The head priest was saying, "... but my dear, dear Perikles, it would be against all precedent. The Health-Giver would be offended if we absented ourselves ..."
There was a crackle of papyrus and the voice of Perikles, "There you are. I know not what this means, but I intend to find out. Will you go, or must I call for help in removing you?"
"Oh, we go, we go. But say not that we failed to warn you."
"Not that way. This way. I do not care to be deceived by human voices issuing from holes in this rabbit warren."
Bulnes looked through the funnel-shaped hole into the Cave of Apollo. Beyond the altar stood the two priests, their backs more or less to Bulnes. Beyond them stood Perikles. All Bulnes could see through the smoke of the altar fire was a neatly trimmed gray beard and a himation. The priests went out and turned left along the ledge. Perikles came forward toward the altar. "Phoibos Apollon, if it indeed be you, I have come as you requested. Have you a message for me?"
"Go ahead," whispered Bulnes, pushing Flin into the place behind the speaking hole.
Flin said, "O Perikles, it is indeed the God of the Silver Bow. You and all your people have been subjected to a monstrous deception, and it is time this imposture were unmasked."
"How so, O god?"
"You are not Perikles Xanthippou, nor are the other Hellenes the persons they think they are. The true Perikles lived three thousand years ago. You are a man who has been seized by the world rulers, and by their science caused to believe that you are indeed this ancient Perikles, and the other Hellenes have been subjected to the same deception."
"Indeed?" Perikles took the news, Bulnes thought, with unwonted calm.
"Just so. If you wish proof, order your people to dig down into the floor of the Parthenon chamber of the New Hekatompedon, and below the altar of Theseus in the Theseion, to discover the tunnels which the servants of the world rulers use for ..."
Flin broke off and jerked back from the orifice. Bulnes took a quick look through the hole, to see the man called Perikles coming around the altar and drawing a pistol from his draperies. In that second the altar fire blazed up. By its light, Bulnes recognized the face he had manipulated scores of times in making up the dummy for the next issue of Trends: Vasil Hohnsol-Romano, ninth of the name, and Emperor of the Earth.
Bulnes tumbled back in his turn. As he did so, the piercing crack of a shot smote his ears and fragments of rock stung his face. Again and again came the crack of the shot mingling with the crash of the explosive bullet. A hit from one of those little pellets would blow a man to pieces.
He crawled after Flin toward the curtained entrance and collided with him. "Caray! What the hell?"
"He's coming around this way," quavered Flin. "Look!"
"What?" Bulnes craned his neck backwards. The shooting had stopped and the heavier dust particles were settling. By the fugitive light of the altar fire, through the now-enlarged orifice, Bulnes observed that the explosions had broken away a concealed door at the rear of the priest hole.
Bulnes thought he heard footsteps in the Cave of Pan from which they had come. Wherever it led, the newly revealed door seemed to offer more safety than a cave containing an armed and homicidal emperor. Bulnes scurried back into the hole. The explosions had smashed the bracing that held the lock, so that a good heave opened the door. Bulnes scooted through, Flin after him.
"Close it!" hissed Bulnes.
As the door closed, they were again plunged into darkness. Not complete, however. As his pupils dilated, Bulnes became aware of a row of tiny spots of softly glowing light along the roof of the tunnel in which they found themselves. These were ordinary radioactive night lights. Gradually his vision sharpened until he could dimly see the floor and walls.
He proceeded, crouching, until the tunnel ended in a T intersection. The new tunnel, at right angles to the old, was somewhat higher and carried a mass of cables along its roof.
Bulnes turned left at hazard and followed the lights of this tunnel. It dipped down and did a couple of dog legs, then ended with a door that reminded him of the pressure doors through watertight bulkheads on large ships.
On the wall beside the door was a push button. Below it was a legend, illuminated by a brighter night light, which, in English, instructed the wayfarer to push the button to summon a guard to open the door and admit him to the tunnel system,
Bulnes said, "I don't think we'd better do that. Let's try the other direction."
They retraced their steps to the tunnel leading to the Cave of Apollo, but continued straight on instead of turning. Bulnes, puffing up the slope, said, "We know a couple of things now: Not only is Perikles really Vasil the Ninth, but he's an unconditioned man like us and like Diksen."
"How d'you know that?"
"Would he be shooting a pistol otherwise? Of course he doesn't believe in Apollo, and as soon as he heard your voice he guessed another unconditioned man was talking to him from hid-mg.
"Do you suppose he's putting on this whole Greek thing as a sort of grandiose charade to satisfy his vanity?"
Bulnes shrugged in the gloom. They had come to the end of the tunnel. There were no outlets except straight up. The cables overhead led up, and so did a ladder, into a dimly lit cavernousness above.
Bulnes craned his neck, peering up, then started to climb. He soon found himself squirming through a jungle of struts and crossbraces, lit by a whole constellation of night lights. Around him rose an irregular structure of dark greenish metal.
Flin said: "By Gad, Knut, I know where we are!"
"Where?"
"Inside Athene Promachos!"
"Really? Let's hope we don't give the dear lady indigestion. This reminds me of the Statue of Liberty in America. Where do those cables go? Wish I had a flashlight ..."
Bulnes finally reached a point that he judged to be somewhere on a level with the solar plexus of the goddess. From there, looking up, he could see where the cables ended in a forest of metal antennas, something like radar antennas: clusters of rods and plates arranged in patterns.
"There they are," he said.
"There are what? Oh, those things." Flin fell silent. After puckering his mouth with thought for some seconds he said, "Of course I don't know a ruddy thing about electricity, Knut, but I thought radio and radar antenna had to be out in the open — that a lot of metal around them would smother the rays or whatever it is they send out."
"That's true on the electromagnetic spectrum, but not on the gravito-magnetic. You know those things the World Government scientists were playing with a couple of decades ago?"
"No."
"Well, I'm not a scientist myself, but the magazine has a tickler file on gravito-magnetics, and once every few years we try to find something out about it. There was a lot of activity, with prophecies of the wonderful things it would do for us, and then it dropped out of sight. As far as Trends knows, not a single scientist is interested in it any more."
"So you think they've been developing this secretly?"
"It looks that way."
"Why?" asked Flin.
"I'm just guessing, but I suspect it's what keeps all our pseudo-Greeks under control."
Flin looked speculatively at the cables. "If we could cut through those, we'd queer the whole pitch at once."
Bulnes shook his head. "Probably electrocute ourselves in the process, and they're armored, so it would take days even with a modern hacksaw. It would be more to the point to find the master switch that turns off the power. Let's see. There ought to be a door in the lady's skirts at street level ... Here we are. Get ready to slip out quietly ..."
Presently Bulnes and Flin emerged from the colossus and hurried toward the northeast corner of the Akropolis, in search of the stairway that led to the base of the wall and the path down the hillside that Diksen had shown them that afternoon.