A look of wonder appeared on the faces of the guards. They glanced at one another nervously.
"Look!" yelled Adjani. He pointed ahead of them up the road.
There stood a tall, thin figure clothed in a radiant blue, skintight garment, his arms outstretched, holding a long glowing rod. Behind this figure stood a squat, roundish, bell-shaped object that shimmered as if through waves of heat.
The soldiers, too, saw the figure. They drew back. One of them fired his rifle and all watched his bullet sink feebly into the dirt at his feet. At this the soldier threw down his gun and backed away. The others turned and fled with him, leaving only the leader who mumbled something under his breath and then turned and ran after his men.
Spence was on his feet running toward the strange figure. Adjani and Gita came on more cautiously behind him.
When they reached their friend they found him embracing an extremely tall humanoid who gazed at them with great round amber eyes.
"Kyr!" shouted Spence, almost beside himself with relief. "You came! You saved our lives!"
Adjani's jaw dropped and Gita rubbed his eyes.
"Adjani, Gita…" said Spence turning to the astonished men, "Kyr, these are my friends."
The Martian regarded them with a long, unblinking gaze as if reading their thoughts. "Men of Earth," he said at last, "I am happy to meet you." With that he slowly extended his long, three-fingered hand.
21
… SHOULD MELT YOUR flesh where you sit! I should blast your shriveled body to atoms! How dare you defy me!" The ancient eyes flashed fire and the voice croaked with murderous rage.
Hocking, for once, appeared at a loss for words. "I… I did not defy you, Ortu. Th-there must be some mistake."
"There is a mistake and you made it when you gave heed to your own overreaching ambition. You will pay for this error, but first I want to know if you have any notion at all of what you have done. Do you have the slightest idea what you have ruined with your trifling, puny efforts? No answer?"
Hocking had never seen his master so angry. He thought it 4, best to keep his mouth shut and weather the blast if he could.
"No? Well then, I will tell you," Ortu spat. He raised himself up and sat on his cushions erect and commanding, though he had not moved from his place. His hairless head gleamed like a polished knob; the hanging folds of skin around his neck jerked with every venomous word. The gleaming circlet across his forehead glowed hotly, and the great yellow eyes, burning out of their enormous sockets, undimmed by age, pierced the object of their focus like laser beams. Hocking shrank even deeper into the yielding cushions of the pneumochair.
"Your meddling has jeopardized the work of a thousand years. Centuries of cultural and social conditioning have brought us to the precise moment of maximum vulnerability. The tanti is at last attuned to the exact mental frequency of the collective human mind. Mankind trembles on the threshold of our new world order, and does not even guess what is about to happen. Like dogs they await the coming of a master to lead them."
"How has anything changed, Ortu? It is still as it was. Nothing has been lost."
"Silence! A great deal has been lost! I thought you were smarter than others of your kind. Use that miserable brain o yours, then-think what you have done!"
Try as he might Hocking could not think what had gone wrong. He did not even know exactly how Ortu had found out about his plan to eliminate Spencer Reston.
"Does your tongue fail you? Well it might, since you do not fathom even the tiniest fraction of the whole.
"The tanti is ready, is it not? It has been tested relentlessly for many years." Ortu sank back into himself, and glared dully at Hocking. "Its power has been increased a billion-fold."
"Correct." Hocking's mouth was dry and he croaked.
"With the tanti we possess the ability to control the universal subconscious and thereby control the behavior of every human being on earth. With it we can literally rule the world."
"Control a man's dreams and you control his mind," said Hocking. He had heard the maxim often enough.
"And yet, in the final calibration experiment what happens? Unexpectedly, we discover a man capable of resisting complete domination. How is this possible?" Ortu crossed his long thin arms across his narrow chest. "Answer me!"
"I don't know," snapped Hocking. "Obviously, if I knew it would not have happened."
"Well said. But do you not even now perceive your error? Did it never occur to you that where one man resists there may lie the secret of all men's resistance? That is why I wanted him brought here-to learn the secret of his ability to withstand control. Instead, you seek to eliminate him, to destroy him. If you had succeeded we would never know."
"You saved him, didn't you?" Hocking fought down the twinge of fear that coursed through him as he remembered his unsuccessful attempts to kill Reston. "I fail to see how I have seriously harmed our plans, let alone damaged our overall contingencies."
"Then allow me to illumine you, oh wise one," mocked Ortu. Hocking colored under the scorn. "Reston has contacted a member of my race-"
"Impossible! It is beyond current physics…"
"It is not impossible. I have just said it has happened. It is a fact. He did not travel to distant galaxies, no. He has awakened one of the Guardians and has summoned him here."
"I don't believe it!"
"You will believe it. Long ago when we on Ovs migrated we left behind in each city one of our own to guard all that we left behind against the day when others would come, that the knowledge gained should be wisely used and our treasures respected."
Reston could not have discovered this-no one on Earth believes Martians exist, much less Martian cities."
"You, who believe nothing-how do you know what men believe in their innermost hearts? And why do you keep telling me these things are not possible when indeed they have happened?
"Men believe that their salvation will come from the stars, from benevolent beings who will show them the way. That is what men believe today. Have I not spent hundreds of years nurturing that belief? Creating wonders in the sky, strange and unexplained events on the ground? All to prepare the way for this final stage, for the willingness of humankind to accept a savior from beyond their world.
"It has all been part of the social and mental conditioning. Men speak of UFOs and watch the sky by night for a sign that their space brothers are coming. And why? Because I have willed it so. I, Ortu, have programmed it to be so."
"How can one man, even a very stubborn man like Reston, change that?"
Ortu sighed. "Because within him is the force to withstand, and to undo all I have done. And the Guardian who is with him now will not allow our work to continue-he will see it stopped." …
GITA, WHOSE WIDE ROUND eyes never for a moment left the alien, kept hopping up and down in a kind of ecstatic dance, first on one foot and then on the other. He was beside himself, almost literally. And though he did not enter into the conversation with the others, he did not miss a word.
Spence and Adjani were endeavoring to explain their present situation to Kyr, who listened intently. It was a marvel to Gita that the Martian could speak so well; Spence had explained the being's remarkable facility, but that did not diminish Gita's sense of wonder that the first words he heard from the mouth of an extra-terrestrial were in plain English.
Spence explained, "We have very good reason to believe that one of your own-an Ovsian -came to Earth during the time of the Great Migration. He has lived for thousands of years somewhere in these mountains-a place called Kalitiri. The soldiers in the truck were supposed to be taking us to him but… they evidently changed their minds."