Tower Of The Medusa

8. THE MIND PROBE

Before Kirin could phrase his reply to Azeera’s offer, a diversion occurred.

“Beware of the Earthling, my lady! He means to betray you.”

The cold harsh voice rang out through the stillness of the vaulted room wherein the Space Mirror hung like a globe of mystery above the glistening floor.

Kirin turned to see the man who had entered the chamber unseen by either of them. He was tall and gaunt, with shaven skull. His saffron skin was stretched tightly over sharp cheekbones and jaw, and seamed with a thousand minute, almost invisible wrinkles. His eyes were suave, cool, dark, and appraising. They shone with a mingled amusement and scorn as they probed deep into Kirin’s gaze.

Kirin remembered having seen him at the feast, but he had been seated across the hall and they had exchanged no words. Who was the strange man in the purple robe, and—a chill struck through Kirin as the realization hit him—how did he know the direction of Kirin’s own inmost thoughts?

Azeera turned to observe the intruder.

“What do you here, Pangoy? Do you dare to spy upon your Queen?” she demanded wrathfully. Scorn flashed in his somber eyes as he shook his head.

“Not on you, my lady, but upon the Earthling, yes. I was determined to observe him during your conversation, while remaining unobserved myself. You know my abilities, hence believe me when I say the Earthling is not to be trusted. He means to acquiesce, but only seemingly. To go along with your plans only on the surface. Actually, he means to steal the Medusa and use it for his own ends.”

A cold wave of alarm passed through Kirin, but he fought to control his features and appear calm. “You know my abilities,” the gaunt man with cold, suave eyes had purred. Kirin looked him over speculatively. He had seen a man very much like this many years before. The same saffron skin, shaven pate, and cold merciless eyes.

The sense of alarm grew stronger suddenly. Kirin recalled that the other had been a Nexian. Only too well did he know the strange tales men whispered about the ominous and curious powers of the men of Nex. The Mind Wizards of Nex, he mentally corrected himself. This man was a natural telepath!

Cold eyes fastened on his own, Pangoy smiled a cool, enigmatic smile of ironic malice.

“Your musings are correct, dog of Tellus,” he purred. “I can indeed read the current of your unspoken thoughts.”

Kirin turned to the Witch Queen who surveyed him in silence, the gem-fires of her almond eyes flickering with chill and deadly inquiry. On impulse he blurted out, “He lies, my lady! I say he lies! I know not for what reason, whether to willingly deceive you, or simply because he mis-reads my thoughts, but I say he lies.”

His words hung there echoing in the silence of the room. For a time no one spoke. Pangoy stood aloof and disdainful across the chamber, cold mockery in his eyes, a small ironic smile upon his lips, hands tucked into the voluminous sleeves of his purple robe. The Queen stood between them, slender and regal, her jade arms and shoulders rising from the glittering silver sheath of her metallic gown.

“Perhaps,” she said softly. “Perhaps he does lie.”

A sudden dew glistened on the saffron brows of Pangoy. His smile slipped, faltered, fell. The sheen of perspiration daubed his polished brow.

“My lady, I swear by the thousand gods of space my words are true!”

“Don’t believe him, Azeera,” Kirin said levelly. “He is trying to deceive you for some unknown purpose of his own.”

Her eyes danced with mockery as they turned from Kirin to Pangoy and back again to the dark face of the tall Earthling.

“I am no Mind Wizard, and hence cannot read the inward thoughts of men,” she said. “Thus I cannot say which of you two speaks the truth and which utters a vile lie. But I have known Pangoy the longer of you both, and have trusted him ere now. However, I know that he hungers for my love, and is envious of you, Earthling. The jealousy of thwarted lust has often turned a true friend into a deceiving traitor.”

Fury writhed across Pangoy’s pale, drawn features.

“Never would I by word or deed betray you, my Queen!” he swore in a shaking voice. “I have not earned such scathing words of doubt as these!”

She raised one slim hand to silence him.

“Permit me to finish. I was about to propose a testing of the Earthling.” Her eyes glinted with malice and mockery as they burned into Kirin’s. “If he speaks the truth and Pangoy lies, we shall easily learn this. Place the Earthling under the Mind Probe!”

From nowhere appeared two of the metal colossi. Grim and expressionless metal masks glared down at him with eyes of red flame as they seized Kirin’s arms in their cold grasp and forced him out of the chamber. Pangoy and Azeera followed behind him.

