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 lantern. 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
