pped
among us. "All is ready. Come."

We ignored the girls. Snap again protested that he was hungry, which
indeed, for me at least, was certainly the truth. And I was parched
with thirst. I felt that this vaunted strength of my Earth body would
not last long without food and drink.

We entered the globular interior. There were narrow corridors;
triangular rooms; a slatted, ladder-like incline leading upward to a
higher level.

The girls followed Meka up the incline. Molo and Wyk herded us into a
nearby room. "You will have your food and drink here. Cause Wyk no
trouble and you will be quite safe."

He turned, but Snap plucked at him. "When are you coming back?"

"Not too long."

I said, "We will cause you no trouble. Take us on the ship."

"I will see."

He murmured to Wyk in Martian, then left us.

* * * * *

The small triangular room had no windows and only the single door. Wyk
touched a mechanism and it slid closed. The place was a queer
apartment indeed. The floor was convex, curving upward to the walls.
The light radiance dimly glowed, as though inherent to the metal
ceiling. There was strange metal furniture: a table and chairs, high
and large; bunks of a size evidently for the ten-foot workers.

The door opened, and a worker brought us food and drink. Wyk sat apart
and watched us while we consumed the meal. I noticed that he seldom
let himself get close to us. He sat stiffly upright, with his jointed
legs bent double under him, his many arms and pincers hanging inert,
save the one short shoulder-arm with flexible fingers gripping his
weapon. At his waist, and upon several hook-like protuberances of his
chest, other weapons and devices were hanging.

Snap gazed up from where, on the floor, we were ravenously eating and
drinking. "Aren't you hungry?" he asked Wyk.

"No."

"You eat often?"

"No."

An incurious, taciturn creature, this insect-like being. Snap
whispered, "Got to talk to him; make him let us get close. That
weapon...."

How the weapon operated, we did not know; but that a flash from it
would bring instant death we well imagined.

Half of that hour of waiting was past.

I said to Wyk, "You would call this night on your world; the sun
obviously is on the other hemisphere. When will it be day?"

His gaze swung on me. His hollow voice, deep from the capacious shell
of chest, echoed and blurred in the room.

"I think Wandl has no rotation now. Or