greeted us with stock phrases as though impatient to meet people more his equal. His impatience and boredom were further emphasized by the way he kept prancing on his cloven hooves--his heritage from some variform ancestor--and by the nervous way he kept drumming his fingers on the jeweled clasp of his weapon belt. Nothing about him pleased me, particularly the swaggering way he kept his long dark cape in motion. I thought to myself, 'What's he afraid of--that we'll contaminate his precious cloak?' I looked him full in the face--that handsome cynical face with the blue eyes of his Angle family, icily and incongruously staring back at me with the disdain ill-befitting a Ruler of Nor. That struck me as odd and jarring, here in this usually solemn hall(and my nostrils twitched with the scent of the evil, sulphurous odor about him, no doubt from some ingredient of his nutrient vapors.
I should have known then, or at least have been suspicious, but, in the hallowed halls of the Council of Nor one does not suspect one's equals. But he was a dero [*4]--I know that now.
There was a time, once, when the peoples of Mu and the other Sun planets were unaware that there could be such a thing as a dero. But that was when the Sun and Earth were young--before the Sun burned hot and deadly. But as the Sun burned down through its layers of carbon, it eventually reached the heavier substances near its core--the "de"--producing radio-active metals. It is the deadly emanations given off by burning radio-actives that produce in life, a dero--a detrimental energy from the Sun that so motivates life that they are like that which is robot--controlled by these "de", or detrimental energy emanations--evil completely.
We didn't find that out until later, though. His family, foolishly indulgent, had concealed all the signs of his deroism. They didn't know enough of science to realize what a dread thing a dero can be.
They had paid for their indulgence and their ignorance with their lives--lives that should have been immortal--for the first of Sathanas crimes had been the summary and permanent removal of all the heirs above his rank in the family blocking his mad rise to power.
'Something has happened to Sathanas', people said. In a way, they were right, but they didn't know in what way or they would have removed him. I know from similar cases that his character was a long time growing.
Sathanas had been born on the planet Mu (Earth) in one of the older cities and the mech of that city was condemned not long after Sathanas had left Mu to become the satellite Ruler of one of the planets under the Elders of Nor.
His was pretty much the same background, in many ways, as that of Ex-Elder Zeit whose antecedents I had studied long ago, as I had been curious as to how an apparently intelligent man had become such an unthinking monster.
I thought--and experiments of the Elder scientists subsequently proved--that aging mech has produced many a criminal. I think that their subjection to the infected energy from the wornout pleasure mech was the cause of this as it formed their inner polarization--their very soul--along dis-inductive lines. Hence, as long as stars blaze in space, such characters will induct that will to Evil from the stars' mighty destructive fields. And unfortunately there is absolutely no way to prevent these creations.
The whole group connected with Sathanas had fallen into some evil and dissipated habits, had formed a cult of great power, and had built secret hideouts where they could indulge their perverted tastes in safety. They did not relish being deterred by Nor laws protecting the rights of every individual to safety of person. All this evil they had kept concealed behind many a barrier of sub-officials. And all went along smoothly for the Gods of Space know only how many years.
But finally, a very beautiful young Nor maiden had wheedled and vamped her way out of their unholy clutches and exposed the whole rotten mess.
Their use of girls for wall ornaments, [*5] living in stimmed nutrient, the whole depraved business of torture for pleasure and profit--the horrible circuses where captive men were forced to fight for their lives against beasts from the unsettled sun-planets--all this disgusting blight on the rule and culture of the Nor Empire had finally been dragged out into the open. What Sathanas had thought was a corner on illegal entertainment had turned into a trap from which he was now just barely making his escape.
# Footnotes #
^119:4 DERO: (See 'I Remember Lemuria")
^120:5 STIMMED BODY--ORNAMENTS: This use of girls and women for ornaments is a particularly revealing angle on the opulence and cruel disregard for the natural rights of man which has marked ray-secrets since the earliest days.
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