<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
<p>Under the trees, she raised up on tiptoe and kissed the balding forehead
of a tall, dark-robed priest. "Dunderhead," she said, "I think you're
cute." Then she blinked very rapidly and knuckled beneath her eye. "Oh,"
she added, remembering, "I was making yogurt in the biology laboratory
yesterday. There's two gallons of it fermenting under the tarantula
cage. Remember to take it out. And take care of the hamsters. Please
don't forget the hamsters."</p>
<p>Finally, they started once more around the slope of the volcano, and the
temple and grove fell black and green away behind them.</p>
<p>"Two days to get to the ship," said Geo, squinting at the pale sky.</p>
<p>"Perhaps we had better put the jewels together," said Urson. "Keep them
out of harm's way, since we know their power."</p>
<p>"What do you mean?" Iimmi asked.</p>
<p>Urson took Geo's leather purse from his belt. Then he took the jewel
from Geo's neck and dropped it in the purse. Then he held the purse out
for Iimmi to do the same.</p>
<p>"I guess it can't hurt," Iimmi said, dropping his chain into the pouch.</p>
<p>"Here's mine too," Argo said. Urson pulled the purse string closed and
tucked the pouch in at his waist.</p>
<p>"Well," said Geo, "I guess we head for the river, so we can get back to
your sister and Jordde."</p>
<p>"Jordde?" asked Argo. "Who's he?"</p>
<p>"He's a spy for the blind priestesses. He's also the one who cut Snake's
tongue out."</p>
<p>"Cut his—?" Suddenly she stopped. "That's right: four arms, his
tongue—I remember now, in the film!"</p>
<p>"In the what?" asked Iimmi. "What do you remember?"</p>
<p>Argo turned to Snake. "I remember where I saw you before!"</p>
<p>"You know Snake?" Urson asked.</p>
<p>"No, I never met him. But about a month ago I saw a movie of what
happened. It was horrible what they did to him."</p>
<p>"What's a movie?" asked Iimmi.</p>
<p>"Huh?" said Argo. "Oh, it's sort of like the vision screens, only you
can see things that happened in the past. Anyway, Dunderhead showed me
this film about a month ago. Then he took me down to the beach and said
I should have seen something there, because of what I'd learned."</p>
<p>"See something?" Iimmi almost yelled. "What was it?" He took her
shoulder and shook it. "What was it you were supposed to see?"</p>
<p>"Why...?" began the girl, startled.</p>
<p>"Because a friend of mine was murdered and I almost was too because of
something we saw on that beach. Only I don't know what it was."</p>
<p>"But ..." began Argo. "But I don't either. I couldn't see it, so
Dunderhead took me back to the temple."</p>
<p>"Snake?" Geo asked. "Do you know what they were supposed to see? Or why
Argo was taken to see it after she was shown what happened to you?"</p>
<p>The boy shrugged.</p>
<p>Iimmi turned on Snake. "Do you know, or are you just not telling? Come
on now. That's the only reason I stuck with this so far, and I want to
know what's going on!"</p>
<p>Snake shook his head.</p>
<p>"I want to know why I was nearly killed," shouted the Negro. "You know
and I want you to tell me!" Iimmi raised his hand.</p>
<p>Snake screamed. The sound tore over the distended vocal cords. Then he
whirled and ran.</p>
<p>Urson caught him and brought the boy crashing down among leaves. "No you
don't," the giant growled. "You're not going to get away from me this
time. You won't get away from me again."</p>
<p>"Watch it," said Argo. "You're hurting him. Urson, let go!"</p>
<p>"Hey, ease up," said Iimmi. "Snake, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell.
But I do want you to tell me. Very much."</p>
<p>Urson let the boy up, still mumbling, "Well, he's not going to get away
again."</p>
<p>"When did he get away from you the first time?" Geo said, coming over to
the boy. "Let him go. Look, Snake, do you know what there was about the
beach that was so important?"</p>
<p>Snake nodded.</p>
<p>"Can you tell?"</p>
<p>Now the boy shook his head and glanced at Urson.</p>
<p>"You don't have to be afraid of him," Geo said, puzzled. "Urson won't
hurt you."</p>
<p>But Snake shook his head again.</p>
<p>"Well," said Geo, "we can't make you. Let's get going."</p>
<p>"I bet I could make him," the giant mumbled.</p>
<p>"No," said Argo. "I don't think you could. I watched the last time
somebody tried. And I don't think you could."</p>
<p>Late morning flopped over hotly in the sky and turned into afternoon.
