Under his guidance, the beautiful, streamlined car rolled forward. In a minute, Jommy Cross saw the pathway; it was little more than that. The abnormally long car whipped into it and along it. The pathway wound through heavily wooded areas, through several small valleys. It was three miles farther on that the next message brought him to an abrupt stop.
"This is a Porgrave broadcaster. It directs you, a true slan, to the little farm ahead, which provides entrance to an underground city of factories, gardens and residences. Welcome. This is a Porgrave – "
There was a great bouncing as the car struck a row of small ridges; and then the machine broke through a thick hedge of yielding willows and emerged into a shallow clearing. Jommy Cross found himself staring across a weed-grown yard to where a weather-beaten farmhouse drooped beside two other age-weary buildings, a barn and a garage. Windowless, unpointed, the rickety old two-story house gaped sightlessly at him. The barn tottered like the ancient hulk that it was; its roller door hooked on one roller only, and the other end edged deep into the forsaken soil.
His gaze flashed briefly to the garage, then away, then back again thoughtfully. There was the same appearance of something long dead – and yet it was different The subtle difference grew on him, bringing interest in its wake. The garage seemed to totter, but it was by design, not through decay. There were hard metals here, rigidly set against the elements.
The apparently broken doors leaned heavily against the ground, yet opened lightly before the pressing fingers of the tall, lithely built young woman in a gray dress who came out and gazed at him with a dazzling smile.
She had flashing eyes, this girl, and a finely molded, delicately textured face, and because his mind was always held on a tight band of thought, she came out thinking he was a human being.
And she was a slan!
And he was a slan!
For Jommy Cross, who had searched the world with caution for so many long years, his mind always alert, the shock and recovery from the shock were almost simultaneous. He had known that someday this would happen; that someday he would meet another slan. But for Kathleen, who had never had to conceal her thoughts, the surprise was devastating. She fought for control and found herself uncontrollable. The little-used shield was suddenly, briefly, unusable.
There was a noble pride in the rich flow of thought matter that streamed from her mind in that instant when her brain was like an open, unprotected book. Pride, and a golden humility. Humility based on a deep sensitivity, an immense understanding that equaled his own, yet lacked the tempering of unending struggle and danger. There was a warm good-heartedness in her that had nevertheless known resentment and tears, and faced limitless hate.
And then her mind closed tight, and she stood wide-eyed, looking at him. After a long moment she unlocked her mind and let a thought reach out to him:
"We mustn't stay here. I've been here too long already. You probably saw in my mind about the police, so the best thing we can do is to drive away immediately."
He just stood there, gazing at her with shining eyes. Each passing second, his mind expanded more, his whole body felt warm with joy. It was like an intolerable weight lifting. All these years everything had depended on him. The great weapon he held in trust for that future world he sometimes dreamed of hung suspended like a monstrous sword of Damocles over the destiny of human being and slan alike by the single, fragile thread of his life. And now, there would be two life threads to control it.
It was not a thought, but an emotion; all sad, sweet, glorious emotion. A man and a woman, alone in the world, meeting like this, just as his father and mother had met long ago. He smiled reminiscently and opened his mind wide to her. He shook his head.
"No, not right away. I caught a flash from your mind about the machines in the cave city, and I would like to have a look at them. Heavy machinery is my greatest lack." He smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry too much about the danger. I have some weapons that human beings cannot match, and this car is a very special means of escape. It can go practically anywhere. I hope there is room for it in the cave."
"Oh, yes. First you go down by a series of elevators. Then you can drive anywhere. But we mustn't delay. We – "
Jommy Cross laughed happily. "No buts!" he said.
Later, Kathleen repeated her doubts: "I really don't think we ought to stay. I can see in your mind about your marvelous weapons, and that your car is made of a metal you call ten-point steel. But you also have a tendency to discount human beings. You mustn't! In their fight against slans, men like John Petty have had their brains keyed to a pitch of abnormal power. And John Petty will stop at nothing to destroy me. Even now his net must be tightening systematically around the various slan hiding places where I might be." Johnny Cross stared at her with troubled eyes. All around was the silence of the cave city: the once white walls that pushed bravely up to the cracking ceiling, the row on row of pillars, bent and worn more from the weight of years than from the heavy earth that pressed them down. To his left he could see the beginning of the great expanse of artificial garden and the gleaming underground stream that fed water to this little sub-world. To his right stretched the long row of apartment doors, the plastic walls still gleaming dully.
A people had lived here and had been driven forth by their remorseless enemies, but the menacing atmosphere of the flight seemed to linger still. Looking around, Jommy guessed that the settlement had been evacuated not less than twenty-five years before; it all still seemed very near and deadly. His thought answer to Kathleen reflected the grim threat of that lowering danger.
"By all the laws of logic, we have only to be on the alert for outside thoughts and stay within a few hundred yards of my car to be absolutely safe. Yet I'm alarmed by your intuition of danger. Please search your brain and try to discover the basis for your fear. I can't do it for you as well as you can do it for yourself."
The girl was silent. Her eyes closed. Her shield went up. She sat there beside him in the car, looking strangely like a beautiful overgrown child fallen asleep. Finally her sensitive lips twitched. For the first time she spoke aloud.
"Tell me, what is ten-point steel?"
"Ah," said Jommy Cross in satisfaction, "I'm beginning to understand the psychological factors involved. Mental communication has many advantages, but it cannot convey the extent, for instance, of a weapon's power as well as a picture on a piece of paper, or not even as well as by word of mouth. Power, size, strength and similar images do not transmit well."
"Go on."
"Everything I've done," Jommy Cross explained, "has been based on my father's great discovery of the first law of atomic energy – concentration as opposed to the old method of diffusion. So far as I know, Father never suspected the metal-strengthening possibilities, but, like all research workers who come after the great man and his basic discovery, I concentrated on details of development, based partly on his ideas, partly on ideas that progressively suggested themselves.
"All metals are held together by atomic tensions, which comprise the theoretical strength of that metal. In the case of steel, I called this theoretical potential one-point. As a comparison, when steel was first invented its strength was about two-thousand-point. New processes rapidly increased this to around one-thousand, then, over a period of hundreds of years, to the present human level of seven-hundred-and-fifty.