"You're crazy!" Evan Harwich stormed fiercely. "You're a liar!"
But his furious tone was tremulous with doubt, even as he spoke. He
knew at once that he'd just grabbed onto these words, and uttered them,
maybe because, somehow, he hated Bayley, and wanted to contradict his
seemingly impossible claims. But in this temple of un-Earthly marvels,
one's whole standard of judgment was upset. Possible and impossible
became meaningless terms here, at the foot of this great, whirring
pyramid, which seemed a symbol of omnipotence.
"Crazy?" Bayley questioned. "No, Harwich, you can't say that, when
you're all tangled up and fuddled yourself! What I said about wishing
is true. Telepathic control of machines, it must be. This place is so
damned wonderful that it would turn Aladdin of the Wonderful Lamp green
with envy! And it would drive the Genie of the Lamp down into his shoes
in shame!"
Harwich's doubts, if they had been doubts, and not just confusions,
began to dim a trifle. After all, one of the big objectives of the
science of Earthmen, was to make life easier; to transfer as much of
the burden of work as possible to machines. Why couldn't the same
objective have been conceived here on the Forbidden Moon? Not only
conceived, but accomplished? Io was an old world; life had begun here
sooner than on Earth, and science, too! So there had been more time for
advancement.
"All right, Bayley," Harwich growled grudgingly. "Tell us what you've
discovered."
"Yes, for Pete sake, tell us!" Paul Arnold joined in.
It was odd, the way they were asking the fat printer for information,
now, when they should be hating him for the wrongs he had done them.
But, perhaps, the human mind can hold only so much at one time. For
the moment there was room only for dazed awe and questioning in their
thoughts, and hatred was temporarily pushed into the background. The
equal of Aladdin's miracles did not seem so far from possibility, here!
"Okay!" George Bayley rumbled. "Glad to spill the beans; what I know
of them. I arrived here in my space ship about fourteen hours ago,
when it was still dark. The Tower building here looked by far the most
important, so I came straight to it. There were machines flying about,
but they paid no attention to me at all, so I wasn't worried much about
what they might do to me.
"Leaving my ship on the other side of the Tower, I got into this room
through a tunnel. I was wearing a space armor, of course. I passed
through a kind of airlock. This chamber was just like you see it now,
except that lights were burning, because it was night."
"And then?" Paul Arnold questioned eagerly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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