_Now listen, lads, and you, Lady Nirea. I came from a world that may have had its rugged spots, but it was heaven and Utopia compared with this one. You disinterred me at the damndest most vital moment of your history, and probably of Earth's as well--we've had conquerors aplenty, but always of this world, not from out of it. It seems to me that if your rebellion fails, you're due for worse treatment than ever. You've got to win, and win fast. Any entity that has atomic weapons is going to be no easy mark, and the gentry have guns. How about you people? Ten? Ten guns altogether? Oohh...._ _See here. That big machine over there is a--well, that's hopeless. I'll try to break this down in one-syllable words. Orbish words, I hope._ _That big thing sends up rays like beams of sunlight but of different intensity, color, wave length, et cetera--it sends up beams that counteract, I mean work against, destroy, other beams. Now the buttons are held up there by forces in diamonds, taken out by these globes of yours and used to hold up their homes, ships, saucers, buttons. The beams from that big thing will destroy the diamond beams and make the buttons fall._ _There's just one thing. We have to get the machine, the thing, out of this cave and onto the surface of the earth. You catch my meaning? It has to have sky above it before it can work against the button-beams. Yes, much like your globes' telepathy (what a word to survive, when "glass" and "electricity" didn't) and hypnosis fails when rock gets in the way._ _Can you get it to the surface? Talk it over, Mink. It can give you plenty of help ... if you can get it up there. I'll just sit here, if it's okay with you, and let my imagination boggle at what you've told me._ _I have the most confounded urgent feeling that this is a visit I'm making in a time machine, and that tomorrow I'll go back to good old 2084. Johnnie, Johnnie, wake up! You're here!_ _God!_ CHAPTER XIII The Mink he takes his pick and gun, He ranges through the towns; His force is miners, trappers, thieves-- And a girl in gentry-gown. The rebels ride on stolen nags, They travel on shanks' mare; The gore's awash, the heads they roll, All in the torches' glare. --Ruck's Ballad of the Mink Revel the Mink and his eight troops crouched in the dark entrance of the mine. The night was black, clouds had obscured the moon, and only the occasional pinpoints of globes drifting between the buttons above them broke the gloom. "What are they doing?" hissed Nirea. "Why haven't we been attacked long since?" "The globes move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform," muttered John Klapham. "I'll wager there's something like that in the Globate Credo." "Almost those words." Revel glanced at him respectfully. This man of the Ancient Kingdom had great mental powers.