He nodded and they went on.
At the end of the horizontal shaft C’mell turned and said:
“All men die here. Come on!”
Rod started to follow and then stopped, “C’mell, are you discoordinated? Why should I die? There’s no reason to.”
Her laughter was pure happiness. “Silly C’rod! You are a cat, cat enough to come where no man has passed for centuries. Come on. Watch out for those skeletons. They’re a lot of them around here. We hate to kill real people, but there are some that we can’t warn off in time.”
They emerged on a balcony, overlooking an even more enormous storeroom than the one before. This had thousands more boxes in it. C’mell paid no attention to it. She went to the end of the balcony and raced down a slender steel ladder.
“More junk from the past!” she said, anticipating Rod’s comment. “People have forgotten it up above; we mess around in it.”
Though he could not smell the air, at this depth it felt thick, heavy, immobile.
C’mell did not slow down. She threaded her way through the junk arid treasures on the floor as though she were an acrobat. On the far side of the old room she stopped. “Take one of these,” she commanded.
They looked like enormous umbrellas. He had seen umbrellas in the pictures which his computer had showed him. These seemed oddly large, compared to the ones in the pictures. He looked around for rain. After his memories of Tostig Amaral, he wanted no more indoor rain. C’mell did not understand his suspicions.
“The shaft,” she said, “has no magnetic controls, no updraft of air. It’s just a shaft twelve meters in diameter. These are parachutes. We jump into the shaft with them and then we float down. Straight down. Four kilometers. It’s close to the Moho.”
Since he did not pick up one of the big umbrellas, she handed him one. It was surprisingly light.
He blinked at her. “How will we ever get out?”
“One of the bird-men will fly up the shaft. It’s hard work but they can do it. Be sure to hook that thing to your belt. It’s a long slow time falling, and we won’t be able to talk. And it’s terribly dark, too.”
He complied.
She opened a big door, beyond which there was the feel of nothing. She gave him a wave, partially opened her “umbrella,” stepped over the edge of the door and vanished. He looked over the edge himself. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing of C’mell, no sound except for the slippage of air and an occasional mechanical whisper of metal against metal. He supposed that must be the rib-tips of the umbrella touching the edge of the shaft as she fell.
He sighed. Norstrilia was safe and quiet compared to this.
He opened his umbrella too.
Acting on an odd premonition, he took his little hiering-spieking shell out of his ear and put it carefully in his coverall pocket.
That act saved his life.
HIS OWN STRANGE ALTAR
Rod McBan remembered falling and falling. He shouted into the wet adhesive darkness, but there was no reply. He thought of cutting himself loose from his big umbrella and letting himself drop to the death below him, but then he thought of C’mell and he knew that his body would drop upon her like a bomb. He wondered about his desperation, but could not understand it (Only later did he find out that he was passing telepathic suicide screens which the underpeople had set up, screens fitted to the human mind, designed to dredge filth and despair from the paleocortex, the smell-bite-mate sequence of the nose-guided animals who first walked Earth; but Rod was cat enough, just barely cat enough, and he was also telepathically subnormal, so that the screens did not do to him what they would have done to any normal man of Earth — delivered a twisted dead body at the bottom. No man had ever gotten that far, but the underpeople resolved that none ever should.) Rod twisted in his harness and at last he fainted.
He awakened in a relatively small room, enormous by Earth standards but still much smaller than the storerooms which he had passed through on the way down.
The lights were bright.
He suspected that the room stank but he could not prove it with his smell gone.
A man was speaking, “The Forbidden Word is never given unless the man who does not know it plainly asks for it.”
There was a chorus of voices singing, “We remember. We remember. We remember what we remember.”
The speaker was almost a giant, thin and pale. His face was the face of a dead saint, pale, white as alabaster, with glowing eyes. His body was that of man and bird both, man from the hips up, except that human hands grew out of the elbows of enormous clean white wings. From the hips down his legs were bird-legs, ending in horny, almost translucent bird-feet which stood steadily on the ground.
“I am sorry, Mister and Owner McBan, that you took that risk. I was misinformed. You are a good cat on the outside but still completely a human man on the inside. Our safety devices bruised your mind and they might have killed you.”
Rod stared at the man as he stumbled to his feet. He saw that C’mell was one of the people helping him. When he was erect, someone handed him a beaker of very cold water. He drank it thirstily. It was hot down here — hot, stuffy, and with the feel of big engines nearby.
“I,” said the great bird-man, “am E’telekeli.” He pronounced it Ee-telly-kelly. “You are the first human being to see me in the flesh.”
“Blessed, blessed, blessed, fourfold blessed is the name of our leader, our father, our brother, our son the E’telekeli” chorused the underpeople.
Rod looked around. There was every kind of underperson imaginable here, including several that he had never even thought of. One was a head on a shelf, with no apparent body. When he looked, somewhat shocked, directly at the head, its face smiled and one eye closed in a deliberate wink. The E’telekeli followed his glance. “Do not let us shock you. Some of us are normal, but many of us down here are the discards of men’s laboratories. You know my son.”
A tall, very pale young man with no features stood up at this point. He was stark naked and completely unembarrassed. He held out a friendly hand to Rod. Rod was sure he had never seen the young man before. The young man sensed Rod’s hesitation.
“You knew me as A’gentur. I am the E’ikasus.”
“Blessed, blessed, threefold blessed is the name of our leader-to-be, the Yeekasoose!” chanted the under-people.
Something about the scene caught Rod’s rough Norstrilian humor. He spoke to the great underman as he would have spoken to another Mister and Owner back home, friendily but bluntly.
“Glad you welcome me, Sir!”
“Glad, glad, glad is the stranger from beyond the stars!” sang the chorus.
“Can’t you make them shut up?” asked Rod.
“’Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ says the stranger from the stars!” chorused the group.
The E’telekeli did not exactly laugh, but his smile was not pure benevolence.
“We can disregard them and talk, or I can blank out your mind every time they repeat what we say. This is a sort of court ceremony.”
Rod glanced around. “I’m in your power already,” said he, “so it won’t matter if you mess around a little with my mind. Blank them out.”
The E’telekeli stirred the air in front of him as though he were writing a mathematical equation with his finger; Rod’s eyes followed the finger and he suddenly felt the room hush.
“Come over here and sit down,” said the E’telekeli.
Rod followed.
“What do you want?” he asked as he followed.
The E’telekeli did not even turn around to answer. He merely spoke while walking ahead,
“Your money, Mister and Owner McBan. Almost all of your money.”