The Caterpillars Question

Chapter 13

Jack, Tappy, Candy, and Garth stood on the floor of the crater. About ten miles away, the gigantic icons and symbols on the crater wall moved very slowly in their never-ending parade. Now that Jack was close to the wall, he could see that the figures were on a smooth band made of some kind of material— certainly not of stone. The band or ring was set halfway up the wall. Its lower edge was at least three thousand feet above the crater floor. Its upper edge was about five thousand feet from the floor. Thus, tile ring was two thousand feet broad. Above this, the crater wall extended upward for an estimated three thousand feet.

Who were the makers of this Brobdingnagian ring? What did the images and symbols mean? What could be rotating the mind-reeling gigantic artifact? What... ? Jack quit thinking about it. Or tried to do so. He had a much more urgent problem to consider— survival.

The Gaol ship had left after Garth had given it instructions. It would be in orbit now, ready to return if Garth radioed a command. If other Gaol ships came while it was still in orbit, it would transfer to the system of another star. And it would move again if it were again located.

Jack led the others toward the wall. Between it and the place where the ship had departed was a tiny camp of honkers. Jack wanted to give the honkers plenty of opportunity to be alerted to the presence of the intruders. If the honkers were caught unawares, they might scatter in a panic or, perhaps, attack the strangers.

But if Jack could get friendly with them, he might get them to hide the refugees, maybe even direct them to the leader of the secret organization Tappy said existed among the honkers.

Beyond that, though, she did not know much about it.

Jack had to work fast. The Gaol would find Tappy and her companions very soon if they did not get to a hiding place. Garth had told him that it would be at least three hours before the Gaol's vessels would appear above the planet.

The sun was just descending from the zenith. The refugees were on the bank of a large creek. The vegetation on the plain was somewhat like that on an African veldt— now and then. But there were distinctly non-Terrestrial plants here. Like those that resembled thirty-foot-high croissants with one end stuck in the ground and with many large-headed red pins stuck in them. A moldy blue-green moss dripped from the pins, which were probably just exotic-looking branches. The ends of the pin-branches had knobby growths with holes in the center. Very tiny reptiloids stuck their shiny plated heads out from the holes.

These trees and others lined the creek. Beyond these, yellowish grasses as high as Jack's waist grew thickly. Their expanse was broken here and there by plants twenty feet high, their puce trunks ascending in a zigzag fashion to topknots of thick scarlet and lemon fronds.

Far to Jack's right, some enormous blue piglike beasts with huge round ears and elephantlike proboscises munched on the grass.

Somewhere, an animal roared.

Jack ordered Garth to take the lead. His big wheels pressed the grass down to make an easier path for the others. If they encountered a large predator, Garth could cut it down with his built-in beamer. But Garth's presence would make access to the honkers difficult. These always fled if they saw a Gaol. On the other hand, Jack was betting that the honkers knew that Tappy was the host for the Imago. If they watched the strangers long enough, they would conclude that Garth was not your run-of-the-mill Gaol.

They had walked a mile when Garth halted. His whistles were low, and Candy, replying, also whistled softly. Then she spoke in English. "He says he detects middle-mass life-forms ahead about twenty meters. Also on both sides of us and behind us. He can hear them move and see their body heat. He cannot hear them speak."

"Tell him to proceed very slowly," Jack said.

Tappy came to his side and took his hand. She looked wary but not frightened. She certainly was much tougher than when he had met her. Her scary experiences might have destroyed the nerves of many, but she was basically courageous and resilient.

She had held his right hand briefly as if a touch could give her strength. Or did she think that she was giving him the strength? Though the Imago seemed to be sleeping, some of its power could be leaking from it to her. And she was unconsciously transmitting that to him.

"You're getting too introspective, Jack," he told himself. "You're so eager to find hidden meanings in this mess, you're getting ridiculous."

