"Ali,” cried Meeva, whirling on him, “yes — then you could lead the Vellae here and kill us all!"
"Oh, hell,” said Horne disgustedly, “women are women no matter what, I guess.” He turned to Fife. “Who is she, anyway?"
Fife grinned maliciously, as though he had had trouble before with Meeva.
"She was a priestess where she came from,” he said. “She had a big temple built in beautiful stone with hordes of people to wait on her, and they came from all over the world to hear her oracles."
The two men of Meeva's race jumped up and cried, “That is true — every word!"
Fife said, “If it is, the people of your world are great fools. Sit down, Meeva."
She started to open her mouth, and he said again, in a certain tone, “Sit down, Meeva. We do not need any of your oracles."
Meeva shut her mouth and sat down. The two men assisted her, making a great show of her preciousness, Meeva thanked them graciously and then said to Fife, “Do as you will. But I stay here."
She folded her arms and retired from the argument, looking lofty. Horne felt easier. But then the purple gargoyle said in its subterranean voice, “Even charlatans can speak the truth."
"I know, I know,” said Fife. He looked impatiently around the circle. “You chose me your leader, didn't you?"
"Yes,” said the gargoyle.
"Why?"
"Because you were clever enough to find a way for us to escape the slave-pens."
"All right. Now do you think that I have become suddenly so stupid that I can't see what is obvious to everyone else?"
Fife looked up at Horne, and then from him to Ewan and the girl, and his eyes were bright, cruel and utterly without mercy. He had begun to seem almost human to them as they talked, but now in an instant that psuedo-humanness was gone and he was as alien as all the others and far more dangerous.
"I do not trust these humans, either,” said Fife. “But I weigh the chances. We are great gamblers in my home place, and since I left the egg I have been used to casting dice with both hands. So I say this: it is my thought that we should go into the tunnels and on to Rillah with them, by the ways we know. Those who wish to stay here with Meeva can stay. But I say this, too. The three humans go weaponless and each one with a guard, and if there is any treachery they will be the first to regret it."
Ewan sprang up. “No!” he said. “I'm not going up against the Vellae unarmed. Either you trust us or—"
"Ewan,” said Horne quietly. “Look around you. Figure how many you could kill before the rest would tear you to pieces. Then think a minute about Yso."
Ewan growled something under his breath. But there was no denying the truth of what Horne said. He took his gun from his belt and threw it down in front of Fife. Then he sat down again.
Horne said to Fife, “I'm a gambler, too. I'll wager everything I have left — my life — against a million-to-one chance of getting my hands on Ardric. If this is the way you want to play the hand that's the way it will have to be. But before you're through you may wish you'd let us keep our weapons.” He handed over his stunner.
"We'll be very careful of them,” Fife said, grinning. “They're the only ones we have."
He looked around. “Now, then. Who's going to go into Rillah?"
The aliens began to mutter and shift about, talking among themselves. Horne watched them anxiously, thinking in terms of strength and feeling hopelessly handicapped by his total ignorance of what traps and dangers might lie before them. But Yso, exhausted as she was, was thinking of something else. She leaned forward.
"Fife, you said, ‘behind the locked gates of the Great Project.’ She — Meeva — mentioned it too. What is it?"
Fife said speculatively, “Don't you know?"
"No.” She had forgotten her weariness in her excitement. “My father always believed that the Vellae were doing something so dangerous and forbidden that they didn't dare use Skereth labor, even the poor devils they practically conscript into some of their mines. He thought that that was why they secretly brought in the outworld slaves, like you."
Fife shrugged. “Your father would know the reasoning of his people better than I. I only know that we are taken in our sleep by armed men and drugged and brought in ships to Skereth, where we do not even see the daylight before we're unloaded in hidden hangars and taken into pits. There we dig. We dig endlessly, making galleries, chambers, and more galleries, running here, there, up and down. This is called the Great Project."
They looked at each other. Horne asked, “But what is it that these galleries are meant to hold?"
