Wall Around a Star

SIXTEEN

Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Free Polynesia, stumbled out of the tachyon-transmission chamber with his eyes downcast and his step shambling, carrying on the masquerade of a Purchased Person— Into what?

He shouted in sudden rage and fear. Polynesian theology had no hell, but the missionaries had told him about theirs. Heat, noise, pain, bewilderment—had they been right? Was he in it?

Tupaia had no way of saying that this tachyon transfer was any worse than the earlier ones, for he had no memory that there had been any earlier; but he knew that this expe­rience was gut-knottingly, mind-wrenchingly terrible. Everything was wrongl Even the man in front of him was wrong—was no longer the same man he had followed in the prisoners' file. Was no longer a human being at all! Tupaia stumbled in the queerly lit gravity of this awful place and crashed into him—or into it. Certainly this could not be a person! It was something queer, hideous, red-lit. It was a troubled dreamlike memory from childhood, for in the whiteskins' preprimary school there had been fairy-tale books, with goblins and elves. One of tiny Te'ehala's first shocks of betrayal had come when he learned that these creatures were lies. No such beings had ever existed—

But they did, and he was surrounded by them! The man ahead of him was now wearing the exact shape of a kobold—gnarly limbs, squat frame, craggy face. It was the most horrid creature Tupaia had ever seen, worse by far than the scuttling or writhing creatures at the bottom of his home lagoon, worse than a nightmare, for it bore human features. It turned toward him, and the eyes were the eyes of a person as vulnerable as Tupaia himself to shock and pain, as filled with terror; it spoke, and the voice was the voice of a human being, bleating for help. It was a diaboli­cal mixture of monster and man . . .

And so was Te'ehala Tupaia.

For he himself had been changed in the same way.

In that moment Tupaia nearly went mad.

He could find nothing familiar, nothing that related to any previous part of his existence. He was in a gnome's body, inhabiting a devil's cavern, surrounded by creatures queerer than any demons. He was seeing by a light that was redder than red—it stood in the same relation to red that indigo does to blue—and it had no source. He was on a balcony of sorts, and far below him was a tangle of ma­chines and pipes, with queer figures scuttling around and over them. And he was surrounded by a sea of raucous sound, like the middle of an April typhoon, but deeper and slower. The other Purchased People, as shocked and mad­dened as himself, were milling around in disarray.

Then, above all the tumult, came a call in a crackly, raspy sort of language that, incredibly, Tupaia understood. "Purchased People!" it grated. "You have been selected for labor in edited form for purposes of scientific research!"

The creature speaking was more hideous than Tupaia itself; it was a thing like a great blood-red eye, glittering like a ruby, that hung above them. The enslaved kobolds fell silent and it continued: "Reimbursement will be made to your owners. You have been edited in a stress-resistant form capable of functioning readily in this environment, and given optical systems capable of seeing by the heat sources all around us, with language faculties adequate to understand our orders. You need no more!"

It paused, and crackling tendrils of electrostatic force leaped from its ruby surface to sting Tupaia and some of the nearest others. "You eight! Follow me! Your first task will be to ascertain what other members of our first party survived!"

* * *

Stumbling up a steep corridor, with the lash of the ruby eye's electrostatic lightnings to spur him and the others on, Tupaia felt his mind racing out of gear. He was staring around this hellish place in terror in one moment, in an­other reliving the days when he drove a bulldozer for the island's new airstrip to pay his college tuition, when he plucked red hibiscus for the tourists' breakfast tables, ran errands at the Chinese store, lit spirals of pyrethrum to kill mosquitoes because a bug-zapper would not have looked authentic enough for the hotel's whiteskin manager. Bug- zapper! Suddenly the parts of his memories came together. All around them swarmed a huge cloud of tiny beings, larger and faster than any mosquito and far more danger­ous. Boaty-Bits, he knew.

And suddenly wondered how he knew. And that weird being with the whip was a Sirian eye. Those other horrid beings had names too: the great doughy creature inside a crystal shell was a Sheliak; the clattering, hissing metal thing a Scorpian robot. But how did he know that?

