Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/87

Rh let these things happen to those who served them? Or whether they were really so formidable as Tanil seemed to think not to be able to protect their own from such as Nueces. Or whether Neuces was not their spy and tool, expressing and encompassing their fear of wisdom like Tanil's, the tool of their own traitorous minds that could never support a more able person than themselves? But in truth, of their nature I knew nothing. FINISHED, shouted to Tanil.

"All set!"

She dropped the booster cable she was hooking to still another great generator, came racing toward me across the vast floor.

Even as she came, a silver ray—ghastly yet beautiful—leaped in through the rock walls, played over Tanil's lovely, supple figure softly. It was a weirdly beautiful and yet heart-breaking sight to see her freeze, her face and her wonderful tall figure contort into agonized lines as death raced through her. I stood with a terrible sorrow and a feeling of futile helplessness tearing through my breast. I knew she was dying and I was helpless! I could not think of anything to do toward saving her. Frantically my hands sought the utterly mysterious controls of the Elder race mech before me, and miraculously from my ignorant fingers' motions, a ray, a strange lovely beam of power, throbbed outward from the enigmatic heart of the great mech. Desperately my frantic hands tried dial after dial and knob after knob—

Kyra came running, her sweet face a piteous mask of terrible loss at Tanil's plight. She had been working at the other mech beside Tanil, seen the deadly silver ray freezing her, ducked around its deadly circle of ghastly beauty, raced toward me.

Her clever hands sent the great beam I had started inadvertently into action, sent it swiftly swinging along the path of deadly silver light—beautiful as moonlight—as terrifying to the sensing of its electric force as a viper's venom trickling up the nostrils.

Her little tapered fingers plied several tiny lever-switches upon the great keyboard of intricate controls. Then she reached out and touched a finger into the beam where it shot from the center of the mech. Her finger shriveled, disappeared and she gasped with the sudden voluntarily assumed agony of the searing pain. Then she sent the now deadly atuned beam leaping on and on, across the now glass-like transparency of the adamantine under-rocks, seeking Nueces with the penetrative power ray.

At its end we finally found Nueces, his hair standing straight up with electric and with fear, his face working with ugly triumph as he kept the silver beam upon the now prostrate body of his enemy, Tanil. He was a cornered rat clinging, biting to the end.

As Kyra touched him with the great beam, he screamed, a sound to haunt a man's dreams—screamed and screamed—and quite suddenly stopped. The flesh shriveled under the far power of the beam, shriveled tightly about his bones, and under our eyes his body turned swiftly to mummy-like appearance, dried up, fell like a sack of dried sticks, his mouth still working feebly—and then turned slowly to powder before our eyes.

Those were terrible rays that the ancients manufactured and hid within the intricacies of their machines that only the wiser initiates might know where weapons lay.

The index finger of Kyra's finger was gone I noted as she shut off the power of the death ray. I realized she had not hesitated at all to sacrifice her hand for Tanil's sake. I leaped forward now to where Tanil lay, still under the silver death beam, where Nueces' death had left it full upon her.

I tugged her body from under the beam with one swift motion. The deadly moon-whiteness lay in a round circle of vicious emanations as I carried her to a huge couch at the side of the room.

Tanil looked piteously up at me, and that was the hardest thing I ever went through, to look into her confident eyes, once receptacle of endless unknown secrets, now stricken and begging me for release from her inward agony. She gasped:

"It is too late. The hidden ones have double-crossed me sooner than I expected, though I knew they would do that one day anyway. I have been deluding myself and others. They could have protected us, Kent; they chose not to do so! You and Kyra leave here, go far away. They are not good, these hidden ones that loom over such work as ours. They have duped me into working out a system of absolute tyranny for them to fasten on your United States. I have been as much a dupe