Wall Around a Star

THIRTEEN

Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior in the forces of Free Polynesia, stumbled out of the tachyon-transporter chamber to take his place in line—

But there was no line!

He was not in the tachyon center on Earth—was not even on Earth! The place he saw was eerily lighted, filled with repellent creatures out of a nightmare; and in it he had no weight! He bobbed like a balloon toward a creature like a huge blue eye, who dodged away with an irritable crackle of electric force, until he was caught by a Pur­chased Person who had been in line with him. He was thrust against a wall while half a dozen additional Pur­chased People came popping out of the tachyon chamber, then they were all ordered to form ranks and move out.

After the first terrible moment of terror and shock, Tu­paia was neither frightened nor confused. He did not know where he was, precisely, but he knew where he had been, in the Tachyon Base in Old Boston, and he knew what that meant.

Even if he hadn't, what he saw around him would have told him that he was somewhere out in deep space. For not all his companions were human. With him were some, not all, of the Purchased People he had been with in the Tach­yon Base—the very fat man with the huge blue eyes was there, so were the long-haired girl and the youth with the scar blazing white on his terror-stricken face; but at least half the group was absent. To make up, a dozen others had been added. And what others! Creatures like great floating eyeballs, creatures like children's sculptings of dough, an­gular, metallic creatures that puffed hisses of steam as they chugged along the hallways of this new place.

He could, of course, understand nothing of the screeches and yelps and drum rattles that passed for speech among these freakish beings, but that did not matter. The Pur­chased People were a labor squad, drafted for their brawn rather than for conversation. The queer alien that looked like a lump of baker's dough when at rest—but was seldom at rest—extended a tentacle and hung something around the neck of the girl with the flowing blond hair. It made a series of unearthly sounds, and the machine around her neck whispered to her in English translation, whereupon she became the gang foreman for these unwilling laborers.

The labor was endless. For what must have been more than a day Tupaia was kept at the tasks of a slave, holding this, lugging that, stowing strange machines and supplies in a great rocket vessel. Now and then he came near a port, and once or twice managed to steal a look outside. A sun, a moon, a planet—anything might help tell him where he was. But there was nothing. Not even stars. Only an occa­sional distant silvery smudge that might not have been real at all. When allowed, he slept. When given food, he ate— strange metallic-tasting stuff that seemed to have come from synthesis vats. A part of his mind was sick with long­ing for the sweet fish, the coconut milk, the papaya-poi of his childhood, but it was drowned in that larger part that wanted only freedom.

At least he was out of the Boston prison! He had been flashed terribly far away, he knew; but that same machine that had flashed him here could flash him back.

He stood erect, almost weightless in the tiny centrifugal force of this object he was in, and his immense barrel chest expanded with the appetite for freedom. It would come! In spite of anything. He did not fear the vile creatures who ordered him about any more than those spastic, hollow- eyed humans who were his labor mates. They did not mat­ter. Tupaia, Te'ehala, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, awaited the moment of opportunity that would make him free.

But it did not seem very quick to come . . .

It did not come while they were loading the lander. The hideous aliens were ever vigilant, and the lashing steel ten­tacles of the robot, the scorching electric sting of the huge floating eye proved themselves on other Purchased People. Tupaia learned quickly to avoid them.

It did not come on the long voyage down to the surface of the thing they called Cuckoo. What did come, though, was at least a little leisure, a little time to find which of his fellow prisoners were capable of speech. Most were not, but the young blond girl sometimes, the scar-faced boy more frequently, were willing to talk, almost as human prisoners did in human jails. From them he learned a good deal. They were approaching Cuckoo! Even Tupaia had heard of Cuckoo—no citizen of Earth could have avoided that much. But the flame that burned inside Tupaia had bleached out most other things, and he had had no idea of its size, its distance, or its impenetrable strangeness. No matter. He had discovered that, among the machines and instruments he had helped to muscle on board the lander, some were weapons and one was a miniature portable copy of the tachyon-transfer machine that could flash him back to the orbiter, perhaps even back to Earth. He marked it well. The weapons, even better.

When the aliens discovered that he alone among the dozen Purchased People they had commandeered was not "owned" by some distant creature, there was another ca­cophony of screeches and yelps and confusion as they dis­cussed the finding among themselves. For hours. Finally Tupaia, bored, fell asleep. When he woke the blond girl was staring at him—out of her own eyes, he thought. "What are you?" she demanded.

He said, "I am Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, and I am hungry. What is there to eat?"

She dismissed the question angrily. "Are you with these monsters? Do you know what they plan?"

"I am with them because I have no choice," he said.

"And as to the rest, I have no doubt you are going to tell me.

