His last thought was that freedom was gone forever, because he was dead.
But about that he was wrong. Broken patches of awareness began to come back. He was lying in the dark, his legs still in the slimy water, his body a heavy log of dull pain. He breathed the antiseptic odor of medical foam, and realized the chimpanzee had been caring for him. "Oh, Mr. Tupaia," the animal moaned, "thank heavens you're coming out of it! I thought you were killed!"
Tupaia said thickly, "So did I. What happened?"
"It was that Sirian," the chimp sobbed. "He must've thought you were attacking the Watcher, 'stead of the other way around—anyway, he zapped you, and I thought you were dead! You wouldn't have been the only one. There's two dead already, back in the water—and all the more for the rest of us to carry because of it! Oh, Mr. Tupaia, I'm scared of this place!"
Savior or not, Tupaia was tiring of this preposterous ape and his fretful complaints. But he felt an obligation. "Here," he said, "I'll take one of those cases from you—"
"Oh, would you, Mr. Tupaia? Thank you!" The chimp stood up, peering forward in the dim, shadowy tunnel. "I think they're getting ready to move now," he said dismally. "I'm afraid your light got wrecked, Mr. Tupaia. But you can see, sort of, by watching the lights up ahead—"
Tupaia did not answer. His weakened limbs were nearly too stiff to move, and the dressings the ape had applied had hardened around his neck and shoulders.
Of course, they might have saved his life, he acknowledged fairly. He stood up, setting his increased load in motion, and became aware of new physical sensations. Past the sludgy pool, the tunnel changed character. A coppery, sulfurous odor rose above the medical smell of the foam, and a hot breeze was blowing from below. "It's a bad place we're coming to, Mr. Tupaia," sobbed the ape, and Tupaia did not have the heart to answer. It was true.
It got worse.
It was days later, perhaps, and certainly many kilometers farther along the trail—many kilometers straight down!—when there was a cacophony from the beings at the head of the line that transcended everything before. The temperature had gone up sharply. Every breath was an effort. Tupaia let his load drift to the floor, and peered ahead.
There was light ahead—a lot of it. Even the gallery they were in was almost twilit now; he could see Doc Chimp, gasping ragged breaths beside him, the shoe-button eyes imploringly fixed on the light ahead. The rest of the Purchased People were worse off still, but, strangely, the one worst affected of all was the Sirian eye. The enamel globe of its orb was paled and tarnished as it sped past them to join the other aliens ahead.
If the creatures had been quarrelsome before, now they were frenzied. "Let's take a peek," Doc Chimp whispered hoarsely, and the two of them crept silently toward the head of the line.
And stopped in wonderment.
The gallery ended on a sort of a great, wide balcony, and the balcony looked down on a vast drusy cavern, with what seemed to be faceted diamonds and opals and rubies set into the metal walls. And what walls! They were immense! The cavern dropped sheerly a kilometer and more beneath them, extended at least four kilometers into the distance. And beyond it there were other, vaster chambers still. It was not easy to see very far, because the great chamber was crisscrossed with cables and mirror-bright rods. A thunder of something in motion filled their ears. The walls themselves glowed; the scene was as bright as an afternoon on a Polynesian beach, though there was no central source of light.
As Tupaia's eyes became accustomed to the scale and brightness he realized that what he had thought were precious stones were in facts discrete lights. Almost like instrument lights on a panel; the whole scene, he thought, was like the interior of some vast machine, with its countless thousands, perhaps millions of indicator lights and gauges.
Beside him Doc Chimp was panning his tachyon camera across the scene, muttering to himself. "Oh, Mr. Tupaia, this place gets worse and worse! What do you suppose that Watcher's doing now?"
Tupaia said suspiciously, "Watcher? I don't see the Watcher."
"Not with those other creatures—down there! Way down there, between those two big pipes, don't you see?"
The hideous creature was at least half a kilometer away from them, dipping and soaring among the great beams and cables on his leathery wings. He looked tiny at that distance, but the other creatures were near enough. The sounds of their quarreling rose to a crescendo, and Tupaia felt the chimp shiver beside him. "Oh, good heavens," the animal moaned. "Do you see what that Sirian's doing? That means something special's going to happen now! And it's bound to be something bad!"
The great eye was limping back toward them, its crackle of electrostatic force muted with fatigue and disarray. It paid no attention to the terrestrial creatures but made for a particular metal object, sharp-angled and with a sort of soft, folding cover over one face. With a crackle of force the Sirian thrust the cover aside and squeezed itself into the box; a moment later it emerged again and dragged itself slowly back toward the other aliens.
"What did it do?" Tupaia demanded.
"It sent itself back!" Doc Chimp cried. "Don't you know a tachyon chamber when you see one? It went in and got itself copied; and that copy's back on the orbiter right now, stewing up heaven knows what sort of mischief." He had followed the Sirian with his little camera, and now let it drop in exhaustion. "Oh, Mr. Tupaia," he whimpered, "I wish I'd never come here."
Tupaia turned his back on the sobbing ape, breathing heavily in the damp, copper-smelling heat.
What sort of place was this? It was not merely an artifact buried in the ground After all those untold kilometers, he had to believe that the entire crust of Cuckoo—this part of it anyway—was an artifact! Something, for some reason, had constructed it. This great chamber with all its lights and rods and roaring, muted sounds—it was like being inside the control of some vast, automatic machine.
But for what purpose? And built by whom?
The Scorpian robot was welcoming the return of the Sirian with a drumroll of angry reproach—for what, Tupaia could not guess. He could not hear individual sounds very well, would not have understood them if he could, for almost none of the Purchased People still had Pmals. The young man with the scarred face, almost the only one who had, was listening with that blank, opaque stare that meant some distant owner was occupying his mind.