Chapter VII

I was not killed, as momentarily I had feared, but was flung into a cell. You might call it that--a small cave-like recess off one of the smaller corridors. It seemed a level below the apartment in which Tara had been. My captors flung me into it, shoved a heavy stone into the door-slit, barred the stone with a metal fastening and withdrew.

More than ever now, the light inherent to the metallic rock-masses of subterranean Zura was apparent--a soft luminous glow. Left alone, I looked around me. It was somewhat warmer in here. The air was fresh enough. I saw that it was seeping in through many little rifts, an inch or two in width--tiny fissures in the honeycombed walls. There was a couch here, of white skins. I threw myself on it with the sudden realization that I was exhausted, and hungry and thirsty. The latter two needs I could not supply--but presently I had drifted into sleep.

I was awakened by the realization that the door-slab was being drawn aside. It was Zogg, Tara's guard who had taken Alan and the others away. He came in with food and water--food that was a fatty, uncooked animal flesh. I drank the water greedily--water different in taste from anything I had had on earth, but it was palatable. The blubbery animal-flesh at first was nauseous, but my hunger made me manage it. I was stiff with chill, but the food warmed me.

"Thanks," I said.

Zogg had been standing by the door, watching me impassively. I added: "Those friends of mine--what did you do with them? Kill them?"

"Near here. No hurt them," he said. Was that irony on his weird, grimacing face? A string of little ornaments hung on his chest now, dangling from his spindly neck. He gestured to them proudly. He was a dignitary here--one of Tara's leaders, I surmised. Afterward I learned that for years, in fact, he had been Simpson's lieutenant--forcing Simpson's commands upon the primitive little people, with what autocratic violence I could only guess. A belt of sinew was around his waist, with crude weapons dangling from it.

His grimace widened. He swept me with a sidelong glance and again I had the feeling that this Zurian was far more intelligent than his weird, to me fantastic, aspect would suggest. His little slit eyes stared at me with a queer sort of cunning, and his grimacing mouth more than ever seemed ironical. It sent a vague shudder through me so that involuntarily I tensed as he came suddenly toward me.

"Tara send me for you," he said. "She wants see you now."

Silently I preceded him through the doorway. He followed, guiding me with his brief, guttural English words and with a knife-point prodding my back. We traversed the dim, glowing little tunnel, mounting steadily. I had expected we would emerge into the same apartment where Tara had been before, but we did not. Abruptly the tunnel ended in a huge glowing open space. The ceiling of this gigantic grotto must have been five hundred feet or more overhead; only a bluish opalescent haze was up there so that I had the feeling that I was outdoors. An ice and rock wall rose to one side of me, through big openings of which I could see the grotto apartment where I had met Tara a few hours ago.

And here, stretching before me in shining prismatic beauty, was her garden--a smaller, vaulted grotto to my left, into which Zogg at once led me. It was an amazing little place of glittering ice formations. From its arching roof, ice hung in great sparkling clusters, like stalactites, in places hanging down to meet the icy stalagmites of the floor, so that there were vaulted little corridors and aisles between them. In other places there were recesses shrouded with a white lacery of frozen moisture--great bridal veils, blue-white, intricate with nature's lacy patterns.

A little fairyland of ice. The opalescent sheen of the rocks sparkled on it everywhere with a riot of pastel colors--a soft, prismatic, breath-taking beauty.

"This way," Zogg said. "Tara waits you."

* * * * *

She was in a small ice glade where furs had been spread, and in a recess, half shrouded with frozen lacery, there was a stone bench fashioned in earth-style. She was standing by the bench. Zogg pushed me forward, and at her gesture, he withdrew. I caught a glimpse of his face; his grimace--ironical.

"Tara--" I began.

"Sit down--John Taine." She waved me to the bench and dropped to the pile of rugs. "You angered me," she said. "I am sorry about that. I am thinking I will have to decide what to do with you--and those men with you whom you say are murderers."

I could think of no answer. I could only sit staring at her beauty. The lacery of ice-veils behind her seemed to glorify her with its prismatic pastel glow.

"Tell me," she murmured, "of your earth-world. Is it now what my father feared that always it would be?"

"Yes," I admitted. "I'm afraid it is." I began telling her of the history of my lifetime. It is horrible, when you think of it, how the events which humans create may be translated into terms of lust and greed, and jealousy and hatred. And the motives of nations--aggression--banditry.

"But it isn't all like that," I tried to explain. "There is love, too. And friendship and self-sacrifice. And science to try and heal the sick--to raise the standards of living. Xalite will do that. Xalite which is apparently of no use to your people, Tara."

She was staring at me musingly. Heaven knows, looking back on it now, I can try to understand her. Something within her, frightening her as she talked here alone with me. The urge, hardly to be understood by her, to order me here--to be alone with me. The first young man of her own world whom she had ever seen. Emotions, frightening--mingling with the life-long teachings of her fanatic father--his hatred of mankind, so that now what she instinctively felt must have angered as well as terrified her.

I had shifted from the bench to the rug beside her. My own emotions were sweeping me. "Tara," I murmured impulsively, "I'm going back to earth--and you're going with me."