"From the talk of guards,” Fife said, “we gathered that the Vellae were creating a space for some great and secret scientific thing.” He added, with an edge of bitterness, “But what do ignorant humanoids know of science?"
The gargoyle said solemnly, “Whatever they are making, it is evil. Even the Vellae guards said that."
Yso gave Ewan a small glance of triumph. “Morivenn was right, though. There's no doubt about that."
"No,” said Ewan, “and I'm sorry. Not because I was wrong, but because the Vellae will be more watchful if they're guarding a great secret, and that'll make it harder for us."
In a little while the aliens sorted themselves into two groups. One, a small bunch of seven or eight, were clustered around Meeva and her men. The other one of about fifteen, including the gargoyle and Chell's people and the two hairy giants from Allamar, had moved over around Fife.
Lurgh said, “To go is dangerous. But we think that nothing will come of sitting here."
"Good,” said Fife. “Now we must think.” He rose and began to pace up and down, his eyes bright, the tip of his pointed tongue flicking back and forth over his lips. Suddenly he turned and pointed at Meeva.
"Since you won't risk your person, you can contribute your clothes. The humans must be dressed. The Vellae will know at first glance we're slaves, but the humans must be able to pass as masters."
"No!” cried Meeva. “Never!” But Fife nodded to Chell and Lurgh and the gargoyle. They moved in swiftly. Fife paced, never looking toward the angry shrieking.
"You two men will have to provide for yourselves,” he said. “Guard uniforms, first of all. And a cone would help a great deal if you could get hold of one."
'Cones?” said Horne. “In the tunnels?"
"Oh, yes. One-man cones that are adapted to their special functions. How else do you think the work could be supervised and the slaves ordered and controlled? Yes, a cone. That will be necessary. We can't hope to get all the way to Rillah without meeting someone, even in the older galleries. If we can make it look as though we're a regular work-party of guards and slaves…"
The purple gargoyle, whose name was D'quar, came back with Chell, holding a streamer of blue cloth. Fife took it and the strip of embroidery and tossed them to Yso.
"I hope you appreciate them,” he said maliciously. “Meeva used to work quite naked to save her costume, and even here she only put it on once in a while when she wanted to play priestess."
Yso looked unhappily toward Meeva and said, “I'm sorry…"
Meeva, held forcibly in the enormous hands of Lurgh, screamed a torrent of words, and Fife laughed.
"She never learned that kind of language in any temple. Shut her up, Lurgh."
Lurgh shook her, and she was quiet. So were the two men of her race, who were nursing bruises now.
"We'll sleep for six hours,” Fife said. His sharp eyes had been appraising the two men and the woman. “You're too worn out now to be any good to us. You'd never even make it to Rillah. Meanwhile, those who are not going with us can make a fair sharing of the food and fill the water flasks."
Horne, Ewan and Yso went over and stretched out at the farthest end of the big rock chamber. Despite his crushing weariness, Horne could not close his eyes at once. The spectacle in the big cavern fascinated him, a phantasmagoria of impossible shapes and weird, enormous shadows coming and going around the lanter
n. Shifting spheres that floated with their tentacles reaching, gargoyle faces looking solemnly through the gloom, the sharply unhuman silhouette that was Fife and the brown-furred looming bulk of the giant creatures from Allamar, arms and antennae, chitin, hide and feather, mixing and meeting and clacking and whispering in the light and darkness…
A sudden feeling of nightmare gripped Horne. What was he doing in this place — with these creatures so far removed from human? He thought, not for the first time, that men had gone too fast and far from Earth, that they weren't ready yet for this sort of thing. It seemed to him that he watched an unearthly Sabbat of diabolical celebrants, and he could almost hear Berlioz’ mocking, blasphemous music. He wanted to get out of here, to leave sleeping Yso and Ewan and their problems, to leave these children of nightmare, to get off the world and go home, go home…
A thought checked Horne's shuddery reaction. Alien and creepy as the shadowy horde were, they all wanted just the same thing as he. To go home. They had been dragged here by force, by the slavers of the Vellae. They had labored, endured and finally escaped, and their simple minds yearned for the mists of Chorann, and the sad forests of Allamar, and all the other wild Fringe worlds they came from, just as he longed for Earth. A hatred for the Vellae for doing this ruthless thing — a hatred that for the first time was not connected with his own wrongs — came to Horne. And why had the Vellae done it? What mysterious thing were they doing with the slaves that even their own men thought was so evil?
