Part 3

"He got through the force shield," Harwich growled after a moment. "We knew he would, of course, with his Penetrator operating right. Damn him!"

There was no more blue fire visible now; but the little silver-tailed path of rocket flame, showed that the ship was coming in safe and sound, its propelling jets working steadily.

Among the stars it turned southward toward that deepest enigma of Io. Toward the unknown scientific wisdom, which lay hidden somewhere near the Ionian equator.

"He'll get there in a few minutes' time," Paul whispered. "And I guess we won't get there at all. I'm sorry, Evan, that I got you mixed up with the Forbidden Moon. Me--I'm just about finished--now."

* * * * *

Paul Arnold's voice trailed away. Harwich turned the boy's glass-covered face up. In the light of monster Jupiter, he could see that it was blank and relaxed. The eyes were closed. In the quiet rays of the giant of planets, the youth looked as though death had already touched him. But there was a little frosty blur on the inside of the crystalline face-plate of his helmet. It showed that he still breathed.

Tottering a little himself, Harwich picked the boy up, pack and all. He struggled to put one foot ahead of the other, marching again toward the south, where the space ship was rapidly receding. Had his strength been at normal level, his load, bulky though it was, would have been light in this weak gravity. But Harwich was near the end of his rope, too. And so he moved on through that beautiful shadow-haunted, frigid night, where no man was meant to live.

Many times he had to stop and rest. After a short while, the atomic motor of the air compressor separator unit refused to work any more. Harwich tried turning the mechanism by hand. But this was slow, exhausting work.

He watched the luminous dial of the cold-proof wrist-watch, strapped on the outside of one of his heavy space gantlets. His mind was getting dimmer. Cold was biting home, savagely. Harwich wanted to see just how much longer he could keep going. It was eight hours now, since Bayley's ship had appeared. Slowly more time crept by. His boots trudged in the desert dust, mechanically. The hands of his watch moved on. One hour more. Another.

Why didn't he desert the dead weight of Paul Arnold? But you never deserted somebody who was like a kid brother, did you?

The patrol pilot's breath was coming fast and short, now. The last of his air was being used up. It was useless to try to replenish the oxygen flasks with hand power, even though he was suffocating.

Harwich tripped in the dust, and fell sprawling. Jupiter, shining down upon him, somehow looked like a fat face, tremendously bloated in size--the face of George Bayley. Harwich cursed, and tried to crawl toward the south.

Did he hear a sound through his oxygen helmet--a sound loud enough for the tenuous Ionian atmosphere to transmit? Or was it only the roaring of the unsteady pulses in his ears? He tried to look ahead, but his vision was very dim, now, and the light of Jupiter and his moons was so confusing. The shadows of the rocks and the ruined buildings were so very black.

But suddenly Harwich squinted. Something _was_ moving toward him, skimming low over the ground, but not touching it. Something that glinted wickedly, and showed long, shadowy arms. It was no hallucination. Evan Harwich was sure of that! Fear came out of that numb fog into which his brain was settling. It gave him a last, feeble spurt of strength. He knew that here he must be facing a tiny part of Io's colossal riddle.

He tried to crawl away from nameless danger, dragging Paul Arnold with him. He got behind a mass of million-year-old masonry, tufted with prickly plants.

But the thing that pursued him, easily overcame his weak, instinctive effort to find concealment. Cold metal claws closed on him. He felt himself lifted upward, into the night. His mind toppled away into black nothingness.

* * * * *

Somehow, it wasn't the end of life. Harwich began to regain his senses, slowly. First he heard a distant, muffled clanging. For a long time before he paid any real attention to the fact, he was aware that strange warm rays were pouring down upon his body. They seemed to heal and soothe his aching muscles.

He opened his eyes at last. Startled, he sat up. Around him was the warm glitter of glass and metal. His space suit was gone. He was in a crystalline cage, filled with warm, humid air. Odd gadgets, like ray lamps used in therapy, were fitted to the ceiling. Strange, tropical vegetation grew in the cage, and water tinkled somewhere.