His left hand dangled free, but it was ready to snatch the beamer out of its holster if it were needed. He, Candy, and Tappy each carried one. There was also one in a recess in Garth. Jack could lift the lid and grab it quickly. But that was to be used only as a surprise weapon. All four beamers had been taken from the Gaol ship before they had left it. They also had extra batteries.

The Gaol moved ahead. Jack walked behind him but several paces to the Gaol's right. When he saw a figure stand up from the grass twenty feet ahead, Jack told Candy to tell Garth to stop. The person in their path was a honker, though unlike any he had ever seen. Its body was festooned with animals and reptiles. At least, that was how the honker looked at first glance.

Tappy walked past Jack and Garth. Her right hand was raised high, its palm open toward the honker. The honker responded with the same signal. Jack knew that that was the I-come-in-peace sign. He made the same gesture, and so did Candy. Other honkers appeared from the tall grasses. He looked behind him. Scores of their fellows had popped out of their hiding places. They held flint-tipped spears and long blowguns, but these were pointed at the ground. And when the first one to bar the strangers' path blew some kind of salute, they also saluted.

After Tappy had quit honking, the male "wearing" the animals bowed low. The tentacles growing from his hips rose and waved. The dormouselike beast whose tail was embedded in the honker's navel waved its paws and squeaked loudly.

Jack thought, If I ever get back to Earth, I'll do a painting of this exotic being. He's so baroque, so nightmarish. I could make a career just from my depictions of non-Earth beings. And then there's Tappy in her many moods, Tappy blind, and Tappy seeing.

At the moment, it looked as if he had little chance of ever returning to his native world. And, if he and Tappy did defeat the Gaol and she elected to stay here, he would not leave her. Without Tappy, he would not care where he was.

Now she was honking at the witch doctor, chief, or whatever he was. When she stopped, he honked for a long time at her. While speaking, he moved slowly toward her. Jack saw that he was old and wrinkled. Liver spots covered his body. But he was certainly quick and agile, nothing stiff or creaky about him. The snake coiled around his neck had a long thin body banded with alternating black and scarlet. Its head was twice as large in proportion to its body as any Earth snake would have been. It resembled a skinned and earless wolf's. It had neither eyes nor eye sockets. It uncoiled enough to extend its body and to lick Tappy's eyes and cheeks with a long wet unsnakelike tongue.

The dormouselike beast, the tip of the tail of which was sunk into the honker's navel, also lacked eyes. It stiffened its tail so that its body was at right angles to the honker's. Then its hairy three-toed paws clung to the skin of Tappy's belly for a moment while it sniffed with a huge doglike nose. Its tongue shot out. It was cylindrical and tipped with four tendrils. These momentarily flattened out on her belly, curled, then withdrew around the tip of the tongue, which also withdrew.

Jack had thought that the oyster-shaped thing over the honker's genitals was a sort of codpiece. But it quivered with a life of its own under its hairy exterior. And it split bilaterally for a few seconds to reveal some of its organs. Jack shuddered with repulsion. What function this molluskoid had, he could not guess. Nor did he really want to know.

By then, the conversation of honker and human was over. The animal-festooned male turned and began walking toward the crater wall. Except for the rear guard, which disappeared into the grass, everybody followed the weird male.

Tappy said, "He's the oldest honker on this planet, maybe two hundred or more years old. He's the administrative and spiritual leader of all the honkers. He's a sort of, how to translate?... shaman, from a long line of shamans."

"Does he have a name?" Jack said.

"It's a word that means, uh, one who puts a system together, uh, one who also gets a system working and keeps it working."

"You mean a builder?"

"No."

"An operator?"

"No, it's more like a..."

Poor Tappy! Her formal education had been very much neglected.

She smiled and said, "An integrator!"

He told himself not to be so hasty in the future in judging her knowledge.

"Good! Let's call him the Integrator. I wonder what he integrates?"

The honkers appeared to be Stone Age proliferates. But that must be because they wanted the Gaol to believe that. As evidenced by the Integrator, they were more advanced in biological science than the peoples of Earth. What else were they concealing?

