V
There was a time when, roped and tied like Jan and Torrence, I was laid beside them while in the torchlight, alone with his pagan gods, the ancient Org priest stood intoning his prayers and incantations. It was then that Jan was able to tell me what had happened to him. He was lying between Torrence and me. I had little chance to talk to Torrence. Nor any great desire, for I considered him then merely a craven fellow who had deserted us at the very first of the weird attacks.
Human emotions work strangely. It was obvious now, as we lay there in the darkness, with the aged savage in the torchlight near us—obvious enough that we were doomed to something horrible which at best would end in our death. Yet Jan and I—each having considered the other dead—were for a brief time at least, pleased that we were here. No one yet alive, can normally quite give up hope of escaping death. I recall that in the darkness I was furtively trying to loosen my bonds, twisting and squirming.
"You needn't bother," Torrence muttered. "I've tried all that. And those two damned Orgs who carried you here—they're still watching us."
"Going to take us inside, I guess," Jan whispered. "Inside this temple to—to—"
His shuddering imagination supplied no words. But his idea was right, for presently the old priest was finished with his incantations. His cracked voice called a command and the two savages who had brought me here came from nearby. One by one, they picked us up and carried us inside.
I was the last to go in. The place was a single stone square room. It was lurid with a swaying torchlight. Carved gargoyle images, crude and hideously ugly—grotesque personification of the pagan Vulcan gods—where ranged along the walls. The old priest was standing now on a little dais, between the two interior torches. His arms were upraised toward me as I was carried in; behind him there was a quick stone altar, with a line of smaller images on it. His voice rose, quavering, as I was slowly carried past him; and his hands over me might have been purifying me for the coming rite.
In the center of the room, raised some five feet above the floor, there was a broad stone slab, with a big, grinning, pot-bellied stone image mounted up there. Then I saw that the slab had a broad, cradle-like depression in front of the image. Still bound, lying there side by side, with the belly of the huge image projecting partly over them, were Jan and Torrence. And now the two savages hoisted me up and rolled me among them.
The sacrificial altar. Heaven knows, I could not miss the realization now. There was a weird, acrid, nauseous smell clinging here from former ceremonies. And as I was hoisted up, I saw that the smooth sides of the altar were seared, blackened by the heat of flames which so many times before must have been here.
And the heat—the fire? Within a moment after I was rolled into the saucer-like depression of the alter—with Torrence muttering despairing curses and Jan pallid and grim beside me—outside the temple there sounded a weird gibbering chorus of baying. Ghastly, familiar sound! The mimes—the giant fire-males! Released at the temple doorway, they came bounding in—blobs of leaping red-green flame! A dozen or more of the weird creatures, all of these much larger than the male Jan had killed near the Roberts' spaceship. Fire-males trained for this ceremony. Enveloped in their lurid flames they rushed at the altar, circling it, swiftly running one behind the other so that we were encircled with a ring of leaping flames.