Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/52

52 as it unrolled, and the inner mind of "me" leaped as I saw that he alone, of all these people, swarming in incomprehensible activity about me was free of the terrible compulsion. Or was he?

One of the dwarfish men led Nydia away and I saw her no more. I seemed to know she was placed among other slaves to await a certain terrible fate that all who were of no use to Sathanas met sooner or later.

A fury of activity, of building, pulling and hauling, carrying to and fro, was going on around me. I myself was busy tinkering with a great old mechanism—it was a ray which my conscious mind understood not at all, but my hands, obeying the compulsion of the ro-mech's powerful waves of thought, knew what they were doing and rapidly set the thing to rights, though I somehow knew that whatever I had done to it had been done unnecessarily, and that it was not needed.

Now, my inner mind became aware of a much greater number of people about than I had observed to be living there. There were rushing about me at least a thousand people, wild, staring-eyed men of the far darkness, and somehow I knew that the terrible compulsion of the great ro-mech had caught up in its field some strange tribe of nomads from the caverns outside the Palace of Eg Notha, and had made them a part of its activity. A certain worried expression on Zigor's face told me that his inner mind had seen the unwanted additions to his ranks, as well as myself, and was wondering what would come of it when the record had played itself out and it had come time to insert a new roll of the ancient record-wire in the ro-mech.

For the most part, these undisciplined nomads of the caves were a bloody, cannibalistic lot, and once the restraint of the ro-mech was off them, no force could restrain their seizing the opportunity to loot and kill. I guessed that his idea of using the ro-mech to build once again the ancient power of the Mephisto's was not going according to schedule. Myself I knew it could not, for there were too many missing links for the chain of circumstance to be forged again as it had been, so long ago.

UT there was one series of events in that record which had caused Zigor to choose it as the first! I soon realized what this was, for Zigor walked to a great machine near the throne; activated the inner dynamos, and from it leaped a beam of blinding white light. This light he played over the dancing form of Chlio, where she undulated before his throne.

That light was a terrible thing for a reason no man alive knows enough to understand, and it was a thing Sathanas had used much for its after effects upon men. Some slight details of its use remained in my mind from old Mephisto's display of the record to me. It was a thing that acted upon a man in exactly the same way a flame acts upon the senses of a moth. It blinds the will, even such a synthetic will as was acting within us from the ro-mech, replacing it with a terrible desire to lose the self, such a desire as the masochist knows: to be enslaved; to give up to another all self; to become the property of another.

But why was Zigor using this thing upon Chlio. As the light bathed her, she ceased her dance and stood, frozen in a strange and awful beauty, with tears streaming down her face from her disappearing inner self. And as the light burned on, I realized why he was using Chlio as the point of focus of the beam—for a terrible compulsion reached out to all of us, and we inched, crawled, scrambled and raced, at the last, to place ourselves at her feet—her "things," her slaves. This beautiful, white, woman-thing was absorbing ourselves magically within her.

What still remained of reason within me told me that a terrible kind of soul-stealing was going on, that "Chlio" was but the focus, and Sathanas—Zigor, standing outside the direct beams and ruling its power by reason of the directive action of the ro-mech review of the ancient scene, was the recipient. For even as we gave up forever our "selves" to "Chlio" in a terrible and complete hypnosis—from which my mind knew we could never rise again free—even so was Chlio in turn giving all up to Zigor at the source of the terrible beam.

This terrible bit of ancient magic upon the record Zigor had noticed, and was using to make us all captives forever of his will—even as had Sathanas, so long ago!

A man will walk through fire to reach that awful devouring whiteness when it is played upon the body of a woman, and about me writhed the bodies of all the others, those strangers from the outer darkness and the mad sadists who had chosen