"How can you joke? They are playing a dangerous game! They think they can learn all of Cuckoo's secrets to send back to their home worlds and then destroy it!"

"Perhaps they can."

"Only if they die with Cuckoo—and we with them!"

"I do not die so easily, woman," he growled.

"And you are free," she added thoughtfully. She looked at him almost with envy. "They're going to have to reim­burse my owner for this," she explained, "and at least you come free. Nobody cares about you."

"I come free," said Tupaia softly, "because I am free."

"Not really," she said jealously. "None of us are that!" But he would not argue with her and when, a moment later, that familiar look of sudden abstraction came into her eyes and she moved off on some errand of her distant owner, he was not displeased. The more solitude, the more opportunity to plan. Barring the terrible food, the crowd­ing, and above all the stink—the creature they called a "Watcher" was the filthiest of all the creatures aboard, but each one had its own sickening fetor—he was not dis­pleased with where he was.

Especially since every moment brought him closer to the surface of that great, mysterious world called Cuckoo— huge enough to escape into, he was sure!

They came down at last on what seemed like a white porcelain boulevard in front of a tall, stern temple. The thrusters of the landing craft fouled the boulevard with streaks of scorched blackness and stretches of crazed, heat- cracked porcelain. The aliens herded the Purchased People out at once, and when Tupaia touched the cracked surface it singed his jail-softened feet. He cried out. The blond girl caught him roughly by the shoulder. In a voice not her own she declaimed, "If this unit cannot perform it should be eliminated." Tupaia muttered something, not caring to look back at what looked out of those mad eyes, and took the hint. He did not complain again.

And had no need to, really. The immense bits of metal and instrumentation they made him carry out of the ship were feather-light in this gentle gravity. They did, how­ever—he discovered—have mass and momentum. He made the mistake of getting between two of them, one a case of synthetic rations, the other a huge, massy, translu­cent block with a kind of organ keyboard attached to it. There was something about the block that flared Tupaia's broad nostrils and erected the hairs at the back of his neck. Was it a weapon? Had he seen it before? He hesitated, wondering, as the objects floated crunchingly together, and it nearly cost him a leg. He did not do that again. But the work was no challenge for his great muscles.

A great lake. An even greater forest, almost a jungle. Tupaia was desperate to explore either or both, but at first there was no chance. The beings that seemed to be the real leaders of the expedition—the floating eye and the great, puffing cubical robot—disappeared almost at once into the temple. Tupaia could only get quick glimpses of them as they scoured its confines for . . . what? For something he could not guess at, and did not think they found, to judge from the discontented, rancorous squawks and crackles that came from them. The leathery-winged, foul-smelling Watcher cruised overhead, watching all of them at close range; the lesser aliens toiled with the Purchased humans at slave labor. With three other Purchased People and a horse-headed creature they were set to putting together a raft and loading it with material from the ship. It was hot work in the dank air. All of the humans sweated profusely, and even the horse-headed Canopan exuded great oily drops of a scarlet liquid like blood.

But what a paradise this was! In the moments he could snatch from toil, Tupaia mapped every feature he could see.

All around lay distant, gentle slopes rising up to a ring of far-off cliffs. The slopes were wooded with pink-leaved trees that smelled graciously of cinnamon and pitch. And down in front of them was the great lake. Cool. Clean. It reminded him of the crystal waters of the lagoon beyond the hotel where he had worked as a boy, no more than a meter deep until you reached the distant breakwater reef, with patches of dark coral and the bright underwater lanes where he and the other beachboys raked pebbles and shell fragments away to save the whiteskins' tender feet. But this was even more clear. He could see no fish or crusta­ceans, just a gentle sandy bottom with a few clusters of marine growth—and the white porcelain roadway. He could trace its outlines as it went straight into the water, descending steeply as the lake deepened until it was lost from sight.

That was puzzling; but the forest was a promise! It would not be hard to hide in such a place.

Tupaia's courage did not exclude the awareness of dan­ger. There were dangers in plenty in the place where he was and the company he kept. He knew that those gentle woods might conceal dangers more appalling still. The only native life form he had seen was the Watcher; if that was typical of what inhabited Cuckoo, the sharks and orcas of the outer reefs were playthings by comparison!

But dangers were not important. Tupaia's ancestors had learned to deal with fear. They could not afford to let it rule them. They had crossed the wide Pacific Ocean in hollowed tree trunks, with nothing to guide them but wave crests, a distant sight of clouds—and courage. They had reached, and conquered, islands no human had ever seen before—Fiji, Tahiti, Easter, the great calm archipelago of Hawaii—and Te'ehala Tupaia was their worthy descen­dant.

