Assignment in Nowhere

Chapter Four

The traditional first move when imprisoned in the dark was to pace off the dimensions of the cell, a gambit which presumably lends a mystic sense of mastery over one’s environment. Of course, I wasn’t actually imprisoned. I could crawl back out into the corridor—but since I would undoubtedly meet Lefty before I had gone far, the idea lacked appeal. That left me with the pacing off to do.

I started from the opening, took a step which I estimated at three feet, and slammed against a wall. No help there.

Back at my starting point, I took a more cautious step, then another—

There was a sound from the darkness ahead. I stood, one foot poised, not breathing, listening…

“Vansi pa’ me’ zen pa’,” a mellow tenor voice said from the darkness. “Sta’ zi?”

I backed a step. The gun was still in my hand. The other fellow had the advantage; his eyes would be used to the dark, and I was outlined against the faint glow from the tunnel. At the thought, I dropped flat, felt the cold wetness of the rough floor come through my clothes.

“Bo’jou’, ami,” the voice said. “E’ vou Gallice?”

Whoever he was, he was presumably a fellow prisoner. And the language he had spoken didn’t sound much like the grunts and clicks of the ogres outside. Still, I had no impulse to rush over and get acquainted.

“Kansh’ tu dall’ Scansk…” The voice came again. And this time I almost got the meaning. The accent was horrible, but it sounded almost like Swedish…

“Maybe Anglic, you,” the voice said.

“Maybe,” I answered, hearing my voice come out as a croak. “Who’re you?”

“Ah, good! I took a blink from you so you come into.” The accent was vaguely Hungarian and the words didn’t make much sense. “Why catch they you? Where from commer you?”

I edged a few feet to the side to get farther from the light. The floor slanted up slightly. I thought of using my lighter, but that would only make me a better target if this new chum had any unfriendly ideas—and nothing I had encountered so far in giant-land led me to expect otherwise.

“Don’t be shy of you,” the voice urged. “I am friend.”

“I asked you who you are,” I said. My hackles were still on edge. I was tired and hungry and bruised, and talking to a strange voice in the dark wasn’t what I needed to soothe my nerves just now.

“Sir, I have honor of to make known myself: Field Agent Dzok, at the service.”

“Field agent of what?” My voice had a sharp edge.

“Perhaps better for further confidences to await closer acquaintance,” the field agent said. “Please, you will talk again, thus allowing me to place the dialect more closely.”

“The dialect is English,” I said. I eased back another foot, working my way up-slope. I didn’t know whether he could see me or not, but it was an old maxim to take the high ground…

“English? Ah, yes. I think we’ve triggered the correct mnemonic now. Not a very well-known sub-branch of Anglic, but then I fancy my linguistic indoctrination is one of the more complete for an Agent of Class Four. Am I doing better?”

The voice seemed closer, as well as more grammatical. “You’re doing fine,” I assured it—and rolled quickly away. Too late, I felt an edge under my back, yelled, went over, and slammed against hard stone three feet below the upper level. I felt my head bounce, heard a loud ringing, while bright lights flashed. Then there was a hand groping over my chest, under my head.

“Sorry, old fellow,” the voice said up close. “I should have warned you. Did the same thing myself my first day here…”

I sat up, groped quickly, found the slug gun, tucked it back into my cuff holster.

“I guess I was a little over-cautious,” I said. “I hardly expected to run into another human being in this damned place.” I worked my jaw, found it still operable, touched a scrape on my elbow.

“I see you’ve hurt your arm,” my cell-mate said. “Let me dab a bit of salve on that…” I heard him moving, heard the snap of some sort of fastener, fumbling noises. I got out my lighter, snapped it. It caught, blazed up blindingly. I held it up—and my jaw dropped.

Agent Dzok crouched a yard from me, his head turned away from the bright light, a small first aid kit in his hands—hands that were tufted with short, silky red-brown hair that ran up under the grimy cuffs of a tattered white uniform. I saw long thick-looking arms, scuffed soft leather boots encasing odd long-heeled feet, a small round head, dark-skinned, long nosed. Dzok turned his face toward me, blinking deepset yellowish eyes set close together above a wide mouth that opened in a smile to show square, yellow teeth.