There was a kind of soothing quiet over the place, except for that distant clanging. There was a smoothness to everything; a mood of mechanical refinement and perfection. It was almost hypnotic, somehow. It dazed and quieted the senses.

Paul Arnold, clad in the slacks and shirt he'd worn under his space armor, was lying on the floor beside Harwich. He was still unconscious, but he was breathing evenly. His color was much better than before. The rays from the roof above were slowly healing his weakened body.

Evan Harwich shook the boy gently. "Wake up, Paul!" he urged. "This must be it! The center of Power! The place we wanted to find! Some kind of machine brought us!"

Paul Arnold rubbed his eyes and sat up. Together, Harwich and the boy looked around through the crystal walls of the cage in which they were confined.

"There--there's the Tower!" young Arnold stammered at last, pointing.

It glittered in the faint morning sunshine. It was undoubtedly the same huge pinnacle that astronomers had photographed from the other moons of Jupiter. Only it was close, now, its details sharp and clear and real. Around its slender, tapered spire, thousands of feet aloft, the faintest of frosty aureoles clung; a ghostly light, like the sundogs of Earthly winter days.

"The Tower must be the source of the Ionian force envelope, Evan!" Paul Arnold offered after a moment. "That light up there at its top almost proves it."

Both men were talking vaguely, thinking vaguely, looking around vaguely. In part this must have been because of sheer wonder. Places like the Spacemen's Haven on Ganymede seemed as far away as a dream now.

An incomprehensible sense of depression was creeping over Evan Harwich, as he studied his surroundings further. There were many other cages in view, arranged in blocks, with paved alleyways between. Vegetation was thick in the evidently air-conditioned habitations. Little pools of water glistened in them daintily, strange paradox on dying Io.

And there were creatures, too. Scores of them in each cage. Strange, fragile, sluglike animals crept about aimlessly. They looked just faintly human, with their pinkish skins and manlike heads. But there was no slight shadow of intelligence in those great, sad, stupid eyes.

Harwich wasn't squeamish, but he looked at these futile animals with a certain pitying revulsion. "What kind of a nursery place have we got ourselves into, Paul?" he grumbled quizzically.

Arnold shrugged. "They're something like men, these things, aren't they?" he offered in puzzlement. "Maybe that's another unknown quantity to figure out. But this place is plenty wonderful, though. Look!"

The youth was pointing upward. Against the cold Ionian sky a flattened object was circling at low altitude. A flying machine without wings, it seemed to be. From it dangled strange webby metal arms, as it moved in a circular path, above the surrounding desert hills. It seemed to keep watch over those thousands of crystal cages in the valley. It must be a guardian of some sort.

"I'm not at all sure I like it here," Harwich growled. "We were fixed up, revived, made new men again, so to speak; but still I don't like it here."

"Somehow I've got the same idea," Paul Arnold agreed with a quizzical smile.

A little clinking noise behind the two men made them turn about. After that, awe kept them spellbound. They didn't speak. What was there to say? They didn't try to retreat, either. What was the use? If what they saw was danger, they could do nothing to avert it. Hypnotized with wonder, they only stared, feeling as helpless as the larvae in an ant-hill, tended and cared for by the workers.

* * * * *

A section of the cage-bottom had raised, like a trapdoor. A bulk was creeping through the opening. It was a machine, so marvelous, so refined in its functioning, that it seemed far more than alive. It was flat, like a small tractor; but there were no treads for it to move on. It seemed, rather, to glide on a cushioning, grayish mist. The thing purred softly, like a great cat, and tiny lights twinkled in crystalline parts of it--batteries to deliver fearful atomic or cosmic power, perhaps. The mechanism had many flexible tentacular arms of metal that glinted with a lavendar luster.

But even the substance of those arms, the metal itself, looked indefinite and eye-hurting at the edges, as though it was partly fourth-dimensional, or something.

