She counted carefully. It looked like fifteen of them, when one would be enough to handle two humans. If E.C. Tally chose to return at that moment…
She could do nothing to help him, nothing to warn him. If she called out it would announce her own location. The Zardalu must know enough about the air ducts to realize where she would emerge on the surface.
Five minutes. Ten. The Zardalu had settled into silence. The chance that Tally might return and find himself in their midst was increasing.
Darya was thinking of easing closer to the room, so that if she saw him coming she could at least shout a warning and take her chances on beating the Zardalu in the race back to the surface, when the whistles and clicks began again. There was a flurry of moving shapes.
She took four cautious steps forward. The Zardalu were leaving. She counted as they moved across the part of the room that she could see. Fifteen. All of them, unless she had made a mistake in their numbers when first they entered. To a human eye, one mature Zardalu was just like another, distinguished only by size and the subtle patterns on their corsets of webbing.
They were gone. Darya waited, until the room was once more totally silent. She crept back along the three-foot pipe of the air duct. Tally had to be warned, somehow. The only way she could do it was to assume that he would return along the same path by which he had left, and station herself in that duct. And if for some reason he favored a different return route, that would be just too bad.
The big room was filled with the faint ammoniac scent of the Zardalu. It reminded her of Louis Nenda’s comment: “If you can smell them, bet that they can smell you.” Her own recent misfortunes had swept the fate of the other party right out of her thoughts. Now she wondered who had escaped in the Indulgence. Who was alive, and who was dead? Were others, like her, still running like trapped rats through the service facilities of Genizee?
Out on the planetary surface, the long day must be wearing on. The sun would be approaching zenith, farther from the line of the air ducts. It was darker in the room than when she had left. She could barely distinguish the apertures of the ducting, over at the other side. She tiptoed across to the widest of them, peering along it for any sign of the Zardalu and ready to turn and flee.
Nothing. The corridor ran off, dark and silent, as far as she could see. She felt sure they would be back — they knew she had been here.
She moved on, heading for the third corridor, the right-hand one, which Tally had taken when he left. The second corridor, according to him, angled away in the wrong direction. If it led to the surface at all it would be farther from the place where the Indulgence had rested.
Darya hardly glanced at the round opening as she passed it. Any adult Zardalu would find it hard to squeeze more than a few feet along that narrowing tunnel.
She took one more step. In that same moment there was a rush of air from her left. She did not have time to turn her head. From the corner of her eye she saw a blur of motion. And then she was seized from behind, lifted, and pulled close to a body whose powerful muscles flexed beneath rubbery skin.
Darya gasped, convulsed, and tried to twist free. At the same moment she kicked at her captor’s body, regretting that she had taken off her hard and heavy shoes.
There was a rewarding grunt of pain. It was followed by a creaking moan of surprise and complaint. Darya was suddenly dropped to the ground.
She stared up. Even as she realized that those were not tentacles that had held her, she recognized the voice.
“Dulcimer!”
The Chism Polypheme was crouching down next to her, all of his five little arms waving agitatedly in the air.
“Professor Lang. Save me!” He was shivering and weeping, and Darya felt teardrops the size of marbles falling onto her from his master eye. “I’ve run and run, but still they come after me. I’m exhausted. I’ve shouted to them and pleaded with them, promising I’ll be the best and most loyal slave they ever had — and they won’t listen!”
“You were wasting your time. They don’t understand human speech.”
“I know. But I thought I had nothing to lose by trying. Professor Lang, they want to eat me, I know they do. Please save me.”
A tall order, when she could not save herself. Darya groped around on the floor until she found her shoes and put them on. She patted Dulcimer on his muscular body. “We’ll be all right. I know a safe way to the surface. I realize that the Zardalu could be back here anytime, but we can’t go yet. We have to wait for E.C. Tally.”
“No, we don’t. Leave him. He’ll manage just fine on his own.” Dulcimer was tugging at her, urging her to stand up. “He will. He doesn’t need us. Let’s get out of here before they come back.”
“No. You go anywhere you like. But I stay here, and I wait.” Darya did not like to be in the chamber any more than the Polypheme; but she was not about to abandon Tally.
Dulcimer produced a low, shivering moan. He made no attempt to leave and finally crouched back on the floor, tightly spiraled. Darya could not see his color in the dim light, but she was willing to bet that it was the dark cucumber green of a fully sober and nervous Polypheme.
“It will only be a little while,” she said, in her most confident tone, and forced herself to remain seated calmly on the floor. Dulcimer hesitated, then moved close to her.
Darya took a deep breath and actually felt some of her nervousness evaporate. It helped to be forced to set a good example.
But it helped less and less as the minutes wore on. Where the blazes was Tally? He had had time to go to the surface and back three or four times. Unless he had been captured.
Dulcimer was becoming more restless. He was turning his head, peering around the room. “I can hear something!”
Darya stopped breathing for twenty seconds and listened. All she heard was her own heartbeat. “It’s your imagination.”
“No. It’s coming from there.” He pointed his upper two arms in different directions, one at the duct that Darya and Tally had used to reach the surface, the other at the narrow opening from which he himself had emerged.
“Which one?”
“Both.”
Now Darya was convinced that it was Dulcimer’s imagination. She would barely be able to squeeze into that second gap herself. He had gone across to peer into it, and his head was a pretty tight fit.
“That’s impossible,” Darya started to say. But then she could hear a sound herself — a clean, clear sound of hurrying footsteps, coming from the duct that Tally had left through. She recognized that sound.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s E.C. Tally. At last! Now we can — thank heaven — get out of here.”
“And I know a better way,” Tally said. He had emerged crouching from the air duct just in time to catch Darya’s final words, and now he was staring at the corkscrew tail of the Chism Polypheme, sticking out of the round opening to the other tube. “Why, you found him. That was very clever of you, Professor. Hello, Dulcimer.”
The Polypheme was wriggling back out of the duct, but he took no notice of E.C. Tally. He was groaning and shaking worse than ever.