So he did not fear Cuckoo, or whatever great enemies its forests might conceal. Nor did he fear his companions. Not the stinking, hideous Watcher. Not the Sheliak or the Sirian or the Scorpian robot or the lesser breeds. Not the other Purchased People, catatonically still or in a frenzy of compelled action—not any of them. They were not to be feared. They might even be useful, and if not they could easily die. Te'ehala Tupaia would not shrink from ending their lives at the instant those lives became inconvenient to him.

He became aware of great surges of foul stench, wafted down on him. Overhead the Watcher hung, staring at him with those strange compound eyes. He squealed something peremptorily; the blond girl hurried over and hung her Pmal translator on Tupaia's broad shoulder.

"You are the one who says he is 'free,'" the Watcher declared contemptuously, the Pmal faithfully reproducing his speech. Tupaia muttered assent. "For you that word means nothing! You will work as you are ordered. If you fail, you will die. When you are no longer needed, you will die. And perhaps you will die anyway, for I enjoy a good meal!" And it flew away with great sweeps of the leathery wings.

Tupaia swallowed, and returned the Pmal, and for some time was careful to keep his eyes on his work.

They finished fitting the sections of the raft together, then slid it down to the edge of the lake and loaded it with equipment from the lander, for purposes he could not guess . . . until he saw the blond girl throw off her clothes and step onto the raft. She knelt, shivering, staring out at the water.

When she glanced toward him he saw human fear in her eyes and, for the first time in, at least, some weeks, a hint of human compassion touched him. "What's the matter?" he asked.

She said dully, "They want me to swim down to the bot­tom of the lake." Tupaia was surprised. "Why not? It's not cold." "I can't swim," she explained simply. "I told them that I'd drown. They said it was known that Earth primates possessed aquatic skills, and they don't. None of them can survive very long under water. The Sirian and the Scorpian would be destroyed at once."

"Huh!" Tupaia said scornfully, and then, condescend­ingly, "This Earth primate has plenty of aquatic skills. If you get in trouble, I'll come after you." Maybe, he added to himself, and then observed one of the other Purchased Peo­ple gesturing furiously for him. He moved off, storing the useful information about the vulnerability of the Scorpian and the floating blue eye in his mind.

Behind him, he saw the Watcher swoop down over the raft, squealing something at the girl. Tupaia cursed him­self. What had he boasted about his skills for? Now they would watch him more closely than ever, because he might be useful!

There were only a few more bits and pieces to load onto the raft, and Tupaia studied them carefully. At least one, he was almost sure, was some sort of hand weapon, a metal object with an onion-shaped barrel and two stocks. When he reached for it casually and the Scorpian robot, with a fierce flurry of drumbeats, snatched it away, he was cer­tain. Good enough! And there were the woods, hardly a hundred meters away . . .

How far inside would he have to get before he was out of sight—and thus, perhaps, free? Another fifty meters? A hundred? He plotted paths, guessing at his running times, studying likely patches of undergrowth . . . and then he saw something peering at him out of the very spot he had chosen.

An ape?

That was silly! But he had no time to think of it; be­cause there was a flurry of slow, strong wings behind him and an overpowering reek. The Watcher! He lifted his head just in time to have a metal object strike it.

In Cuckoo's light gravity it did not drop fast enough to hurt. He caught it easily. It was a Pmal translator, and through it the Watcher's voice crackled: "You, the creature who is free! Get back to the raft. We're going to let you serve us by diving to the bottom of the lake!"

"All right," said Tupaia, turning obediently—since there was no choice. But he could not help taking one last glance at the patch of undergrowth.

Nothing was there.

He had not imagined it; something had been looking back at him that very closely resembled a terrestrial chim­panzee. None of the others seemed to have noticed it. Or had thought it not worth paying attention to.

Indeed, in some sense it was not. An ape in a jungle? Why not?

Except that this ape had been wearing clothes.

Tupaia emerged from the tepid, transparent water with a shout, exhaling air like the spout of a whale, splashing the side of the raft. The Sirian eye darted away with a crackle of static-electrical fury, and Tupaia marked that confirma­tion down in his memory: the creature feared water. The blond girl leaned over to drape a Pmal around his neck, and the Sirian demanded: "Have you secured the charge?"

Tupaia pulled himself up contemptuously. "Of course." It was a foolish question, since they already knew the an­swer, for they had sounded the depths of the lake with arcane methods of their own. Radar? Sonar? Something more incomprehensible still? Tupaia did not know, but he could see the glowing virtual image hanging over the center of the raft. The Sheliak extruded a pseudopod to the con­trols, lovingly sharpening the image, but Tupaia had seen it sharply enough when he dove down to the bottom.

