It was the power and the quality of this new mental voice. It had in it the vibrations of a mind of range and magnitude beyond his imagination. It was alien, yet had a tantalizing echo of familiarity.
"Take warning!"
Nsharra's voice broke the spell. She had stepped quickly with Tark to his side as he stood frozen between the platinum pillars.
"It is the voice of the ancients of the Cavern, Eric Nelson! Their voice, speaking from the dim past, from those!" She pointed at the great, glittering quartz spheres atop the two platinum pillars.
"Each time one steps between these pillars, their mind speaks — always the same. My father and all the Guardians before him knew it."
Nelson began dimly to understand. The mental voice he heard was a record — not a sonic record but a telepathic one imprinted somehow in those quartz spheres and reproduced to all who came between them.
How was it done? How could thought be recorded and reproduced? He did not know that, would never know. But that the ancients had been masters of telepathic science, his experience with the thought-crowns and the mind-transferer proved.
And now, after a pregnant pause, that cool passionless voice was speaking on in his mind.
"Take warning not lightly to unchain the forces and powers within this ship, should you learn to master them! Take warning to let no unscrupulous or ignorant ones even know of these powers! Take warning from our own tragic fate!
"We who speak to you were not like you in body. We were not of this world of yours. Upon a world far out in the starry universe we were born and developed in intelligence and grew to great knowledge and power.