only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."

"To the mountain, you mean."

"And into it, if need be."

The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you--are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"

Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."

* * * * *

The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."

"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."

"Do you believe that?"

"As one believes stories."

"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.

"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.

"Because of them we must build with dream