Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/53

Rh Zigor as their leader. All of them, were beside me, prostrate and wriggling ever closer and denser about the white and straining pillar of compulsion that was the body of Chlio under the full strength of the awful, ancient ray of power.

And as men or as souls or as beings of any kind we ceased to be in that white light, and our minds ceased to remember or think, but only listened for the voice of Chlio and that voice itself waited for the order of Zigor to speak.

Zigor walked now to the great ro-mech and shut off the record, for it had accomplished its purpose. And he looked at his white-headed and shaking old father where he sat bound and watching, and he laughed in triumph.

"Now, father, try and give orders here contrary to my own!"

But the older Mephisto answered not at all, nor did he look at the younger man or speak to him. And upon his face was a repugnance, as if he regretted ever having left such a thing as his son live one day.

Still we groveled there before the white, frozen form that had been Chlio—the sultry, the scornful, the beautiful—and Zigor looked at us and laughed. He picked up a thonged whip from where it lay near the throne, and tossed it to Chlio, who caught it dutifully.

"Beat them, my Chlio, they are yours, as you are mine. Beat them; they deserve a reward for all the work they have been doing."

Chlio, her face as blank and empty as stone, swung the whip and brought it down upon the scrawny back of a dwarf. Not a howl of pain came from the blow, but a gasp of exaltation, a sound as of Heaven's gate opening before his astounded eyes. Again and again she brought the whip down upon us, walking through and around us, and we writhed and crawled to get under the descending whip, and our sides ran with blood from the thongs of the whip.

"Enough, Chlio, send them to bed. We will find work for them all in the morning."

Chlio gestured with the now dripping whip, and like mindless servants of her will, we scuttled out of the room, and found places in the many empty rooms about. And because the order had been to sleep, we, at once, became unconscious, oblivious of pain as well as of life itself.

Nydia, still herself, was unaware of the change that the young Zigor had brought upon her friends. Her despair at the change came later, when Zigor put her before a telaug to vaunt his supremacy, his acquisition of power over the minds of all the others.

Old Mephisto, still sitting bound where he had been placed, looked at her pitifully, and said: "I am sorry" and relapsed into the silence he had assumed. Zigor had him taken to his former place of imprisonment, where he himself had spent such a long time under locks and bars.

IGOR, who had small regard for or fear of the blind girl, used her to attend to his duty of the records in the collection—most of which he had never seen, as the Elder Mephisto had never allowed him access to the great old library which contained the secrets of the lost power of the family.

So it was that Nydia, alone in the huge room with the glowering young scion of the most evil family in Earth's history, selected the records in chronological order, played them one by one for his half attentive eyes. Subtly she inserted her own thought interpretations into the recorded scenes and thought sequences, so that the records meant what she wanted them to mean.

This can be done by moving a single control beside the projection nozzle, a great "V" shaped opening, which, by means of a double beam converging upon a single focus gives a solid appearing image. Upon moving the control, one can comment with subtle, unnoticeable abstract thought, merely by looking at a small aperture near the record augmentative tubes, where a pickup-detector takes the thought from the natural body-magnetic beams of the eye and augments them along with the augmentation of the images and thought patterns upon the record.

And so it was that Zigor was educated according to Nydia's ideas of what he should think—rather than from the true, raw evil of the terrible old records of Sathanas' life. (Which did no harm, but little good, for Zigor's mind was incapable of correct logic; being, like all evil people, infected with sun-polarized cell matter in his ego centers, which convert all impulses of the mind into detrimental will.)

"This magic of those ancients, if I could but master it, the world would be helpless