The Integrator halted, and he scanned the cloudless sky. The only objects in it Jack could see were five crimson birds circling high in the distance. Satisfied that he saw nothing suspicious, the shaman walked into a grove of huge trees resembling banyans with thick overlapping plates of yellowish bark. Jack sniffed at their strong odor.

He said, "Wino's delight! Muscatel, three dollars a gallon!"

The shaman walked into the semidarkness of the center of the grove. Jack, following him, was startled when he saw the bark of the central tree open. It swung out to display a hollow in the tree. A honker stood within it. He bowed once to the shaman and three times to Tappy. Then he turned and went down a steep flight of steps. The shaman leading, all followed him.

But Tappy stopped and said, "What about Garth? He can't get down the steps, too. It's too narrow. And these wooden steps wouldn't bear his weight."

"Oh, man, I forgot about him," Jack said.

He, Tappy, and Candy went back up the steps, forcing the honkers behind them to get out of the tree. Jack was startled when he stepped out into the half-light. Garth was gone. A score of honkers was busily erasing the tracks of the Gaol's wheels.

"Ask them where Garth is," Jack said to Tappy.

Tappy honked at the nearest female. Then she said, "They've hidden him in a big hole in another tree. It's covered up with a fake section of bark."

"For God's sake!" Jack said. "Why didn't they tell us? And how did they get Garth to cooperate?"

She honked again, listened, and then said, "Some of the honkers speak the Gaol language. They can't whistle, but their honks can be the equivalent of the whistles that make up words. They just have to be the same lengths of the whistles and have me same timing between groups of whistles. He understands them when they do that, but he doesn't know honker speech.

"The Integrator didn't tell us that Garth would be hidden. Apparently, he took it for granted that we'd know that Garth had to be concealed up here. That's the way of the honkers. They assume a certain amount of intelligence in others. We'd better get used to their way of doing things, Jack."

They went down the steps again and passed through several tunnels lit only by pine torches set in wall sconces. They emerged into a vast cavern. This was well illuminated by light from plants growing on the walls and ceilings. These were tangled vines growing luminiferous pods.

A twenty-foot-wide stream of water coursed from a hole in one wall to a hole at the far end of the cavern. A bridge formed of material like spiderweb silk, its cables attached to the cavern ceiling, crossed the stream. The mouth-watering odor of meat cooked in stone braziers filled the cavern. The smoke drifted slowly along and was sucked up by a large hole in the ceiling. About thirty honkers, adults and a few children, were here. The youngsters were like children on Earth or elsewhere, playing, making a lot of noise, running around, having a good time, and testing the adults' patience.

Jack expected to be annoyed by them, especially since he needed quiet and privacy to think about his plans and also to talk (via Tappy) to the Integrator. Surprisingly, the noise was not to bother him. Perhaps, his increased empathy made him more tolerant.

Then he caught sight of a table near the wall and forgot about the infants. He walked to it and bent down to look intently at the objects on its top. They were three concentric circles made of some brown fibrous cardboard and, in the center, a tiny rose-red stone. Bending over to get closer to the stone, he saw that one side of it had been carved to make a sort of throne.

The inner circle bore on its inner side the same images and symbols that were on the crater-wall ring. These were also on the inner side of the two outer rings. By them were several piles of papyruslike paper. The top pages of these were inked with handwritten characters. These honkers were not proliferates.

He called to Tappy. Before she could reach him, a honker walked swiftly to him and began "talking." When Tappy got to him, she said, "It's a model of the crater bands. Apparently, there are two similar rings around the one we can see. They're concealed inside the cliff. He says this model is the latest in a long, long series. The honkers have been studying it for many centuries, maybe millennia, trying to figure out what the function of the real rings is."

A series of loud blasts from the Integrator interrupted her. She said, "He wants to talk to us. Now."

The Integrator sat on a high-backed and intricately carved chair by a table. He was feeding his body-beasts with meat and vegetables. Another honker was doling out live insects to the mossy oysterlike thing covering the shaman's genitals. Somewhere in the mass beneath its thick greenish hair covering was a mouth.