“The light’s a bit bright,” he said in his musical voice. “I’ve been in the dark for so long now…”

I gulped, flicked off the lighter. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Wha—who did you say you were?”

“You look a trifle startled,” Dzok said in an amused tone. “I take it you haven’t encountered my branch of the Hominids before?”

“I had a strange idea we Homo sapiens were the only branch of the family that made it into the Cenozoic,” I said. “Meeting the boys outside was quite a shock. Now you…”

“Ummra. I think our two families diverged at about your late Pliocene. The Hagroon are a somewhat later offshoot, at about the end of the Pleistocene—say half a million years back.” He laughed softly. “So you see, they represent a closer relationship to you sapiens than do we of Xonijeel…”

“That’s depressing news.”

Dzok’s rough-skinned hand fumbled at my arm, then gripped it lightly while he dabbed at the abrasion. The cool ointment started to take the throb from the wound.

“How did they happen to pick you up?” Dzok asked. “I take it you were one of a group taken on a raid?”

“As far as I know, I’m the only one.” I was still being cautious. Dzok seemed like a friendly enough creature, but he had a little too much hair on him for my taste, in view of what I’d seen of the Hagroon. The latter might be closer relatives of mine than of the agent, but I couldn’t help lumping them together in my mind—though Dzok was more monkey-like than ape-like.

“Curious,” Dzok said. “The pattern usually calls for catches of at least fifty or so. I’ve theorized that this represents some sort of minimum group size which is worth the bother of the necessary cultural analysis, language indoctrination, and so on.”

“Necessary for what?”

“For making use of the captives,” Dzok said. “The Hagroon are slave raiders, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“I assumed you knew, being a victim…” Dzok paused. “But then perhaps you’re in a different category. You say you were the only captive taken?”

“What about you?” I ignored the question. “How did you get here?”

The agent sighed. “I was a trifle incautious, I fear. I had a rather naive idea that in this congeries of variant hominid strains I’d pass unnoticed, but I was spotted instantly. They knocked me about a bit, dragged me in before a tribunal of nonagenarians for an interrogation, which I pretended not to understand—”

“You mean you speak their language?” I interrupted.

“Naturally, my dear fellow. An agent of Class Four could hardly be effective without language indoctrination.”

I let that pass. “What sort of questions did they ask you?”

“Lot of blooming nonsense, actually. It’s extremely difficult for noncosmopolitan races to communicate at a meaningful level; the basic cultural assumptions vary so widely—”

“You and I seem to be doing all right.”

“Well, after all, I am a Field Agent of the Authority. We’re trained in just such communicative ability.”

“Maybe you’d better start a little farther back. What authority are you talking about? How’d you get here? Where are you from in the first place? Where did you learn English?”

Dzok had finished with my arm now. He laughed—a good-natured chuckle. Imprisonment in foul conditions seemed not to bother him. “I’ll take those questions one at a time. I suggest we move up to my dais now. I’ve arranged a few scraps of cloth in the one dry corner here. And perhaps you’d like a bit of clean food, after that nauseous pap our friends here issue.”

“You’ve got food?”

“My emergency ration pack. I’ve been using it sparingly. Not very satisfying, but nourishing enough.”

We made our way to a shelf-like flat area high in the right rear corner of the cell, and I stretched out on Dzok’s neatly arranged dry rags and accepted a robin’s-egg-sized capsule.

“Swallow that down,” Dzok said. “A balanced ration for twenty-four hours; arranged concentrically, of course. Takes about nine hours to assimilate. There’s water too.” He passed me a thick clay cup.

I gulped hard, got the pill down. “Your throat must be bigger than mine,” I said. “Now what about my questions?”

“Ah, yes, the Authority; this is the great Web government which exercises jurisdiction over all that region of the Web lying within two million E-units radius of the Home Line…”

I was listening, thinking how this news would sit with the Imperial authorities when I got back—if I got back—if there was anything to go back to. Not one new Net-traveling race but two—each as alien to the other as either was to me. And all three doubtless laying claim to ever-wider territory…

Dzok was still talking, “…our work in the Anglic sector has been limited, for obvious reasons—”

“What obvious reasons?”

“Our chaps could hardly pass unnoticed among you,” Dzok said drily. “So we’ve left the sector pretty much to its own devices—”

“But you have been there?”

