'Why not?' Raft asked. 'We've got the science of two cultures here in this room, which gives us an edge on Parror. Janissa knows the Flame. She's its hereditary guardian. I know biochemistry, and Craddock isn't a layman. And you must have technicians here.'
'We do.'
'Well, then, what's to prevent us from making the device ourselves?'
'The question of possible failure,' Darum said. 'The First Race never tested their machine. They waited too long. There is absolutely no way of fortelling whether it would actually control the Flame. Trial and error is the only way, and one error means destruction.'
'There is a way,' Raft said.
Janissa breathed a question.
Raft took out the amulet. Seeing it, the king's eyes narrowed.
'You know what this is, Darum. It holds a spark of Flame. It is the Flame, but too tiny to be very dangerous. Why not use this as the control? If this spark from the Flame itself can be stimulated, and leashed, you'd know the machine was successful.
Darum shrugged.
'Parror may have the same idea,' Raft continued. 'I hope so. But in case he doesn't, we'll have the jump on him, and know definitely whether the device the First Ones planned is safe.'
Darum hesitated.
'Perhaps that is true.'
Raft talked fast. 'If this works, it'll remove the menace of the Flame forever. It'll mean complete control of that source of energy. The threat of degeneration will be removed from Paititi completely. Suppose we do fail—we'll simply be right back here where we stand now, won't we?'
'He's right,' Janissa said breathlessly. 'It's a chance, Darum. The only one, if Parror outwits us. And it may mean safety for Paititi forever.'
Darum did not speak for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly.
'I agree, then. Janissa, this is in your hands. And now leave me. We will talk later.'
The girl led them out. Behind them the lights dimmed, and, as Raft moved along the passage that led from the king's chamber, he heard a murmuring of faint music.
Yrann. Should he have warned the king against her? Perhaps. But he doubted whether Darum would have believed him. He shelved the thought for future reference.
Meanwhile Craddock was pulling at his arm.
'Brian.'
'Well?'
'I didn't want to queer the pitch, but—' His voice lowered '—you forgot one thing. I can't remember what Parror dragged out of my mind. He forced it out with his gadget, but I was in a trance. I don't remember now.'
Janissa had overheard even Craddock's soft whisper.
'It is well you didn't mention that to Darum,' she said. 'But I think the problem can be solved. I don't know what device Parror used. Nevertheless, when a gate has been opened once, it opens more easily the next time. I have some knowledge of the mind, Craddock, and possibly we can succeed.'
'We'll get it out of you,' Raft said. 'If it means a course in psychonamics!'
It did, almost. Raft had used medical hypnosis himself, and could help Janissa, who otherwise might have been hindered by the alienage of minds, the more than racial difference between Craddock's thought-patterns and her own. But with Raft as mentor, the secret wisdom was slowly, painfully pulled into the light.
They did not sleep. Some drug like benzedrine, Raft guessed, kept them alert and stimulated for their long sessions. There was technical equipment in the castle, and there were scientists as well, though their knowledge lay chiefly in the realm of the psychic. Many allied sciences were represented among the cat-people. Surgery was, highly developed, as was biology.
It was Craddock's subconscious they were probing, and it was like fishing in a teeming pool. Too often they caught the wrong fish, till they learned the right sort of bait to use. But finally symbols began to take form on the pad that was always ready to Craddock's hand. He scribbled a line—hesitated, corrected himself—and, step by step, pieced out the record he had read only once, thirty years before, but which his subconscious mind had never forgotten.
'If Parror hadn't opened the way, we'd never be able to do this,' Janissa said later as she was standing on a balcony with Raft, taking a well-earned breathing-space after a particularly arduous session. Before them the slow cloud of mist hung like an enormous tower.
Raft looked at her. He remembered his half-mocking question of long ago, whether two species could mingle. But logic did not seem so important now. The warm, living presence of Janissa was more vital.
Till lately he had not known her, really. She had been a paradoxical, fascinating girl who had revealed few of the traits that make humanity human. But now, since they had been working together, he had come to understand her more, and to know that he would never be able to understand her fully.
That sweetly curved, softly malicious little face, with its hint of diablerie, its lovely, feline strangeness, was more attractive than he dared admit to himself. The aquamarine, shadowed eyes were turned up to his… Eyes of Bast, whose velvet aloofness guards the night of Egypt. Yet she could be playful too, gay as a kitten might be, and with the same endearing charm.
Now as he stood there, something hidden and secret flashed between them. There was no need for a physical embrace. It was subtler than that. But, briefly, it seemed as though a veil had been lifted, a veil that hung between two beings who had been alien.
His hand stole out and touched hers. They looked out across Doirada Gulf, to the colossal columns of giant trees that supported the sky of Paititi.
He thought, Only here in this lost land beyond space and time, could I have found Janissa.
They were silent. Speech was not necessary. Hand jn hand they stood, lost in the warm, comforting awareness of each other's presence, until Craddock's voice called them back to the work of harnessing the Flame.
What could harness such a tremendous force, a power which burned in the heart of the spiral nebulae and kindled giant suns? The chain that bound Fenris-wolf? What was the Flame?
They did not know. But men do not know what electricity is, either. Yet they can tame it with insulated wires. What was needed here was insulation, but not only that. There must also be a means of stimulating the Flame. A safe way.
That was not easy to find. First the last fragments of the lost record had to be taken from Craddock's mind. Time after time hypnosis probed into his memories, and gradually the cryptic symbols made longer lines on the recording pad. Janissa could read those symbols for her own language was founded upon it, as her own civilization was built on the earlier culture of the vanished First Race. Also technicians were helpful.
For there were semantic difficulties. Raft knew the Indio dialect thoroughly, but he did not know the intricacies of Janissa's more highly developed language. There were symbols she could not explain to him. Then a chemist, perhaps, would sketch charts, electro-chemical hookups, or atomic patterns, until the answer clicked in Raft's mind.
He was no technician, though, and could not have built the device alone. Nor could Janissa. But his different background of human science was invaluable in casting light from another angle on the problem. There was the matter of the amulet, for example.
'When you turn the stone, it slows down metabolism,' Raft pointed out. 'That means the radiation is blocked at a variable rate. What blocks it? Something opaque to the vibration, eh?'
'The metal?' a physicist hazarded. 'It's-an alloy of chromite. Vanadium, perhaps. We'll have it tested.'
For, though the last secrets of the records in Craddock's memory had been discovered by now, there were still gaps. In the days of the First Race, different elements had existed in the valley, elements which were now exhausted.
They found that the truth lay not only in the material of the amulet's setting, but in the intricate interlocking of alloys, a very tiny machine powered by the induced radiation of the energy-source itself, the spark in the crystal. That crystal was simply quartz, but how the radiant atom had been put into it Raft couldn't guess.
The secret, then, lay in a complicated arrangement of various alloys that seemed to block the energy-output