The time for escape, Tupaia promised himself, was very close.

The lake was forty meters deep at this point, and Tupaia had been down to the bottom six times. Not to see. To do. It was easy enough to see in the aliens' instruments what was there: the end of the white porcelain roadway, at a huge doorway of greenish metal. But the instruments could not do what Tupaia had done. They could not carefully attach sticky lugs to the edge of the doorway, could not fix to each of the lugs an explosive charge, could not carry down the delicate fuses that would blow it open. Blow it open for what? That was not Tupaia's concern. Then, no doubt, the aliens planned to use some other gadget from their bag of tricks that would permit a drone to dive down and enter the water-filled passage beyond—if that was in­deed what was beyond—but by that time their foolish schemes would no longer matter to Tupaia, for freedom would be his!

So he waited patiently, the lake water drying on his bronzed skin, while the Sirian eye and the Watcher lifted themselves into the air, one on a web of electrostatic force and the other by the force of his huge, leathery wings, and flew toward the beach. The Sheliak made last-minute ad­justments, then gave the order to head for the shore. Obedi­ently the Purchased People on the raft sculled it toward the temple.

It was easy enough to pull the raft onto the beach—in this light gravity, there was no such thing as hard work! Tupaia swatted away some sort of steel-blue insect and re­viewed his plans. Yes. This would be his chance. That submarine bomb would create it for him. A huge water­spout—at least a loud noise—there would certainly be some sort of confusion, any kind, enough to let him get into the shelter of the cinnamon-scented trees.

As the Scorpian robot rattled peremptory commands and the Sheliak adjusted the firing mechanism, Tupaia strolled idly toward the tree line. Out of the corner of his eye he saw them trigger the fuse transmitter.

The explosion was a great disappointment.

He could hardly tell when it happened. There was no great spout of white foam, no thundering crash. There were not even bubbles. There was only a small upthrust of gentle, slow water in the middle of the lake, like some great fish disporting itself just below the surface. A distant, mild rumble. Nothing else.

Tupaia swore angrily. No matter! It was time to make his move. He started to spin, to run toward the trees—

And froze. With a snare-drum rattle of fury the Scorpian robot was jetting directly toward him, followed by the Watcher and the Sirian eye . . . and how had they known?

But they hadn't known what he was doing. They were not after Tupaia at all. They overflew him, dived into the woods, and disappeared. There were sounds of a scuffle, and then they came back, in line of procession, with the Sirian robot in the middle, clutching, in one disdainful ten­tacle, the queerly dressed chimpanzee.

As they passed, the Sirian eye sent a casual stinging elec­tric lash in Tupaia's direction, warning him back toward the shore. He had no choice. He obeyed; and as he turned back he heard a sad, whimpering voice: "Oh, please! I wasn't doing any harm! I was just on a, uh, a scientific expedition—"

It was the chimp! And he was speaking English!

Te'ehala Tupaia could not help himself; he expanded his barrel chest and roared with laughter. The chimp, carried like a rag doll in the robot's contemptuous grasp, wriggled around far enough to stare down at him reproachfully. Now he was upside down, whimpering with fear, a bedrag­gled monkey in yellow shorts and bright red jacket. Even though it had cost Tupaia his best chance at freedom, it was funny!

And then the humor ended. He heard a strange sound from the lake, and when he looked he saw that it was qui­etly emptying itself.

When the bomb blew out the underwater door, it had not been to connect with some still deeper, vaster body of un­derground water. It had been like blowing the stopper out of a tub. There was a slow, chuckling gurgle from the mid­dle of the lake, as its whole surface began to stir, and cir­cle, and narrow down to a gentle whirlpool at the center. Already the edge of the water had retreated a dozen meters from the beached raft as the lake, with all deliberate speed, drained itself into the empty caverns below.

Two days later the comedy was not even a memory. There was no longer anything for Te'ehala Tupaia to laugh at. Escape had failed. Every hour they were deeper and deeper into the shell of Cuckoo, and the hours were many.

What drove the aliens to this headlong plunge into the depths Tupaia did not know, but the aliens remorselessly drove him, and the rest of the Purchased People with him. They were beasts of burden. Once past the blown-out gate at the end of the porcelain road they were in a narrow, dark tunnel that spiraled down and down. The Sirian eye produced headlamps from one of the containers of instru­ments, tools, and weapons—eight of them for the Earth- primate labor squad, or about one for every other slave. The Scorpian had built-in lights of his own; the Sirian lit his way with coronal discharges of electricity when he needed them, and the other aliens had lamps given to them as a matter of course. Tupaia had one, of course. If he had not, he would have taken it from the nearest other; it was obvious that it was better to have it than not, if one must be a beast of burden at all.

