as ever you suspected you were, Kent. Go, while you may!"
KYRA, her lovely sea-green eyes filled with streaming tears, bent over Tanil, her mouth working, her hands touching the racked face so tenderly and so pitifully.
"Yes, dearest Mistress . . . yes. The Hidden Ones hate intelligence in anyone. We thought we had found a different sort, but they were only getting us to accomplish work they did not know how to do. They have been hiding their monstrous selves from the sight of men so long they hate us all. They have not real brains left—and cannot stand any in others. I believe they are hateful creatures like Panot, in truth, their evil nature only surpassed by their immense stupidity."
I listened to this mysterious interchange astonished, for to me the only villain of the piece was Nueces Panot. But as we bent over her, a lovely, too lovely voice began to speak beside us—and there was no one here at all! It said, in false sorrow:
"Oh, dear Tanil, we are endlessly grateful for your work, which has taught us so much. Now that you die, we will carry on your efforts, attain your goals for you. Never fear, dear Tanil, your beloved surface fools will have tender care."
The saccharine, mocking voice ended in a hideous titter of weird and ugly triumph, and Tanil's dying face lit with a terrible hate. I would have not wanted to be the owner of that tittering horror voice and been in Tanil's power then.
I bent and whispered:
"We know, Kyra and I. We know and we love you, Tanil. Can you tell us something we can do to save you even yet. It is better you live with such enemies as that voice yet to conquer."
"Kent, you can love Kyra and take care of her, but without me our plans are finished. You can do nothing now. Go up to that City overhead and marry, and then go far away; too far ever to hear that voice again. Be happy, and just citizens. This game is not for you, except you have such as me with you. Forget it."
In a few moments she died.
About her still lovely body gathered the other workers of our cavern, some fifty people who had come and gone, done their work and been what people always are on this earth—just shadows in our unseeing eyes. Softly some of them wept, and I knew they had been more than shadows to Tanil's eyes, and that she had been a glory in their own.
Tanil, I realized, had been a good force in a morass of horrible evil, but had not quite figured out how to overcome that evil and accomplished what she willed without hurting the innocent—had hesitated too long for that very reason.
I turned sadly to Kyra, as the two husky torpedoes came back from their hunt for Nueces.
"Kyra, shall we do what Tanil advised—go up to that city and become normal citizens. Or shall we stay and try to become what she might have succeeded in becoming?"
"Kent, I think that sweet, evil voice that mocked her death also made her tell us to leave by controling her dying body. But there is a way to find that out. You and I will take a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, and when we return our friends here will let us back into these caverns. If they do not let us in, they will drive us away, and we will know that our ugly hidden enemies do not want us here. They will not kill us in the open in the city—as they usually seek to hide the power they have in the ancient mech rays. We will be safe enough, I think. When we return, we will not feel Tanil's death so greatly. We need time now to start over. Time to recover ourselves from this experience. Our friends here will carry on while we are gone. And one day we may yet become what Tanil planned—the saviors of mankind from the morass of war and stupidity that is their life today.
So it was that our honeymoon and the thunder of Niagara's mighty waters spelled release from sorrow and a promise of all the magic of love to us—as it has for others.
But we shall go back and wrest from those forgotten machines and those idling, superior and evil hidden ones the secrets of those dead forgotten sciences that built those vital and needed mechanisms—and give them to the men of the future.
"The dreams of me you had," Kyra one day explained, "were due to one kind of machine they built. As a little girl, playing in those same caverns, I watched you and loved you—and made your mind my own. It was wrong of me? They were good dreams I made; were they not?"
What would you say? The same as I, would you not?
