Raft saw the face of Dan Craddock.
He had a stubbly white beard. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked utterly exhausted. Beyond him Raft could make out vague outlines. Silks, he thought, of many colors.
'He is alone, and resting,' Janissa whispered. 'So you may speak with him freely.'
'Speak?'
'In the mind. Look closer now, while I summon him.'
Raft stared down at the lens. He saw Craddock's gaze lift, and sudden awareness spring into them.
Raft heard his name!
He did not hear it. He sensed the impact of Craddock's thought. Abruptly he was conscious of nothing but his friend's presence. The room about him darkened and vanished. There was present only the odd feeling that Janissa was here, somewhere, alive and guiding.
'Dan. Are you all right?' His thought formed words.
'All right, Brian. Yes. You?'
'So far I'm alive, anyway,' Raft thought grimly. 'Janissa's here.'
'Good. She managed to tell me a little. And Parror's told me more.'
'Is he—has he tried any tricks?'
Craddock grinned wanly.
'More or less. He's the most dangerous altruist I've ever met. You shouldn't have come after me, Brian.'
'You should have told me the set-up back in the hospital, when Parror first showed up,' Raft pointed out. 'But that's water under the bridge. What we've got to figure on now—'
'I didn't know,' Craddock interrupted. 'When Parror brought da Fonseca to the hospital, I hadn't the least idea what was going on. When he showed me my notebook, I was—well, as flabbergasted as I looked.'
'You were here before, though.'
'Yes. I was here. Thirty years ago by our time, a hundred million, maybe, by Paititi's time. For it's variable. There's the Flame…'
'Tell him,' Janissa's thought urged.
Craddock nodded.
'Yes, I—I'd better, I suppose. Though thirty years ago I hadn't much idea what I was getting into. I was pretty young. I was on the trail of the secret medicines the Indio witch-doctors were supposed to have around here, and that's how I stumbled on the unseen road. It wasn't closed then. It lay wide open. A trap, as it proved.'
'A trap?'
'One set by fate,' Craddock thought grimly. 'I went on, though, past the cavern of the monsters, and to the place where the road forks. One branch leads to Paititi. The other leads to the thing the Indios call Curupuri.'
'The Flame,' Raft supplemented. 'What is it?'
'I don't know. Radiant energy of some kind. It may be alive. It may not. But certainly it's nothing that ever was spawned on this earth. Paititi's a meteoric crater, Brian, and I think Curupuri came to this planet in a meteor. Perhaps it was the meteor. It's—life.'
'The creator and the destroyer,' Janissa put in quietly.
'Destroyer? Yes. There are forms of energy we know nothing about. Sometimes we see them through telescopes, in the giant nebulae light-years away. The stuff of primal energy, spawned in interstellar space, where that tremendous force can safely exist. It can't exist—safely—on a planet. Not unless the planet is still gaseous, still molten. Curupuri, the thing that fell on Brazil in a meteor ages ago, is a source of life, Brian.'
'A living thing?'
'Too colossal for us to conceive of or measure. You know the Arrhennius theory, that life reached Earth in the form of spores, drifting through space on light-pressure tides. Well, that's fair enough, but what gave life to those spores?
'It's the old chicken or the egg problem, with a difference. The spores may have been the dust, the waste- products of things like the nebulae. Or that vast force raging in space may have had power to create life in dust, a galaxy away. I don't know. I'm theorizing, that's all. But radiant energy, vibration, power—they're tied up with it, somehow.'
Craddock's tired face brightened.
'And the merest fraction of that energy fell on Earth once, in a meteor. It must have been a microscopic amount, for anything more would have devastated the planet. Growth, unchecked. I guessed some of that, and learned a little more, from records I found in Paititi.'
'Records? Left by whom?'
'I didn't know then. There was no one in the valley, no life except birds and insects, peccary, tapir, and the jaguars. Remember the jaguars, Brian. They're important. Meanwhile, I found those records in what is now Parror's castle.
'They weren't unlike the written Indio language. I suppose that's where the Indies get their lingo in the first place. Anyway, I found out the truth. Curupuri had given life to Paititi. The merest touch of that energy has made the Amazon Basin the most fertile and prolific place on Earth.'
Raft nodded.
'Keep going. How does this trick work?'
'In cycles. There are cycles in suns, giants and dwarfs, and in nebulae too, though our lives are too short to comprehend them. When the Flame is at full tide, a certain type of energy pours forth from it. The result is peculiar.'
'Time is speeded up?'
Slowly Craddock shook his head. 'No. Not objectively. What happens is a metabolic change. The rate of growth is tremendously increased. Not only in men, in mammals, but in all living things. When the Flame is at the top of its cycle, a man may be born, live a complete life, and die in one second. Yet it will be a lifetime to him.
'Inanimate things are not affected, of course. The radiation won't make stone crumble faster. It influences living cells only. The animal world, and plants. That is what happened.'
'The Flame wakened,' Janissa supplemented. 'And in its light all things sprang to life.'
'Yes. Long ago. But that cycle was more normal. The First Race, the one that built these castles, lived here, evolved, and—and then the Flame sank. They did not die. But apparently the radiation is a false stimulus.
'When the Flame's power falls below a certain level, its rays are actively malignant. Cellular tissue may be stimulated, but it can also become cancerous. When the Flame sinks, there is a retrogression. It's freakish. It's— horrible.'
'I saw what was left of the First Race,' Raft mentioned. 'Those monsters in the cavern.'
'Yes. They saw their fate coming, and made plans. They were skilled scientists. They found a way to rekindle the Flame before its cycle had been run, but they failed to do it. Because it was dangerous. If they were not accurate to a hair's breadth, if they failed to control the Flame exactly, it would mean total destruction. The radiation would rage out unchecked. The Flame would devour itself instantly, but in that instant Paititi would be seared lifeless.'
'They didn't do it, then.'
'No. They waited. Each generation thought it could live out its own span. Each generation let the problem go on to its children. And the children thought the same. In the end, the beast-minds were too dull to comprehend.
'The creatures that had been the First Race remembered only the Flame, and they found their way to the cavern where you saw them. Their nearness to the radiation keeps them alive, and they've lived and bred there in the dark for a long time.'
Raft frowned.
'But the cat-people. How did they come into being?'
Craddock's eyes held a touch of deep horror. 'I created them. I—wakened the Flame.'
CHAPTER VIII.
KHARN, THE TERRIBLE