And beast of burden he was, for what he had been made to carry was the great translucent block with the keyboard. Was it really a weapon? He was convinced it was, for the slave drivers kept a special eye on him, the Watcher's reek never out of his nostrils as the hideous creature soared overhead, except when the Sirian eye or the Scorpian was there. The thing outweighed Tupaia's own hundred-kilos- plus; on Earth he could barely have lifted it, and he was glad when the aliens commanded other Purchased People to take it in turn.

And they traveled down and down . . .

It was clear, at least, that this was no natural cave; the walls were metal, regular, with queer niches and protuber­ances that must once have had some function. It was an artifact. And it was immense! It seemed endless, and so steep that even in Cockoo's forgiving gravity it was hard to traverse.

Worse, it was slippery. The cascade from the lake had gone before them. It had kept on going, to depths unguessable to Tupaia; but in its passage it had left a coating of slimy muck. Even for Tupaia's huge strength, guiding the great massy block along the unpredictable jogs and bends of the tunnel was hazardous. At one switchback, damp and oily, the young blond girl slipped and fell headlong. Tu­paia, trying to avoid her, stumbled himself, and would have fallen except that a long, skinny black arm snaked out of nowhere and caught him.

"Watch it, big fellow," chattered an unhappy voice.

It was the ape, staggering under a load almost as great as Tupaia's own. Tupaia stopped his block and turned to see him with the headlamp, scowling. The poor creature ducked his head, half-blinded. He was only an animal—

But a king-warrior did not fail to acknowledge a favor. "Here," he said gruffly, "let me help you with that."

The chimp sighed, shifting the burden. "Well, thanks," he said, "but I'm a lot stronger than I look. But if you want to do something for me—"

Tupaia frowned. "What?" he demanded.

"Well, if you'd just shine that light straight ahead for a minute. —That's right. Thanks! And now at the walls of the tunnel, and then at the stuff I'm carrying—"

Tupaia caught himself automatically doing as the chim­panzee had asked, and stopped. "What's this about?" he asked suspiciously.

The chimp grimaced with fear. "Please, not so loud! It's just that I have this tachyon camera. See, this little thing, strapped to my wrist? I didn't lose it when they caught me—didn't even drop it, although—oh, believe me—I was so scared! I thought that minute up by the lake was going to be the last this old monkey would ever see!"

"What is it for?" Tupaia demanded, picking up his load once more.

"The camera?" The chimpanzee bared his fangs in a pla­catory grin. "For my friends, you see. They sent me down to keep an eye on this, and I'm doing it. Not that it matters to me, I suppose," he added, in self-pity, "because the deeper we get the surer I am that this is a one-way trip for old Doc Chimp. But at least they can see what I see— watch it!"

The procession of bearers had suddenly knotted up, be­cause at the head of the group the aliens were squabbling over something again. Rataplan from the Scorpian robot, chitterings and yowls from the others. The ape said appre­hensively, "The one that worries me is the Watcher. The others are just mean. I think he's crazy! I mean, really insane. There's something religious about this whole thing for him—he's looking for his God, sort of—and he's not finding him, and he's not sure he should have these others with him. Oh, there's going to be trouble, I promise you," he finished sorrowfully.

Carefully, Tupaia set down his ponderous burden again.

"You seem to know more about this than I do," he said slowly. "What's it all about?"

The ape sighed. "It's a long story—"

Tupaia laughed shortly. "We've got plenty of time. Maybe nothing else but time."

Down, down. Now and then they stopped to catch a few moments' sleep while the aliens wrangled. At long intervals they ate, more of the queer-tasting, metallic, faintly spoiled stuff—in Tupaia's judgment—all-purpose synthetic food from the tachyon chamber. But it kept them alive.

Escape seemed further away than ever. It was not that Tupaia was lost. Not the descendant of those Pacific ex­plorers! But how could he get away? Always one of the flying aliens brought up the rear of the column, always the others paused even in their interminable squabbling to watch and count the slaves. It was an endless trip, with nothing to do but listen to the ape's whining complaints and ponder the meaning of what he had said. Tupaia could form no opinion of how true most of Doc Chimp's stories were. These outlandish aliens were incomprehensible in any terms; Tupaia could make no sense of the chimp's guesses at their drives and alliances. But he was surely right about the Watcher. That particular creature was growing more agitated and more frenzied at every meter. It carried no light of its own and needed none—when its bulging multiple eyes could not collect enough light to serve, its hideous black ears guided it by sonar like a bat's—and that made it all the worse. They could not see it coming as it swept back and forth over the ragged slave procession, squealing mournfully and furiously to itself by turns. The chimp's diagnosis was not to be doubted. The Watcher was mad. And when the line of porters knotted up at a dip in the tunnel where the cascading lake waters had accumulated and left a stagnant pool of thin mud, the Watcher displayed its madness. It came screeching back and struck out at the first in line, the young long-haired blond woman. Tupaia was just behind her. He dropped his burden—fortunately not the block this time!—and turned to face the attack; and something from behind struck him down. His muscles convulsed in a quick tetanic shock. He smelled ozone and his own burning flesh, and lost con­sciousness.