“Routine surveillance only, mostly in null time, of course—”

“You use too many ‘of courses’, Dzok,” I said. “But go on, I’m listening.”

“Our maps of the area are sketchy. There’s the vast desert area, of C—” he cleared his throat. “A vast desert area known as the Desolation, within which no world lines survive, surrounded by a rather wide spectrum of related lines, all having as their central cultural source the North European technical nucleus—rather a low-grade technology, to be sure, but the first glimmering of enlightenment is coming into being there…”

He went on with his outline of the vast sweep of A-lines that constituted the scope of activities of the Authority. I didn’t call attention to his misconceptions regarding the total absence of life in the Blight, or his seeming ignorance of the existence of a line with Net-traveling capabilities. That was information I would keep in reserve.

“…the scope of the Authority has been steadily extended over the last fifteen hundred years,” the agent was saying. “Our unique Web-transit abilities naturally carry with them a certain responsibility. The early tendency toward exploitation has long been overcome, and the Authority now merely exercises a police and peace-keeping function, while obtaining useful raw materials and manufactured products from carefully selected loci on a normal commercial basis.”

“Uh-huh.” I’d heard the speech before. It was a lot like the pitch Bernadotte and Richthofen and the others had given me when I first arrived at Stockholm Zero-zero.

“My mission here,” Dzok went on, “was to discover the forces behind the slave raids which had been creating so much misery and unrest along the periphery of the Authority, and to recommend the optimum method of eliminating the nuisance with the minimum of overt interference. As I’ve told you, I badly underestimated our Hagroon. I was arrested within a quarter-hour of my arrival.”

“And you learned English on your visits to the, ah, Anglic Sector?”

“I’ve never visited the sector personally, but the language libraries naturally have monitored the developing dialects.”

“Do your friends know where you are?”

Dzok sighed. “I’m afraid not. I was out to cut a bit of a figure, I realize now—belatedly. I envisioned myself reporting back in to IDMS Headquarters with the solution neatly wrapped and tied with pink ribbon. Instead—well, in time they’ll notice my prolonged absence and set to work to find my trail. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime, what?”

“I can only hope they take action before my turn comes.”

“Your turn for what?”

“Didn’t you know, old chap? But of course not; you don’t speak their beastly dialect. It’s all because of the food shortage, you see. They’re cannibals. Captives that fail to prove their usefulness as slaves are slaughtered and eaten.”

“About how long,” I asked Dzok, “do you suppose we have?”

“I estimate that I’ve been here for three weeks,” the agent said. “There are two poor sods here when I came—a pair of slaves of a low order of intelligence. As well as I could determine, they’d been here for some two weeks. They were taken away a week ago. Some sort of feast for a high official, I gathered. Judging from the look of the menu, they’d have need of those ferocious teeth of theirs. Tough chewing, I’d say.”

I was beginning to see through agent Dzok. His breezy air covered a conviction that he’d be in a Hagroon cooking pot himself before many more days had passed.

“In that case, I suppose we’d better start thinking about a way to get out of here,” I suggested.

“I hoped you’d see that,” Dzok said. “I have a chance of sorts—but it will require two men. How good are you at climbing?”

“As good as I have to be,” I said shortly. “What’s the plan?”

“There are two guards posted along the corridor. We’ll need to entice one of them inside so as to deal with him separately. That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“How do we get past the other one?”

“That part’s a bit tricky—but not impossible. I have some materials tucked away here—items from my survival kit as well as a number of things I’ve salvaged since I arrived. There’s also a crude map I sketched from memory. We’ll have approximately one hundred meters of corridor to negotiate before we reach the side entry I’ve marked as our escape route. Our only hope lies in not running into a party of Hagroon before we reach it. Your disguise won’t stand close examination.”

“Disguise?” I had the feeling I had stumbled into somebody else’s drunken dream. “Who are we going as? Dracula and the wolf man?” I was light-headed, dizzy. I lay back on my rags and closed my eyes. Dzok’s voice seemed to come from a long way off:

“Get a good rest. I’ll make my preparations. As soon as you wake, we’ll make our try.”

