I looked at her for a long moment in silence. It has never been difficult for me to take a hint. I knew, of course, that women have a remarkable capacity for burying their real feelings beneath a dozen or more carefully arranged masks for the sole purpose of keeping a man guessing. But I decided not to even attempt to peel off the masks. It would have been too dangerously time-consuming.
Fortunately I was wearing heavy enough spaceleather to protect me from the cold. I wouldn’t need a blanket, and there were no owls on Dracona to hoot at me.
“I’m afraid I’m still too much of a primitive to find our ancient folk writings amusing,” I told her.
Without another word, ignoring her abrupt, startled gasp, I swung about and went striding out of the hut into the cool night.
I slowed my stride the instant I found myself alone under the stars. So far I’d gained a respite. But I knew that what remained to be done could backfire and destroy me. She’d stepped into a situation more complicated than any we could have planned together. Nature had set the stage for it before her arrival, and the performance was about to begin. If the first act went wrong the music might well become a dirge, and the final curtain descend on a funeral landscape as bleak as a fire-ravaged tinder box.
A half mile from the village there was a hill where I could get a clear view of the volcano, and the cloud that hung poised above it night and day, its peculiar configuration giving it the aspect of a gigantic black moth flailing the air with soot-encrusted wings. For centuries that cloud had hung there, and would probably remain until the volcano burnt itself out.
I skirted the shadows until I was clear of the village and then I walked with my shoulders squared until I reached the hill. On Dracona a man must walk boldly if he is to walk at all.
It was cold on the hill—chillingly bleak and depressing. But I knew that my spaceleather would keep me warm enough. Thinking of Kallatah’s violet eyes and the incredible glints of gold in her hair I threw myself down and lay stretched out at full length in the velvety darkness.
My eyes were on the cloud when the strange, startling play of colors began. First a flash of red on the underside of the cloud, and then a flash of dazzling violet piercing the cloud. Red, violet, and then red again—each color lingering for perhaps ten seconds.
I took out my instruments then, and made a careful check. My equipment consisted of a tiny electromagnetic linear strain seismograph which was sensitive to a tremor as faint as one ten-billionth of an inch, and a vertical recorder which gave me a picture in two dimensions of the surface tension at the edge of the crater ten thousand times enlarged.
I watched the cloud and studied the instruments, waiting until I was completely sure. Then I arose, brushed the dirt from my knees, returned the instruments to their cases, and started back down the hill.
When I reached the village there was no stir of movement anywhere. I did not trade on my luck by pausing to explore the shadows. I went straight to Geipgos’ hut, pushed the boughs aside, and crept inside on my hands and knees.
Geipgos was sleeping on a couch of matted vines with his arms interlocked on his chest, the green sheen of his skin, and the prominence of his cheekbones giving him an eerily mummified aspect.
I knelt at his side, got out the little reflector and strapped it to my forehead. I had to pause an instant to control the trembling of my hands.
The light came on in a sudden, blinding glare. I was hardly aware that I had switched it on until I found myself staring directly into Geipgos’ startled eyes.
To get anywhere with hypnosis you’ve got to start fast. I looked Geipgos straight in the eye, passing my hand swiftly back and forth before his face, giving him no chance to realize that he was no longer asleep. The abrupt, almost intolerable glare was my greatest immediate asset.
“Yon Honi Erun,” I whispered. “The Servants of the Mountain are very evil.”
Geipgos blinked furiously, and his eyes widened in stark, incredulous terror.
I went on quickly: “You have always known them to be wicked—monstrously wicked and hateful. How repulsive they are in appearance alone, with their long scaly bodies so like the bodies of the shadow monsters which you feared would tear you piecemeal when as a child you disobeyed your parents.
“Do you not remember how you ran screaming from your father’s wrath and hid in the dark, wishing that you might be a man grown, mighty in your contempt and defiance? You have always known the Servants of the Mountain to be hateful. But in your great fear you dared not say to yourself: ‘They have brought me nothing but disaster!’ ”
Geipgos groaned and his eyes rolled.
“You dared not say,” I went on relentlessly, “what you knew in your heart to be true. You dared not say: ‘The Servants of the Mountain are false servants. They have brought my people nothing but disaster! When a man is hungry must he starve? Must the fruits of his labor, the harvest that he has sown not only for himself alone, but for the adored ones of his heart be snatched from him?’ ”
Geipgos’ eyes took on a strange glaze and his lips began to tremble.
“Soon the sky will be red,” I told him. “Soon the ground will shake. Soon the wrath of the mountain will be terrible against its false servants.”
Geipgos tried to rise, but I gripped his arm and
