Instantly the great couch fell like a stone upon us. As it crashed to the floor, two of the metal legs of the thing bent like putty with the force of the fall. The crash must have awoke Chlio, our sultry-eyed friend, for she called over the invisible telaug beam into the room.
"Is anyone hurt?"
I answered a little roughly, for falling asleep on watch is unforgivable under the conditions of cavern life. For it is by inducing sleep with a nerve deadening ray that the dero's overcome a watch and kill a whole group in their sleep.
"No, but small thanks to your careful watch. Some of us had better help you keep awake."
"That might be wise," she answered, laughing. "Particularly if it were you or that nice young Solaris. Come, I will guide you."
I looked at Nydia, and stood in doubt, for the sensual, frank thought of Chlio had not been entirely concealed from us on the beam, and she was no woman to spend a night with without suspicion and Nydia's heart was one I had no wish to hurt. Solaris understood, and nothing loath, went to the door and left, guided by a thought beam from Chlio, somewhere overhead.
One would have thought that would have ended the night's mysterious happenings, but I was reckoning without knowledge of the mad bunch who festered there under old Mephisto's once iron hand.
I was just drifting into a dream of days when Nydia used to come to me in my prison cell, and her flower-sweet face was drifting closer and closer to my own, my mind was slipping into a soft blackness that was her imagined embrace crossed with the gentle blackness of night itself, when the face that was Nydia's contorted savagely, swiftly—and facing me instead was the red-lit eyes, the snarling over-ripe lips, the sharp teeth, the reaching hungry hands of some horrible vampire. A demoness was wrapping her mental self about my soul. I woke with a curse for it is great mental pain to see the image of one's beloved turn into the face of a revolting ghoul of the medieval darkness, and as I opened my eyes, I cursed again.
For still before me in the darkness floated the very face that had frightened me awake. It was not unreal, not a projection, it was the living flesh of a fiend in a woman's body, and from her hands streamed the lure, the doping compulsion of the pleasure stim-rays I was familiar with as the most seducing and irresistible of the ancient's works. This force of irresistible allure surrounded this evil-eyed female with a strength greater than any physical force could resist.
I felt her hands on my shoulders, and I was frozen. She bent and her sharp teeth sank into my neck. And even as I felt that in spite of all my knowledge that such things were always an illusion produced by the antique mechanisms, a superstitious horror froze me immovable in her terrible embrace. Then as gradually as dawn-light another presence grew into being in the room, and the face of the luxurious lipped Chlio came out of the shadow, filling the room with an unearthly, almost divine aura from the God-ray mech she was using. She seized the solid-seeming hypnotic-powered ray projection of the mad girl by the shoulder, and led her back—out of my sight. The twin vision, as opposed as Heaven and Hell, disappeared.
Soon after, I heard a mad screaming, as of an insane woman being beaten, and I was bothered no more that night.
The next day we were called to re-enter the presence of Mephisto at an early hour. In the ever-dark caves, time—sunlight and dark; noon and midnight—are exactly the same except for the clock. Too, there is always a ray watching something in the sunlit world overhead, piercing up through the rock to bring the vision of sunlight and green leaves down to the screens of the vision rays, and one senses day and night by these two things.
We found the lean old Lord of the Darkness in his library, this was that library where countless ancestors' acquisitions had accumulated, brought from far ends of the cavern world to one or another of the Mephisto's homes, and then to this place where the Mephisto's great Zigor had assembled it all together in the single great collection. Records and spools of thought were stacked in endless tiers in a vast room, and several great record-reader-mech stood about the chamber. This modern, aged, scion of the ancient family waved a hand at his ancestor's collection of the immense and usually enigmatic ancient wisdom that the spools of wire and metal micro-film represented,
