“Otho”, said Newton, “will you go up and give Grag a hand in? The natives won’t dare to follow us in here on forbidden ground.”
AND that was the last thing he said that night, except to exchange a few terse remarks with Simon on the intricacies of some formulae or equation.
Grag and Otho waited. They did not speak. From beyond the high windows came a distant sound of voices that was like a bitter dirge.
Curt Newton read on and on in Carlin’s record. And as he read the terrible suspicion that had been born in his mind took form and shape and crystallized at last into a truth as horrifying as it was inescapable.
There was more in that record than mere scientific data. There were history and hope and terror and a great dream and a conclusion so staggering that the mind reeled before it — a conclusion that brought in itself a dreadful punishment.
Or was it, after all, a punishment?
Curt Newton flung the book from him. He leaped up and found that he was trembling in every limb, his body bathed in sweat. “It’s ghastly, Simon!” he cried. “Why would they have let such an experiment go forward?”
Simon’s lens-like eyes regarded him calmly. “No knowledge can be wrong in itself — only in its application. And the men of the Old Empire did forbid the use of this apparatus when they learned its effect. Carlin quotes here the inscription he found in the ruined city that so states. Also he mentions that he himself broke the seals on the great door.”
“The fool”, whispered Newton. “The crazy fool!” He glanced at the twin sets of glowing coils and then upward at the dome.
“He changed and went out along the Beam. And the natives, horrified by what he had done, caused the landslide to seal this place.”