The word passed in whispers. And then the very small army moved as skirmishers against the cliff base. They reached it without alarm. Hackett and the lieutenant fumbled for the end of that unseen packed trail.
Here was certainly a secret installation of the Greks—a matter of vast importance. They'd chosen a spot where very probably no human being had ever set foot. The secrecy of their construction of the installation was absolute. Their ability to hoodwink humanity had been demonstrated beyond any question, so they reacted exactly as men would have done under the same circumstances. All rational beings will act as fools when the circumstances favor that activity. The Greks, having reason for confidence, reacted with arrogance.
They left the installation to Aldarians to operate. Aldarians were there to turn off the power generator when or if the Greks wished it. And it did not occur to the Greks to set up intruder alarms in an unvisited wilderness which never had been and never ought to be approached by men.
Hackett found an opening in the rock. It was a door. Guns ready, he and the others entered it in single file. A very dimly lighted passage led upward. Presently there was a vast clear space, indifferently lighted, where the floor had been filled in with broken rock and the top roofed over. There would be snow upon that roof, now, and no examination from the air would show it. Besides, this was now the arctic night.
In the center of the artificial cavern there was a motionless, glittering, faintly droning complex of metal. It did not seem large enough to generate the power it did, and at that much of its apparent substance was jimcrackery. The Greks were habitual liars. They concealed the actual simplicity of their apparatus even when none but Greks and Aldarians should ever see it.
The rest of the cavern was bare rock. Here was nothing of civilization, of comfort, or of luxury men imagined as existing among the Greks. This was merely a rocky cave with a floor of packed stone. There were structures of metal pipe very much like bunk racks for use by people with little care for comfort. There was an undisturbed heap of parcels which looked like supplies. Except for the brazen mass of motionless machine in the center, the effect was much like that of a stable. Which it was—for those domestic animals, the Aldarians.
And there was one Aldarian in sight, seated on something indefinite, his furry head sunk into his hands in a position of absolute despair.
A foot scraped on a stone. He did not hear. Men filed into the cave. He did not notice. But then some motion somewhere in the tail of his eye roused him. He jerked his head about and saw them. Instantly he leaped up and as instantly Hackett knew he was terrified, with a terror past the fear of death. He did not flee. He snatched out a weapon from somewhere and leaped toward the machinery in the center of the cave.
Hackett did not fire. Instead, he flung the service automatic in his hand. The Aldarian was obviously under orders to destroy the machine rather than let men see it. He scrambled for it desperately. One of Hackett's followers snapped his rifle to his shoulder, but he did not pull the trigger. He did not need to.
The spinning automatic pistol hit the Aldarian with the impact of a pile driver. He was literally stopped in his tracks by the blow. And then there were men rushing to fling themselves upon him and make him fast.
Hackett snapped orders. Men spread out to hunt for other passages, other rooms, and other Aldarians. But most of them stayed to protect the mass of motionless machine until the entire installation was in their hands.
But there was no more. This one cavern was all there was. It was bare, it was chilly, it was comfortless. Half the broadcast power used on Earth depended on the machine it contained, but it had been made for Aldarians to occupy. Aldarians were slaves. Worse, they were domestic animals, and there was no thought of comfort for them.
But there was only one furry alien in the secret power-generating station.
That was one mystery, and there were others. But Hackett sent a man out to the dog teams and the Eskimos who had been ordered to stay out of the way if fighting started. There had been no fighting. The Eskimos were peacefully asleep and their dogs lay peacefully in the snow, some dozing but the more ambitious ones trying persistently to get rid of the muzzles which kept them from barking or fighting with their fellow dog team members.
That one messenger unlimbered the packed-away shortwave set. He made a call, waited for a reply and then gave a single code-word message. It meant incredible success. It was not wise, of course, to say anything informative in the clear. Too many humans were rejoicing because the Greks were on the way back to Earth.
But within minutes of the transmission of that one-word message, planes far away rumbled and took to the air, helicopters began to throb their way from the airstrip on Baffin Land, and very many others things began to happen. For one, planes began to carry equipment southward, past the equator and the torrid zone and to the remotest edges of the inhabited antarctic.
Hackett prowled around the huge masses of metal in the cavern. He scowled, examined, and drove his brains to superhuman effort. He wished that Lucy were present. For all of an hour he was subject to baffled bewilderment.
Then something fitted itself to something else, and that fitted . . .
The troopers who'd risked so much for so little excitement stared at him as he began to sputter furiously. He had solved the problem of the power generator. And it was infuriating—it was intolerable! It was enough to fill any man with rage to see how elementary, how utterly simple the whole thing was. He'd spent years with the possibility right under his nose, so to speak, and hadn't realized it.
It was power unlimited under absolute control. It was energy inexhaustible without harmful radiation or even high temperatures to get out of hand. The Greks had found it. They'd made use of it. They'd built a civilization upon it. But that civilization was in their own image, and the Greks were not nice people.
There was a curious parallel, in the discovery of one principle that would shape a culture, to the human discovery of the principle of the dynamo. When Faraday discovered that a current-carrying wire in a magnetic field moved sideways, he began the sequence of events which determined human technology. Monstrous atomic-powered generators—no more were built after the coining of the Greks—to microvolto-meters and incandescent lights, the things of which mankind made most use were invariably dependent upon that principle for their use, or in their manufacture, or in their distribution. The one observation was responsible for human technology as far as it had gone. The Grek discovery was different, that was all. It was different, and therefore the technology and the civilization growing from it were different from that of Earth.
But of course the Greks were different, too.
Presently there were planes circling over a place on previously unknown Morrow Island, parachutes blossomed in the night, and flares destroyed the darkness at the earth's surface. Presently Hackett was again explaining disgustedly to newly-arrived eminent scientists what was so plainly to be seen, and they doubted and objected and grew indignant—and then suddenly understood and were stunned by what they realized.
Lucy arrived. She was prim, but her eyes shone. She explained that she'd been working with the Al-darian nerve current device and had found a way to project it in a beam. She was sure that if a really powerful nerve stimulus field could be beamed at Aldari-ans, that if the sounds produced in their severed hearing nerves could be made intelligible . . .
There were high level scientists feverishly anxious to get back to their laboratories to get to work. There were others arriving to have their skepticism satisfied. There were men demanding facts of Hackett so they could begin to make this and that . . .