Things seemed to make sense to me now, not just the mystery I was buried with, but mysteries that had gone on for quite some time.

Climbing back out of the rocket, I crept through the wall of stones and crossed the sands to the camp site. I saw where the boy and the beast lay in sleep and I went quietly up behind them.

Did I dare do what I contemplated? Even in the weird bluish light of the cavern I could still discern where the blood remained in the fur.

I lay my hands on the fur pelt and found the fastener, under a flap at the back of the neck. I opened it.

The bestial head flipped back, held to the rest of the suit by heavy rubber cables. These were extinct things of lost history, but it was still known of the complex systems employed, by which the movement of the wearer re-charged the battery, cool air circulated within so that the soldier did not smother. All of these things worked in his favor, for he seemed to be in decent condition.

The handsome elvish face, with pleasing soft features had a mop of spiked black hair and a patch over one eye. It was a face I had seen once before, half a million years ago, in the Canadian woods. This was the man who had saved my life when the Satellite Lords attacked following the death of the bandits.

This was the hero, Loh-Nala.

His nose twitched and I watched his mouth pull into a frown. A tremor passed through his whole form. I saw his good eye squeeze tighter shut, I must have woken him.

In a whimper of a voice, he said: “Back! Please, put the helmet back on.”

“Loh Nala?” I asked.

“Yes, damn you, please. Put it back on!” his voice turned raspy at the end, the tone of a madman.

“I will, I will, don’t fear. But, please, tell me…”

“Not now! Oh, I suffer so. The brightness is poison to me. Put the helmet back and I will tell you all in the morning.”

I did as he bade me.

How could I sleep after that? What could I do but turn it over in my mind? The hero of the empire had gone in stasis under a volcano, survived the coming and going of a race, and awoke in ruins as a madman. He was like nothing so much as an English lord losing his grip and turning into a werewolf by the light of the full moon.

Healthful sleep never found me, and instead I tossed and turned on the blanket, my mind rushing with feverish images. I pictured again, my lost guardian, Tando Var, bound in the dungeon, with the raygun pointed at him. I saw the mute Kardo running away deep in the tunnels, just barely stepping over deep cracks, menacing shadows crossing his face. Finally I saw Loh Nala, wearing the survey suit that the people of the woods called “sasquatch”, meeting with the other elf on the cliff. They conversed but their words did not reach one another, until they heard a rustling sound coming through the trees. Clouds passed before the sun and the shadows lengthened. The wind stirred them, and the other man put his helmet back on against the chill. Loh Nala looked back in confusion, a look of fear crossing his face. And his face!

I sat up, bolt upright, back in my cabin in 1879. Morninghawk sat cooking in the far corner.

“Bad dream?” Morninghawk asked me.

“A werewolf, a monster,” I mumbled. “What are you cooking at this hour?”

“Just a snack. For some reason I’m always hungry these days.”

I half knew that I only dreamed my long dead companion, but I remarked on the reality of the scene, and how handsome he looked. And yet, something was different “Morninghawk, are you sick?”

He laughed at that “Just a little, in the mornings. I might just be out of shape, putting on weight. This is what happens when a man plays house instead of panning for gold.”

“Well,” I said, getting out of bed, “sometimes the gold we find isn’t the yellow metal, at least that’s what they tell me.”

“You shouldn’t get up yet. It’s dangerous, you know. Sometimes what a man peeks in on in the middle of the night can kill him.”

“Superstition?”

He pulled the pan off stove and just shrugged. “Look for yourself.”

He pointed at the bed I’d just risen from.

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I looked at the sheets, and saw not wool or cotton, but sand, and no pillow, but two bodies in Indian garb beside a dead campfire. Two bodies and not three.

I shook my head “It’s all wrong. Where’s the monster? Where’s…?”

Kardo stood above me, shaking me, making a pleading sound.

I sat up, and reality hit me like a bucket of freezing water. “Where is he?”

He pointed at tracks in the sand and pulled me to my feet.

“I wish he would take that thing off sometime.”

Kardo shook his head and kept dragging me away, naturally I went with him.

