And beyond the altar was a precipice overlooking a sunken vale. This vale, like the interior of the cave, was shimmering like the plains of Abaddon with coruscating fingers, sheets, spires of red.
He was aware that he had gasped, for he detected a similar gasp from Syd, and he heard Salvation Smith say a single, incredulous word. "Sheol!" Then the chieftain, or high priest—Chip did not know which—spoke from the altar. Shortly he spoke, but with strident emphasis, jabbing his fingers at the two groups of captives in turn.
"What is he saying?" demanded Chip.
Salvation interpreted hastily. "We have violated their land. We have been brought to the Place of Destruction to meet judgment for our crime. The test of fire will prove our guilt—" Then he raised his voice, spoke to the Titanian ruler.
The outland ruler heard him through, then answered. Salvation turned to Chip and Syd. "I told him," he explained, "that we were friends, come in amity. That we intended them no harm or offense—"
"And what did he say?"
"He said," relayed Salvation grudgingly, "that they were forced to distrust us because our 'companions' were men of sin and violence—"
"Companions!" interjected Syd angrily.
"—and he said, also, that he realized we might be gods. He says there are two types of white creatures, those who are mortals and evil, and those who are Masters of Fire. We must be tested to see which we are."
"Two types?" cried Chip. "Masters of Fire? Padre, what does he mean?"
Salvation shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. But wait—he is talking again."
This time the green chieftain's speech was longer, more dramatic. He postured, gestured; once he strode to the edge of his raised platform and pointed majestically down into the chasm below. Then, concluding his words with a tone of finality, he folded his arms across his chest.
Chip noticed that a few rods away Amborg's Uranian companion was interpreting his decision to Blaze. Salvation performed the same function.
"He says," explained Salvation, "we must walk into this cave of fearful flame. It leads through burning corridors to the valley below. In that valley is the life-skiff which brought Amborg and his men here.
"If we are good men, gods, and guiltless, the flame will not destroy us. There was one not long ago who walked unscathed through the fires, he says. That man was surely a god."
"Jenkins!" broke in Chip. "It must have been—"
Salvation nodded. "That is what I thought, too, my son. But—but how? How could Jenkins survive the flames?" And he stared sombrely, questioningly, at the sheet of ruddy fire filling the cave from base to arch. He shook himself. "Well—that is a problem we must solve, and soon. For the ceremony has begun.Amborg!" he cried.
The dark man turned. Chip saw that his face was set in granite lines. Nearest to the cavern mouth, his men were being prodded toward the awful test they must endure.
Even in this critical moment, Salvation was the man of god. "Amborg," he said, "you have been ever an evil man, living and thinking the thoughts of Satan. But there is yet time for you to repent and confess your sins. As a fellow man, I loathe and despise you. But as His emissary, I offer you even in this hour of trial the peace that surpasseth all human understanding—"
Amborg laughed at him. His voice crackled harshly, metallically, in the audio-phones of Chip's space-helmet.
"Save that stuff for the suckers, old man. You and your pals are just worried because we get first chance to go down into the valley. Well—you'd better worry! There's a rotor-gun mounted in that life-skiff. If we hadn't all been jarred cold when we landed, we'd have given these greenies a sweet greeting. We're going to lift the ship out of that ditch and bring it back over here. Save your prayers; you'll need them when we come over!"
Salvation reminded him stonily, "The flames—"
"Flames be damned! Superstitious poppycock! Spacesuits will protect us from heat or cold alike. Well—come on!"
He gestured his mates to him. The wailing chant of the Titanian natives increased in tone and volume as the four outlaws left their guards and boldly strode the last few rods up the hill, past the dais—and into the roaring hell-mouth of the cave!
And as they entered, Chip Warren knew a swift sinking of heart. His apprehensions had been unfounded, Amborg's claim that the lethal power of the flame was "superstitious poppycock" was true. The spacesuitswereadequate protection, and in short moments, Amborg would be soaring back across the plateau, the jets of his rotor-gun spewing death and destruction upon them all....
Then, "My God!" gasped Syd Palmer, his voice awed.
Chip looked, and shuddered to see, the last judgment of Blaze Amborg and his men. A scant dozen yards they strode into the cavern. Vast spirals of fire played about them, but they did not falter. Their suits, ingeniously woven of metal, rubber, asbesto-quartz, defied the combustive powers of fire. But despite this—one of the figures staggered. The stunted Jovian was first to succumb. He had just pitched forward to his face when the second figure reeled. Raat 'Aran, the Uranian. He reeled and clutched at the tall Venusian, Torth—but the Venusian, too, had dropped to his knees; his hands clawed frenziedly at his breast.
Then the mysterious death struck Amborg. His voice rang out in a piercing scream; Chip saw him stare wildly at the three now-motionless bodies of his comrades, whirl, race back toward the safety of the hillside.