At a gesture from the Integrator, Jack and Tappy sat down. But the shaman indicated that he had meant for Tappy only to take a chair.

She said, "Sorry, Jack. He says this is going to be a long talk, more like a lecture, actually. He doesn't want to be interrupted by my translating what he says. You wander around, do whatever you want to do while he talks. Later, I'll report what he's told me."

"Don't forget to ask him about the model of the crater rings," Jack said. "I want to know everything he knows."

"Runner there, that's his name, Runner," Tappy said, indicating the male who had told her about the model, "will guide you. You can go wherever you wish, but he'll see you don't go into dangerous areas."

Jack bent over and kissed her forehead. "See you." But he did not leave at once. He stayed to watch the Imaget snatch a tiny piece of meat from a dish near the edge of the table. It had to move fast to escape the lunge of the snake thing. Jack paled. It would be a terrible loss if the Imaget were killed.

However, the hatchling was the fastest creature he had ever seen. Its jump was a blur like a hummingbird's wings in flight. In fact, it looked as if it had zipped from this continuum into another and then immediately reappeared in this world. That was a fanciful analogy, which, however, might be true.

An estimated hour later, he returned from his tour. Though he could not understand his guide's language, he had comprehended from the gestures that the many caves he had seen were a very small part of the complex. Part of it was a natural cavern network. Another part had been dug by others than honkers, if he interpreted Runner's hand signs rightly. And the honkers had extended the work of their predecessors.

Many of the caves contained animals and insects. These were obviously being mutated into species the honkers intended to use for their own purposes. One great chamber particularly fascinated him. Millions of green red-spotted flies were in cages made of what seemed to be glass. But this material was excreted by a horde of worms laid out in frameworks. The stuff, when dried, could be used as glassy panes.

Runner managed to impart the information that the flies were very poisonous.

Another chamber was devoted to a fungus that ate metal and plastic. The latter material, Jack guessed, came from artifacts which the honkers had stolen from the Gaol or picked up after they had been discarded.

When Jack was led back to the council chamber, Tappy and the shaman were still at the table. She was drinking ruby-red liquor from a strangely shaped goblet of cut quartz. The Integrator was sipping his drink from another curiously formed stone goblet. Jack took several seconds to realize that the container was made of bone, not stone, and that it had to be the skull of an upper-class Gaol.

The shaman gestured for Jack to sit down. A honker brought him a stone goblet shaped like a hawk with half-folded wings. Its eyes were large emeralds. The liquor smelled like wine and was wine. It was too thick for his taste, but the glow that came swiftly after swallowing it was pleasant.

"I like it fine," Tappy said. "But you should know it's made from insect blood."

If he had not swallowed so much of the liquor, he might have gotten sick. By now, he didn't care if it had been made from horse manure. This world wasn't such a bad place after all. In fact, he felt as if everything was going to work out in Tappy's favor. The Gaol would be utterly defeated, and all would be well in the world.

While Tappy related her conversation, the shaman went to sleep. Some sudden honks and the wild waving of his hip tentacles indicated that he was having a dream. Or a nightmare.

"What'd he say about that?" Jack said, pointing at the crater-ring model.

"The shamans still have no idea what the crater ring is for. It was there when their ancestors climbed the crater wall and came down onto the floor. By the way, their name for themselves can be translated as 'the Latest.' Nobody knows why they're named that. They do have myths about its origin.

"Anyway, when the Latest got here, they saw the moving circle, and, of course, it's intrigued them and even become part of their religion. The original settlers thought that the images on the band were representations of the gods and the symbols were holy messages. If deciphered, they would bring permanent peace and plenty to the honkers, other peoples, too. The more enlightened now believe that the ring was made by a species that came here from another planet."

"Ring? The model shows three rings. How do they know there are three?"

"You'll know when we see a burial chamber of the people who made the rings. The honkers call them the Makers. We'll see the chamber soon. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The honkers call the rings the Generator."