I came awake to the sound of voices—snarling, angry voices. I sat up, blinking through deep gloom. Dzok said something in a mild tone, and the voice snapped back—a booming, animal snort. I could smell him now—even in the fetid air of the cell, the reek of the angry Hagroon cut through. I could see him, a big fellow, standing near the entry. I wondered how he’d gotten through; the opening was barely big enough for me…

“Lie still and make no sound, Anglic,” Dzok called in the same soothing tone he had been using to the Hagroon. “This one wants me. My time ran out, it seems…” Then he broke into the strange dialect again.

The Hagroon snarled and spat. I saw his arm reach, saw Dzok duck under it, plant a solid blow in the bigger creature’s chest. The Hagroon grunted, crouched a little, reached again. I came to my feet, flicked my wrist, felt the solid slap as the slug gun filled my palm. Dzok moved back and the jailor jumped after him, swung a blow that knocked the agent’s guard aside and sent him spinning. I took two quick steps to the Hagroon’s side, aimed, and fired at point-blank range. The recoil kicked me halfway across the room as the monsterman reeled back, fell to the floor, kicking, his long arms wrapped around himself. He was making horrible, choked sounds, and I felt myself pitying the brute. He was tough. The blast from the slug at that range would have killed an ox, but he was rolling over now, trying to get up. I followed him, picked out his head against the lesser dark of the background, fired again. Fluid spattered my face. The huge body gave one tremendous leap and lay still. I wiped my face with a forearm, snorted the rusty odor of blood from my nostrils, turned back to Dzok. He was sprawled on the floor, holding one arm.

“You fooled me, Anglic,” he panted. “Damned good show… you had a weapon…”

“What about that plan?” I demanded. “Can we try it now?”

“Damned… brute,” Dzok got out between his teeth. “Broke my arm. Damned nuisance. Perhaps you’d better try it alone.”

“To hell with that. Let’s get started. What do I do?”

Dzok made a choked sound that might have been a laugh. “You’re tougher than you look, Anglic, and the gun will help. All right. Here’s what we have to do…”

Twenty minutes later I was sweating inside the most fantastic getup ever used in a jail break. Dzok had draped me in a crude harness made from strips of rags—there had been a heap of them in the den when he arrived—luxurious bedding for the inmates. Attached to the straps were tufts of greasy hair arranged so as to hang down, screening my body. The agent had traded his food ration to his former cell-mates in return for the privilege of trimming hair samples from their shaggy bodies, he explained. The dead Hagroon had supplied more. Using adhesives from his kit, he had assembled the grotesque outfit. It hung down below my knees, without even an attempt at a fit.

“This is fantastic,” I told him. “It wouldn’t fool a newborn idiot at a hundred yards in a bad light!”

Agent Dzok was busy stuffing a bundle inside what was left of his jacket. “You’ll look properly bulky and shaggy. That’s the best we can do. You won’t have to pass close scrutiny—we hope. Now let’s be going.”

Dzok went first, moving awkwardly with his broken arm bound to his chest, but not complaining. He paused with his head out in the corridor, then scrabbled through.

“Come on, the coast is clear,” he called softly. “Our warden is taking a stroll.”

I followed, emerged into air that was comparatively cool and clean after the stale stink of the den. The light was on along the passage as usual. There was no way to tell the time of day. A hundred feet along, the corridor turned right and up; there were no openings along the section we could see. The guard was presumably loitering farther along.

Dzok moved silently off, slim-hipped, low-waisted, his odd, thin legs slightly bent at the knee, his once natty uniform a thing of tatters and tears through which his seal-sleek pelt showed. Before we reached the turn, we heard the rumble of Hagroon voices. Dzok stopped and I came up beside him. He stood with his head cocked, listening.

“Two of them,” he whispered. “Filthy bit of luck…”

I waited feeling the sweat trickle down inside my clown suit of stinking rags and dangling locks of hair. There was a sudden sharp itch between my shoulder blades—not the first since I had been introduced to Hagroon hospitality. I grimaced but didn’t try to scratch; the flimsy outfit would have fallen to pieces.

“Oh-oh,” Dzok breathed. “One of them is leaving. Changing of the guard.”

I nodded. Another minute ticked by like a waiting bomb. Dzok turned, gave me a large wink, then said something in a loud, angry snarl—a passable imitation of the Hagroon speech pattern. He waited a moment, then hissed: “Count to ten, slowly—” and started on along the passage at a quick, shambling pace. Just as he moved out of sight around the corner, he looked back, shouted something in a chattering language. Then he was gone.