But he never reached it. He had taken no more than a dozen strides when he fell. A moment his incoherent cries babbled sickening delirium into his watchers' ear-phones....
Then all was still, save for the inexorable chanting of the natives. And the grave, judicial voice of the Titanian on the altar.
"They have been tested in the flame," interpreted Salvation Smith soberly, "and found guilty. Now it is our turn...."
Chip Warren was not a religious man. He lived by a simple code: do good and keep your sidearms primed. But now there faced him the inevitable finality of death; he felt an urge to meet that last, great mystery in comfort. He turned to his friends gravely.
"Now," he said, "it is our turn. So I guess this is goodbye, Syd. And Padre—it might help if you could say a few words for us ... just something...."
"So be it, my son!" said Salvation, understandingly. He lifted his head; his fine old eyes sought the murky gray skies of Titania, so different from the sweet blue Earthly skies for which all space-farers' hearts yearned when their journey's end was reached.
"If this be the way," he said quietly, "thy servants must depart, then so be it, O Lord. Yet even now in extremis we do not forget Thee and Thy might. We remember even yet—" He looked at the flaming cave-mouth toward which they must in a moment walk. "Even yet we remember a fellowship like ours who met and defied the dread embrace of fire.
"'And in those days,'" he said, "'there were three children of Israel which the king Nebuchadnezzar ordered to be cast without raiment into the fiery furnace. And their names were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—'"
"Shadrach!" cried Chip. There was no intentional irreverence in his interruption. Understanding had burst upon him so suddenly that the words hurtled from his lips.
"Peace, my son!" counseled the old man. "Let not your heart be troubled—"
"It's not! We're all right, Padre! If my hunch is right—and it must be! Look, they are bidding us walk into the caves. We haven't a moment to spare. Hurry,get off your spacesuits!"
There was biting cold upon Chip Warren's limbs and body as he cast the limp shell of his bulger behind him. But as he neared the cavern's mouth, the cold grew less intense. Less intense! That in itself was final, convincing proof he had been right! He was barely two yards from the writhing gouts of flame now. Were that the true fire itappearedto be, its searing blasts would already be parching his skin to black flakes—
But it was not! It was merely—pleasantly warm!
"I was right!" he cried exultantly. "Syd ... Padre! Come on in!" His voice was almost hysterical with relief as he stepped gingerly over the prostrate bodies of those who had gone into the fiery furnace garbed in suits of metallic substance. "Come on in—the fire's fine!"
And together the three new Children of Israel walked unharmed into the fiery furnace of Titania....
The corridors led, as the Titanian chieftain said, downward, winding, through the hill to the vale below, where rested Amborg's navigable life-skiff. The small cruiser in which they were to fly to neighboring Uranus, there find aid and eager ears into which to pour their story.
And it did not surprise Chip Warren in the least to discover, about halfway down the flickering tunnel, a ledge of brightly gleaming ore that was resilient to the touch but broke the keen edge of the knife with which Chip attempted to scratch it.
"Ekalastron!" he cried. "See—a whole mountain of it! Not just a mine; a mountain! Enough to fill Man's needs for centuries!"
Syd's eyes, behind the quartzite globe, were big as saucers. He gulped, "C-chip—are you sure we're alive? Do you think maybe we died back there in the first cave, maybe? And this is all some wild illusion—?"
"It is not illusion," proclaimed Salvation serenely. "I understand, now, what Chip divined in time to save us from a dreadful fate." And he looked at the young man affectionately. "Radiation was what killed the others, my boy?"
Chip nodded. "Must have been, Padre. The 'flames' were not true flames at all. Not as we Earthlings, children of a warm Sun, masters of combustive fire, understand flame.
"Different elements have different combustive temperatures. On bitter-cold Uranus and Titania, the kindling point of certain rare gases is necessarily in ratio to the outer cold. The kindling point of the gases in this tunnel is a temperature which—though fiery-hot and deadly to the Titanians—is only pleasantlywarmto us!"
"So Amborg," continued Syd, "walked into the flaming tunnel wearing a space-suit—"
"Ametallicspace-suit," reminded Chip, "which was a transmitter for certain lethal radiations inherent to this 'cold heat.' Blaze Amborg did not die of flame. He died of—electrocution."
Then a strange thought struck him and he turned suddenly to Salvation Smith. "Padre—?"
"Yes, my son?"
"The story you started to tell. The one that gave me my inspiration. About Shadrach. I wonder if some time long ago in the past, that legend may not have sprung from an adventure such as ours?"
Salvation smiled and shook his head.
"That is not mine to say, my boy, not yet thine to question. Perhaps some day the truth shall be known to you and me. But meanwhile—"
But meanwhile, the life-skiff was theirs for the taking. This was no question to long plague Chip Warren or any other space-adventurer, before whom stretched a whole, wide universe of wonder.