"Generator of what?"

"The murals in the burial cave imply that the rings are a generator of some sort."

"And what happened to the Makers?"

"The honkers believe that the Makers built the Generator as a weapon against the Gaol, a last-ditch stand. But the Gaol killed all of them before it could be used. The Gaol had no idea what the ring was for. They consider it to be a great curiosity but not worth intensive investigation. To them, it's some kind of religious artifact."

"All those millennia, and the honkers don't have the slightest idea what its purpose is or how to operate it?"

Despite his strong pleadings, she refused to say more about it.

The Integrator was absent during the following "day." Jack asked Tappy if she knew where he was.

"He's gone ahead to the burial chamber we're to visit. He didn't say much about what he'd be doing there except that he had to repaint some of the murals. They're so ancient they need retouching now and then. I suppose he's going to prepare the chamber ritually for our visit."

The day after that, they were awakened early— or he thought it was early since there was no sun to go by— and were given breakfast. Immediately afterward, Candy accompanying them, they started their journey through the tunnels and the caves. Three lesser shamans led the way. These lacked the implanted animals, but the genitals of each were covered with the mossy oyster-thing, and each had a pale snake-thing coiled around his or her neck.

Throughout the journey, Tappy was silent. Jack asked her what was depressing her. She only replied that she had much to think about and was trying to work her way through them. Would he please not be worried about her? She would be all right soon.

After three meals, the party came to a halt. The Integrator was waiting for them in a tunnel. The luminiferous pods growing on the vines on the wall showed two large packs, a large canteen, a chamber pot, and a collapsible wooden ladder on the floor. The Integrator had camped here, Jack thought. But why at this place? It looked like every other tunnel the party had traversed except that one section of the wall was bare of the vegetation.

But the honkers, including the lesser shamans, were obviously awed. All halted when they were thirty feet from the Integrator, bowed, and honked softly.

Tappy had spoken about the chambers during their trip. Nobody but the chief shaman entered them except for some highly placed shamans who repainted the murals when they needed it.

The Integrator, honking a "chant" over and over, danced around the tunnel in a tight circle. Then he went to the bare section and pushed on it. It swung out at one side and in at the other. It was a door of stone on pivots in its center. Musty air rushed out.

Jack looked into the darkness within. The shaman, after some more incomprehensible "chanting" and dancing, lit a pine torch. The flame wavered slightly, showing that the tunnel had some ventilation. The shaman posed in the doorway, facing toward Tappy. He honked at her, genuflected three times, turned, and walked into the darkness.

Tappy said, "You and Candy are allowed, too, Jack."

Candy just behind him, he followed the girl and the shaman for about twenty feet. The tunnel began curving here. After two hundred paces, counted by Jack, the tunnel straightened out. Immediately, a large arched doorway was ahead of them. The shaman walked through it, his torch lighting up the immense chamber. He set that in a wall sconce, then lit two more torches he had carried in a bag on his back. He handed one to Tappy and one to Jack.

There were several fascinating objects seen dimly in the shadows deeper within the chamber. But a mural near him caused him to stop and study it by the light of his torch. It looked as if it had been painted yesterday. In fact, he could smell the paint.

He said, "I can't believe it."

Above him was a painting depicting, among other things, a group of four people. No. Change that to three people and one weird being who looked as if it were half machine. The human beings were a young female, a somewhat older male, and a woman. But a section of clockwork and wires was exposed in a hole in the woman's chest. That meant what? That she was not really a human being. She was an android.

And, though the half-machine did not look much like Garth, it portrayed a cyborg fitted with wheels.

To one side was another painting. It was clearly the space-time vessel in which he and Tappy had taken refuge and found the androids in it. Squiggly lines around it represented, he supposed, the pulsations emanating from the vessel.

All the images had been freshly repainted.

Jack's heart was clenching as if it were a hand desperately squeezing down on ectoplasm. Though he did not want to look again at the young female in the painting, he forced himself to do so.

