I
saw was more dimlit corridor. The place was a labyrinth! There was
nothing but twisting passages running every way, lit by occasional
lights, and now and then a creature running by, sometimes with a
pushcart, sometimes without.

"Well, I wasn't much worried at first. Tweel and I had only come a few
steps from the entrance. But every move we made after that seemed to get
us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of the creatures with an
empty cart, thinking that he'd be going out for his rubbish, but he ran
around aimlessly, into one passage and out another. When he started
dashing around a pillar like one of these Japanese waltzing mice, I gave
up, dumped my water tank on the floor, and sat down.

"Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said 'No--no--no!' in a
sort of helpless trill. And we couldn't get any help from the natives.
They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were
friends--ouch!

"Lord! I don't know how many hours or days we wandered around there! I
slept twice from sheer exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to need sleep. We
tried following only the upward corridors, but they'd run uphill a ways
and then curve downwards. The temperature in that damned ant hill was
constant; you couldn't tell night from day and after my first sleep I
didn't know whether I'd slept one hour or thirteen, so I couldn't tell
from my watch whether it was midnight or noon.

"We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of
the corridors, but they didn't seem to be doing anything--just wheels
turning. And several times I saw two barrel-beasts with a little one
growing between them, joined to both."

"Parthenogenesis!" exulted Leroy. "Parthenogenesis by budding like _les
tulipes_!"

"If you say so, Frenchy," agreed Jarvis. "The things never noticed us at
all, except, as I say, to greet us with 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!'
They seemed to have no home-life of any sort, but just scurried around
with their pushcarts, bringing in rubbish. And finally I discovered what
they did with it.

"We'd had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted upwards for a
great distance. I was feeling that we ought to be close to the surface
when suddenly the passage debouched into a domed chamber, the only one
we'd seen. And man!--I felt like dancing when I saw what looked like
daylight through a crevice in the roof.

"There was a--a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel
that turned sl