Kirin tried to keep his face impassive, but dismay was in his heart. He had heard of the Mind Wizards of Nex and he knew how they could strip a man’s brain bare before the terror of the Probe. He had gambled all on a woman’s vanity, hoping to hurl suspicion on Pangoy through the sheer vehemence of his accusation, and because a woman as gorgeous as Azeera would have a natural tendency to believe such an accusation because flattery of her beauty was involved therein.

But he had no illusions. He could not maintain his imposture beneath the merciless beam of the Probe. Before the mental wizardry of the adepts of Nex, his grim determination to stay silent would not long shield him.

Without speaking, he permitted the robot warriors to lead him out of the chamber of the Space Mirror and down a long corridor of glimmering lights.

Pangoy and the Witch Queen looked down at the nude figure strapped to the operating table in Pangoy’s secret chambers. The Earthling lived, but his respiration was shallow. Sweat glistened on his dark skin and stood in cold globules in the lines of his tortured face. His features were distorted, twisted into a mask of silent agony.

Pangoy felt a certain cold pleasure in stripping the mind of the bold young thief who had thought to steal his own place beside Azeera. A curious helmet now surmounted the brows of the Mind Wizard. It was a domed and glittering thing of metal and crystal. Small odd lights flickered and wove amidst the miniscule mechanisms of the helm. This cunning device acted as an amplifier, to augment and direct the force of Pangoy’s own trained mind. To focus his mental probe into a narrow needle-beam with which he searched the shadowy terrain of Kirin’s helpless brain like a cartographer reading a map.

Pangoy had not expected a slightest degree of difficulty in laying Kirin’s inmost thoughts bare. Only a trained telepath of enormous skill and a vast reservoir of inner power could have hoped to avoid the tremendously magnified strength of Pangoy’s brilliant intellect. And, in point of fact, it had been child’s play to insinuate a mental tendril through a small crack in the Earthling’s mental defenses. The next step had been to intensify pressure against this small flaw until the outer walls of Kirin’s mental defenses broke and were crushed. The amplified intelligence of Pangoy could then at his leisure pick through the ruins and expose hidden things to the light of his probing sensors.

But his plans had gone awry.

Just as the mental walls were crumbling and Kirin howled, writhing in the agony of defilement and mental violation, his struggling, tenacious, battling mind somehow tapped a hidden source of mind power. Pangoy knew that the resources of a mind at bay were sometimes extraordinary. But those which Kirin’s mind displayed were something beyond the limits of even the Mind Wizard’s experience.

What had happened was swift and inexplicable. One moment the naked Earthling panted and fought against the Probe, the next instant he was plunged into a death-like sleep. In this trance-like state his mind was dead, lax, unreadable. All energy seemed to drain instantly from the memory-sequences. To the telepathic vision of Pangoy, these mental chains were like glowing paths that coiled and twisted between and around the dim glowing nuclei of the instinctive mind-centers. The blazing memory-sequences could be read like so many illuminated signs. But suddenly the energy source was annulled. The glowing sequences died into somnolent darkness. In the death-like darkness of Kirin’s mind, Pangoy’s attempts to probe his thoughts were useless.

Feeling an unaccustomed sense of frustration, Pangoy one by one withdrew his mind tendrils from the dead citadel. The lights in the steel and crystal helm dimmed, went out. Wearily he removed the curious headpiece and set it in its place atop a low pedestal.

This unusual mental defense-mechanism was something completely beyond Pangoy’s experience. He could do nothing further until such time as the Earthling awakened from his unnatural and death-like trance. He sought to explain this to the Witch Queen.

“I had hoped to strip his mental defenses to such a stage that you could question him yourself, my lady. In such a condition his conscious mind would be helpless and the answers to your queries would spring automatically from his memory-circuits. It is impossible for a man to lie under the Probe; hence you would learn the truth of his accusations and the falsehood of his counter-claims…”

She raised a hand for silence.

“Enough, Pangoy! I am not fully satisfied in the truth of your statements. Let me warn you that if you have slain the Earthling under guise of preparing him for my questioning, if you have destroyed his mind to protect your own position, my vengeance shall be sudden and terrible.”

He bowed humbly before the icy scorn in her voice.

“I swear to you that he lives and is sane! This trance condition is beyond my knowledge, but he will recover normal consciousness with time. Then we shall continue the Probe and you can discover for yourself whether I speak the truth or whether I lie…”

“Very well, Pangoy. We shall continue this at a later time,” she said, and together they left the laboratory.