The strange silhouette of Fife came toward him, against the Light. The little alien had not missed the fact that Horne was wakeful. He came and looked down at him with his yellow eyes.
"You watch us,” he said, and there was suspicion in the statement.
Horne nodded. He said, “Yes, Fife. I watch you."
There was a silence. Whether Fife was partly telepathic or not, or whether he read Horne's changed feelings by some other means, Horne could not know. But when Fife spoke again it was in an altered tone.
"Sleep, human. There will be no rest for any of us on the way to Rillah."
CHAPTER XII
The gallery was cut wide and high through the living rock.
It was dry and well-ventilated, partly through shafts that bored upward to the outside air. Horne figured that they must be hooded against rain and therefore against light too, because no light came through them even though he knew that it was day again in the outer world. Some of the slaves had had their work-lamps with them when they escaped. The purple gargoyle, D'quar, stalked ahead, wearing an incongruous star on his hideous brow, a guiding light to the rest of them.
At intervals along the gallery, steel hatches were set into the right-hand wall — the inner wall, if Horne had figured rightly. They were coated with an anti-corrosive plastic and locked with curious-looking locks. Even Fife did not know what the hatches were for. He only knew that they were deadly dangerous to tamper with. Horne was not tempted to bother with them.
They had come a long way from the refuge in the badlands, working their way by forced marches during the dark hours along the rim of the foothills until they reached the base of a particular bald, humped mountain that was, Ewan had said, close to Rillah on the other side.
While the slow dawn was breaking, Fife led them up a maze of canyons and rising ridges which made for such arduous travel that Yso's strength gave out temporarily. Lurgh, the big brown-furred creature from Allamar Two, had carried her along for a while, not seeming in the least bothered by her weight. By the time she had her strength back, they were entering the mouth of an old boring half hidden by a slide.
"This must have been part of a mine once,” Fife said. “This side of the mountain is full of them, I believe, but this is the only one I know. Some of them connect with the outer galleries of the Project, and that is how we few managed to escape. I think even most of the Vellae have forgotten these borings are still here."
He added, “Go softly. The roof is liable to fall."
They wormed their way through a claustrophobic nightmare of rubble and rotten shorings, with sand and pebbles sifting ominously down their necks, until a narrow opening let them into the dry, solid gallery cut in the deeper rock. That had been, Horne thought, a devil of a long time ago and they had been climbing ever since. By now, they must be close to the top of the mountain, just inside the curve of the south shoulder.
Tunnel in the rind of a mountain, with doors in it. What for? Even preoccupied as he was with Ardric and his intense need to find him, Horne could not help wondering now and again just what was hidden behind those locked doors in the vast bulk of the mountain.
Yso and Ewan were feverish in their desire to know, and they had been restrained only by the grim warnings of the alien slaves from trying to find out.
A Chell of Chorann spoke suddenly in a sibilant whisper. “D'quar, put out your light."
D'quar obeyed, instantly and without question. As the purple gargoyle stopped, they all stopped, and then they stood in the utter darkness, trying not to breathe or move while they listened.
Horne could hear nothing at all, but the ultra-sonic hearing of Chell was keener.
"There isss a cone,” he said. “Coming this way."
