-and that discovery alone made him shudder, he who as a free
beetle had spent his whole life under desert skies. His feet rested on a
floor of hard-packed sand, and his back, behind which his wrists were
lashed together was propped uncomfortably against a wall ribbed with
metal girders. The room was circular and its walls converged upward,
into tangled shadows overhead; the chamber was roughly bottle-shaped.

To one side a door stood ajar, and it was thence that the light
streamed, but from where he was Dworn couldn't see into the space
beyond.

He tried hard to collect his thoughts. When had everything stopped
making sense? When he had first glimpsed the fires that were burning
beetles on the mountainside, or....

The converging lines of the wall-girders led his eyes upward. The
shadows overhead resolved themselves as he studied them, and Dworn's
heart pounded as he commenced to understand what manner of place he was
in. The roof of the bottle-shaped chamber--he was sure it must be
underground--was no roof, but was the underside of a great machine
complex with gear-housings and levers connected with the six powerful
metal legs radiating from it, their cleated feet resting on a shelf that
encircled the bottle-neck. It squatted there, motionless above him,
sealing the entrance to its burrow....

Trapped. For some reason he couldn't guess at, he had been taken
alive--his human body, at least; he didn't know what had become of the
rest of him, the machine that was part and parcel of him too.

The light suddenly brightened. The door at one side was swinging open.

Dworn blinked at the glare from the lighted room beyond. Against it a
figure stood in silhouette, and he saw that it was a woman.

She was slender, not very tall, and her hair was jet-black, a striking
frame for a startlingly pale face. Here beneath the earth she must not
get much sun.... In that white face her lips were shockingly red, the
color of fresh blood. And the nails of her slim white fingers were
crimson claws. After a moment, he realized that both must be painted--a
strange thing to him, for there was no such practice among beetle women.

She was clad in a coverall suit of much the same design as the green
garment Dworn wore according to beetle custom. But her garb was shiny
black, and in front, between the swelling mounds of her breasts, was an
emblem he did not understand; the shape of an hourglass, in vermilion
red.

She stood gazing at him