“. . . and my people built a new city in the blackened bowels of the old . . .”

“Nonsense!” Brent roared, trembling, angry.

“Blessed be the Bomb Everlasting—” Mendez droned on.

“Utter nonsense . . .”

“. . . to whom alone we may reveal our inmost truth, and whom we shall serve all our days in peace.”

“Until you fire it at the apes,” Brent concluded sarcastically.

There was fresh silence at that. Mendez then stirred. His deep eyes held strange lights in them.

“You don’t understand.” With a rustle of his purple robes, he sat down again. “The Bomb is a Holy Weapon of Peace.”

Brent began to laugh.

He couldn’t help it.

Amusement shook him. A terrible humor that put aside all concern for his own safety. The Negro shut his eyes. Quickly. Sadly almost.

More pain, more mental injections of torture, made Brent a writhing, twisting, burlesque of a human being on the floor of the chamber. Animal sounds tore from his throat. He sounded half bestial.

The Negro waited a full minute and then reopened his eyes.

“We’re a patient people, Mr. Brent,” he said softly, his voice nevertheless filling the chamber. “We can repeat this little lesson as often as we want. Because we are determined to know what the apes want. War, or peace.”

Brent waited for the waves of agony and nausea to recede. He recovered more slowly this time. He propped himself up on his hands and knees, fighting off hysteria. Caspay’s puckish voice came down to him, reprovingly.

“Try to understand—the only weapons we have are purely illusion.”

Albina’s soothing contralto filtered down too.

“You imagined he was hurting you.”

Brent smiled at her crookedly, shaking his head.

“Because I imagined I was hurting you,” the Negro explained without malice. “Are you in pain now?”

“No,” Brent admitted.

“No imaginary bones broken? Or blood flowing?” The Negro’s voice took on echoes of sadism; he was enjoying his thoughts. “Or eyeballs bursting? Or guts spilling?”

“No,” Brent said, louder than before.

“Then I have hurt but not harmed you,” the Negro affirmed.

Albina smiled triumphantly.

“Traumatic Hypnosis is a weapon of peace.”

Caspay’s eyes twinkled mysteriously.

“Like the Visual Deterrent.”

Before Brent had time to ask what that was, there was a mammoth whooosh of sound and within a yard of where he stood, a pillar of flame shot up. Brent reeled back. A vertical geyser jet of steam behind him licked at his rear so that he had to stumble forward again. Only to be cut off by the wall of fire. Between two horrors.

“Or the Sonic Deterrent,” Caspay chuckled delightedly.

Abruptly there was a rat-tat-tat, a gobbling medley of rapid-fire noises to the right of where Brent stood imprisoned. As if an invisible machine gun had cut loose. Then to his left, an ear-skewering electronic scream of sound rose in such deafening volume that soon the entire chamber and the outside world seemed to reverberate with the caterwauling. The sounds rose to a deafening tumult, then just when Brent was sure his eardrums would explode, vanished with terrifying, miraculous abruptness. His body swayed with the assault from all sides.

“Weapons,” Caspay continued blandly, “of peace, Mr. Brent.”

“Like all our weapons,” the beautiful Albina agreed from her sea of blue robes.

The Negro nodded firmly. “Mere illusion.”

Brent lost his temper and what was left of his discretion. He had been a toy for too long; a mere mortal buffeted and battered about by what was seemingly an impossible manifest destiny.

“Damn your hypocrisy!” he bellowed.

The Negro turned to look at Caspay. Then he looked at his white wall. There, projected, was an image of Brent set afire, clothes and flesh blazing, screaming soundlessly in a void of death. Caspay returned his gaze down to Brent. His expression was gentle.

“We very much need your help, Mr. Brent.”

“Why?” It was a helpless groan from Brent.

“We are the Keepers of the Divine Bomb. That is our only reason for survival. And yet—as you see—we are defenseless.”

Brent sneered. Bitterly.

“Yes, I can see that.”

“Defenseless,” Caspay continued, “against the monstrous, slobbering, materialistic apes.”

“I’ll help nobody!” Brent rallied, with deep but slow confusion. “I hope you annihilate one another.”

Caspay smiled.

“Mr. Brent, I apologize for your language. There are times, I know, when your sanity—is about to give way. I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope you can tell us . . .”

“Exactly,” the fat man interrupted again, as seemed to be his conversational forte, “what the apes are planning!”

Brent didn’t understand. He couldn’t.

Albina stirred anew. Silky, sinister, maddeningly lovely.

“We’ve caught some of their scouts. Hideous creatures. We had them here—precisely where you’re standing. But either their skulls are too thick. Or they actually know nothing . . .”

“And neither do I,” Brent cut her off violently. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

The Negro laughed. It was a very unpleasant sound.

He gazed at his white wall again.

On it, Nova materialized.

Caspay said gently, “You make me very sad, Mr. Brent.”

Brent looked from the Negro to Caspay, frowning. His mind tried to find an answer. And then, amazingly, he saw Nova being brought into the chamber, struggling between another set of implacable guards. The girl was clawing, scratching, but the guards might have been zombies. Nova, despite her torn garments, or perhaps because of them, looked more paganly desirable than ever. Brent bunched his fists, trembling.

“She can’t help you,” he blurted. “She can’t even talk. Don’t harm her . . .”

Albina made a low, feline sound in her silky throat and motioned regally to the guards who now released Nova. The girl, crying, ran headlong into Brent’s arms. He clasped her to him, reveling in the feel of her once more. He had ached to hold her again, without knowing it. Or realizing why.

“Of course not, Mr. Brent,” Albina purred. “We never harm anyone. You are going to harm her.” Her ivory face pulsed sensually. Her exquisite bosom rose and fell as she breathed deeply.

Smiling sadistically, his great black face wreathed in onyx power, the Negro closed his eyes. A grim Golem created for torment, dedicated to the art of cruelty.

Brent went into action like an automaton.

Mendez the Twenty-Sixth, royally purple and majestic, watched with great attention from his central position on the dais.

He and his four inquisitors, red, blue, green and white.

The weird magic of the wall shattered all that was left of Brent’s power to fight back.

The chamber looked down on madness.

10.

MASKS

Brent closed in on Nova.

He took her in his arms and unexpectedly kissed her on the trembling mouth. The Negro kept his eyes tightly closed. Mendez and the others watched, waiting. Their faces were a study in expectancy. Brent was oblivious of them. All of his being, his soul and his mind and body, was centralized on Nova. The girl in his arms.

The chamber held the odd tableau, like a pin point in the march of time, freezing the moment for all eternity itself.

Brent’s kiss was tender at first. Then some raging passion consumed him. Nova, bewildered, rode along with the first wave of bodily hunger embroiling her and Brent in this fantastic embrace.

The Negro’s eyes remained shut.

The kiss went from the loving to the lustful.

And then from the lustful to the lethal.

For all her unschooled, uncivilized, unsophisticated naivete, Nova sensed the difference. Brent caught her fast in a viselike hold that was all cruelty and mad desire. Nova recoiled in his arms, trying to shake him off, to run, to hide. Brent was remorseless. Now he had her trapped. He was pinching her nostrils, suffocating her mouth with his own. His other hand was digging into her flesh, tearing at her full breasts. He kept on hammering at her, cruelly hurting her until her weak struggles grew even weaker.