Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/81

Rh poorly." And among the workmen whom I saw very often but knew not at all intimately, Nueces was looked up to as the spokesman. He, like all priests, had built himself up for years as an intermediary between themselves and the Goddess Tanit—and tried to do the same between the ruler Tanil and themselves. Tanil's activity with her dolls took much of her day. And Nueces was very industrious in placing himself in the good regard of these workmen who were the real lifeblood of the place. They were, some of them, people from the surface, but for the most part they were the underworld, alien types, whom I had the greatest difficulty in understanding.

Their mental processes were very different from men of the surface. They were born reactionaries, seeming to prefer not having rights to being bothered with them. Which did not seem to annoy anyone but the few surface-trained electricians and technicians who had learned to repair and service some of the ancient machines in constant use. To Nueces it was these cavern people went when they wanted something, and it was his promises and explanations they listened to when they did not get what they wanted.

So it was that when Nueces saw his opportunity he had a number of these people in his confidence.

It happened this way. Tanil had decided to make a trip up to the city to buy materials. Materials she had to have to build the great number of dolls she was planning on using—materials of many kinds I could not imagine her using. But she had strange needs. Silk screens for art work, what did she want of them? Plastics of the new strengths lately developed, a long list of apparently unrelated materials, which I knew could only be used to construct some electric mechanisms of a nature to handle great quantities of electric of the static sort—stored on large areas of dielectric. But all of Tanil's work was mysterious to me, even though it was my own field.

She took Kyra and I with her on the trip; and as we returned, riding gloomily along in the taxi toward the entrance in that unassuming little grimy store on Portland Street, things happened!

Control from an exterior source of nerve energy is a very strange thing to happen to a man. There is nothing else like it, nothing that takes a man out of the illusion of being a free agent in life. Suddenly you do things without volition, you are a by-stander in your own mind. A mechanical doll your body. Yourself, the little thing in your brain that dignifies your thought with a consciousness of identity. Your ego suddenly becomes only a passenger, wondering what is going to happen next.

HAT is how it happened to me. Suddenly my hands rose up and began to choke Tanil. Nothing I could do about it, it was my body doing it and I had no control. Something outside me was directing my body. Logic, reason, nothing I thought had any connection with my actions, with the horrible things my hands were doing to Tanil's lovely neck. She fought, kicked, scratched—and then Kyra leaped upon my back, pounding, screaming at me.

Tanil's hands fumbled a small object, crushed it. I smelled a funny odor. Even as my eyes noted the purpling face of Tanil and squeezed a little harder to make sure she was properly dying, the peculiar odor rose stronger in the cab. A cloud of weird, coiling smoke swirled heavier about me. I breathed it in, and the contorted, lovely straining face before my horrified eyes drained away into a great black tunnel into which we were rushing. I was unconscious.

When I woke up, it was to the smell of ether, of disinfectant, of the soft brisk feet of rubber-soled nurses, rustling their white-starched selves past my bed. I looked around, a forty-bed ward, I guessed. All those sick people, and me one of them! What was it, a plague?

As I raised up to see better, a man got up from a chair beside me.

"I'm police. We found you and two women unconscious in a taxi. Driver said he smelled gas, but that the smell went away. Got anything to say?"

I looked at him, wondering just what he would do if I told him the truth. I knew! He would have me transferred to the psychopathic ward.

"Nothing I could say would tell you a thing. I smelled something and passed out in a cloud of yellow smoke. That is all."

"That's not much help. We know that much. But why? Who would want to harm you? Who are you? Give us some idea of why such a thing would occur to you?"

"I couldn't tell you a thing. Brother, not a thing!" I couldn't help grinning.