Although Tupaia knew something about tachyon trans­portation because everyone did, he had had no direct expe­rience of it—this Tupaia had not—and little knowledge of its refinements. They had not seemed relevant to the prime goal of freeing Polynesia from its whiteskin conquerors, nor had it been discussed in his school classes. "Editing" was a concept he grasped only dimly, and that more by seeing what had happened to himself and the other Pur­chased People than from any theoretical knowledge. He did not need to be told that he had changed. His own hands, as they swung by his sides, testified to that most inarguably. And he could not fail to know that he now had faculties he had never owned before. He knew the names of these outlandish beings. He seemed to understand every communication addressed to him, in whatever language; he saw in colors he had never seen before.

"Halt!" cried a voice—not a voice, but a rattling like drumbeats; but Tupaia understood it, and knew that it came from the robot. The grotesque gnomes stopped, whis­pering to each other; they had passed through a vaulted chamber and were now on another balcony, higher up. Tu­paia edged away from the being that rattled and the being that stung as they conferred, and found himself near a pre­cariously low railing, looking down on the immense cavern itself. Now he could see that the things that scuttled around the machines and pipes were less unfamiliar than anything else in this wholly alien place; they looked exactly like the crystalline crabs that had begun to appear on Earth before he was transported. What they were doing, he could not make out. Repairing the machines? Perhaps so. A great plume of liquid was arching slowly out of some ruptured pipe, breaking up into a sort of rainbow spray, but the rainbow was made all of gradations of red, from almost orange to that newer, deeper red that he had never seen before. As he watched the plume dwindled and stopped, and he saw that the crystal crabs were swarming over the place it had come from.

Over Tupaia's head the great ruddy eye dived past with a crackle of static electricity, and the Sheliak and the flying metal cube just behind. They plunged over the low railing and dropped like meteors to the far floor. They were after a huge translucent block with a keyboard at one edge. Something about the device troubled Tupaia— something not quite a memory, more than a dream—he could not pin it down. But the slave drivers had no doubts. Even at that great distance, even through the barrier of their queer shrieks and rattles, he could see that this object was something important to them.

Then the brief rest was over. The blood-red Sirian de­tached itself from the others and soared back up to the balcony, hovering just overhead. A sparkling sting jolted some of the kobolds to attention. "Here are your orders," the Sirian rasped. "You indicated ones will proceed up this corridor until you encounter living beings or their corpses. Survivors will then return to report. Move outl"

There seemed nothing threatening in the long, narrow corridor they moved through. Away from the cataclysmic environment of the great machine chamber, with its wink­ing lights and scuttling, glassy crabs, the present tunnel seemed almost peaceful, and some of the other Purchased People began to speak almost normally among themselves. Tupaia disregarded them as a king-warrior should. He took the position at the front of the line as by right. No one argued. When he came to a gallery whose end disappeared in dimness, with branching corridors all along, he made the decision. "We will split up," he announced. "One of you go into each of these tunnels. I will proceed along the main passage."

There was a grumble from the other kobolds, but Tupaia paid no attention to that, either; except that when he had advanced a few score meters along the gallery he glanced covertly over his shoulder and was pleased to see that the others were no longer in sight. Perhaps they had followed his orders. Perhaps they had gone in a cluster into the first tunnel they saw, or even returned to the great cavern; it did not matter, what mattered was that Te'ehala Tupaia was alone and unsupervised.

How often he had dreamed of a chance like this!

But, now that he had it, was it real? Was there anywhere to escape to? And even if there was, how could he escape from the hideous shape these enemies had forced on him?

For almost the first time in his life, Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior, began to doubt his destiny.

He slowed down, almost idling, glancing into each of the side tunnels as he passed, but there was no evident hope in any of them. The gallery was bare and empty, apart from Tupaia himself and a single insect—or, more likely, a Boaty-Bit from the swarm he had left behind him—that danced above and around before him like a silent sentry. Which perhaps it was, Tupaia thought gloomily; perhaps here too his freedom was only an illusion.

