It made no sense at all. Their god couldn’t even move rocks out of his own way. Yet the rains fell, in spite of the fact that the amulets were nothing but symbols. The power had to come from some source. “So he was destroyed. Yet you say he still is!”
“He’s there, and the young learn from him still. We had to find out how to build the time-negation drive from him since you came.” Skora found another beer, remembering to open this one. He was mellowing from the liquor. “Derek, I don’t know. He’s dead and he’s deteriorating—slowly, but the changes are there. We’ve always been in danger of becoming superstitiously dependent on him without realizing how much so we are. But now, some of us are worried. As he deteriorates, he may warp our children. Sometimes I’ve thought of digging him up and destroying him.”
“Why don’t you?” Derek suggested softly.
“I’ve thought of it. As senior priest for Vanir, I could. But it’s hard… emotional attachment, I suppose. And fear of what would happen.”
Derek frowned. “Suppose I were to destroy him?”
The old priest looked up, studying him, resolution coming slowly. “You could! Of course, you could! Derek, one more beer! Then go home. And be back here early. We’ll do it!”
Skora’s hands were trembling as he reached for the bottles.
6
Siryl would have none of it.
“Nonsense,” she told them after she had heard the story, along with Kayel. “Primitive cultures don’t breed agnostics. Skora was just drunk or testing you! Probably saving face by trying not to act superstitious. Derek, if you break any more taboos—”
“They aren’t primitive! Damn it, Siryl, if you can’t get that much through your pathological skull, go outside and watch it rain for a while!”
She stiffened and then cloaked herself in professional calm. “A culture,” she recited, almost by rote, “observed in situ may have certain apparently inconsistent developments, usually as a result of some isolated individual genius or accidental discovery. These, however, do not violate the fundamental 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 Sepelora. The priest looked as if he had been unable to sleep, and the porch where the school was usually held was locked up tightly.
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—”