Part 2

Myra laughed. "What an ego you must have, my husband. It won't permit you to think that it's possible these peach-people have bigger and better brainwaves than we."

A bell sounded and a blue light went on and off above the door.

"Open it yourself," shouted Steve irritably. "I don't know how."

The door opened. Peachy entered.

Accompanying him was a strictly utilitarian piece of robot machinery. Headless, it consisted of a long steel body terminating in a balled foot at one end and two triple-jointed arms at the other. At the end of each arm was a murderous looking spiked ball, both of which swung idly and menacingly at the thing's sides.

Peachy beckoned to them. When they hesitated, the robot clanged its spiked fists together with an unpleasant ringing sound, then raised them menacingly in the air.

Steve and Myra blanched, and meekly followed Peachy through the door. They walked outside, followed Peachy to a space-ship and entered.

Myra looked at Steve a trifle uncertainly.

"Resistance would have been futile, I suppose?"

Steve tried to make himself comfortable on a tiny seat of the cabin.

"I think so, considering that our only hope of ever getting back to our own System lies in playing ball with these fuzzy Fascists. There may not be much chance of our succeeding in this screwball expedition, but the important thing is that there is _some_. Putting up a fight might have been gratifying to the ego, but I doubt that it would have convinced these gangsters that they ought to send us back home."

"I suppose you're right, Steve. But just what exactly do you think our chances are, this way?"

"Looking at it from the scientific angle, we're pretty well off. Here we are scootling along at Lord knows what speed, in what may well be the most up to date ship in the universe, with nothing to do but push Button X when we get to Point Q on--what the hell'd I do with that chart?"

"It's all right," said Myra. "I've got it."

"--And we land without fuss or bother. Providing...." A worried look crept into Steve's face.

"Providing we don't go nuts," supplemented Myra.

"We do have to put an awful lot of faith in Peachy's theory that we're subnormal enough, mentally, to escape the spider-people's batty beam. Then all they ask is that we put the beam out of business, or show them how they can."

"Steve!" Myra's eyes reflected inspiration. "Why don't we escape? I mean really escape. Get out of this whole business!"

"You mean off the planet?"

Myra nodded.

"Peachy paid a touching tribute to our allegedly minus intelligence by warning me against any such ideas--for our own good. Our fuel would last, and our food might, and even we might, since it'd take years without Peachy's space-annihilator. The only thing that stands in our way is the fact that this ship isn't space-proof. It leaks air. Compared to our Skypiercer," Steve clutched at a simile, "it is as a hotfoot compared to a holocaust."

"Well," Myra shrugged philosophically, "no one can say Lady Horn ever leaves a stone unturned."

"If you've stopped blowing your own, Horn," said Steve recklessly, "come look at the view. It makes me homesick."

IV

The tiny ship sped along, a thousand feet above the great ocean that separated Siykul from its neighboring continent. Only a slight mental effort was needed to imagine themselves back on Earth. Long swells swept across the deep, green surface. No sea-craft were in sight, but occasionally a huge fish would break through the surface and quiver in the air as sunlight glinted on the drops of water it shook from its back.

Miles ahead, land appeared, like low-lying clouds on the horizon. Ten minutes of flying brought them over the shore--a wide beach that stretched back half a mile and ended abruptly in a forest.

The forest seemed endless.

"We must have gone a hundred miles inland," said Myra. "When are we supposed to push that fateful button?"

"Point Q is described as a large prairie. We should reach it any minute now."

"What's that up ahead?"

"That appears to be it," said Steve.

He pushed the button with crossed fingers. The ship immediately went into a long glide. The ground came up rapidly. Just when they thought they would surely crash, the nose came up automatically and the ship skidded to a bumpy halt.

Steve shut off the motor. "Last stop," he said.

Myra looked at him closely.

"Steve," she said. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," he replied. "Why? Scared?"

"No. I mean--aren't we supposed to be ... well, affected, somehow?"

"Oh." Steve looked at her and scratched his head in thought. "Well-l, I do feel a trifle crazy."

"How?" Myra looked concerned.

Steve grinned impishly. "I feel like kissing you."

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."

VI

What had seemed to be a long flat meadow was in reality, just beneath the surface, an emergency airport that was used in place of the moving chairs or the underground freight-railway when speed was imperative. Seldom used, but always in a state of preparedness, the port now buzzed with activity as the roof of simulated grass rolled back, disclosing a resplendent green space-ship waiting on the take-off ways.

So simple was the ship in construction that less than an hour of intensive instruction from Gion, on a model control board set up in the underground room, was sufficient to acquaint him perfectly with the management of the craft.

It almost frightened him to think that he and Myra were about to undertake a journey in a ship so swift that they would arrive on Jupiter, in an inestimably distant solar system, almost as soon as they would have in their Skypiercer, had they not been interrupted by Peachy.

At last, all was ready. Steve and Myra waved good-bye to the people they had come to know as friends in such a short time, and sealed themselves inside the ship.

Steve consulted the charts for a second, then sent the ship into a noiseless take-off that soon left the field far below, already being retransformed into a green meadow. He followed his instructions carefully and kept the ship at a moderate speed, to wait until the gravitational pull of the planet had been left behind before beginning the almost unbelievable acceleration of which the ship was capable.

Myra sat in thought for a moment, then: "Steve," she said, "I don't want to seem skeptical, but doesn't Gion's theory about the beginning of man on Earth sort of conflict with our time-honored theory of evolution? Apes and men from the same source, and all that?"

"Not exactly," Steve said. "The evidence seems to point to the fact that those third-generation refugees landed on North America a few ages ago, and founded the Indian nations. It's the only tenable explanation of the origin of the American Indian that I've ever heard."

The planet was rapidly growing smaller behind them.

"If only they hadn't mutinied against discipline, it's probable that with their advanced knowledge, the Indians would have discovered Europe long before Columbus--or Lief Erickson--crossed the Atlantic. Their culture, if they had kept it, might have been a better incentive to European development than theirs was--"

"Brrr!" Myra shivered suddenly. "I get the creeps when I think of talking to a corpse."

Steve Horn chuckled. "Don't ever accuse me of being dead, again," he said mockingly. "At least, I can get up and walk around."