Except human happiness. I recalled Nereid's words of her world, living for love and music and beauty. Strange how in all human affairs there are two sides of looking at everything! I said something like that to Allen, and he nodded.
"The trouble with science," he agreed, "is that it can be so easily perverted. Things to benefit mankind, turned into engines of death. That's the recent history of our own world."
And the Arones had gone to the other extreme. Science was banned. Men and women should live for human happiness, with no thought of conquest, or of personal power. And out of this, a few generations ago, had risen the Gorts. They had been for centuries a nomadic race of giants, mere savages roaming the barren parts of the planet. Few in number, and like the savages of our own Earth, apparently doomed to extinction. Banished criminals from the world of the Arones, generations back, had joined them, brought them science—stolen things of science.
And out of this sprang the Gort, Tollgamo. His father had started it: Tollgamo, the son, carried it on. He was a genius, of course. A genius with mad dreams. To mechanize his little world. There were only a few thousand of them now. Men and women making themselves into machines; fed by Tollgamo upon his own mad dreams of Venus conquest.
He had discovered the secret of spaceflight, which before him, on Venus, had never been known. Peters' Earth-signals had attracted him, and quietly he had gone to Earth, and seized Peters and his men; bringing them to Venus so that they might tell him all they knew of their science. It would be useful, that future day when he would attempt to conquer the Arones.
Most, perhaps all, of Peters' men were dead now; killed, possibly by Tollgamo, when their usefulness to him was finished. But Peters had escaped; gone to the Arones. And telling them their danger, had made himself the leader of the revival of their science. All Nereid's life, her father, with a group of men he had trained, had feverishly been working in the city of Arron, to build weapons with which to combat the attack when it came.
All that was known to Tollgamo, of course. He had spies in Arron. Queer how human nature is the same, wherever in the Universe the Creator has planted it! The fatuous, decadent, pleasure-loving leader of the Arones was unwilling to believe that the Gorts could be any menace. The efforts of Peters and his fellow scientists, even now were looked upon with disfavor. Peters and his men were distrusted, even accused of having dreams of conquest of their own. Thousands of the Arones thought it, so that there was an undercurrent of strife in Arron, fostered, of course, by Tollgamo's spies.
"And now Tollgamo seems to be about ready for his attack," Allen was telling me. "Peters probably has no weapons of any importance with which to oppose him. And so Peters made an effort to get help from Earth. Tollgamo found it out, and sent this ship to follow the girl so as to keep her from giving the secret of spaceflight to Earth."
The barred metal door of our little cubby suddenly opened. A Gort man stood there. Allen and I stared. Like the other Gorts, he was encased in shining mailed garments. But he was crippled, bent and twisted, with one shoulder higher than the other and a lump on his bent back. On him, the metal garments were grotesque. He came sidling in, grinning at us with his ugly, puffed and bloated grey-skinned face.
"I am Borgg," he said. "You will have food and drink soon. You hungry?"