attitudes and emphases, the cultural gestalt, but are inevitably assimilated emotionally. That means, Derek, that they can have a machine left over from pre-Collapse days that makes miracles—but they still think it’s magic. If you’ll drop your persecution complex and listen to—”
He grimaced, and then grinned slowly. “My hairy-chested persecution complex, you undefiled prude!”
She drew in her breath harshly and marched out of the room, white to her lips. Kayel looked sick, starting after her and turning back. “You shouldn’t have done that, Derek!” he protested. He sighed, shook his head, and sat down slowly, reaching for his pipe. “I wonder what we’ll find—and whether Skora will do it?”
Derek had his own doubts, but they found the old man ready the next morning, with Wolm behind him, carrying a supply of amulets and two battery torches he must have pulled from the
He saluted them, his eyes still troubled but with no doubt in his voice. “The place is on the other side of Vanir, deep in a cave our ancestors built. He expected the explosion toward the last and had the one of them who could use his power dig two such caves—one for him, one for us. He had a machine… We almost starved and died of asphyxiation, until that one who could use the power found from god how to bring food and keep fresh air coming from another world.”
He sighed, and his eyes ran across the landscape and the growing fields. “When we came out years later, the world was a cinder, and god had to teach us to restore it and to farm it. At first, we thought of moving to another world. Even the air here had to be brought in. But we stayed near god. Well, let’s go!”
There was an abrupt, sickening shift of scenery and they were standing at the base of a mountain that stretched up as one of a huge chain, barren and forbidding. Only a few stunted plants existed there, and the sun was purpling the sky in the west. Ahead of them was a cliff that stretched up nearly half a mile, and there were two rubble-filled holes in it, near them.
The priest motioned to one of them, and Wolm moved ahead. He had what seemed to be a huge umbrella without covering. He pointed the ribs toward the fallen rocks, twisting it slowly and feeling the swiveled handle of clay. He came to the stones and continued walking. The rock seemed to flow away from the device, compacting itself against the walls of the older passage that was there.
“This is the way he taught Moskez, the only one of us who could learn the power,” Skora explained. “God came across space from Terra to study us with other scientists. When the enemy began exploding suns, he stole us to help him, taking all .the supplies he could carry. We built this cave for him, and the one beyond for ourselves. Fortunately, the sun’s explosion was a weak one.”
He was worried, but oddly determined. They were moving downward and forward. Then they hit a clear passage that wound down and down. It must have taken a great depth to protect them from the solar blowup. Ot^er peonle had tried it, without this digging device, and had failed.
They reached a long section where the passage was clear, and foul, air’rushed out at them. Skora reached for an amulet and cold, clear atmosphere blew in rapidly. Derek wondered why the old man didn’t simply teleport them into the cave where their god lay, but decided to let the question go. It was probably only a means of delaying the accomplishment. His legs ached, and Kayel was panting, but they went steadily down.
Finally it flattened out and another five minutes of walking brought them into a partially clear chamber. There was a great radium motor on one side, whirring softly. In the center stood a huge glass case, covered with thick layers of ice from the ages of slow atmospheric seepage. Oxygen tanks were beside it and stores of food and equipment lay about, all rotted and useless now. Wolm scraped off the ice at a gesture from the priest, and Derek stared into the tank.
Doubled up on the floor of the case was an old man, his face hidden by one arm, his neck bent at an imnossi-ble angle. He was naked and fat, with the waxy color of frozen flesh. One hand lay near a heavy notebook and the other clutched an archaic type of heat-projecting rifle. A rock lay near the wound on the back of his neck, and another had wedged itself into the hole at the top of the case, sealing it with the layer of ice around it. From the breakage inside the case, it was obvious that he had gone mad, to wind up shooting at the ceiling above him. The cooling system must have been cut off before he revived, but it had somehow gotten turned on again during his insane frenzy.
“Suspended animation!” Kayel said. “There were accounts that it had been developed. But no details on the cooling, chemicals in the blood, the irradiation frequencies. Skora, was he a biologist or biophysicist?”
“No, he stole the parts from the place where our people were studied,” the priest said. “Another man meant to use it, but god took it. And he didn’t adjust it right. He wanted to wait fifty years, but it was twelve hundred before it released him. We left him because we needed him and he was preserved in this.”
Wolm had drawn closer to the case, trembling. Now
he bent his white face down and stared into the case. Skora stood beside the boy, indecision working on him.
“What do we do now?” Derek asked, as gently as he could.
The old man sighed. “I don’t know. The enzymes of his body are bringing a slow decay, despite the cold. And things go wrong with the teaching of the young… but without him, god is gone and Vanir may have no power. If I could only be sure—”
He waited, while Derek stared at the case and its machinery. At first, he had wondered if it might not conceal the great machine that could perform the miracles he had seen. But Kayel had looked it over at once and had shaken his head. It seemed to be no more than it was supposed to be. And that left only their god—a fat, dead god who had gone insane because of his weakness and his fear.
Skora’s fingers moved .on the amulet savagely. Wolm’s body snapped out of existence, while flakes of ice trickled down where he had been.
The priest looked sicker than before. “I sent him home,” he said. “Derek, that is what our youngsters learn now. There is decay, and distinctions are going. The old emotional superstitions are stronger than later logic, and all children used to have them. Now they creep through into the minds of our young. A decaying mind and an insane one—and our children absorb
He sighed heavily. “And I—even I must have absorbed some of it. I can’t destroy him! It’s—horror! Derek, it’s up to you. Do what you will. I’ll wait fifteen minutes for you and keep the air pure here for you. But I can’t even watch!”
He was suddenly gone, too.
Kayel swallowed thickly, his neck bobbing against tight muscles. He reached for his pipe, then stuffed it back. “But if he loses his power when the body is destroyed, he can’t keep air for us or get us out?”
Derek kicked at the glass case. Kayel hesitated, and then joined him. It broke finally, and they waited while the blast of freezing air wheezed out, foul and miasmic. Derek reached for the weapon, but it was too cold to touch. He kicked it around with his foot until he could point it toward the corpse, while he found a bit of cloth he could use to cover the trigger.
Kayel knocked his arm aside before he could fire. The little man pointed toward the notebook and began hastily ripping off his shirt. He scooped up the book and spread it out on a low couch, ripping off the thin plastic that protected it. “We still have fourteen minutes, Derek. And this may be our only chance to find the secret.”
The captain stepped back, feeling relief wash over him. He had been bracing himself to take the chance, but the excuse to delay it was welcome. If burning the body destroyed the power of god, Vanir would be just another primitive world—and they would almost certainly die before they could get out. If the power remained, there would still be the need to warn the Federation of the menace hers—and no clue on which to operate.
Kayel flipped the cover back and skimmed through a few pages as quickly as he could turn them. It was obviously written in Classic, heavily interspersed with strange mathematics like none Derek had ever seen. From Kayel’s puzzled glance, they were equally strange to him. He turned to the front again. Then he pointed. “Aevan— god is Aevan!”
The book was described on the first page grandiloquently as the diary and records of A. Evan, the discoverer of metadynamics, the only true science of all time—the full and final work, from which the notes the world had been unready for had been extracted.
