CHAPTER XII
In the laboratory tower of Toron, the transparent bubble above the receiving stage brightened. In shimmering haze on the platform, the transparent figures solidified. Then Alter and Tel slipped beneath the rail on the stage and dropped down to the floor (Alter still wore the hospital robe and the cast on her left arm) while Arkor, Jon, and Petra used the metal stairway to descend. A battery of relays snapped somewhere and the scarlet heads of forty-nine switches by the window snapped to off. The globe faded.
"A bit more explanation," Petra was saying. "Hey, kids, keep quiet."
"Well, as far as the Lord of the Flames goes, on Earth anyway, it's more or less trivial and irrelevant," said Arkor. "You're still right. This war is in Toromon, not outside it."
"My curiosity is still peaked," Jon said. "So give."
"From what I gathered while I saw scanning the minds of those two who came out of the generator building with the Lord of the Flames (I should say the host of the Lord of the Flames), there's a tribe behind the barrier which resembles more or less what man might have been forty or fifty thousand years ago. Physically they're squat, thick-boned, and have the elements of a social system. Mentally they're pretty thick and squat too. The Lord of the Flames got into one of them just about when he was at age four. Then he gave the kid about sixty thousand years worth of technical information. So he began building all sorts of goodies, forcing his people to help him, using some equipment from a ruined city that dates from pre-Great Fire times behind the barrier. That's how the generators and the anti-aircraft guns got constructed."
"Our war is still going on," Jon said.
"Well, the Lord of the Flames is no longer with us," said Petra. "We've chased it to the other end of the universe. Now that we've removed what external reason there was for the war, we've got to think about the internal ones."
"What are you going to do immediately about the kids?" Jon asked.
"I think the best thing for them to do is to go off to my estate for a little while," Petra said.