The Valley of Creation

'They'll be up here soon,' he said edgedly. 'Nsharra, there's still time for you to get away!'

'I will show you the safe way into the Cavern, now,' she answered. 'But I am its Guardian and I will not leave it!'

He turned with her toward that great mouth of cold, quivering light. Deliberately, Nsharra led the way into it.

Just inside the entrance she paused. Nelson looked about. Where the light outside had been red and hot, here it was a cool glow like uncanny moonlight.

The cavity was huge and circular, running back into the hill. Nelson guessed it to be eighty feet high. A hundred feet from where they stood yawned a deep cleft that ran across the cavern floor, and it was from here that the cold light came — a terrific blaze of white radiation flung upward out of the cleft.

Nelson began to see things that astounded him even more than his first sight of Vruun and Anshan.

Great circular ribs of metal, massive girders dim in the lofty gloom, seemed to support the roof and sides of the Cavern. He made out the shapes of metal tubes, gigantic things, crumpled and twisted as though by blasting force, that ran along the walls into the unguessable shadowy spaces farther in.

His brain began to reel with impossible conjectures. Stepping forward toward the cleft, he glimpsed a glowing white mass that lay deep down at the bottom of the crevice.

Nsharra drew him back. 'Do not go too close to the cold fire — its light can blast and kill!'

'Radioactive!' Nelson muttered incredulously. 'A radioactive chemical mass of some sort that's eaten its way into the floor.'

Very effectively, that moat of death had barred all entrance into the unguessable farther depths of the Cavern.

He looked up along the wall above the cleft and made out vast twisted cylinders, their metal sides burst and gaping. There was no mistaking what those cylinders were. They were huge tanks.

Had the radioactive mass spilled from those shattered tanks? It seemed obvious and yet—

Nsharra led him to the end of the mass of giant tubes that ran along the walls back to the farther depths of the Cavern. The tubes were all of six feet in diameter, made of unfamiliar metal, massive and thick. He tried to picture them as they must have been once and the picture staggered his mind with suggestions that were pure madness.

Nsharra said, 'Most of these strange tunnels are broken. But one of them leads safely over the cleft of cold fire. It is the secret way, found long ago by a Guardian and told only to his successors.'

She climbed into the flared ripped end of one of the giant tubes, motioning him to follow. He did so, using his pocket light. The inner wall of the tube was pitted and scored, the metal burned. Yes, burned, like a charred log. And yet it seemed amazingly tough metal. It acted as a shield against the deadly radiation they were crossing.

Numbly Nelson wondered what terrible force had ripped through these giant tubes to scar them so.

Ahead of him, Nsharra came to a place where the tube twisted upon itself. He scrambled with her around the turn. Then, suddenly, he snapped off his light and whispered quickly to her.

'Silence!'

They crouched and listened, and Nelson heard plainly this time the sound that had warned him-a sound of something slipping and scrambling behind them in the tube, something straining to overtake them.

He had his gun out and ready when Tark's thought came to them. 'Where man can go wolf can go! And where Nsharra goes this wolf goes also!'

Nelson relaxed and swore. Tark scrambled toward them, digging his claws into the pitted metal.

'Too late for anger now,' he thought to Nsharra. 'The outlanders and Shan Kar's men have already landed.' He added with a wolfish shrug, 'And anyway my Clan is safe now.'

Nsharra's hand briefly touched the massive hairy head, but she did not speak. They went on for what seemed a long time in the tube. Then it debouched into a round gigantic metal chamber that looked to Nelson very like part of a turbine — a turbine built by giants for some unguessable purpose.

'Giant tubes that could be jet-tubes!' he said half aloud in a stunned voice. 'This colossal turbine — and the radioactive chemical from the tanks, that could be fuel—'

'Come,' said Nsharra and he followed her, the wolf keeping close to them as though awed by this forbidden place.

As they stepped out of the shattered turbine, well beyond the deadly cleft, Nelson could look into the shadowy farther spaces of the Cavern that previously the cold radiance had hidden from him.

He was not really surprised at what he saw. Shocked, stunned, awed, but not really surprised. Before him stretched the Cavern, vast, incredible, shadows glooming thicker as the eye went back into it.

And its half-seen, half-guessed shape was the shape of a torpedo, tapering from blunt stern to slender point. A sharp, clean point to cleave the air, to cleave, perhaps, the vast gulfs where there was no air, where only the stars rubbed shoulders with eternity!

He saw the great arching ribs, the looming platinum machinery that had no meaning for him because there had never been anything like it on Earth. Machines, and panels, that bore gauges and dials marked in strange symbols. And the alien but unmistakable assembly of jet-tubes, the great turbine-engines that once had driven thunderously—

Nelson spoke, and the sound of his own voice was echoing and strange in that vast dead vault of metal.

'A ship,' he whispered. 'The Cavern is a giant ship, that crashed here heaven alone knows how long ago. A space ship, that came to Earth and fell and was buried here by the silt of ages.'

The deadly danger of the imminent crisis with Sloan was almost forgotten in Nelson's stupefied wonder. He moved slowly forward deeper into the shadowy ship, looking up at the huge broken machines.

Was this the colossal secret of the valley of L'Lan? Those ancients whose subtle science had made the thought-crowns and the mind-transferer — were they from another world, long, long ago? He stepped between two thick platinum pillars, on each of which was mounted a big quartz sphere. And suddenly, as though it came from the depthless gulfs of time, a cool, vast alien mind spoke to his.

The words, the thoughts, rang through his brain with a throbbing power that shook the whole fabric of his mind.

'You who shall come after us, take warning!'

Chapter XVII THE DAY OF THE BROTHERHOOD

Nelson stopped, stricken by a freezing awe that he had never felt before. It was not the mere fact of the thought-voice speaking in his mind that stupefied him. He was too accustomed to that, by now.

It was the power and the quality of this new mental voice. It had in it the vibrations of a mind of range and magnitude beyond his imagination. It was alien, yet had a tantalizing echo of familiarity.

'Take warning!'

Nsharra's voice broke the spell. She had stepped quickly with Tark to his side as he stood frozen between the platinum pillars.

'It is the voice of the ancients of the Cavern, Eric Nelson! Their voice, speaking from the dim past, from those!' She pointed at the great, glittering quartz spheres atop the two platinum pillars.

'Each time one steps between these pillars, their mind speaks — always the same. My father and all the Guardians before him knew it.'

Nelson began dimly to understand. The mental voice he heard was a record — not a sonic record but a telepathic one imprinted somehow in those quartz spheres and reproduced to all who came between them.

How was it done? How could thought be recorded and reproduced? He did not know that, would never know. But that the ancients had been masters of telepathic science, his experience with the thought-crowns and the mind-transferer proved.

And now, after a pregnant pause, that cool passionless voice was speaking on in his mind.