I think she hardly heard me. She drew in her breath with a little hiss at my touch and leaped to her feet. "I shall show you my people," she said. "You will see what my father and I have done here."

She led me through the fairyland of the little garden; out through an archway, so that again I seemed outdoors, with the ceiling of this giant grotto high in the luminous haze overhead. And presently we stood on a small rocky height, gazing down upon a primitive little city. It was a brief glimpse--my only glimpse--of the Zurian subterranean world. This group of habitations here--one of perhaps a dozen scattered throughout the vast system beneath the wild surface of the little asteroid--I saw as a scattered collection of white little mound-dwellings. Stone and frozen moisture, modeled so that families might have privacy. I saw the women there, with dangling hair and breasts; and children, playing in the doorways of the huts.

It had been, before Tara's lifetime, a much more numerous people. Perhaps once they had lived on the asteroid's surface. They were of a different bodily structure from earth-humans--cold-blooded, in comparison with ourselves. Then the Great Change had driven them in here--and killed most of them, so that now, so far as Tara knew, only these few thousand were left.

"The Great Change?" I said.

"It was when this world first came into the Solar System. My father has explained it to me. It happened at about the time of my birth when this world rounded the sun. Almost all of them died then. The heat was too terrible to them."

* * * * *

And that time was coming again! Zura now was heading to round the sun, close, between the orbits of Mercury and Vulcan. Already, as I well knew, the little asteroid was inside the orbit of Venus.... With the protective blanket of heavy atmosphere, and the fires which doubtless were at the core of the little world, Zura, even in the realms of outer Interstellar space, had been habitable. But that protective atmospheric blanket was not enough, inside the orbit of Mercury! The heat would melt these ice-grottos. Already it was melting the outside surface.

"And you have no crime here?" I murmured. I could not avoid a faint irony. "Nothing ever goes wrong? Everyone always does everything exactly right?"

We were back in the prismatic little garden, walking down one of its glowing blue-white aisles. She stopped and faced me.

"They would not dare do wrong," she said. Again her eyes were flashing.

"I see," I murmured. "But you have done well, Tara. You and your father." And then, some damnable little imp within me made me add: "On earth, Tara, our people sometimes resent that their rulers live in palaces, when they can have only a hovel. That room where I met you--and your gardens here--they're very beautiful--"

It stung her. I cursed myself for the words, almost as I said them. She leaped to her feet, backed away, panting, in a tumult of hurt and anger.

"So all you can do is let me talk and then jibe at me! I--I hate you! You and all your kind!"

"Oh, Tara--I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. Really, I'm sorry--"

"I hate you--"

The words died in her throat. Behind us, here in the glittering garden, from Tara's apartments a group of Zurian women came running. They were terrified, calling out to her in their guttural voices. Her personal servants. And now, with them, a dozen or more of the little guards appeared. They came from several directions, shouting for Tara; confused, panic-stricken, wildly jabbering and gesticulating as they gathered near us.

Tara's questioning glance crossed with mine. "Why--why, what--" she stammered.

* * * * *

There was a turmoil everywhere here. Tara's servants and guards gathering around her in terror. And now we could hear other sounds, coming in through the huge archway from the open grotto-space outside. Sounds floating up from the Zurian village down the declivity. A distant blended murmur of angry voices. A mob down there, mounting the slope, screaming defiance....

It was as though my words of a moment ago had been prophetic. Tara's people had risen now into sudden murderous revolt!

"Why--why, what is this?" she gasped. Amazement swept her face as she listened to the terrified words of one of her servants. And then her beautiful face contorted with anger, her eyes were flashing as she tossed up her head and squared her shoulders. "Why--why, how dare they--"

She whirled suddenly and dashed through the garden, with me after her, and the panic-stricken guards and servants gathering behind us. At the big archway, where we emerged upon a little ledge-like eminence with a ragged white slope down to the village spread below us, Tara paused, stricken by the tumult of the scene. A mob of a thousand or more, men, women and even children, were milling up the broken ascent. A frenzied, menacing mob. Most of them carried crude weapons--shafts of pointed ice, knives of polished stone; others primitive implements of agriculture.

At Tara's appearance on the little height, a great shout went up. Those in front, halfway up the slope now, momentarily paused, but the milling throng behind shoved against them, screaming threats, waving their weapons. A leaderless mob? And then I saw the tall figure of Zogg. Not in the front ranks, but a little farther down. He was shoving, shouting, inciting them forward. Then with a prodigious leap he was on a boulder, screaming up at Tara, wildly waving at the milling crowd, exhorting them forward.

The thought stabbed at me: Had the crafty Carruthers contrived this? Working upon Zogg, showing him how he could raise himself into power here in his little world by promising these people things which poor Tara had not been able to give them? Had Carruthers, Duroh and Alan contrived to be released? In that stricken moment I stared down at the frenzied, milling throng, expecting perhaps to see them down there. But I did not.

"Tara, good Lord--" I gasped.

An imperious sweep of her arm shoved me back. Then, with her little figure drawn to its full height, she stepped to the brink of the ledge, with her arms raised as she confronted the murderous mob!