Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/79

Rh two hands. I knew that, and I feared her.

She was an alien, powerful, above and outside the law. I was an American inventor who had already given her my best invention, and control over my actions, my soul. Perhaps I was being a dupe, falling for glossing words and sweet smiles. An entire dupe! Where would her domination end if I kept on giving her myself? I would be nothing but a monkey on a stick.

My head in a whirl again, my heart torn between the strange loyalty Tanil had inspired in me, and my own knowledge that she had appropriated to herself both my work and my will left me not even freedom. I went in to Kyra, suspicious even of her.

AYS went by swiftly, in a kind of daze of working and waiting, of pleasure in the subtle contention between the two women, Tanil and Kyra, over my affections, and in a growing comprehension of what they were doing. A growing dread that the peculiar activity of these peoples would result in no good for the human race came to live with me. There was evil about it, but just why and what the threat was I could not fathom.

It took me many days to absorb what Tanil was about, what she intended. When I did understand, a kind of dread of my own conclusions and doubt of my own ability to analyze such work from a moral standpoint was my attitude.

I watched her working, always working with the dolls. To me it was unholy, mysterious, pure black magic. It was a subtle, invisible enslavement of men to her purposes. Even if her purposes were of the purest white, she was at the same time setting up a machine for absolute rule that might be seized at any time by the "Hidden Ones" whom she served, as I served her.

I could learn almost nothing about them, their purposes, or why they were hidden. From Kyra I learned that they were the old hereditary rules of the sparse population of the endless caverns, and that Tanil was doing a good thing in preparing to break down this barrier between them and the surface world. Sometimes I wondered if Tanil was not being duped by them, rather than that ourselves were duped by Tanil.

The more I learned about Tanil's work the more I doubted my own ability to analyze such alien work from a moral standpoint.

I decided that she herself was not cognizant that her work was potentially evil, that she was inherently incapable of appreciating that a man's soul and self-determination in life were sacred.

On a screen in front of her rapt, lovely face would be a scene in the city overhead. The screen was a kind of televisor, bringing over a beam the scene from above and displaying the city at any magnification she wished. She could make a man's face take up a space four feet in area on that screen, or she could spread it out till a vision of the whole city was displayed, the people but dots wandering in its vastness.

On the great expanse of level floor in the mech-chamber was a miniature reproduction of the city. There were also several larger-scale reproductions of central sections of the city, just that size in which those dolls of hers could move about as though they were normal-sized men. The dolls, placed in these three-dimensioned duplicates of the city above, went through exactly those actions she told them to with her mental control.

On the screen in front of her she watched people in the city overhead, those of whom she had doll duplicates especially. For those people duplicated with their actions and movements precisely the motions of the dolls, and the dolls moved as she dictated with a thought-beam upon them. So of course she was in reality controlling those people, and they were quite unconscious of it.

Just what her purpose was in this practice of hers I could not guess, unless it was to accustom the people themselves to this control in many actions and over long periods when they did only normal things and so would not notice when the control made them do things they would not normally have done.

In time, I guessed another answer to this question, and a greater dread of her seized me, for I could not but think that what she was doing was greatly wrong. I was convinced she was up to no good; but such was her nature one approved of her and could not gainsay her. Even while I feared and detested the things for which she stood, an absolute control of surface life beyond any possibility of free choice in important matters, still I could not convince myself I was opposed to her.