Kirin was fully conscious of everything about him as Pangoy and Azeera discussed his condition. Although he could hear perfectly his eyes were closed and he had no knowledge of where he was. And he was unable to lift his eyelids and look. It was as if an unbreakable paralysis seized control of all his faculties. Although he strove desperately to break the spell that bound him as if with invisible chains, he could not so much as move a muscle.

His lungs expanded. His chest rose and fell. His heart pumped red blood through his body. All automatic life systems continued operation. But every conscious ability was numbed and rendered helpless. It was an eerie and terrifying state; it was as if his mind was a prisoner, locked and helpless within his own skull.

Within his mind strange forces were at work. He was conscious of them but in a vague, dim way. It was as if doors long sealed were opening one by one. Strange hulking shapes arose from the dark sediment of his bottomless unconscious. Whole unknown segments of memory rose slowly from the black well of the lower mind, that enormous reservoir of racial memory where the conscious mind can never trespass.

The sensation was uncanny. As if colossal submerged icebergs were lifting their titanic bulk out of an unknown and shadowy sea. Enormous sequences of memory rose slowly into the light of his upper mind and connected to his memory circuits. He caught glimpses of unknown lands, strange faces, curious symbols. Colors unknown to mortal man flashed before the inward eye of his mind. Tumbling panoramas of fantastic beauty, strangeness and terror rose into view.

There were colossal mountains of blazing crystal that covered the surface of an unknown planet. Titanic storms of flying fire clove and shattered the crystal ranges and brought their glittering escarpments down in a rain of ringing shards.

Other sectors of previously-submerged memory rose into place, linking with yet more, forming a colossal pattern. It was like the pieces of a mental jigsaw puzzle coming together into a whole.

There were vast and unfamiliar winged shapes of fierce light hurtling through regions of golden coiling mist towards an unknown goal. Then surging mists drove these things from view and when they parted he stared down on the strange purple waters of a nameless sea. Here a scaled and finny folk dwelt in coral cities adorned with giant pearls. He saw their glittering silvery bodies as they clove the winy foam. He watched as they tamed gigantic monsters of the depths to serve as their steeds and as animate weapons of war in a colossal conflict with feathery avians who dwelt in cloud realms above the surface. The wars of the sea and air seemed to occupy endless centuries of slow time. At length the mists drove all from view again.

He was conscious of remembering the sensation of rapid flight through regions of utter darkness and terrible cold. Then the darkness fell away and he strode through halls of golden splendor, where tall faceless beings were throned amidst thunderous light. He stood before them. Streams of unintelligible converse flowed about him; vaguely he understood that a mighty task had been set upon him, a quest of some nature beyond his powers of comprehension.

He departed helmed and armed and cloaked with terrific forces. He descended through seas of stars to a miniature spiral of light, a jewelled pinwheel that looked like a glittering toy against the dark of the abyss. With a distinct shock, the portion of Kirin’s mind that observed these dim memories recognized that jewelled spiral as the galaxy wherein he had been born.

There a Thing moved across the stars. It was invisible; to the sight it could be glimpsed only as a clotted thickness of shadows, a greater darkness against the dark. He closed in battle with the crawling blot of darkness. Tremendous forces surged in that titanic conflict. Stars were torn flaming from their place and hurled against the coiling gloom. Streams of enthropy were levelled against it that would have withered into nothingness any material being. Naught availed against the Thing, ever it came on across starry space.

At length he closed with it in something akin to hand-to-hand battle. Coils of silken shadows settled about him. A wintry cold blew from the clotted nest of writhing night. He battled with blasts of heat and searing light. And then…

But the mind of Kirin was not able to handle the flood of intolerable memories that rose from the dark gulf within his deeper brain. He sank into astounded, stunned unconsciousness. One name, one strange and curious name, echoed and resounded through the vaults of his memory.

Somewhere he had heard that name before, but the sound of it conveyed no meaning to his over-loaded brain.

Valkyr… Valkyr… I am Valkyr!

He sank into the darkness of deep slumber.

And while he slept, the hidden Second Mind that had shared this body with him all his life, rose into wakefulness and into realization of itself. The probing tendrils of the Mind Wizard had triggered an automatic protective reaction. A slumbering intelligence long dormant was roused to wakefulness again by the threat of mental violation. As Kirin slept this intelligence swiftly reorganized itself, linked memory sectors together into patterns of supernal power, and began at leisure to explore the surface recordings of recent events. For millions of years the dead and banished God had endured incarnation after incarnation in mortal form. When one host-body died, the disembodied intelligence fled from the corpse to enter another life. Now was it reborn within Kirin of Tellus.

Knowing none of this, the Earthling slept, until awakened by a girl’s shrill scream of terror!