I started my count, listening hard. I heard the Hagroon guard snort something, heard Dzok reply. Five. Six. Seven. The Hagroon spoke again, sounding closer. Nine. Ten—

I took a deep breath, tried to assume the sort of hunch-shouldered stance the Hagroon displayed, moved on around the turn in a rolling walk. Twenty feet ahead, beyond the light, Dzok stood, waving his good arm, yelling something now, pointing back toward me. A few yards farther on, the guard, squat, bristly figure like a pile of hay, shot a glance in my direction. Dzok jumped closer to him, still shouting. The Hagroon raised an arm, took a swing that Dzok just managed to avoid. I came on, getting closer to the light bulb now. Dzok dashed, in, ducked, got past the guard. The Hagroon had his back to me, fifteen feet away now, almost within range. I flipped the gun into my hand, made another five feet—

The guard whirled, started an angry shout at me—then suddenly got a good look at what must have been only a dim silhouette in the bad light at his first glance. His reflexes were good. He lunged while the startled look was still settling into place on the wide, mud-colored face. I got the shot off just as he crashed into me, and we went down, his four-hundred-pound body smashing me back like a truck hitting a fruit cart. I managed to twist aside just enough to let the bulk of his weight slam past before I hit the pavement and skidded. I got some breath back into my lungs, hauled my gun hand free for another shot. But it wasn’t necessary—the huge body lay sprawled half on me, inert as a frozen mammoth.

Dzok was beside me, helping me to my feet with his good hand.

“All right, so far,” he said cheerfully rearranging my hair shirt. “Quite a weapon you have there. You sapiens are marvelous at the sort of thing—a natural result of your physical frailty, no doubt.”

“Let’s analyze me later,” I muttered. My shoulders were hurting like hell where I had raked them across the rough paving. “What next?”

“Nothing else between us and the refuse disposal slot I told you about. It’s not far. Come along.” He seemed as jaunty as ever, unbothered by the brief, violent encounter.

He led the way down a slanting side branch, then up a steep climb, took another turnoff into a wider passage filled with the smell of burning garbage.

“The kitchens,” Dzok hissed. “Just a little farther.”

We heard loud voices then—the Hagroons never seemed to talk any other way. Flat against the rough-hewn wall, we waited. Two slope-shouldered bruisers waddled out from the low-arched kitchen entry, and went off in the opposite direction. We went on, following a trail of spilled refuse, ducked under a low doorway and into a bin layered with putrefying food waste. I thought I had graduated from the course in bad smells, but this was a whole new spectrum of stench. We splashed through, looked out a two-yard-wide, foot-high slot crusted with garbage. The view was darkness, and a faint glistening of wet cobbles far below. I twisted, looked up. A ragged line of eaves showed above my head.

“I thought so,” I said softly. “The low ceilings meant the roof had to be next. I think these people stacked this pile of stone up here and carved the rooms out afterward.”

“Precisely,” Dzok said. “Not very efficient, perhaps, but in a society where slave labor is plentiful and architectural talent nonexistent, it serves.”

“Which way?” I asked. “Up or down?”

Dzok looked doubtfully at me, eyeing my shoulders and arms like a fight manager looking over a prospective addition to his stable. “Up,” he said. “If you think you can manage.”

“I guess I’ll have to manage,” I said. “And what about you, with that arm?”

“Eh? Oh, it may be a bit awkward, but no matter. Shall we go?” And he slipped forward through the opening in the two-foot thick wall, twisting over on his back; then his feet were through and out of sight, and suddenly I was very much alone. Behind me the growl of voices and an occasional clatter seemed louder than it had before. Someone was coming my way. I turned over on my back as Dzok had done, eased into the slot. The garbage provided adequate lubrication.

My head emerged into the chilly night. Above I saw the cold glitter of stars in a pitch-black sky, the dim outlines of nearby buildings, a few faint lights gleaming from openings cut at random in the crude masonry walls. It was a long reach to the projecting cornice just above me. I stretched, trying not to think about the long drop below—found a handhold, scrambled up and over. Dzok came up, as I rolled and sat up.