His last thought was that freedom was gone forever, be­cause he was dead.

But about that he was wrong. Broken patches of aware­ness began to come back. He was lying in the dark, his legs still in the slimy water, his body a heavy log of dull pain. He breathed the antiseptic odor of medical foam, and real­ized the chimpanzee had been caring for him. "Oh, Mr. Tupaia," the animal moaned, "thank heavens you're com­ing out of it! I thought you were killed!"

Tupaia said thickly, "So did I. What happened?"

"It was that Sirian," the chimp sobbed. "He must've thought you were attacking the Watcher, 'stead of the other way around—anyway, he zapped you, and I thought you were dead! You wouldn't have been the only one. There's two dead already, back in the water—and all the more for the rest of us to carry because of it! Oh, Mr. Tupaia, I'm scared of this place!"

Savior or not, Tupaia was tiring of this preposterous ape and his fretful complaints. But he felt an obligation. "Here," he said, "I'll take one of those cases from you—"

"Oh, would you, Mr. Tupaia? Thank you!" The chimp stood up, peering forward in the dim, shadowy tunnel. "I think they're getting ready to move now," he said dismally. "I'm afraid your light got wrecked, Mr. Tupaia. But you can see, sort of, by watching the lights up ahead—"

Tupaia did not answer. His weakened limbs were nearly too stiff to move, and the dressings the ape had applied had hardened around his neck and shoulders.

Of course, they might have saved his life, he acknowl­edged fairly. He stood up, setting his increased load in mo­tion, and became aware of new physical sensations. Past the sludgy pool, the tunnel changed character. A coppery, sulfurous odor rose above the medical smell of the foam, and a hot breeze was blowing from below. "It's a bad place we're coming to, Mr. Tupaia," sobbed the ape, and Tupaia did not have the heart to answer. It was true.

It got worse.

It was days later, perhaps, and certainly many kilome­ters farther along the trail—many kilometers straight down!—when there was a cacophony from the beings at the head of the line that transcended everything before. The temperature had gone up sharply. Every breath was an effort. Tupaia let his load drift to the floor, and peered ahead.

There was light ahead—a lot of it. Even the gallery they were in was almost twilit now; he could see Doc Chimp, gasping ragged breaths beside him, the shoe-button eyes imploringly fixed on the light ahead. The rest of the Pur­chased People were worse off still, but, strangely, the one worst affected of all was the Sirian eye. The enamel globe of its orb was paled and tarnished as it sped past them to join the other aliens ahead.

If the creatures had been quarrelsome before, now they were frenzied. "Let's take a peek," Doc Chimp whispered hoarsely, and the two of them crept silently toward the head of the line.

And stopped in wonderment.

The gallery ended on a sort of a great, wide balcony, and the balcony looked down on a vast drusy cavern, with what seemed to be faceted diamonds and opals and rubies set into the metal walls. And what walls! They were immense! The cavern dropped sheerly a kilometer and more beneath them, extended at least four kilometers into the distance. And beyond it there were other, vaster chambers still. It was not easy to see very far, because the great chamber was crisscrossed with cables and mirror-bright rods. A thunder of something in motion filled their ears. The walls themselves glowed; the scene was as bright as an afternoon on a Polynesian beach, though there was no central source of light.

As Tupaia's eyes became accustomed to the scale and brightness he realized that what he had thought were pre­cious stones were in facts discrete lights. Almost like in­strument lights on a panel; the whole scene, he thought, was like the interior of some vast machine, with its count­less thousands, perhaps millions of indicator lights and gauges.

Beside him Doc Chimp was panning his tachyon camera across the scene, muttering to himself. "Oh, Mr. Tupaia, this place gets worse and worse! What do you suppose that Watcher's doing now?"

Tupaia said suspiciously, "Watcher? I don't see the Watcher."

"Not with those other creatures—down there! Way down there, between those two big pipes, don't you see?"