He stopped, aware that the Boaty-Bit's dancing had be­come agitated, and aware of something new. It was not a sight or a sound. It was an odor, of such choking foulness that his armored nostrils tried to close to keep it out.

He knew that stench, with the queer new knowledge that had been grafted into him in the editing; and he ran for­ward to peer into the next tunnel.

A Watcher! The name flashed into his mind, and with it the sudden internal warning: Beware. But the warning was too late; the creature rose up to confront him.

Tupaia had never imagined anything as repellent. It was crouching over a half-eaten corpse, he saw with disgust—a human corpse? At first flash he thought so, for it wore the rags of clothes; but it was too small to be an adult human being, too incongruously proportioned, with long, skinny arms—no. With only one long, skinny arm; because the Watcher was crunching the marrow from the severed other, which still retained rags of a once-gay scarlet and green jacket.

The creature fastened its great eyes on Te'ehala Tupaia and dropped the arm. With a hoarse, hooting roar, as pow­erful as the whistle of a tour liner at the docks of Papeete, it plunged toward him, black enormous ears cupped in his direction, bulging multiple eyes glaring horridly. Blood was dripping from its hideous beak.

The creature was incredibly fast. There was no time to react, and he was weaponless. Tupaia could see that the beak was powerful enough to crush even the leathery chitin that was now his skin, that the coarse, reptilian wings ended in strong talons, that in one of the writhing pink tendrils which served it for arms it held a huge-bladed knife. Any of those weapons would have been enough to kill him; but he could not move away.

What saved him was a sudden bass bellow—"Drop to the ground!" It came from an unseen tunnel to his side; and a great, bronzed figure leaped out. It carried a crude spear, lunging at the Watcher. The beast, disconcerted by the sudden attack, veered away, soared past Tupaia, and blundered on down the gallery.

But Tupaia did not even turn to look. Two things had driven his danger out of his mind. The first was that the shout had been in Polynesian.

The other was that the man who had driven off the Watcher, the golden-skinned giant who leaped out to save him, was himself. Scarred, limping, with a bloodied rag wrapped around one arm—nevertheless, the savior of Te'ehala Tupaia was Te'ehala Tupaia.

For Tupaia—for both Tupaias—the unexpected meeting was shocking in ways that went beyond even the terrible shocks instrinsic to the place and circumstances. The one saw himself hideously caricatured—squashed, wrinkled, hands like claws, armored eyes. The other saw the same powerful frame and flesh his mirror had always shown, but terribly torn.

The flesh Tupaia took a step forward, opened his mouth to speak—then grimaced and clutched his side. "You're hurt!" cried the kobold Tupaia, and his elder twin smiled faintly.

"Worse than hurt," he gasped. "That thing got me in the side, and the bleeding's started again. But what—how— why do you look the way you do?"

"Whiteskin treachery," the kobold said bitterly. "That's all I know." He glanced up sharply as the distant mad hooting of the Watcher sounded. "Is that thing likely to come back?"

His twin shrugged, then grimaced with the pain. "He'll be back when he gets hungry again, that is sure," he said grimly. "There are no other survivors." He swatted irrita­bly at a silver-blue mote in the air, which turned and darted away. "Unless you count the Boaty-Bits, but the gods know what they're up to. They're no use even to the Watcher—he couldn't get a square meal out of them!"

The kobold Tupaia bent to his self s side, probing the wound while they exchanged stories; when he looked up his gnarled face was grim. "Don't say it, my brother," the flesh-and-blood one said softly.

"I don't know what you mean!" the kobold flared. "Come on! I'll help you down to where the others are. We'll get you medical attention—"

The flesh one laughed gently. "How hard it is to lie to yourself," he said. "We both know, Te'ehala Tupaia, that this Ce'ehala Tupaia at least has not long to live."

"We don't know that unless we don't try!"

