"As you say, O Mother." The priestess slipped away. Soon she re-appeared, followed by workers bearing golden trays laden with food and drink. These they placed before the trio without lifting their eyes, then backed from the room. Steve looked after them curiously.
"But, Mother Maatha, you must tell your clansfolk we are not gods. We are but men—"
"Men!" The Priestess Beth almost dropped the golden ewer from which she was pouring water. "Men!"
The Mother said hastily—too hastily, thought Steve Duane—and in a tone of admonition, "Be not so swift of ear, child, when is spoken that of which you know naught. The god but jests, nor is it ours to comment on his words.
"O, Wise One—" She changed the subject quickly—"is it not true, then, that you do bear us the knowledge of a Great Secret? A new weapon with which we may wreak vengeance on our enemies?"
Steve answered slowly, "It is true, O Mother, that I hold such a secret. But—" He was thinking of the chemical problem involved in the preparation of his invention, the anesthetic methioprane. Not only did the preparatory process for its sublimation require intricate equipment unknown to this crude culture; it also demanded an ingredient which even in Steve's day had been so frightfully rare that it had taken ten months to segregate the flaskfull used in his experiments.
The basic ingredient of methioprane was the seed-pod of the swamp-musk, a tank-epiphyte so delicate, so sensitive, that even in Steve's day—fifteen hundred years ago—it had been virtually extinct. Only the painstaking plant husbandry of a hundred patriotic botanists had enabled Steve to continue his work. It had been hoped that once his research was done, and crowned with success, the end-product of his labors might be analyzed, and its formula synthesized from ingredients less rare.
And in a day which had known nylon, alnico, plastics; had made felt hats of cows' milk, automobile bodies of rolled oats, and women's hose of water, coal and air, this might have been possible. But now—
"Tell me first, O Mother," said Steve, "something of these Daan invaders. It is needful to know their nature if I am to prepare a weapon against them. When came their rockets to Earth? How strong is their rulership over our world? And was it they who destroyed all the males and left the women to fend for themselves?"