“What, uh, did happen, Hantis?” the captain asked. “I seem almost to remember that I … but-“
The Sprite image shrugged.
“We’re not really sure, Captain Mung. One moment we were on your ship, the next we were in this place! It’s the place of a great being called Moander. We haven’t seen him but he’s talked to us. He’s upset because nothing was supposed to be able to get in here and now we’ve come in, through time! It must have been a warp. But Moander won’t believe yet it was an accident.”
“He’d better believe it!” snorted the captain haughtily, playing his part. “When Koloth the Great learns how his couriers have been welcomed here-“
“Moander says, sir,” Goth-Hantis interrupted, “that in his time the Emperor Koloth the Great has been dead more than three hundred years! Moander thinks we’re perhaps spies of his enemies. He’s setting this place up now so nobody else can get in the same way. Then we’ll go to his laboratory so he can talk to us. He-“
“GRAZEEM!” a great voice shouted deafeningly in the fog above them. “Grazeem! Grazeem! Grazeem… “ The word seemed to echo away into the distance. Then there was more shouting all around them by the same mighty voice.
“What’s the yelling about?” the captain asked in what he felt would be Captain Mung’s impatient manner.
“Moander talking to the other machines,” said the grik-dog. “Got a different language for each of them, don’t know why. It’s just a big, dumb machine, like they said.”
“Pul, you-“
“ ‘S’all right, Goth,” the grik-dog told the Sprite. “Grazeem’ means ‘all units’. Moander’s talking to all of them now. Machine that was listening to us won’t till Moander stops again. You got something to say, better say it!”
“Guess she’s right, Captain!” Goth-Hantis said hurriedly. “Vatch got us into Moander’s place on the Worm World, our time. Haven’t relled it, so it’s not here. Got any ideas?”
“Not yet. You?”
“Uh-uh. Just been here a few minutes.”
“The vatch figures there’s something we can do if we’re smart enough to spot it,” the captain said. “Keep your minds ticking! If somebody sees something and we can’t talk, say, uh-“
“Starkle?” suggested the grik-dog.
“Eh? All right, starkle. That will mean ‘attention!’ or ‘notice that!’ or ‘get ready!’ or ‘be careful!’ and…”
“Starkle!” said the grik-dog. “All-units talk’s stopping!”
The captain couldn’t tell much difference in the giant shouting, but again they probably could trust the Leewit in that. Whatever machine had been listening to them had begun to listen again. Goth-Hantis was glancing about, the image’s big, pointed, furry ears twitching realistically.
“Looks like we’ve started to move,” she announced. “Probably going to Moander’s laboratory, like he said…” The fog substance enveloping the spherical hollow which contained them, and which must be the interior of a globular force field, was streaming past with increasing swiftness. There was no sensation of motion, but the appearance of it was that the globe was rushing on an upward slant through the gigantic structure on the surface of Manaret, Moander’s massive stronghold, which the captain had glimpsed in a screen view during his talk with Cheel the Lyrd-Hyrier. The fog darkened and lightened successively about them, giving the impression that they were being passed without pause through one section of the interior after another. Sounds came now and then, presumably those of working machine units, and mingling with them, now distant, now from somewhere nearby, the shouted commands of Moander resounded and dropped away behind them.
Then, suddenly, there was utter silence … the vast, empty, icy kind of silence an audio pickup brings in from space. There were blurs of shifting color in the fog substance ahead and on all sides; and the fog no longer was rushing past but clinging densely about the globe, barely stirring. Evidently they had hurtled out of the stronghold and were in space above Manaret, and if Moander chose to deactivate the field about them now, the captain thought, neither the vatch’s planning nor any witch tricks his companions knew could keep their lives from being torn from them by the unpleasantly abrupt violence of the void.
It seemed a wrong moment to move or speak, and Goth and the Leewit appeared to feel that, too. They stood still together, waiting in the cold, dark stillness of space while time went by, a minute, or perhaps two or three minutes. The vague colors in the fog which clung about the force field shifted and changed slowly. What the meaning of that was the captain couldn’t imagine. There was nothing to tell them here whether the globe was still in motion or not.
But then a blackness spread out swiftly ahead and the globe clearly was moving towards it. The blackness engulfed them and they remained surrounded by it for what might have been a minute again, certainly no longer, before the globe slid out into light. After a moment then, the captain discovered that the fog was thinning quickly about them. He began to make out objects through it and saw that the force field had stopped moving.
They were within a structure, perhaps a large ship, which must be stationed in space above the surface of Manaret. The force globe was completely transparent, and as the last wisps of fog stuff steamed away, they saw it had stopped near the center of a long, high room. The only way the captain could tell they were still enclosed by it was that they were not standing on the flooring of the room but perhaps half an inch above it, on the solid transparency of a force field.
Almost as he realized this, the field went out of existence. There was the small jolt of dropping to the floor. Then he was in the room, with the images of a Nartheby Sprite and a grik-dog standing beside him.
The room, which was a very large one, had occupants. From their appearance and immobility, these might have been metal statues, many of them modeled after various living beings, but the captain’s immediate feeling was that they were something other than statues. The largest sat on a throne-like arrangement filling the end of the room towards which he, Goth, and the Leewit faced. It could have been an obese old idol, such as primitive humanity might have worshipped; the broad, cruel face was molded in the pattern of human features, with pale blank disks for eyes which seemed to stare down at the three visitors, It was huge, towering almost to the room’s ceiling, which must have been at least seventy feet overhead. Except for the eye-disks, the shape seemed constructed of the same metal as the throne on which it sat, rough-surfaced metal of a dark bronze hue which gave the impression of great age and perhaps was intended to do so.
A round black table, raised six feet from the floor, stood much closer to the center of the room; in fact, not more than twenty feet from the captain. On it another bronze shape sat cross-legged. This one was small, barely half the size of a man. It was crudely finished, looked something like an eyeless monkey. In its raised right hand it held a bundle of tubes’ which might have been intended to represent a musical instrument, like a set of pipes. The blind head was turned towards this device.
The remaining figures, some thirty or forty of them and no two alike, stood or squatted in two rows along the wall on either side of the captain and the witch sisters, spaced a few feet apart. Most of these were of more than human size; almost all were black, often with the exception of the eyes. Several, including a menacing, stern-faced warrior holding a gun, seemed modeled after humanity; and across from the warrior stood a black-scaled image which might have been that of Cheel, the Lyrd-Hyrier lord of Manaret. None of the others were recognizable as beings of which the captain had heard. The majority were shapes of nightmares to human eyes.
This was Moander’s laboratory? Except for its disquieting assembly of figures, the great room seemed to hold nothing. The captain glanced up towards the ceiling. Much of that was a window, or a screen which served as a window. Through it one looked into space. And space was alive with the colors they had seen vaguely through the fog enclosing the force globe. Here they blazed brilliantly and savagely, and he could guess at once what they were; reflections of the great network of energy barriers Moander and his Nuris had constructed about the Worm World between the dead suns of the Tark Nembi Cluster. As he gazed, something edged into view at one side of the screen, blotting out the fiery spectacle. It was the metallic surface of Manaret. The structure of which this room was a part appeared to be rotating, turning the viewscreen now towards space, now to the Worm World far below it.