"We do know it. But, yes, we will go to where the others are, because there is no better choice. I could not find my way back to the surface—and they, at least, have a tachyon transporter. So perhaps one of us, at least, can both die and live." He cocked an ear to the hooting that sounded again. "Help me!" he commanded, and they limped back toward the larger gallery.

The kobold glanced once at the maimed body of the dead chimpanzee, then resolutely looked away. Even though the flesh Tupaia was grievously wounded, it was not hard to travel in that gentle gravity. They were through the gallery, and the sounds of machinery from the great, hot cavern were growing louder, when the kobold felt his wounded brother stiffen. He pulled away and tried to level the spear.

A figure stepped out of a tunnel to confront them. It was a tinier version of the kobold Tupaia's own armored shape, staring fearfully at them out of startlingly bright green eyes. "Please, mister," it begged, "don't hurt me! Put down that spear. I'm lost! My name is David Doy Gentry, and I don't know what's happened to me!"

The kobold Tupaia growled, "What the devil are you doing here?" But his other self put a hand on his shoulder.

"Don't you see the boy is terrified? Answer him, boy."

"I wish I could," David-the-kobold sobbed. "I just wanted to see what it was like inside the tachyon chamber. That's all! And then all of a sudden I was here with you other freaks, and—" He stopped, his hand to his mouth. "Oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings!"

"You didn't," the gnome Tupaia said angrily. "You were part of the group of Purchased People? A child?"

"I didn't mean to be," David apologized. "And then that ugly big red glass eyeball sent you others up that way, and the rest of us just stayed there. And then some of them came back with a bunch of those Boaty-Bit bug things, and all the freaks—I mean the real freaks, mister— I anyway, they were talking together, and finally the eyeball thing told us that there weren't any survivors of any im­portance from the other expedition—whoever they were— and we were to move along. So they did. All of them ex­cept me. I hid. I didn't like that big eyeball!" He moved over to the railing of the balcony and looked down, nod­ding. "Yeah, you can see them now—they're down there in that other place, where they left all the bundles. I don't know what—oh, gosh! They're all jumping off the bal­cony!"

The kobold Tupaia leaped to the rail, peering over. It was true! One by one, the squat, tough Purchased People were launching themselves into the abyss, while the eyeball and the Sheliak and the Scorpian robot flew nearby, driv­ing them on. The three on the upper ledge watched incredulously as the ugly gnome bodies fell in slow motion toward the distant bottom of the cavern. It looked suicidal. But the captors had made an elegant calculation of forces. In that weak gravity, the long fall was survivable—just. Each one in turn struck—struck hard, but not harder than their armored bodies could take. Each one stood up and waited, as the slave drivers gently dropped after them.

It was hard to see what the party was doing once they reached the bottom, since the ruptured pipe had laid a cur­tain of mist over much of the cavern. But they seemed to be loading up with burdens—that translucent block the big­gest—then forming ranks and moving on.

The kobold Tupaia straightened up. "Now what? We can't stay here!"

The injured man shook his head. "Nor get back to the surface," he said. "We must follow them."

"No!" roared the kobold. "The boy and I could survive that fall—you could not!"

"There is no other choice," the wounded man pointed out. "And—have you forgotten, Te'ehala Tupaia, how strong Te'ehala Tupaia is? It is true that I am not at this moment at my strongest, but nevertheless we have no choice."

He broke off, for the mad hooting had sounded again, and this time very near.

The three on the ledge turned to meet the challenge, as the Watcher brayed once more and dived out of the tunnel at them. The kobold Tupaia shouted in rage; he was bare handed, and the slick red armor that covered the Watcher's belly was far too tough for him to harm. The boy shrank silently behind him; and the Tupaia of flesh, the only one armed at all, stumbled to the fore, slowly bringing the crude spear around. Grunting with pain, he stabbed it di­rectly into the wide red mouth beneath the beak and was borne down in the monster's rush. Tupaia-as-kobold saw his chance. The Watcher shrieked in agony, and the grip of its slimy pink tendrils loosened on the knife; Tupaia/kobold snatched it away and plunged it into the glitter of the many-lensed green eye. The hard red belly armor smashed him down. The great wings folded in to trap him in their suffocating reek—

But there was no strength in them, and as Tupaia/kobold fought free of them he realized that the monster was dead. Gasping and retching, he thrust the stinking form away and saw it float down into the depths of the cavern. He shouted with exultation and turned to his flesh brother.

