She didn't know what they had come out into. It was like a fog of darkness, growing thicker as they went sliding forward. The light beams seemed to be dimming. Then they quietly went out as if they'd switched themselves off.

In blackness, she fingered the light controls and knew they weren't switched off.

"Repulsive!" she cried in her mind.

Repulsive couldn't help with the blackness. She got the feeling of direction. The blackness seemed to be soaking behind her eyes. She held the speed throttle steady in fingers slippery with sweat, and that was the only way she could tell they were still moving forward.

After a while, they b.u.mped 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 pa.s.sage 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 l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage, 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 all over the Hub. It had been donated to the professor twenty-five years ago by the populace of another Federation world. That populace had negligently permitted a hideous pestilence of some kind to be imported, and had been saved in the nick of time by the appropriate pestilence-killer, hastily developed and forwarded to it by Mantelish.

In return, a lifetime ambition had been fulfilled for him--his own private botanical garden plus an unlimited fund for stocking and upkeep.

To one side of the big garden house, where Mantelish stayed whenever he found the time to go puttering around among his specimens, stood a giant sequoia, generally reputed to be the oldest living thing in the Hub outside of the Life Banks. It was certainly extremely old, even for a sequoia. For the last decade there had been considerable talk about the advisability of removing it before it collapsed and crushed the house and everyone in it. But it was one of the professor's great favorites, and so far he had vetoed the suggestion.

Elbows propped on the broad white bal.u.s.trade of the porch before her third-story bedroom, Trigger was studying the sequoia's crown with a pair of field gla.s.ses when Pilch arrived. She laid the gla.s.ses down and invited her guest to pull up a chair and help her admire the view.

They admired the view for a little in silence. "It certainly is a beautiful place!" Pilch said then. She glanced down at Professor Mantelish, a couple of hundred yards from the house, dressed in a pair of tanned shorts and busily grubbing away with a spade around some new sort of shrub he'd just planted, and smiled. "I took the first opportunity I've had to come see you," she said.

Trigger looked at her and laughed. "I thought you might. You weren't satisfied with the reports then?"

Pilch said, "Of course not! But it was obvious the emergency was over, so I was whisked away to something else." She frowned slightly.

"Sometimes," she admitted, "the Service keeps me the least bit busier than I'd prefer to be. So now it's been six months!"

"I would have come in for another interview if you'd called me," Trigger said.

"I know," said Pilch. "But that would have made it official. I can keep this visit off the record." Her eyes met Trigger's for a moment. "And I have a feeling I will. Also, of course, I'm not pushing for any answers you mightn't care to give."

"Just push away," Trigger said agreeably.

"Well, we got the Commissioner's call from his ship. A worried man he was. So it seems now that we've had one of the Old Galactics around for a while. When did you first find out about it?"

"On the morning after our interview. Right after I got up."

"How?"

Trigger laughed. "I watch my weight. When I noticed I'd turned three and a half pounds heavier overnight than I'd averaged the past four years, I knew all right!"

Pilch smiled faintly. "You weren't alarmed at all?"

"No. I guess I'd been prepared just enough by that time. But then, you know, I forgot all about it again until Lyad and Flam opened that purse--and he wasn't inside. Then I remembered, and after that I didn't forget again."

"No. Of course." Pilch's slim fingers tapped the surface of the table between them. She said then, paying Repulsive the highest compliment Pilch could give, "It--he--was a good therapist!" After a moment, she added. "I had a talk with Commissioner Tate an hour or so ago. He's preparing to leave Maccadon again, I understand."

"That's right. He's been organizing that big exploration trip of Mantelish's the past couple of months. He'll be in charge of it when they take off."

"You're not going along?" Pilch asked.

Trigger shook her head. "Not this time. Ape and I--Captain Quillan and I, that is--"

"I heard," Pilch said. She smiled. "You picked a good one on the second try!"

"Quillan's all right," Trigger agreed. "If you watch him a little."

"Anyway," said Pilch, "Commissioner Tate seems to be just the least bit worried about you still."

Trigger put a finger to her temple and made a small circling motion. "A bit ta-ta?"

"Not exactly that, perhaps. But it seems," said Pilch, "that you've told him a good deal about the history of the Old Galactics, including what ended them as a race thirty-two thousand years ago."

Trigger's face clouded a little. "Yes," she said. She sat silent for a moment. "Well, I got that from Repulsive somewhere along the line," she said then. "It didn't really come clear until some time after we'd got back. But it was there in those pictures in the interview."

"The giants stamping on the farm?"

Trigger nodded. "And the fast clock and the slow one. He was trying to tell it then. The Jesters--that's the giants--they're fast and tough like us. Apparently," Trigger said thoughtfully, "they're a good deal like us in a lot of ways. But worse. Much worse! And the Old Galactics were just slow. They thought slow; they moved slow--they did almost everything slow. At full gallop, old Repulsive couldn't have kept up with a healthy snail. Besides, they just liked to grow things and tinker with things and so on. They didn't go in for fighting, and they never got to be at all good at it. So they just got wiped out, practically."