sides?
“A hexagon!” Yulin exclaimed, hardly able to contain himself. “They got the message!”
“We’ll see,” Trelig responded. “Obviously they mean for us to enter the thing, and we might as well. Air’s running out anyway. All set?”
“Okay, let’s go,” Yulin replied, praying again that they would not enter a cave that was just the seat of government of these folks.
Trelig went first. He didn’t seem to enter a cave or hole—he just stepped forward, seemed frozen for an instant, then vanished. Yulin prodded Zinder next, but the scientist knew the air situation as well as they did. He stepped in, and to the same effect. Ben Yulin took an expensive deep breath, held it, and stepped in, too.
It was a strange sensation, like falling down a great, endless hole. It was nasty and unpleasant, but they had to endure it.
The sensation ended as suddenly as it began, bringing them out in a strange sort of cave inhabited by more of the flowing creatures.
The other two were already there.
“Oh, no!” Yulin swore, heart sinking. “Just a shuttle system!”
Trelig was just about to reply when a ghostly figure quite unlike any of them, humans or creatures, appeared. It was huge—three meters at least, and almost as big around. It had nasty-looking claws and sets of insectlike legs, and it was encased in some kind of protective artificial shell.
“What the hell?” Trelig managed, but then he saw the figure make a very recognizable “follow me” gesture with its great claws, turn, and start down the cave.
“Our new guide,” speculated Yulin. “I think I like the paint smears better. Well, let’s get going. Air’s getting low.”
They went through a passage, then a doorway slid out, and they found it was some kind of air lock. It closed behind them, then opened ahead after a few moments. The creature had gone ahead but, they saw, it waited for them outside.
Outside proved to be a long, broad hallway made of some orange-white crystalline material that sparkled. The whole area was lit up, and Yulin wasn’t the only one that noticed the rows of doorways in hexagonal shapes. The hallways, however, were almost rounded, with no sharp corners.
The large insectlike creature walked slowly down the corridor, and they followed. It seemed like a long journey, and it took more than twenty minutes by Ben Yulin’s air timer.
Suddenly the hall opened onto a huge chamber. Huge was hardly the word for it. The chamber had six sides, which seemed almost natural by now; but the enclosure was so enormous that it took some time to establish that fact. The center area was in the shape of an enormous glassy hexagon, too, and around the sides stretched a railing and what appeared to be a walkway. A single great six-sided light, like a great jewel, was suspended from the center of the mammoth ceiling, providing all the light.
The walkway was just that, and more. The big creature got on it, walked down so they could also step onto the vinyllike, spongy surface, then it pressed some indistinguishable area on the wall.
They almost tumbled over as the walkway started to move.
It took about ten minutes to go halfway around to another break in the wall. There were openings in the rail to go down to the glassy surface, but they passed them up. Eventually they stopped, and the weird creature, which seemed to them to be much like a lobster made of transparent glass, went slowly down a new hallway.
They reached a room, much smaller than either the big chamber or the cave. It had an air lock, too, but it was an almost perfect square. The ceiling and three of the walls looked normal, including the door area.
The fourth was blackness absolute.
“Looks like another transfer,” Trelig noted. “I hope we get to our kind of air in the next forty minutes.”
“Thirty-six,” Yulin replied glumly. He’d been checking it every half-minute.
“They’re not going to let us die,” said Trelig confidently. “They’ve gone to too much trouble.” He stepped unhesitatingly into the blackness, followed by Zinder, and then Yulin.
Again they experienced that falling sensation, longer this time. Yulin worried about how long it might be and wanted to check the timer, but vision was impossible.
They emerged in an identical room. In fact, all three could have sworn that they’d gone no place. That puzzled and disturbed them. Yulin’s timer still read close to thirty-six, which meant that the long fall they’d just taken had consumed no time. That was impossible, he told himself. And then he noticed—a slight humming sound, a tiny whine.
And the timer was going up.
“Trelig! We’ve got power! The electrical system is processing again!” he almost screamed.
The excitement and relief swept over them. Trelig, ever practical, broke the mood.
“Remember that we’re being manipulated by someone,” he cautioned. “They may know more than we think. Remember, you, that you’re
Yulin calmed down.
Suddenly the door slid open, and a third kind of creature entered.
They all stared at it, still not used to the changing wonders of the races of the Well World. It was a little under two meters tall with a thick, smooth, green-skinned body ending in two round, thick legs without apparent joint, supported by broad, flat-bottomed round cuplike feet. Two spindly arms grew from a point just above its midsection and seemed to have smaller divisions at the tips. The head, which sat atop an impossibly thin neck, looked like a green jack-o’-lantern, with its mouth in a permanent expression of surprise, and two nonblinking, almost luminous saucers for eyes. No sign of a nose or ears, Yulin noted. Atop it all grew a single huge, broad leaf that seemed to have a life of its own, slowly moving toward the strongest light source.
The creature held a piece of cardboard or something similar in its left tentacles, then lifted the board in front of it, angling it so they could read. The message was in standard Confederation plain talk, bearing out Trelig’s suspicion that the denizens of this world were far from ignorant of them or their nature. It said, in block- printed crayon:
YOU MAY REMOVE YOUR SUITS. THE AIR IS BREATHABLE. WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED, FOLLOW ME TO BRIEFING.
Trelig accepted the guarantee and pressed the releases to flip back his helmet bubble. He took a breath, and the air was good. Satisfied, he switched off the backpack. The suit collapsed, seemed to grow and melt into a puddle of synthetic cloth at his feet. He helped Zinder do the same. Yulin started to, but suddenly fell horribly nauseous; blood suddenly clogged in his throat, and pain wracked him everywhere.
He collapsed and passed out.
Teliagin
In the early afternoon of the third day, the one thing Mavra Chang feared more than the rain happened.
They ran out of woods.
Not much, of course. This was pastoral country, and the woods picked up about a kilometer away. But here was a broad plain, grassy and lumpy, and crisscrossed by several of the dirt roads, on which there was a great