"Ah!” Fife's sharp whisper held both satisfaction and worry. “The Vellae patrol these outer galleries now and then, making sure that all is well. So. We will have a chance at a cone. If we take it, good. If we do not, we may as well kill each other quickly and mercifully on the spot. And it will have to be done fast. Fast, Horne, you hear? Otherwise he will call the others with his radio and it will all be useless."
Remembering the utter lack of facilities for ambush in the gallery, Horne said; “That's fine, but do you have any idea about how we do it?"
"Oh,” said Fife, “I have a plan already. I've been making it ever since we entered the gallery."
He began to talk rapidly. When he was finished Horne said, “All right. Why argue? Let's get going."
Chell said, “The cone isss still some distance away. You can risk a light for a few ssseconds."
A work-lamp flicked on, turned so low it was hardly brighter than a match flame but almost blinding after the total darkness. Chell wrapped three of his tentacles around Horne and took an enormous breath. He rose to the ceiling and began bobbing along under it. Another one of the furry green balls from Chorann picked Ewan up, the same way. The others all began to run along the gallery, hurrying to get out of sight around a turn they had just passed. Horne saw Yso stop and look around, reluctant to leave them, and the entirely useless thought came to Home that she was a very gorgeous thing in Meeva's scanty finery, with her long yellow hair hanging over her white shoulders. Then he called in a frantic whisper,
"Fife! Fife, what about the gun?"
Fife paused long enough to shake his head. “You might damage the cone or the uniform. Don't worry, we'll give you all the help you need."
"Thank you,” said Horne, “very much."
"Sssh!” said Chell. “It comes."
His companion, carrying Ewan, whispered, “Here it is.” In the last gleam of the vanishing light, Horne saw him disappear upward into one of the air-shafts. Chell followed him.
It was the devil of a place to be, hanging in the grip of a living green balloon, jammed into a hole in the mountain where he could not see anything at all. His life and the success of his whole mission and a lot of other things depended on his seeing clearly and not making the slightest mistake.
He couldn't see, but he could hear. There was a faint, muffled throbbing in the gallery below.
Then there was light.
Then there was a transparent canopy directly underneath him, with light glowing from two rods set in it, and the top of a man's close-cropped head and the tops of his shoulders in a red uniform tunic and his arms outstretched in red sleeves and his hands on the control levers.
Chell let his breath out and dropped.
They landed together, with Horne underneath, on the slipp
ery plastic bubble. Instantly Chell gripped onto the rim of the cone with three widespread tentacles and flung Horne out and down with the other tentacles. Horne caught a glimpse of Ewan apparently flying through the air and then the other green ball was beside Chell and the two of them with their combined weight and strength were overbalancing the light, floating cone. The man inside it was craning his head upward, his mouth and eyes stretched wide. For the first moment or two he was not doing anything but that. In another few seconds, while he got his wits together again, it might be too late.
Horne leaped for the rim and hit the canopy release.
The plastic bubble opened, almost throwing Chell and his friend but not quite. The cone was dragging now at a tilted angle and the man inside it was clawing mechanically toward the controls to level it again. But he was also trying not to fall clear out of his seat. Before he could make up his mind, Horne was inside the cone and on top of him.
The cockpit was only meant to hold one man. The red-uniformed man tried first to get at his gun, but Horne's knee was already on it and crushing it into his side. Then he bunched up his fists and snarled and pounded Horne as hard as he could around the face. Home hit him back. He got his hands around the man's neck and choked him and beat his head against the inside coaming of the rim, but it was padded and the whole thing was ineffectual because there was no room to move in.
Ewan reached the controls from outside the cockpit and shut off the small propulsion unit and shifted the grav shields so the cone fell over easily and Chell could let go of it. Horne sprawled out of the cone onto the rock floor, dragging the guard with him.
The guard looked past him and his face went perfectly white. He made one last desperate effort to get his gun out. Horne got his feet under him and hit the man solidly on the jaw, and the rest of the slaves came round and stood looking at the first Vellae they had ever seen lying prone and helpless at their feet. Horne slid the man's gun out of its holster.
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