"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far, the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom. Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them. They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age. If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them. Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their vision, and they saw—