The hideous creature was at least half a kilometer away from them, dipping and soaring among the great beams and cables on his leathery wings. He looked tiny at that distance, but the other creatures were near enough. The sounds of their quarreling rose to a crescendo, and Tupaia felt the chimp shiver beside him. "Oh, good heavens," the animal moaned. "Do you see what that Sirian's doing? That means something special's going to happen now! And it's bound to be something bad!"

The great eye was limping back toward them, its crackle of electrostatic force muted with fatigue and disarray. It paid no attention to the terrestrial creatures but made for a particular metal object, sharp-angled and with a sort of soft, folding cover over one face. With a crackle of force the Sirian thrust the cover aside and squeezed itself into the box; a moment later it emerged again and dragged it­self slowly back toward the other aliens.

"What did it do?" Tupaia demanded.

"It sent itself back!" Doc Chimp cried. "Don't you know a tachyon chamber when you see one? It went in and got itself copied; and that copy's back on the orbiter right now, stewing up heaven knows what sort of mischief." He had followed the Sirian with his little camera, and now let it drop in exhaustion. "Oh, Mr. Tupaia," he whimpered, "I wish I'd never come here."

Tupaia turned his back on the sobbing ape, breathing heavily in the damp, copper-smelling heat.

What sort of place was this? It was not merely an arti­fact buried in the ground After all those untold kilometers, he had to believe that the entire crust of Cuckoo—this part of it anyway—was an artifact! Something, for some reason, had constructed it. This great chamber with all its lights and rods and roaring, muted sounds—it was like being in­side the control of some vast, automatic machine.

But for what purpose? And built by whom?

The Scorpian robot was welcoming the return of the Sirian with a drumroll of angry reproach—for what, Tu­paia could not guess. He could not hear individual sounds very well, would not have understood them if he could, for almost none of the Purchased People still had Pmals. The young man with the scarred face, almost the only one who had, was listening with that blank, opaque stare that meant some distant owner was occupying his mind.

Intent on the squabble, Tupaia brushed an annoying in­sect out of his face, and was astonished to find the thing so dense that it hurt his hand when he struck it. He had no time for such thoughts, though; Doc Chimp was moaning, "Oh, Mr. Tupaia, do you see what they're doing? Do you know what that means?"

The Purchased Person with the Pmal, obeying some or­der, had bent to open a bale of equipment of some sort. Tupaia could not identify it; it seemed to contain folded— garments? No, not garments, but some sort of chest har­nesses, with blunt torpedo-shaped metal objects attached to them. "Thrusters!" Doc Chimp sobbed. His eyes were dull, his breathing labored, his demeanor hopeless, even as he was pointing his camera at the emerging equipment. "That means they're going to make us put them on!"

Tupaia growled, "What's wrong with that? Better than walking!"

The chimp shook his head miserably. "Not in that mor­tal long tunnel we just came through, not with all those bends and turns. But out there—out in that big cave— don't you see? They're going to make us fly straight through!"

Tupaia slapped another bug away and then, realizing what he had done, looked around. Why, the air was full of the bugs! Even in the semidarkness he could see dozens of them, hundreds.

And then he saw that there were swarms of the little insects, all over, even out on the balcony. The other Pur­chased People had noticed them now, and a sudden aston­ished rise in pitch of the gabble of the aliens said that they had discovered them, too. They were coming from the tachyon transporter. A bright bubble blossomed from the machine. It popped, and a batch of a thousand of the in­sects buzzed out of the chamber as he watched—and an­other batch—and another—it was like watching puffs of vapor from an antique steam engine, thousands upon thou­sands of them. For a mad moment Tupaia found himself a boy again, bringing breakfast to the tourists in the over-water dining room on Mooroa. To entertain the whiteskins he would throw a slice of toast into the water, and—oh!— what a frenzy! The water would boil with silvery bodies and gold and blue, flashing and flailing into each other like a tiny underwater game of pushball, until magically the last crumb was devoured; and just so these flashing bright crea­tures milled and raced around—

But were by no means so harmless.

Doc Chimp cried out in alarm. "The Boaty-Bits! I've never seen so many of them!"

And then, slowly, his voice shaking as if in mortal fear, "But they're collective beings. It takes a thousand of them to equal a human or a Sheliak or any of those—that's why they go in swarms—but here—" His voice failed him. "Here there's a million or more," he gasped, "and what will that make them equal to?"

Perhaps the Sheliak and the Scorpian had thought of the same thing; at least, their actions showed sudden panic. The robot whirled in midair and, steam jets screaming, raced toward the Purchased Person bearing a load of queer double-stocked weapons, while the Sheliak extended a lightning-fast tentacle in the same direction.

