But not for long — there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their eye sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led the way without a word.
A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal doorway labeled in archaic script MARK m BEACON AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The overly trusting builders counted on the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn't a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.
I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the blue-Prints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me I found that there Was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected.
One of the eager lizards had managed to open the circuit box and had polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the switches and that had caused the trouble.
Rather, that had started the trouble. It wasn't going to be ended by just reversing the water-valve switch. This valve was supposed to be used only for repairs, after the pile had been damped. When the water was cut off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit.
I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left in the reactor.
I wasn't going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was about a tenth of the size of the ancient bucket of bolts. Before I sent for it, I checked over the rest of the beacon. In two thousand years there should be some sort of wear.
The old boys had built well, I'll give them credit for that. Ninety percent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they beefed up figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick — and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts.
The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded into a small metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the heavy-duty Eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen.
I watched the priests thorough the Pryeye while they tried to open it. When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up.
The repair didn't take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get to the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they waited for.
I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.
There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony.
The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why — it was bolted and barred from the other side.
"It has been decided.” a lizard said, "that you shall remain here forever and tend to the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and serve your every need."
A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn't accept.
"What! You dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors!" I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration almost shook my head off.
The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the doorjamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.
The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface.
"What lack of courtesy!" I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. "The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness, they will let the waters flow. Now I must return — on with the blinding ceremony!"
The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes, under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.
Before they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door.
I couldn't see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders. I had got turned around after the eye burning and my flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset. Instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the fresh air and away.
When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.
One: The beacon was repaired.
Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate.
Three: The priest should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which added up to—
Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.
I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad it would be some other repairman who would get the job.
Pressure
The tension inside the ship rose as the pressure outside increased— and at the same rate. Perhaps it was because Nissim and Aldo had nothing at all to do. They had time to think too much. They would glance at the pressure gauges and then quickly away, reluctantly repeating this action over and over. Aldo knotted his fingers and was uncomfortably aware of the cold dampness of his skin, while Nissim chain-smoked cigarette after cigarette. Only Stan Brandon — the man with the responsibility — stayed calm and alert. While he studied his instruments he appeared completely relaxed, and when he made an adjustment on the controls there was a certain dash to his actions. For some reason this infuriated the other men, though neither would admit it.
"The pressure gauge has failed!" Nissim gasped, leaning forward against the restraint of his safety harness. "It reads zero."
"It's supposed to, Doc, built that way," Stan said, smiling. He reached over and flicked a switch. The needle jumped while the scale reading changed. "Only way to measure these kind of pressures. Chunks of metal and crystal in the outer hull, different compressibilities, and they compress to destruction. So we switch to the next one—"