Both men grasped the truth. Here was that million-year advancement of science that they'd talked about with such thrilled fascination, in the stuffy bar of the Spacemen's Haven, back in Ganymede City. But Ganymede City, with all its human crudeness and inefficiency, seemed like a lost, happy legend, now, to Arnold and Harwich. Far, far away, and dim. For here was dread wonder to eclipse it. Futurian fact! Physical principles of such a miraculous order that mankind had scarcely dreamed of their outer fringes yet, were functioning here.

The flat machine advanced. But it was only instinct working, when the two men crouched away from it a little. It was useless to fight; it was useless to run.

"Get away, you!" Paul Arnold grumbled dully to the mechanism. "Beat it! Scram."

And Harwich was reacting in a similar manner. "What the hell!" he stammered. "What are you trying to do with us."

It was almost funny--the ineffectual, confused protest of those two men. They were like children too lost in their new environment to know what was dangerous and what was not.

Misty, lavender tentacles reached out and grasped them carefully. They were lifted from the floor of the cage like babes. Once Harwich's great freckled arms tautened, as though he was going to battle the monstrous miracle that held him. But futility checked the urge. Where was there anything to win by struggling, now? And how could a mere man win anyway, against soft-moving mechanical power, that should belong to the far future? Oddly the tentacles were warm and tingling, not cold like you'd think metal should be.

And so Arnold and Harwich submitted to a paternal, mechanical dominance, regretfully, because there was nothing else to do. It hurt their sense of freedom, but where was there any alternative?

Still floating a little off the tile pavement of the cage, the machine carried the two men easily to the opening in the floor, and glided down into a crystal-roofed tunnel. There it began to accelerate swiftly, flying with bullet-like speed, a foot or so above the glass bottom of the passage.

The tunnel's roof was transparent as air. Through it, Harwich and Arnold could see that they were nearing the Tower rapidly. After only a moment of whizzing, breath-taking flight, they had arrived within that great, enigmatic edifice, for the passage entered its base.

There, in an eerie half-twilight, the flat little machine released the two humans whom it had brought here, to the Tower.

Mute with an even greater wonder than before, Harwich and Arnold stared around them. The room was gigantic, soaring up in a huge, metal-ribbed dome. Scores of crystal-walled passages led into this colossal chamber of secrets. The whole immense Tower building was transparent, except that some darkening pigment had been added to the material that composed it, 'till it was like bluish glass. Through it the desolate surrounding hills of Io could be seen, and the cages, filled with those aimless, pathetic, sluglike creatures.

But the attention of the two men was drawn inevitably to the center of the room. Rearing up there, under the rotunda of the dome, was a massive, lavender-sheened pyramid. It gave a steady, throbbing sound, as of countless tiny wheels and shafts whirling inside it, working cams and rods, and who knew what else?

"Dammit!" Evan Harwich kept muttering under his breath in dim confusion. "Dammit."

He was used to machinery, yes. He was used to the roar of rockets, and to the delicate instruments used in space flight. But this was machinery of a far higher order. That busy, vibrating pyramid, squatting there like some huge idol, somehow seemed to possess a definite personality of its own!

Suddenly Paul Arnold clutched the patrol pilot's arm. "I wonder if I believe what I see!" he whispered tensely. "Look!"

Harwich's gaze followed the lines of the boy's pointing finger to something quite near--so near, and seemingly so insignificant in this vast, somber, throbbing interior, that he had not noticed before.

Just at the base of the pyramid there was an artistic little structure, consisting of four slender pillars and a roof. It looked like a small, ornamental kiosk or arbor, so artfully were the scientific details of it--the coils in its top, and the delicate filaments that pronged from them--concealed in the decorative metal scroll-work.

Within the pillared structure, somehow, there stood a man--an Earthman. His heavy body was clad now in a rocketeer's leather coverall. At his waist dangled a heat pistol, and on his fat face there was a strange, wild sort of smirk.

"Howdy, boys!" he greeted. "Yes, it's me--George Bayley, the guy who used to keep a print shop in Ganymede City! I've been here longer than you have, and I've been able to find out more. Pretty nice, huh? The people of Io had science perfected before they became extinct. Everything was done by machines, even investing. Not a bit of work to do any more. And if they wanted anything special, they just came into this little coop, here, and wished."