She did not have Tappy's features. But she had that sweet expression Tappy so often had and that wondering look. Like the faces of Alice in Wonderland and of Dorothy in Oz. The artist had also managed to give a sense of both vulnerability and invulnerability. Jack had never seen anything to match the contradictory impressions in any work by an Earth artist, and he thought he had seen all the works of the great ones and the near-greats.

She wore a blue robe of some sort. It was not a nightgown, but it could easily have been used for that purpose.

A circular section in her breast and stomach areas was white. Representations of rays emanating from the central brightness shot through her body and several feet beyond her. Was that symbolic of the Imago?

He looked more closely. On her left breast was a vague tentacled shape through which the fabric of the robe could be seen. The Imaget?

The hairs on the back of his neck seemed to be standing up, and cold raced over his skin.

The young male did not have his face, and his clothes were not those of any Terrestrial. But he held a painter's brush in one hand.

The four certainly seemed to represent prophecies or predictions of the coming of Tappy, Jack, Candy, and Garth. Impossible— yet, there they were, and the young human female shone with the Imago within her, and she bore the Imaget on her breast.

He stepped back, lifted the torch higher, and saw the image above the group. It was of tongues of fire shooting above the heads of the four persons. Above these were images of the crater-wall rings and their figures and symbols.

From its interior sprang more tongues of fire. And in their midst were upper-class Gaol, the ratcages. Some of them were burning.

How would the rings be powered? The outer one had been rotating slowly for many thousands of years. Some kind of machinery had to be turning it, the other rings, too, he supposed. Nothing in the painting indicated what that could be. Was there a vast engine deep under the crater floor? What did it use for fuel? A shaft plunging to the hot core of the planet? A shaft which conducted the heat to the machine, where the heat was converted to electricity? Or had the Makers possessed means of which Terrestrials had no inkling?

By now the Integrator was bobbing up and down and whirling with an agility and endurance amazing for such an old person. He was also honking loudly.

Jack moved close to Tappy and spoke softly. "This couldn't be just coincidence."

He felt numb, but deep within him was a fiercely hot ball of excitement. "My God! Predictions can't be valid. No one can look into the future and see what's coming. Not about what individuals'll be doing, anyway. Especially if they won't exist for thousands of years. If true prophecies or predictions could be made, we'd just be machines rolling along tracks that were laid in the beginning of time. There'd be no free will.

"Past, present, and future would be fixed. We wouldn't be responsible for anything we did, good or bad. No, I just can't swallow that."

Tappy looked as if she had just seen some horrible monster coming out of a wall.

She said, "I can't believe it either, Jack. The Integrator told me about this, but he made me promise not to tell you about it. It was all I could do to keep silent. But I think I couldn't really believe what he said. I thought we should see this before we got high hopes, too high, and then fell off the wall like Humpty Dumpty."

Jack tried to dispel the numbness but failed. When he spoke, it was as if he were under water.

"Maybe someone— who, I don't know— is trying to make this prophecy, this prophetic mural, come true. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That'd be the only rational explanation. But who could be doing this if that is the case?"

"I'm really confused," Tappy said.

"Me, too."

She smiled, though it was obviously difficult for her to do. She said, "What difference does it make if we are programmed? Does it really matter if Fate or Someone has determined our lives? Or if we screw it all up by ourselves? We think we have free will. Even if it's a delusion, we wouldn't believe it. Not if we had solid proof. We'd deny it. So why worry about it, rant and rail and curse the gods? We can only act as if we truly were the masters of our destinies."

Jack could only grunt. But she was right. And her attitude and her manner of speaking showed that she had matured far beyond her years. Perhaps the false experiences had had some effect after all.

"I suppose," he said, "that the brightness within the girl and the rays shining from it symbolize the Imago?"

"That's what the Latest believe. That's why the Integrator sent that honker to plant the egg-seed in me. The ability to do that, make the egg-seed, I mean, was within their powers long, long ago. They were just waiting for the right person to come along— me— and to do it. There's another burial chamber, miles from here, that gives instructions for doing that. It's in the characters of the alphabet used by the Makers, but with it are images that indicate how to do it."

