "An elevator!"
"Why not?" asked Steve. "Any race that can make steel ought to be able
to build an elevator."
The car stopped after a long descent, and the party stepped out into
a high-ceilinged underground room, filled with hurrying people and,
what was more apparent, noise. Sounds of machinery in feverish action
crashed upon their eardrums in rhythmic, deafening beats. The giant
machines themselves could be seen through great casings of glass-like
material. Men sat at lever-studded desks here and there, evidently in
control of the metal prometheans.
Their guides led them quickly through the large room and out through a
corridor at the far end. They passed many such rooms that branched off
from the hall, but none so large as the first.
At length they came to a platform. Beside it there was a strip of
slowly moving steel. Next to this was another, moving faster. There
were several more, each moving a bit faster than its predecessor, and
the last one, on which there were seats, moving at thirty miles per
hour.
Carefully they made their way across these strips and sat down in the
leather seats. Presently they were whizzing through a dimly illuminated
tunnel.
Steve and Myra took part in all these proceedings with interest, while
questions mounted in their minds. They made many suppositions to
each other, some of them fantastic. On the whole, they were enjoying
themselves.
Steve estimated they had gone about five miles when the moving strips
rounded a curve and their hosts signed that they were to get off. They
made their way over the more slowly moving strips onto another platform
and through a door.
Beyond the door was a wide corridor with an arched ceiling. The whole
was a faint green, the effect achieved by painting the green steel of
which the tunnel was constructed with white paint, which Steve reasoned
had a luminous quality, since the light evidently came from the walls
themselves.
* * * * *
As the faint rumble of the transportation strips died away behind them,
they walked through a silence that was almost reverent. Their guides,
who had heretofore carried on a pleasant guttural conversation between
themselves, became silent, almost grave. A feeling of inexplicable awe
crept over the visitors.
The corridor stretched ahead in a straight line, without a bend to mar
its symmetry. Just when they thought it would go on interminably, a
great double door appeared at the far end. It took up the whole width
and height of the tunnel, and, contrastingly, was of wood, carved over
all in intricate designs.
When they came to it, the older man knocked on it with the ball of
his palm. The echoes of the sound reverberated throughout the tunnel.
Slowly the door swung inward and revealed a dimly-lit room twenty feet
high and about fifty square. A dark red carpet covered the floor.
Heavy, comfortable-looking armchairs had been placed against the walls,
and an immense wooden table occupied the center of the room. What light
there was came from an ornate glass chandelier which hung halfway
between the floor and ceiling.
Steve and Myra took two involuntary steps into the room and stopped,
to stare about them for several minutes without moving. The thing that
struck them so forcibly was the extraordinary resemblance between the
manner in which the room was furnished and one on Earth.
Finally the spell broke and almost simultaneously they turned around.
Their guides were gone. They could see them just within sight at the
other end of the long corridor. They were about to go after them, when
a voice said, in _English_:
"Won't you come in?"
V
Steve and Myra turned around at the sound of the voice and
automatically stepped back into the room. It wasn't until a few seconds
later that they realized what had happened. Someone here, light years
away from Earth, had spoken to them in their own language! They looked
at each other with amazement, then looked around for the speaker.
"I'm over here," the voice said, "to your right."
In that dimly-lit part of the room they made out the figure of an old
man sitting in a high-backed chair, his hands stretched out on its arms.
"Please come in," he said.
Slowly they went over to him. He was a very old man, his face and
hands deeply wrinkled, with white hair brushed neatly away from his
intelligent forehead. There was a curious immobility about him that
half-frightened them, but his eyes were kindly.
Steve and Myra sat down. There was silence for a minute. Then:
"I am very wise," the old man said abruptly.
Unable to help himself, Steve chuckled. Myra looked at him reprovingly.
"You mustn't laugh at me," said the old man. "I know much. What I say
is true. You must remember that. And if you will be patient and humor
me, I will tell you where you are, and how you came to be."
"You mean how we came to be _here_," corrected Steve.
"You mustn't interrupt me, either," said the old man irritably. "I mean
what I say. I will tell you how you began and how you are related to
me and many other trivial things like how you will leave here when you
have decided to go."
"We were on our way to Jupiter," said Myra, "when we got kidnaped.
Steve was going to teach at college there."
"It is a good thing to teach," the old man said. "Of course, you know
very little, but it is admirable to teach those who know less. I have
always been a teacher...." He trailed off into silence.
"Just what do you mean by 'always,'" asked Steve, "as long as we're
being rude to each other. Just how old are you?"
"Who knows?" the old man answered slowly. "Hundreds of thousands of
years."
Myra gave a little yip.
"Steve," she gasped. "His lips aren't moving!"
The oldster took this with equanimity.
"True," he said. "Because they aren't mine. At least not any more. You
see, the real me is up here, in this vat. I'm just a brain. That thing
you've been talking to is just a corpse. I hope you don't mind."
Myra shuddered.
"It's all right," the voice continued. "It's sanitary. They used the
best embalming fluid."
"How come you speak English?" asked Steve.