He showed me his path through the pile of rubble and pushed me out into the dim room full of the machines of the extinct race. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted in there, since I’d seen no signs of life in there. This time he dragged me towards one of the arches on the long wall.

On my first visit to this chamber, I’d thought that all the arches were choked with rubble and impassible, but here, Kardo showed how the seemingly solid stone actually allowed a slight gap where one could squeeze through.

The chamber beyond was shrouded in darkness, but my guide kept a tight grip on my wrist and showed me where a dark curtain hung, and the room beyond it.

Here was a table and some chairs, all set before a woodpile of ancient machinery which even now pulsed with electrical life. The works had several viewing screens, and these glowed, lighting the room. Kardo had me sit at one of the chairs and he sat at the other. He reached out for a switch on the panel, and when he flipped it I had another surprise.

“Cylas,” he was now able to say, “this is the chamber where I may talk to you.”

“Amazing. But, how is it done?”

“The race that lived here had learned a way to transform thought waves into speech.”

“Kardo, I have so many things I want to ask you.”

“Yes, but first you must ask what has become of my protector.”

“Loh Nala? Do you know where he is?”

“Look at that glass there,” he pointed and began to work a set of dials, different sized ones set atop one another.

The glowing image gave a roving view of the room, and Kardo made it pull back, so that it showed the room and us in it, then, miraculously, it pulled further back, though the wall, and into the cave of machines, then over into the room where we had camped. As he rolled back a dial, the view changed not only in space, but also in time, for it showed moments earlier when Kardo pulled me along away from the camp. This all went in reverse, so we walked backwards and I lay back down to my dream. He sped it up so that time went back fast, and I could see Kardo walk backward towards this chamber and then backward to the camp, and the reverse of his bewildered reactions when he’d found Loh Nala gone. Then, at last, Loh Nala, in his beastly suit, walking backwards to our camp.

“But where did he go?” I asked.

“Patience, we can wind forward and follow him.”

He reversed the flow, showing time moving forward, hours, ago, and with the viewer, we followed the monster back up the tunnel, then to the dark room, and up through the crack. The suit somehow gave him the agility of a jungle cat, for he rushed up the nearly sheer crevice without slowing down. We followed him among the cells, and up towards the locked gate.

Suddenly there came an ambush!

Men closed in from all sides, and a net of spun glass fell on the monster. They closed in with prods and subdued him.

“How can that be? They could never hold him before.”

“They only used their own weapons before,” Kardo answered, “they have a store of tools from the ancient Ardon race, and these are a match for our modern inventions.”

“Where are they taking him?”

“Up to their leaders, watch.”

The Satellite Lords removed the helmet from the suit and dragged the unconscious hero from it. He came to as they did and cried out. The machine even brought the sounds of his protestations of the bright lights.

“He can’t abide the light,” Kardo explained, “that’s why he kept so often to his ship or to this room. To go anywhere else he had to be in the suit.”

The captors beat Loh Nala until he fell limp and they wrapped the net around him and took him above.

We followed upwards, through dense layers of rock, and with the wonderful machine we could even see where more treasures and sealed chambers were buried, unsuspected by the occupying force. Above, in a bright chamber, a domed room, the leader waited.

He had the armor off, and instead wore some leisure costume, hose and a shirt with puffy sleeves. He paced and talked down at a man sitting in a chair, I realized as the view closed in that a man was tied to the chair.

Kardo turned one of the dials and we heard the voices.

The leader said: “...you must know something about the ones that followed you. You can hardly keep up playing innocent for long.”

A hollow, tired voice replied “You have had me locked up for days and had me under the lash many times. If I had more to say I would say it.”

The leader paced, stopping at his desk to take nuts from a glass dish he kept there “I don’t agree. They tell me you people have a lot of emotional control. They say even that you count yourselves superior to us in that regard.”

“They say many things. Do what you must, but I can tell you no more.”

“The facts stand this way: first one man came to get you, now another has come, a different one entirely. This needs explaining. If you don’t cooperate, we may find ourselves forced to dispose of you.”

I asked Kardo to shift the view so that we might see the face of the other man. The image turned, and there, in the chair, what I saw made me cry out.

“By God, it’s Tando Var!”