* * * * *

Bayley paused, still smirking. His loud voice had seemed distant in that great room, and vibrant with awe. Harwich and Arnold stared at him for a moment, neither knowing quite what to say, or what to believe.

And what was that which had just spilled from his lips, as though he had been a little afraid of the statement himself? About perfected science, and wishing?

"You're crazy!" Evan Harwich stormed fiercely. "You're a liar!"

But his furious tone was tremulous with doubt, even as he spoke. He knew at once that he'd just grabbed onto these words, and uttered them, maybe because, somehow, he hated Bayley, and wanted to contradict his seemingly impossible claims. But in this temple of un-Earthly marvels, one's whole standard of judgment was upset. Possible and impossible became meaningless terms here, at the foot of this great, whirring pyramid, which seemed a symbol of omnipotence.

"Crazy?" Bayley questioned. "No, Harwich, you can't say that, when you're all tangled up and fuddled yourself! What I said about wishing is true. Telepathic control of machines, it must be. This place is so damned wonderful that it would turn Aladdin of the Wonderful Lamp green with envy! And it would drive the Genie of the Lamp down into his shoes in shame!"

Harwich's doubts, if they had been doubts, and not just confusions, began to dim a trifle. After all, one of the big objectives of the science of Earthmen, was to make life easier; to transfer as much of the burden of work as possible to machines. Why couldn't the same objective have been conceived here on the Forbidden Moon? Not only conceived, but accomplished? Io was an old world; life had begun here sooner than on Earth, and science, too! So there had been more time for advancement.

"All right, Bayley," Harwich growled grudgingly. "Tell us what you've discovered."

"Yes, for Pete sake, tell us!" Paul Arnold joined in.

It was odd, the way they were asking the fat printer for information, now, when they should be hating him for the wrongs he had done them. But, perhaps, the human mind can hold only so much at one time. For the moment there was room only for dazed awe and questioning in their thoughts, and hatred was temporarily pushed into the background. The equal of Aladdin's miracles did not seem so far from possibility, here!

"Okay!" George Bayley rumbled. "Glad to spill the beans; what I know of them. I arrived here in my space ship about fourteen hours ago, when it was still dark. The Tower building here looked by far the most important, so I came straight to it. There were machines flying about, but they paid no attention to me at all, so I wasn't worried much about what they might do to me.

"Leaving my ship on the other side of the Tower, I got into this room through a tunnel. I was wearing a space armor, of course. I passed through a kind of airlock. This chamber was just like you see it now, except that lights were burning, because it was night."

"And then?" Paul Arnold questioned eagerly.

"Exploring, I climbed into this little metal coop, here at the foot of the pyramid," Bayley went on. "By then I was pretty flabbergasted with all I'd seen. I began to think I needed a drink of something strong. Yep, it must have been telepathy! Because presto--one of those flat flying machines with the tentacles, whizzed up to me from a tunnel exit. It was carrying a kind of crystal carafe.

"Boy, I didn't know what to think! I didn't know whether I ought to taste the stuff in that carafe, at first. But finally I did. It was damned good. Not alcoholic, but something a whole lot better."

Harwich and Arnold looked at each other, as Bayley paused, as if to get his breath. They looked up at the pyramid, throbbing above them, like some great, cryptic, servant personality. The feeling that Bayley was telling the truth, was growing on them.

"Naturally you tried other things, after the carafe was brought to you, Bayley," Paul Arnold prompted. "You wanted to see how much further this expression of desires by telepathy might be carried. You wanted to see how much more you could use the ancient Ionian science."

Bayley, still standing in that little metal-pillared structure, nodded slowly. "You catch on quick, Arnold," he said. "First I wished for gold, since it was the first thing I thought of. The sounds inside the pyramid changed a little, as though an order was going out somehow, maybe by radio. Five minutes later a whole bunch of those flying machines came into the Tower here, carrying bars of gold in their tentacles. There it is."

