"I want to help you," he was saying. "Your coming here fits my plans, and believe me I have worked on them a long time. Tahn and I, making the Radaks trust us."
"Say," Shorty murmured, "you certainly are fluent with English."
The young Lei's face wrinkled into a smile. "Why should I not, my wife and I? We Lei learn things quickly. Perhaps a different mind-quality from yours, almost at once to absorb what we hear. Ratan—he is next to the Great Mind as leader of the Radaks—he chose Tahn and me to go on the expedition to Earth. We were carefully watched, or we would have escaped to warn you. It was Tahn who took care of you on the way here."
He told us then of the weird Radak-gun, with its flash of mind-current—the weapon which probably just at this exact moment no more than half a mile away in this maze of subterranean corridors, Blaine was snatching from Ratan.... And Tahn told us, too, of the Radak plot to devastate Earth.
"You have some plan?" Shorty murmured.
He told us then that he knew how to get into the Cavern of Machines—a huge, guarded grotto where all the diabolic, giant mechanisms of the Radaks were housed. The power plant of little Zelos, and the source of the purple radiance which was bathing Earth.
"If we can kill the guards and get into the Cavern—only the Great Mind himself—or Ratan—will be there. No one else but those two are allowed there. No one else knows the secrets of the mechanisms to operate them."
"So we just get in and overcome the Great Mind himself," Shorty commented. He gave a mock shudder with an attempt to be humorous. "All right. Figure that's done. Then what?"
Taro's plan was certainly desperate, but at least it promised the possibility of success. "Do you know where the Earthman Blaine is?" I demanded.