was
the only way she could tell they were still moving forward.

After a while, they bumped gently against something that had to be a
wall, it was so big, though at first she wasn't sure it was a wall. They
moved along it for a time, then came to the end of it and were moving in
the right direction again.

They seemed to be in a passage now, a rather narrow one. They touched
walls and ceiling from time to time. She thought they were moving
downward.

There was a picture in front of her. She realized suddenly that she had
been watching it for some time. But it wasn't until this moment that she
became really aware of it.

The beast was big, strong and angry. It bellowed and screamed, shaking
and covered with foam. She couldn't see it too clearly, but she had the
impression of mad, staring eyes and a terrible lust to crush and
destroy.

But something was holding it. Something held it quietly and firmly, for
all its plunging. It reared once more now, a gross, lumbering hugeness,
and came crashing down to its knees. Then it went over on its side.

The suit's beams flashed on. Trigger squeezed her eyes tight shut,
blinded by the light that flashed back from black walls all around. Then
her fingers remembered the right drill and dimmed the lights. She opened
her eyes again and stared for a long moment at the great gray
mummy-shape before one of the black walls.

"Repulsive?" she asked in her mind.

Repulsive didn't answer. The suit hung quietly in the huge black
chamber. She didn't remember having stopped it. She turned it now
slowly. There were eight or nine passages leading out of here, through
walls, ceiling, floor.

"Repulsive!" she cried plaintively.

Silence.

She glanced once more at the king plasmoid against the wall. It stayed
silent too. And it was as if the two silences cancelled each other out.

She remembered the last feeling of moving downward and lifted the suit
toward a passage that came in through the ceiling. She hung before it,
considering. Far up and back in its darkness, a bright light suddenly
blazed, vanished, and blazed again. Something was coming down the
passage, fast....

Her hand started for the gun handle. Then it remembered another drill
and flashed to the suit's communicator. A voice crashed in around her.

"Trigger, Trigger, Trigger!" it sobbed.

"Ape!" she screamed. "You aren't hurt?"

29

Mantelish's garden in the highland south of Ceyce had a certain renown
al