When the Mountain Shook Part 2

Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent whisper said, "Come on!"

Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.

At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising potential that seemed to whisper _Ready ... ready.... _

The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more--

Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being, pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.

The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.

"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not blocked....

Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that might be near at hand.

From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay, then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the dark burrow:

"_Stop!_--before you go too far!"

Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go free."

In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own--that neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world outside should crumble to ruin around them.

"Follow us, then!"

They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.

Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood before their monstrous and inhuman power.

Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.

Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded with gleaming control b.u.t.tons, levers, colored lights. As they watched light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid s.h.i.+fting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....

For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of their machineless culture. In all the brilliant s.p.a.ce there was no life.

They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once: perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over the threshold.

There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite, above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a ma.s.sive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.

Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.

He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand, with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube; his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.

That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them, conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and a.s.surance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.

With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....

He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the interlopers with the dispa.s.sionate gaze of a scientist examining a new, but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily have been totally strange.

"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality--good. Physically excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand years--more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating in its force. It was a l.u.s.tful image of a world once more obedient, crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will--_toward the stars, the stars!_ The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones indicated in the pa.s.sage above. Then wake the rest...."

Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age--denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's face.

The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place: _Decision!_ He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it.

Neena screamed.

Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flas.h.i.+ng red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.

There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.

But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves.

Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind.

Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga's way--a mere child's bogey out of a fairy tale--the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There will be no new beginning for you in _our_ world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks--it was because you knew no other way."

Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.

"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us _man_ could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else--capacities undeveloped by our science--after us the end of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."

The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed.

Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief, he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.

In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at Var.

Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?

Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?"