Jack shook his head, and he said, "Too much, too much. I still think..."

"Think what?"

"Never mind. It doesn't bear thinking about."

He chewed on his upper lip before he spoke again.

"Why didn't the honkers lead us into the underground refuge as soon as we entered through the boulder-gate?"

"The Gaol were too close. Besides, it was evident to the honker spies that I was headed, being urged to head for, a destination north. They assumed that it was the pulsating vessel that had suddenly appeared. They tend not to interfere in certain situations. When we showed up near their underground entrance, the Integrator decided it was time to hide us."

She drew a deep breath.

"Also, when you and I appeared with Candy and Garth, they knew that the prophecy was being fulfilled. It was time to take us in no matter what the consequences might be for them."

"Anything else?"

"I almost forgot. The Integrator said he thought I was attracted to the boulder-gate on Earth because it led to this crater. The crater ring, he thinks, generates a weak field because it's rotating slowly. But the field was strong enough to attract me to it. I mean attract the Imago in me to it.

"The Makers theorized that the field or whatever should radiate from the Generator would attract the Imago. Like iron filings to a magnet."

"And... ?" Jack said.

"And what?"

"That pulsating ship Candy and the other androids manned: Why did it attract you more strongly than the crater ring? And who made the ship and the androids? Were they prepared millennia ago, too?"

"I don't know," she cried. "There's just too much to know, too many unanswered questions."

He embraced her and kissed her softly on the lips. "Take it easy. One thing at a time. You may feel as if you're about to crack up, fall apart. But you're really tough, Tappy, really strong. Just hang on."

He became aware that the shaman was silent. He looked toward him and saw him gesture for Tappy and him to follow him. He led them out of the muraled room and into another that also had wall paintings. Several yards into it, the shaman halted. He genuflected nine times before stepping ahead again. Then he halted again and genuflected seven times. When he went forward again, he made only three steps. The darkness shrank away from the lights of their torches. Not very far, though. The ceiling was so high that the lights did not touch them.

Now Jack saw, placed on the floor ahead of them, eleven twenty-foot-high globes made of some glittering crystalline material. When the shaman indicated that he and Tappy should come nearer to them, they got very close to the globes. Jack felt as awed and as seized with mystery as the archaeologists who had first entered King Tut's tomb. But this place was probably many thousands of years older than the tomb— older, indeed, than the very first Egyptian tombs or Stonehenge.

Each globe enclosed a body. Jack did not need to be told that each corpse was a Maker's.

They were six-limbed beings, quadrupeds with two arms. Centaurs, he thought, though not resembling much the half-man, half-horse of the Greek myths. Their lower part, the animal body, was shaggy with long red hair. The four legs were long but quite bearlike. The upright torso springing from the front of the quadrupedal form was covered with bright golden hair. Some of the corpses were female. The big, round, and thick-nippled breasts made that certain.

The heads were so flat above the eyes and so narrow from a side view that Jack deduced a similarity in this respect to the Gaol. Like them, the Makers' brains were in their bodies.

The eyes, like the beardless faces, were human, but they had epicanthic folds which would have made their faces Chinese-like if their lips had not been heavily everted like those of West African blacks. Their noses were very large and hawk-beaked.

The eyes, ranging in color from brown to blue, seemed to be magnets drawing eternity and infinity into them.

The Integrator brought eleven candles from his bag and placed them in their holders before the globes. After lighting them, he got down on his knees and began bowing and chanting while his right band weaved unseen symbols in the air. The acrid stench from the candies made Jack and Tappy cough. They walked away to the nearest wall and studied some of the murals there. Most of those showed the Makers in their daily life— or so it seemed to Jack. The vegetation and some of the animals depicted were not those of Earth or of the honkers' planet.

He was just getting started on his study of the series when the Integrator suddenly quit chanting. He quickly put the candles out, placed them in his bag, and gestured that the humans should follow him.