“There’s a bridge to the next tower a few yards down the far side,” he whispered. “What kept you?”

“I just paused to admire the view. Here, help me get rid of the ape suit.” I shed the costume, caked and slimy with garbage now, while Dzok slapped ineffectually at the samples adhering to my back. He looked worse than I did, if possible. His sleek fur was damp and clotted with sour-smelling liquid.

“When I get home,” he said, “I shall have the longest, hottest bath obtainable in the most luxurious sensorium in the city of Zaj.”

“I’ll join you there,” I offered. “If we make it.”

“The sooner we start, the sooner the handmaidens will ply their brushes.” He moved away across the slight dome of the roof, crouched at the far edge, turned, and slipped from sight. It appeared that there was a lot more monkey in Dzok than I’d managed to retain. I got down awkwardly on all fours, slid over the edge, groped with a foot, found no support.

“Lower yourself to arm’s length,” Dzok’s voice came softly from the darkness below—how far below I couldn’t say. I eased over the edge, scraping new abrasions in my hide. Dangling at full length, I still found nothing under my toes.

“Let go and drop,” Dzok called quietly. “Just a meter or so.”

That was a proposal I would have liked to mull over in the quiet of my study for a few hours, but it wasn’t the time to argue. I tried to relax, then let go. There was a dizzy moment of free fall, a projecting stone ripped my cheek as I slammed against a flat ledge and went down, one hand raking stone, and the other stabbing down into nothingness. Dzok caught me, pulled me back. I sat up, made out the dim strip of dark, railess walk arching off into the night. I started to ask if that was what we had to cross, but Dzok was already on the way.

Forty-five minutes later, after a trip that would have been unexceptional to the average human fly, Dzok and I stood in the deep shadow of an alley carpeted in the usual deposit of rubbish.

This place would be an archaeologist’s paradise,” I muttered. “Everything from yesterday’s banana peel to the first fling that ever chipped is right here underfoot.”

Dzok was busy opening the bundle he had carried inside his jacket. I helped him arrange the straps and brasses taken from the Hagroon I had killed in the cell.

“We’ll exchange roles now,” he said softly. “I’m the captor, if anyone questions us. I may be able to carry it off. I’m not certain just how alien I may appear to the average monster in the street; I saw a few australopithecine types as they brought me in. Now, it’s up to you to guide us to where you left the shuttle. About half a “mile, you said?”

“Something like that—if it’s still there.” We started off along the alley which paralleled the main thoroughfare I had traversed under guard eighteen hours earlier. It twisted and turned, narrowing at times to no more than an air space between crooked walls, widening once to form a marketplace where odd, three-tiered stalls slumped, deserted and drab in the postmidnight stillness. After half an hour’s stealthy walk, I called a halt.

“The way these alleys wander, I’m not a damned bit sure where we are,” I said. “I think we’ll have to risk trying the main street, at least long enough for me to get my bearings.”

Dzok nodded, and we took a side alley, emerging in the comparatively wide avenue. A lone Hagroon shambled along the opposite side of the street. Wide-spaced lamps on ten-foot poles shed pools of sad, yellow light on a littered walk that ran under windowless facades adorned only by the crooked lines of haphazard masonry courses, as alien as beehives.

I led the way to the right. A trough of brownish stone slopping over with oil-scummed water looked familiar; just beyond this point I had seen the harnessed mastodon. The alley from which the shuttle had operated was not far ahead. The street curved to the left. I pointed to a dark side way debouching from a widening of the street ahead.

“I think that’s it. We’d better try another alley and see if we can’t sneak up on it from behind. They probably have guards on the shuttle.”

“We’ll soon know.” A narrow opening just ahead seemed to lead back into the heart of the block of masonry. We followed it, emerged in a dead end, from which an arched opening like a sewage tunnel led off into utter darkness.

“Let’s try that route,” Dzok suggested. “It seems to lead in the right general direction.”

“What if it’s somebody’s bedroom?” T eyed the looming building; the crudely mortared walls gave no hint of interior function. The Hagroon knew only one style of construction: solid-rock Gothic.

“In that case, we’ll beat a hasty retreat.”