"I don't," said the voice. "You might as well ask why people understand
music written by people who speak different languages. I'm not
speaking; I'm thinking out loud, if you will pardon the idiom. Music
and thought are universal.
"Now I will tell you a story. Many millions of years ago there was
a great planet, the greatest in the universe. On it was bred a race
of geniuses. Mentally, the planet was ideal; physically, it was less
fortunate. Our sun was about to become a nova. As a result, the day
came when our scientists were forced to warn their people that they
would have to leave the planet before it was burned to a cinder.
"There was one scientist who was more renowned than the others, and
with good reason. It was he was had isolated the _gion_ beam, as it was
called, which had the property of breaking down a substance to its
component atoms and sending it wherever directed.
"To make the story easier to tell, I will admit that I was that
scientist, and that my name is Gion, which you may call me, if you can
do so without interrupting me."
He paused for a moment, as if marshalling his memories.
"Our scientists searched the universe with their instruments, seeking
another planet. Finally this one was located. But it was too distant to
be reached within a life-span by means of the antiquated space ships we
had then. Only one method was possible--the _gion_ beam.
"Even this method was not completely satisfactory, because it would
require terrific power to transport anything here and we hadn't fuel
for more than one shipment. Therefore, it was necessary to make a
careful selection of those who were to go and what they were to take
with them.
"About three hundred were chosen--two hundred women and a hundred men,
all unmarried and all about twenty. The emphasis was put on human
beings, and not on equipment, so only certain surgical supplies were
taken.
"It was decided that one master-scientist was to go, regardless of his
age, to act as guide and counselor to the new race. I was chosen, and
it was a very bad choice. You see, I was dying of cancer of the stomach
at the time. Naturally, I protested, but they paid no attention.
Instead they killed me."
* * * * *
"_What?_" gasped Myra.
"Exactly," said Gion. "They killed my body and locked my wise old brain
in this glass case. Would you believe it--sometimes I get bored."
Steve laughed. "You know, Mr. Gion, you're amazing. Tell me, did your
party ever get here?"
"No I'll tell you about the hairy people," said Gion reprovingly.
"After we had set up our village and things were going along nicely, we
met the people who lived on the planet long before we arrived. Those
peach-colored scoundrels you've already met. Pack of thieves. They
used to come around at night and steal anything they could lay their
hands on. They would also watch up for hours while we worked and later
imitate what we did. It didn't take them long to develop from dumb
animals to malignantly intelligent creatures. Naturally we had to get
rid of them.
"We drove them down to the sea. As we might have expected, they played
a foul trick on us. They stole one of our ships and escaped across
the ocean. Ever since they've been getting brighter and brighter and
breeding like rabbits, until now they've overrun their continent and
want ours. Naturally, we had to take steps."
"So you surrounded your continent with a field of insanity, producing
vibrations to send them back gibbering?" asked Steve.
The voice laughed. "Is that what they told you? Crazy beasts--we did
no such thing. It would be too much bother, too expensive and--well,
impossible. Our defense is much simpler. We merely let them land and
get out of their ships--then biff them with our insanity beam. And
since we don't want any idiotic foreigners running around our forests,
we pile them back into their ships and shoot them back home. Nothing to
it."
Gion paused. Myra, who had been waiting for a propitious moment, said:
"I thought you were going to tell us how _we_ began?"
"I am. I am," he said. "Our new civilization was about a century old,
when we began to receive messages from far out in space. They were
from a ship that had taken off from our old planet just before the
explosion, manned by an intrepid group of people who knew that they
would never live to reach another land, but who hoped that their
children might.
"The messages were pathetic. They were from the sole survivor of the
original travelers, who said that their children had revolted against
the rigid discipline he had tried to maintain, and that the ship was
in a state of bedlam. Only the fact that he had sealed the engine
room against them had prevented them from reaching the controls and
destroying themselves. Inertia kept the ship on its course.
"Further messages from this old man reached us, saying that the rebels
had reverted practically to wild beasts and were living in a state
of indescribable filth. Our records show that the ship didn't reach
your Earth until sixty years later, so you can imagine the condition
its passengers were in when it finally landed. And those were your
ancestors."
"A pretty picture," grimaced Steve. There was a moment's silence. Then
said: "Why do you live underground, or at least work down here? Isn't
it impractical?"
"On the contrary," explained Gion, "it's very practical. You see, we're
a peace-loving people. We don't like trouble, and we don't believe in
waging war to keep out of trouble at some future date. Consequently,
we build all our factories underground, so that the hairy people can't
blow them up whenever they feel like it by flying over and dropping
bombs. Another reason is that we like the forest and believe it's
healthy for our children to grow up there. We don't build cities to
make targets for the potential enemy--human or bacterial, whichever
it might be--but try to live in as close cooperation with nature as
possible. Does that make sense?"
"It makes perfect sense," agreed Myra. Steve nodded.
"And now," said Gion, "if I read your minds correctly, you'd like to
get away from this garrulous old man and see some more of our country
before you continue your interrupted journey to Jupiter."