The little cave was a weird, intense glare of violet light. Atwood had had no difficulty finding it; the glare streamed like an aura from its entrance, out into the night. The _Xarite_, almost in a pure state, lay in great powdery heaps. Atwood's hands were trembling as he scooped it up, filling his insulated cylinder, clamping down its lid. More than ever, a desperate haste was upon him now. So many things might be transpiring back in the village. And he realized too that his spaceship might be discovered.
Within a minute or two he was into the cave and out again, with his precious little cylinder slung on his back. He was more skillful at leaping now. Ahead the circular barrage was complete now, a vertical violet curtain of light enclosing the village. It made the darkness out here on the rocks seem more intense by contrast.
The dim landscape swayed weirdly with his flat sailing leaps. And suddenly, off to one side, he was aware that round blobs of yellow glow were appearing. The monster _genes_. With the season of their growth upon them, they were struggling up out of their microscopic invisible world.
The night out here now was hideous with the throbbing, humming voices of the monsters. Atwood's heart went cold. How would he get the girl out of this damnable place? He could think only that in some way he must quickly persuade her. Together, running, leaping like this--or like birds following the flimsy forest-top which the _genes_ could not reach--he would be able to get her to the spaceship.
With the purple barrage curtain close before him, Atwood slowed up. Then he came within the direct light-radiance; crawling almost flat to pass between two of the braziers. The glare blinded him. Then he was through, rising to his feet.
"So? Here is the God--our Man-God who was gone?" It was Bohr's ironic, guttural voice. Atwood had no chance to jump away. Bohr, with a ponderous pounce, gripped him with the power of a machine. Bohr and a dozen of his roistering men were here.
"Our Man-God is late for the ceremony," Bohr was leering. They were shoving Atwood forward, along a village street crowded with jabbering Marlans, across an edge of the village toward an open space, like a public square. The mound-dwellings bounded it on one side, and the barrage was on the other. The square was thronged with Marlans, standing in jabbering groups, gazing toward the center where three platforms were erected. Two were side by side, and one faced them. The two were empty. On the other a single Marlan sat in a great cradle. The Ruler-Selah. His ponderous fat body was round with flesh. In the cradle he squatted like a huge toad.