There was no answering shout.

The long beak had finished what the earlier wounds had begun. The kobold looked, sorrowing, at the great golden- skinned form of himself, still now in death, yet holding the broken spear.

The boy moved behind him, and reached to put his hand in Tupaia's, the bright green eyes sad in the comic gnome's face.

"I'm really sorry about your friend," he offered. And, a moment later, "What should we do now?"

Tupaia did not answer at once. He had no answer to give. He released the boy's hand and stepped forward to the low rail, peering down into the misty distances of the cavern. Most of the damage had been repaired by the hard-working crabs, and he could see that hordes of them were slowly removing broken beams and replacing them with new. The party of Purchased People with their bizarre captors was vanishing into another tunnel far away. He lowered his gaze and reached out to touch the calm brow of his dead other self.

What should they do now? What a good question that was!

Apart from the obvious practical problems, Tupaia dis­covered an internal problem. He was having a sort of crisis of conscience. He had always had strict priorities governing every act of his life—the cause first, himself second, every other claim on his loyalties far behind. But Free Polynesia was despairingly far away. And this child, this innocent victim—could Tupaia just walk away from his needs?

He could not. He took the boy's hand in his own again and said, "We'll follow the others. Far back, keeping out of sight. And then—"

But there was no way of finishing that sentence. "Let's go," he said instead. "Hold onto my hand. You can close your eyes if you want to."

And the two strange figures stepped off the rail into the immense abyss.

If the boy became a hindrance, Tupaia would abandon him. If the boy resisted, he would kill him. Tupaia's deci­sion was clear and hard as the steel point of a javelin. And yet as time went on, and they went farther down and far­ther, the hard edges of the decision softened and receded into the background of his consciousness. The boy did not question. He obeyed every instruction Tupaia gave him; he followed without argument even when it was into a place, and through a means, terrifying even to Tupaia. The great leap into the cavern was not the last such jump they had to take, nor the worst. And still they went down and down and down.

They were lucky—in two ways they were lucky. The first was that the party they were following was heedless of pursuit; they left bits of wornout equipment, twice dead kobold-shapes, and very often there were bits of food in the trash. That heaviest of burdens, the somehow sinister trans­lucent block, they did not leave behind. But everything else seemed expendable. So they were easy to follow, and their leavings helped keep the pair alive. The second bit of for­tune was that their downward path passed now and then through caverns or wide galleries where things grew and even small animals moved about in the vegetation. Some were edible. Unfortunately, they could not know which un­til they tried, for city-bred David and island-born Tupaia had little experience of trying to live off the flora of a dozen different climates and environments. Appearances could not be trusted. In one rose-lit tunnel they found vines with a bright orange, fist-sized bud growing in profussion; they looked almost like rather misshapen papayas, and Tu­paia plucked one in hope. It felt slightly warm, and the slick surface yielded a little, like a tightly inflated balloon. But a faint sweetish odor clung to his fingers, and he sliced into it with the broad knife that had once belonged to the Watcher.

The glowing orange skin yielded to the edge, then rup­tured with a sharp pop. David cried out in alarm, as a puff of reddish vapor exploded toward Tupaia, almost like a spray of blood. The odor was strange and unpleasant— almost etherlike, edged with something sharply acrid. The vapor filled Tupaia's nose and lungs like the quick, hard rush of a narcotic; he flung the fruit away, but he was dizzy and trembling, and for the next hour and more it was the boy who guided Tupaia's steps, until the toxins worked their way out of his system. Eventually the gallery broad­ened and became distinctly warmer, and off to one side there was a tepid pool of water. They drank their fill. When they saw one of the great glassy crab shapes sidling along the bottom of the pool they ignored it; there were too many other worries and wonders, the glass crabs had lost their power to interest them.

