n slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.

Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.

Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....

For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.

There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.

Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.

* * * * *

He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.

With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in