The jungle became damp, and bright insects plunged like tiny knives of
blue or scarlet through leaves. Wet foliage brushed against their
chests, faces, and shoulders.</p>
<p>"Why would they show you a film of something awful before taking you to
the beach." Iimmi asked.</p>
<p>"Maybe it was supposed to have made me more receptive to what we saw,"
said Argo.</p>
<p>"If horror makes you receptive to what ever it was," said Iimmi, "I
should have been about as receptive as possible."</p>
<p>"What do you mean?" asked Geo.</p>
<p>"I just watched ten guys get hacked to pieces all over the sand,
remember?"</p>
<p>They walked silently for a time.</p>
<p>"We'll come out at the head of the river. It's a huge marsh that drains
off into the main channel," said Argo presently.</p>
<p>Late afternoon darkened quickly.</p>
<p>"I was wondering about something," Geo said, after a little while.</p>
<p>"What?" asked Argo.</p>
<p>"Hama said that once the jewels had been used to control minds, the
person who used them was infected—"</p>
<p>"Rather the infection was already there," corrected Argo. "That just
brought it out."</p>
<p>"Yes," said Geo. "Anyway, Hama also said that he was infected. When did
he have to use the jewels?"</p>
<p>"Lots of times," Argo said. "Too many. The last time was when I was
kidnaped. He used the jewel to control pieces of that thing you all
killed in the City of New Hope to come and kidnap me and then leave the
jewel in Leptar."</p>
<p>"A piece of that monster?" Geo exclaimed. "No wonder it decayed so
rapidly when it was killed."</p>
<p>"Huh?" asked Iimmi.</p>
<p>"Argo, I mean your sister, told me they had managed to kill one of the
kidnapers, and it melted the moment it died."</p>
<p>"We couldn't control the whole mass," she explained. "It really doesn't
have a mind. But, like everything alive, it has, or had, the double
impulse."</p>
<p>"But what did kidnaping you accomplish, anyway?" Iimmi asked.</p>
<p>Argo grinned. "It brought you here. And now you're taking the jewels
away."</p>
<p>"Is that all?" asked Iimmi.</p>
<p>"Well," said Argo, "Isn't that enough?" She paused for an instant. "You
know I wrote a poem about all this once, the double impulse and
everything."</p>
<p>Geo recited:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"<i>By the dark chamber sits its twin,</i><br/></span>
<span class="i0"><i>where the body's floods begin,</i><br/></span>
<span class="i0"><i>and the two are twinned again,</i><br/></span>
<span class="i0"><i>turning out and turning in.</i>"<br/></span></div>
</div>
<p>"How did you know?" she asked.</p>
<p>"The dark chamber is Hama's temple," Geo said. "Am I right?"</p>
<p>"And it's twin is Argo's," she went on. "They should be twins, really.
And then the twins again are the children. The force of age in each one
opposed to the young force. See?"</p>
<p>"I see," Geo smiled. "And the body's floods, turning in and out?"</p>
<p>"That's sort of everything man does, his going and coming, his great
ideas, his achievements, his little ideas too. It all comes from the
interplay of those four forces."</p>
<p>"Four?" said Urson. "I thought it was just two."</p>
<p>"But it's thousands," Argo explained.</p>
<p>The air was drenching. The leaves had been shiny before. Now they
dripped water on the loose ground. Pale light lapsed through the
branches, shimmered, reflected from leaf to the wet underside of leaf.
The ground became mud.</p>
<p>Twice they heard a sloshing a few feet away, and then the scuttling of
an unseen animal. "I hope I don't step on something that decides to take
a chunk out of my foot."</p>
<p>"I'm pretty good at first aid," Argo said. "It's getting chilly," she
added.</p>
<p>Just then Geo slipped and sank knee-deep in a muddy pool. Urson raced to
the edge of the quicksand bog and grabbed Geo by his good arm. He pulled
till Geo emerged, coated to the thigh with gray mud.</p>
<p>"You all right?" Urson asked. "You sure you're all right?"</p>
<p>Geo nodded, rubbing the stump of his arm with his good hand. "I'm all
right," he said. The trees had almost completely given out. Geo suddenly
saw the whole swamp sinking in front of him. He splashed a step
backwards, but Urson caught his shoulder. The swamp wasn't sinking,
though. But ripples had begun to appear over the water, spreading,
crossing, webbing the whole surface with a net of tiny waves.</p>
<p>Then they began to rise up. Green backs broke the surface, wet and
slippery. They were standing now, torrents cascading their green faces,
green chests. Three of them, now a fourth. Four more, and then more, and
then many more. They stood, now, these naked, green, mottled bodies.</p>
<p>Geo felt a sudden tugging in his head, at his mind. Looking around he
saw that the others felt it too.</p>
<p>"Them ..." Urson started.</p>
<p>"They're the ones who carried us ..." Geo began. The tug came again, and
they stepped forward.</p>
<p>Iimmi put his hand on his head. "They want us to go with them...." And
suddenly they were going forward, slipping into the familiar state of
half-consciousness which had come when they had crossed the river, to
the City of New Hope, or when they had first fallen into the sea.</p>
<p>Wet hands fell on their bodies as they were guided through the swamp.