Fast as they were, they were not fast enough.

The milling swarm of Boaty-Bits seemed to shudder in midmotion. Then, with astonishing speed, the entire swarm coalesced around the Purchased Person. They swarmed onto him like African bees onto a luckless victim, covering him from head to toe with a solid, shimmering coat of steely blue. The Purchased Person staggered, then swiftly dropped to one knee, grasped the two-stocked weapon, and fired. The Scorpian robot exploded into a million shards of hot steel as the greenish blob of light struck; a moment later, with a sound like bacon frying, another green bolt in­cinerated the Sheliak.

"How—could he—" Doc Chimp muttered feverishly, and then answered his own question. "The Boaty-Bits took him over! And—heaven help us now, Mr. Tupaia—here comes the Watcher!"

Tupaia instinctively shrank back, as the Watcher screamed up from the depths of the cavern. Its hoarse, hooting roar was almost deafening, even above the thrum­ming in the immense pipes; great flapping wings brought its vile odor in a hot and nauseating gust as it lunged to­ward them—and past. It dropped to another part of the line, cawing its terrible rage at the two Purchased People staggering under the mass of the great translucent block. One fled. The other tried. Not fast enough. The foul talons ripped across his back and blood spurted. The Watcher dropped to the keyboard and its claws danced across it.

Yes. It was a weapon. That green glow formed over the block, elongating toward the Purchased Person wearing the cloak of Boaty-Bits.

The green charge grew and slid toward the edge of the block. Then it raced away. It struck the Purchased Person, and he ceased to exist. Half the Boaty-Bits got away, the rest simply disappeared. It went on.

It went out into the cavern.

Those shining rods, those delicate silver wires—they were in its path, and it touched them. A rumble like a distant H-bomb filled the cavern. Green fire flared into terrible brightness. Tupaia ducked his head, crouched to shield himself from searing heat. A scream from the Watcher faded into sudden dreadful silence. He heard the monkey whimper.

At last the wave of heat receded, and Tupaia lifted his head and tried to see. He could not. His stinging eyes found only a foggy red blur.

"My eyes!" he heard the monkey moaning. "I burnt my eyes!"

The Watcher howled again, in rage and fear, and then the shock wave hit them.

The blast battered Tupaia's body, hurt his ears, dazed him. Dimly, through ringing ears, he heard the diminishing echoes that rumbled after it. When at last he could get his breath he picked himself up and stared around fiercely through the thinning blood-red mist. At least his vision was returning!

The curious mirror-bright rods were intact, but the sil­very cables were slowly wriggling themselves into cork­screw contortions, a great loose skein of chrome-colored spa­ghetti. Huge metal beams had been bent and torn, and somewhere a pipe containing liquid had burst. The plume of liquid dashed itself into spray—or perhaps it was steam, for the heat was indescribable.

Near him the monkey lay in a sobbing heap, hands over his scorched eyes. And the Watcher stood still at his terri­fying weapon.

If he had seemed mad before, now he was utterly ber­serk. He played the console of the weapon again, this time toward the bulk of the remaining group of slaves. They were vaporized at once; and the Boaty-Bits buzzed wildly above them.

Apart from the Watcher, Tupaia, and the chimp, the only individual creature still alive was the horse-headed Canopan, and his future suddenly was in doubt. The Boaty-Bits—more of them every minute, as the tachyon chamber spat out new swarms—wheeled and descended on him.

Screeching horribly, the Watcher lifted the weapon to­ward the shrouded figure of the Canopan—and stopped.

The Canopan raised its hand, and spoke—in a tone wholly unlike its usual whinnying tongue.

The effect on the Watcher was spectacular. It froze. It held motionlessly for a long moment.

Then it screamed in horror and outrage, heaved the great block away out over the balcony. It spun and turned as it fell slowly into the depths. The Watcher, shrieking its despair, turned and flew away.

Tupaia swallowed and glanced down at Doc Chimp. "What—what was that?" he demanded.

But there was no answer. The little chimpanzee was drooping slowly toward the floor, one long, skinny black hand trying vainly to press back the bright flood that spurted from a wound over his heart, the other pressed to the blinded shoe-button eyes. Some tiny fragment from the battle had found an unintended target.

And, except for that strange horse-headed figure with its mummy-wrapping of Boaty-Bits, Tupaia was alone.

He turned and ran back up the corridor, expecting at every moment to feel that bright green blast on his own back.

It did not happen; but the way to escape was not open. The gallery was shuddering under repeated explosions from the disasters in the cave, and as he rounded a turn he saw that some of those quakes had brought down the roof.

The tunnel was blocked.

There was no longer any way back to the surface.