The printer was pointing toward a dully gleaming heap of yellow ingots near the farther wall of the chamber.

"But this, I soon found out, was just kid stuff!" Bayley continued. "I suppose if I'd thought of radium here in this wishing coop, I would have got a couple of tons of that, too! But I wished for a space ship--something special, beyond anything an Earthman ever saw before! Well, the pyramid buzzed a little longer and stranger this time, as though it was sort of thinking and planning, and as though the wheels inside it were maybe inventing, too. Then, somewhere far off, there was a lot of pounding for about an hour. I guess you know the answer, boys. There she is--the sweetest little super-futuristic space flier you ever saw!"

Harwich and Arnold stared at the torpedo-like ship that rested in a cradle-like support nearby. It was completely without rocket-tubes, or other visible means of propulsion. But its rakish lines and wicked lavender glitter made it look as though it might well reach the distant stars themselves.

* * * * *

Evan Harwich bit his lip tensely. Suddenly a thought struck him. "Did you see any Ionians since you've been here, Bayley?" he asked. "Any living, intelligent beings who might question your right to be prowling around?"

Bayley laughed. "Not one!" he returned. "They're extinct, I'm sure of it! And that's lucky for me."

The patrol pilot was beginning to put the pieces of the Forbidden Moon's riddle together at last. And Paul Harwich must have been doing the same. The evidence, as far as it went, was clear.

Perfected science! The fat printer had told them that all you had to do was think your wishes in that queer little pillared structure. And the machines translated your wishes into fact. Unless Bayley had lied, and there was small reason to suppose that he had, the rest was maybe not so difficult to understand.

First, the great envelope of force around Io. That was to keep possibly dangerous intruders away, of course. Thus, the ancient Ionians had lived in carefree idleness and luxury, tended by their perfected machines. The thing in the pyramid must be the master servant mechanism, reachable in that pillared kiosk, by telepathy. It must be the coordinator, in contact with the other mechanisms by radio, or something. Adding and calculating machines, way back in the Twentieth Century, had thought and reasoned, after a fashion. More recently, on Earth, apparati of a similar nature had done far more, working out intricate mathematical problems, far more swiftly and accurately than any human being could.

And the apparatus within the pyramid must be much the same thing, but developed to the nth degree! A vast planning, calculating device that could reason and invent with a swiftness and perfection far beyond any living mind. But it was still just mechanical; a servant apparatus that thought by the turning of the wheels and the movement of levers inside it with no more consciousness than an adding machine of the Twentieth Century!

This was the way Harwich figured it all out. And he saw something else, too.

"Uh-uh, Bayley," he remarked suddenly. "Soon after that new space flier was brought here at your command, you decided that you were complete boss around here, didn't you? There were no ancient Ionians in your way. All you had to do was wish, inside that telepathy kiosk, and it was just like Aladdin wishing with his lamp, eh?"

For the first time, cold, comprehending anger had come into the patrol pilot's tone.

"Why sure--sure!" Bayley growled back at him. "And why not? Just about anything I can think of is possible! And, let me tell you something else, you poor dope! You and Arnold wouldn't be alive now, if I hadn't wished it! I thought you might have gotten through the Ionian force shield somehow, when the RQ257 cracked up. I thought you might be somewhere out there on the desert still living. So I just wished that the machines go and get you, and revive you if you needed it. I thought maybe it might be fun."

It was enough. Cold anger reborn in Evan Harwich's breast was suddenly rekindled into blazing fury by the memory of the RQ257, and a wire filed almost through in a Gyon condenser. Evan Harwich's muscles tightened. Wordlessly he was about to leap at George Bayley.

But a warm metal tentacle whipped suddenly about his waist. The flat mechanism that had brought him and Arnold to the Tower, had seized him. Again, he was helpless.

"You see?" Bayley drawled. "I really am boss, here, just as you said. I just wished that you be restrained, and you are! But I've been doing too much talking and explaining. How about a little showing for a change, huh?"

"Damn you, Bayley!" Harwich growled, but the fat printer ignored the curse.