The Return of Sathanas | Page 6

like--Mion! Look! What's that over there?"
"It looks like... it is a city, Arl!" Her enthusiasm was contagious. "Shall
we go over there?"
"Oh, yes, Mion. Let's see what man has done in all these years."
"All right, Arl, but remember we are not allowed to stay here long."
She nodded, silent.
We of the Nor are not allowed to stay long on a sunlit planet, for one's
character soon becomes twisted--not necessarily into evil, but certainly
into err--which can be worse. One in err is stupidly convinced of his
correctness, of his own brilliance. All of our food and drink must be
brought from our ship, for the radioactives in the water and meat of
Earth may not be eaten by Nor men by law. That err, that mental
polarization, is the thing men of Earth must fight most fiercely, for err
will live in their thinking, an illogic that will make them think black is
white till they are forced to check the question with a colorimeter.
We would pay for my stay on this sad planet with many boring hours
before the medicos finish the mental tests to make sure that we have
not been seriously affected by the sun's hard light. Sometimes I
believed they feared evil and its cause too much to fight it effectively.
The old medicos can be tiresome themselves, to the point of evil. I
would like to give some of them a few tests myself--of my own
devising. Yes! They are too close to some dense metals--err magnets of
another kind--and have become polarized by the dullest and heaviest
metal to be found on a thousand master-size planets, that I know.
I expected to stay but the few hours allowed me and then away. Nearly
two thousand years of the destructive magnetic field sweep of the sun

had passed over old Mu. The difference between this little planet third
from the Sun and the dark planets is immense. There, time is a growth,
never a loss. Here, time is a sorrow, a slow destruction, a completely
OPPOSITE QUANTITY. Here, the proud towers of Old Atlantis are
crumbling stones, eroded by the blowing sands of the encroaching
deserts that did not exist under Atlan science. There, the fecund growth
of man has multiplied the beauty and pleasure, the power and the glory
of Nor, many, many times in these two thousand years.
Having seen death in many forms, I like to fight death's burning face
wherever I find it. Surely, death's face is burning brighter on Mother
Mu than on any other globe these feet have trod, feet that sink further
into the dis-softened stones [*7] of this planet than any other I know.
Many have been the globes trod since I last left old Mu to voyage
through the dark voids where no light but the light of wisdom can be
found. Dull it is, to one who has tasted war and death, and swift-tiding
battles, to speed on some mission in which the element of danger has
been reduced to the undetectable minimum. I am a warrior, trained
through many centuries of supremely difficult schooling to the rigors of
battle and war, and there are few indeed, for Nor men to fight who even
dare to think of braving our slightest displeasure.
Nearly two thousand years had passed since I distributed the records of
the Atlan migration to dark space to guide the men who should come
after us on Mu.
As I guided the craft in a hovering flight over the scarred face of old
Mu, I marveled at the green growth over everything, for it is hard to
realize that though everything dies of the Sun poisons, life goes on,
renewed forever. After first coming upon such worlds of death, one
cannot accustom oneself to the idea that all this life that looks so
vibrant and virile is so short-lived.
I know that since I had left Mu, cities probably had grown and died
upon her surface, and cities under her surface must have been peopled
and have again lost their peoples in the wars that always rage on the
sun-burned planets.

Arl and I glided over the glittering golden roofs of the city, and, settling
to Earth some miles distant, entered a cavern whose ancient shafts still
gaped, unfilled by the rubble that now choked most of the openings to
the Elder world. We were anxious to see what life had taken root within
the caverns, for there lay the tools of the ancient wisdom, waiting for a
wise man-child's learning. Arl opened the great air lock at the bottom
of the shaft and I floated the tender in to the floor of the cavern.
We fell to rummaging about in the ruins of the great mansions, as one