And, after a brief rest, down, and down, and down.

Calculating from the point where they had fought the Watcher, Tupaia estimated they had traveled at least a dozen, perhaps twenty or more kilometers straight down on the trail of the Purchased People, twenty times that in hori­zontal tunnels and gradual declines. It was good that their edited bodies were tough and strong; even Tupaia's own huge frame would have been seriously taxed by these exer­tions, and the boy would surely have collapsed long before. They seemed to need far less food and water than before— another blessing, for sometimes those were scarce. They moved on, through odd, dome-shaped rooms, with incom­prehensible metal rods glowing in dozens of hues, and skirted the edge of a vast vortex of water, slowly spinning and emptying itself into some unknown farther depth.

And, as time passed and they descended deeper and deeper into the unknown, Tupaia found himself beginning to care about the boy. Tupaia was in a turmoil of confusion in any case. Free Polynesia, which had been the core of his life, was now irrelevant. He was scared, and raging, and confused . . . but there was David, who needed him.

If someone gives you trust, it is hard not to try being trustworthy.

Another gallery, opening into still another great abyss. This one had no railings at all, though spikelike projections jutted from it over the yawning gulf. This one they did not dare jump; they skirted the edge and found a continuation of the downward trail.

A shallower jump—ten hours later—which left them on a broad, flat plain, with the ceiling a hundred meters over­head and palely glowing. "It looks like a farm," David whispered; and it did. Geometric patterns covered the wide space, in every shade of green and black and brown, of gold and red and orange; and indeed crops were growing there. Growing for whom? Tended by what? Tupaia could not guess; but the tubers at the base of the dark-green plants were good to eat, and pale yellow fruits in the ad­joining plot relieved their thirst; and they went on.

And down.

And the air grew warmer.

It was nothing like the searing, steamy heat of the great machine cavern with the ruptured pipes. The levels they passed through now were gentle enough in climate; there was really no longer any need for them to wear the horrid gnome shapes. But, definitely, it was warmer. They dropped from another gallery onto another great, wide space, but this one was no farm. It was sheer, burnished metal, almost ILke a steely, oil-smooth sea that reflected a steely sky a hundred meters above. Now Tupaia saw what he had not seen earlier: rows of thin columns, widely spaced, that joined floor to ceiling. "It's like we were in one shell after another," David murmured, staring around. And Tupaia nodded; so it was. But shells of what?

At the end of the next passage that question, with all other theoretical questions, was driven from his mind.

David saw it first and cried out in alarm. Then Tupaia, close behind, saw it too: a heap of three more dead bodies. One was the gnome-shape that had once been a young, long-haired blond girl; one a middle-aged woman; and one not human at all. It was the Sheliak, its crystal shell long gone, its body now stretched and still in death.

"What—what could have happened, Mr. Tupaia?" the boy gasped.

Tupaia was silent for a moment, then met the boy's bright green eyes. "They killed each other in a fight. They're criminals, David," he said harshly. "Same as me."

"No! You told me what you did—you were fighting for a cause—"

"I thought I was," Tupaia agreed, "and I still think the whiteskins wronged my people. But these others—killers, most of them. Psychotic killers! When they were released from ownership I guess it was only a question of time." He turned over the girl's body with his foot, then hastily turned it back before the boy could see. One whole side of the face was a cinder; evidently the Sirian eye had been involved in the fight as well. "Two here," he muttered, "and four others that we've passed on the way. Probably some others dead, too, that we didn't see, or that wandered off. It's been an expensive trip."

The boy clutched his arm suddenly, and pointed at an opening just beyond a cluster of bright red metal columns. Tupaia could feel him shaking, but his voice was steady as he said: "Real expensive, Mr. Tupaia. There's some more!"