“Somehow the thought of pounding through these dark alleys with a horde of aroused Hagroon at my heels lacks appeal,” I said. “But I guess we can give it a try.” I moved to the archway, peered inside, then took the plunge. My shoes seemed loud on the rough floor. Behind me I could hear Dzok’s breathing. The last glimmer of light faded behind us. I was feeling my way with a hand against the wall now. We went on for what seemed a long time.

“Hssst!” Dzok’s hand touched my shoulder. “I think we’ve taken a wrong turning somewhere, old boy…”

“Yeah…” I thought it over. “We’d better go back.”

For another ten minutes we groped our way back in the dark, as silently as possible. Then Dzok halted. I came up behind him.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Shhh.”

I heard it then: a very faint sound of feet shuffling. Then a glow of light sprang up around a curve ahead, showing a dark doorway across the passage.

“In there,” Dzok whispered, and dived for it. I followed, slammed against him. There was a sound of heavy breathing nearby.

“What was that you said about bedrooms?” he murmured in my ear.

The breathing snorted into a resonant snore, followed by gulping sounds. I could hear a heavy body moving, the rustle of disturbed rubbish. Then an eerie silence settled.

Suddenly Dzok moved. I heard something clatter in the far corner of the room. His hand grabbed at me, pulling me along. I stumbled over things, heard his hand rasping on stone, then we were flat against the wall. A big Hagroon body rose up, moved into the light from the open door through which we had entered. Another of the shaggy figures appeared outside; this would be the one we had first heard in the alley. The two exchanged guttural growls. The nearer one turned back into the room—and abruptly the chamber was flooded with wan light. I saw that Dzok and I were in an alcove that partly concealed us from view from the door. The Hagroon squinted against the light, half-turned away—then whirled back as he saw us. Dzok jumped. The gun slapped my hand—but Dzok was past him, diving for another opening. I was behind him, ducking under the Hagroon’s belated grab, then pelting along a tunnel toward a faint glow at the far end, Dzok bounding ten yards in the lead. There were yells behind us, a horrible barking roar, the pound of feet. I hadn’t wanted a horde of trolls chasing me through the dark—but here I was anyway.

Ahead, Dzok leaped out into the open, skidded to a halt, looked both ways, then pointed, and was gone. I raced out into the open alley, saw Dzok charging straight at a pair of Hagroon in guards’ bangles—and beyond him, the dark rectangular bulk of the shuttle. The agent yelled. I recognized the grunts and croaks of the Hagroon language. The two guards hesitated. One pointed at me, started forward, the other spread his arms, barked something at Dzok. The latter, still coming on full tilt, straight-armed the heavier humanoid, dodged aside as the Hagroon staggered back, and made for the shuttle. I brought the slug gun up, fired at extreme range, saw the Hagroon bounce back, slam against the wall, then reach—but I was past him. Dzok’s opponent saw me, dithered for a moment, then whirled toward me. I fired—and missed, tried to twist aside, slipped, went down and skidded under the Hagroon’s grasp, leaving a sleeve from my coat dangling in his hands. I scrambled, made it to all fours, dived for the open entry to the shuttle. Dzok’s hand shot out, hauled me inside, and the door banged behind me as the sentry hit it like a charging rhino.

Dzok whirled to the operator’s seat.

“Great Scott!” he yelled. “The control lever’s broken off short!” The shuttle was rocking under blows at the entry port. Dzok gripped the edge of the panel with his one good hand; the muscles of his shoulder bunched, and with one heave, he tore it away, exposing tight-packed electronic components.

“Quick, Anglic!” he snapped. “The leads there—cross them!” I wedged myself in beside him, grabbed two heavy insulated cables, twisted their ends together. Following the agent’s barked instructions, I ripped wires loose, made hasty connections from a massive coil—which I recognized as an M-C field energizer—to a boxed unit like a fifty KW transformer. Dzok reached past me, jammed a frayed cable end against a heavy bus bar. With a shower of blue and yellow sparks, copper welded to steel. A deep hum started up; abruptly the shattering blows at the entry ceased. I felt the familiar tension of the M-G field close in around me. I let out a long sigh, slumped back in the chair.

“Close, Anglic,” Dzok sighed, “But we’re clear now…” I looked over at him, saw his yellowish eyes waver and half-close; then he fell sideways into my lap.