They were being carried through deeper water. Now they were walking over
dry land where the vegetation was thicker, and slimy boulders caught
shards of sunset on their wet flanks, blood leaking on the gray, the wet
gray, and the green.</p>
<p>Through a rip in the arras of vegetation, they saw the moon push through
the clouds, staining them silver. A rock rose in silhouette against the
moon. On the rock a naked man stood, staring at the white disk. White
highlighted one side of his body. As they passed, he howled (or anyway,
opened his mouth and threw his head back. But their ears were full of
night and could not hear.) and dropped to all fours. A breeze blew
momentarily in the sudden plume of his tail, in the scraggly hair of the
under-belly, and light lay white on the points of his ears, his
lengthened muzzle, his thinned hind legs. The animal turned its head
once, and then scampered down the rock and into the darkness as a
curtain of trees swung across the opened sky.</p>
<p>Eyes of flame whipped ahead of them as water swirled their knees once
more. Then the water went down and sand washed back under the soles of
their feet on the dark beach. The beating of the sea, the rush of the
river, and the odor of the wet leaves that fingered their cheeks,
prodded their shins, and slapped against their bellies as they moved
forward, all this fell away. Red eyes wavered into flaming tongues, and
the tongues showed themselves housed in the mouths of a dozen caves.</p>
<p>Light flickered on the wet rocks and they entered the largest one. Their
eyes suddenly focused once more. Foam washed back and forth over the
sand floor, and black chains of weeds, caught in crevices on the rock,
lengthened over the sand with the inrush of water. Webbed hands
released them.</p>
<p>Brown rocks rose around in the firelight. They raised their eyes to
where the Old One sat. The long spines were strung with shrunken
membrane. His eyes, gray and indistinct, were close to the surface of
his broad nostriled face. A film of water trickled over the rock where
he sat. Others stood about him, on various levels of the rock.</p>
<p>The tugging left them, and they glanced at one another now. Outside the
cave it was raining hard. Geo saw that Argo's hair had wet to dark
auburn and hugged her head now, making little streaks down her neck.</p>
<p>Suddenly a voice boomed at them, like an echo, more than the
reverberation that the cave would give. "Carriers of the jewels," it
began, and suddenly Geo realized that it was the same hollowness that
accompanied Snake's soundless messages. "We have brought you here to
give a warning. We are the oldest forms of intelligence on this planet,"
continued the Old One from the throne. "We have watched from the delta
of the Nile the rise of the pyramids; we have seen the murder of Caesar
from the banks of the Tiber. We watched the Spanish Armada destroyed by
English, and we followed Man's great metal fish through the ocean before
the Great Fire. We have never aligned ourselves with either Argo or
Hama, but rise in the sexless swell of the ocean. We can warn you, as we
have warned man before. As before, some will listen, some will not. Your
minds are your own, now. That I pledge you. Now, I warn you; cast the
jewels into the sea.</p>
<p>"Nothing is ever lost in the sea, and when the evil has been washed from
them with time and brine, they will be returned to man. For then time
and brine will have washed away his imperfections also.</p>
<p>"No living intelligence is free from their infection, nothing with the
double impulse of life. But we are old, and can hold them for a million
years before we will be so infected as you are. Your young race is too
condensed in its living to tolerate such power at its fingers now. Again
I say: cast these into the sea.</p>
<p>"The knowledge which man needs to alleviate hunger and pain from the
world of men is contained in two monasteries on this island. Both have
the science to put the jewels to use, to the good use which is possible
with them. Both have been infected. In Leptar, however, where you carry
these jewels, there is no way at all to utilize them for anything but
evil. There will only be the temptation to destroy."</p>
<p>"What about me?" Argo suddenly piped up. "I can teach them all sorts of
things in Leptar." She took one of Snake's hands. "We used one for our
motor."</p>
<p>"You will find something else to make your motor turn," came the voice.
"You still have to see something that you have not yet seen?"</p>
<p>"At the beach?" demanded Iimmi.</p>
<p>"Yes," nodded the Old One, with something like a sigh, "at the beach. We
have a science that allows us to do things which to you seem
impossibilities, as when we carried you in the sea for weeks without
your body decaying. We can enter your mind as Snake does. And we can do
much else. We have a wisdom which far surpasses even Argo's and Hama's
on Aptor. Will you then cast the jewels into the sea and trust them with
us?"</p>
<p>Here Urson interrupted. "How can we give you the jewels?" he said. "How
can we be sure you're not going to use them against Argo and Hama once
you get them. You say nobody is impervious to them. And we've only got
your say so on how long it would take you to fall victim. You can
already influence minds. That's how you got us here. And according to
Hama, that's what corrupts. And you've already done it."</p>
<p>"Besides," Geo said. "There's something else. We've nearly messed this
thing up a dozen times trying to figure out motives and counter motives.