It wasn't just a few more; if the little group at the end of the passage had indicated a fight, this one showed pure massacre. There were more than a score of bodies—all hu­man, this time—and most of them showing terrible burns. Tupaia shook his head. "Something set this off," he said. "I wish we knew what."

David looked up at him. "Should we go look?"

Tupaia shrugged. "We don't have a choice," he said, and heard the echo of his own voice saying the same thing, over and over. "Come on—but be careful!" he commanded and led the way past the heaps of corpses—

And brought up short.

They emerged onto another gallery, this one, it seemed, the last. For there below them was . . . empty space.

David cried out, and Tupaia caught the boy to him, star­ing incredulously. The next level was transparent, and be­low it nothing but a distant, far-down bright star. A sun! It was redder and brighter than Earth's could have been at such a distance, but unquestionably a star, trapped inside a great crystal shell, with all the rest of Cuckoo enveloping it in spherical layers.

Tupaia knew then what had driven the Purchased Peo­ple over the edge of sanity; he felt his own threatened by a terrible vertigo and fear.

And a new fear added itself, for between the savage blaze of the trapped sun below and the shining metal roof above, something moved. The movement was a swarm of things, and Tupaia's first thought was that they were Boaty-Bits. But that was wrong. They were far too large, and even at great distance he could see that they possessed structure—wings and tails—Boaty-Bits were not like that. They were clustered around a distant structure like a bridge, narrow and unrailed. It leaped across that terrible gulf without cables or piers for support, and at the end of it a strange object hung. It was ball-shaped, and one hemi­sphere of it was mirror-bright, the other dead black. It looked almost like the sort of diagrams they had shown at the mission school to explain the Earth's day-night cycle, half sunlit and half in shadow. The black half was on top, the bright half beneath. It seemed to float above the center of that vast, glasslike floor, but he saw other bridges spun to it, far away and looking tiny as the threads of a spider's web. Things here had little weight; perhaps they were strong enough to hold it up. If those bridges were like a web, the queer ball hung upon them was like the spider's nest. Could there be some kind of spider-thing inside?

He shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun below to see the moving things. Watchers! Scores of them, an army. They were not flying. Ugly wings folded, they were creep­ing on their bellies across the bridge, as if stalking the great spider he imagined. One of them carried a clumsy-seeming, boxlike tachyonic transmitter strapped to its back. Some­thing else was strange. Peering again, he saw that all their ugly heads were covered with queer, ill-fitting helmets. Looking at the head of the line, he saw that the leader was not a Watcher, but one of the hateful triangular things called deltaforms. It, too, was queerly helmeted.

In the vast space above them, insects were swarming— no, not insects; these were indeed Boaty-Bits. A nearer cloud of them swept toward Tupaia and the boy, attracted by David's cry. And beyond them Tupaia could see the Sirian eye and the Scorpian robot, floating over the great translucent block and the bodies of the remaining Pur­chased People.

"Oh, what's wrong with them, Mr. Tupaia?" the boy gasped. Tupaia could not answer. The koboldlike figures were strangely contorted, as if frozen in a rapturous con­vulsion; they seemed to have been caught in the middle of some terrible tetanic spasm.

But the Boaty-Bits were nearer. "They've seen us!" David gasped. "Mr. Tupaia, we'd better get out of here!"

Tupaia didn't answer. No answer was needed. He grasped the boy's hand and towed him, in great slow bounds, back into the tunnel, past the heaped corpses, back into the great wide gallery, past the riven form of the She­liak, back along the wider passage—

And stopped short. Far down the passage other forms were approaching, great, hideous winged beasts that bore riders on their backs. He groaned in frustration, as David made an inarticulate sound and jerked his hand from Tupaia's. "David!" the kobold cried. "Come back! We'll look for another tunnel—"

But it was too late. The boy was running down the pas­sage toward the great flying beasts; and as he neared them the one in the lead stopped, with a flurry of wings. A woman seated behind the rider slipped off, an incredibly tall, lean woman; and David ran up to her, crying, "Mama!"