And it always comes back to the same thing: we've got a job to do, and
we ought to do it. We're suppose to return Argo and the jewels to the
ship, and that's what we're doing."</p>
<p>"He's right," said Iimmi. "It's the general rule again. Act on the
simplest theory that holds all the information."</p>
<p>The Old One sighed again. "Once, fifteen hundred years ago, a man who
was to maneuver one of the metal birds walked and pondered by the sea.
He had been given a job to do. We tried to warn him, as we tried to warn
you. But he jammed his hands into the pockets of his khaki uniform, and
uttered to the waves the words you just uttered, and the warning was
shut out of his mind. He scrambled up over the dunes on the beach, never
taking his hands out of his pockets. The next morning, at five o'clock,
when the sun slanted red across the air field, he climbed into his metal
bird, took off, flew for some time over the sea, looking down on the
water like crinkled foil under the heightening sun, until he reached
land again. Then he did his job: he pressed a button which released two
shards of fire metal in a housing of cobalt. The land flamed. The sea
boiled in the harbors. And two weeks later he was also dead. That which
burned your arm away, poet, burned away his whole face, boiled his lungs
in his chest and his brain in his skull."</p>
<p>There was a pause. And then, "Yes, we can control minds. We could have
relieved the tiredness, immobilized the fear, the terror, immobilized
all his unconscious reasons for doing what he did, just as man can now
do with the jewels. But had we, we would have also immobilized the—the
honor which he clung to. Yes, we can control minds, but we do not." Now
the voice swelled. "But never, since that day on the shore before the
Great Fire, has the temptation to do so been as great as now." Again the
voice returned to normal. "Perhaps," and there was almost humor in it
now, "the temptation is too great, even for us. Perhaps we have reached
the place where the jewels would push us just across the line where we
have never before gone, make us do those things that we have never done.
You have heard our warning now. The choice, I swear to you, is yours."</p>
<p>They stood silent in the high cave, the fire on their faces weaving
brightness and shadow. Geo turned to look at the rain-blurred darkness
outside the cave's entrance.</p>
<p>"Out there is the sea," said the voice again. "Your decision quickly.
The tide is coming in...."</p>
<p>It was snatched from their minds before they could articulate it. Two
children saw a bright motor turning in the shadow. Geo and Iimmi saw the
temples of Argo in Leptar. Then there was something darker. And for a
moment, they all saw all the pictures at once.</p>
<p>A wave splashed across the floor, like twisted glass before the rock on
which the fire stood. Then it flopped wetly across the burning driftwood
which hissed into darkness. Charred sticks turned, glowing in the water,
and were extinguished.</p>
<p>Rain was buffeting them; hands held them once more, pulling them into
the warm sea, the darkness, and then nothing....</p>
<p>Snake was thinking again, and this time through the captain's eyes.</p>
<p><i>The cabin door burst open in the rain. Wind whipped her wet veils about
her in the door as lightning made them transparent, blackening her
body's outline. Jordde rose from his seat. She closed the door on
thunder.</i></p>
<p><i>"I have received the signal from the sea," she said. "Tomorrow you
pilot the ship into the estuary."</i></p>
<p><i>The captain's voice: "But Priestess Argo, I cannot take the ship into
Aptor. We already have lost ten men; I cannot sacrifice ..."</i></p>
<p><i>"And the storm," smiled Jordde. "If it is like this tomorrow, how can I
take her through the rocks?"</i></p>
<p><i>Her nostrils flared as her lips compressed to a chalky line. She was
regarding Jordde.</i></p>
<p><i>The captain's thoughts: What is between them, this confused tension. It
upsets me deeply, and I am tired.</i></p>
<p><i>"You will pilot the boat to shore tomorrow," Argo nearly hissed. "They
have returned, with the jewels!"</i></p>
<p><i>The captain's thoughts: They speak to each other in a code I don't
understand. I am so tired, now. I have to protect my ship, my men, that
is my job, my responsibility.</i></p>
<p><i>But Argo turned to the captain. "I hired you to obey me. I order you to
pilot this ship to Aptor's shore tomorrow morning."</i></p>
<p><i>The captain's thoughts; Yes, yes. The fatigue and the unknowing. But I
must fulfill, must complete. "Jordde," he began.</i></p>
<p><i>"Yes, captain," answered the mate, anticipating. "If the weather is
permitting, sir, I will take the ship as close as I can get." He smiled
now, a thin curve over his face, and turned toward Argo.</i></p>
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