"I wish I could," David-the-kobold sobbed. "I just wanted to see what it was like inside the tachyon chamber. That's all! And then all of a sudden I was here with you other freaks, and—" He stopped, his hand to his mouth. "Oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings!"
"You didn't," the gnome Tupaia said angrily. "You were part of the group of Purchased People? A child?"
"I didn't mean to be," David apologized. "And then that ugly big red glass eyeball sent you others up that way, and the rest of us just stayed there. And then some of them came back with a bunch of those Boaty-Bit bug things, and all the freaks—I mean the real freaks, mister— I anyway, they were talking together, and finally the eyeball thing told us that there weren't any survivors of any importance from the other expedition—whoever they were— and we were to move along. So they did. All of them except me. I hid. I didn't like that big eyeball!" He moved over to the railing of the balcony and looked down, nodding. "Yeah, you can see them now—they're down there in that other place, where they left all the bundles. I don't know what—oh, gosh! They're all jumping off the balcony!"
The kobold Tupaia leaped to the rail, peering over. It was true! One by one, the squat, tough Purchased People were launching themselves into the abyss, while the eyeball and the Sheliak and the Scorpian robot flew nearby, driving them on. The three on the upper ledge watched incredulously as the ugly gnome bodies fell in slow motion toward the distant bottom of the cavern. It looked suicidal. But the captors had made an elegant calculation of forces. In that weak gravity, the long fall was survivable—just. Each one in turn struck—struck hard, but not harder than their armored bodies could take. Each one stood up and waited, as the slave drivers gently dropped after them.
It was hard to see what the party was doing once they reached the bottom, since the ruptured pipe had laid a curtain of mist over much of the cavern. But they seemed to be loading up with burdens—that translucent block the biggest—then forming ranks and moving on.
The kobold Tupaia straightened up. "Now what? We can't stay here!"
The injured man shook his head. "Nor get back to the surface," he said. "We must follow them."
"No!" roared the kobold. "The boy and I could survive that fall—you could not!"
"There is no other choice," the wounded man pointed out. "And—have you forgotten, Te'ehala Tupaia, how strong Te'ehala Tupaia is? It is true that I am not at this moment at my strongest, but nevertheless we have no choice."
He broke off, for the mad hooting had sounded again, and this time very near.
The three on the ledge turned to meet the challenge, as the Watcher brayed once more and dived out of the tunnel at them. The kobold Tupaia shouted in rage; he was bare handed, and the slick red armor that covered the Watcher's belly was far too tough for him to harm. The boy shrank silently behind him; and the Tupaia of flesh, the only one armed at all, stumbled to the fore, slowly bringing the crude spear around. Grunting with pain, he stabbed it directly into the wide red mouth beneath the beak and was borne down in the monster's rush. Tupaia-as-kobold saw his chance. The Watcher shrieked in agony, and the grip of its slimy pink tendrils loosened on the knife; Tupaia/kobold snatched it away and plunged it into the glitter of the many-lensed green eye. The hard red belly armor smashed him down. The great wings folded in to trap him in their suffocating reek—
But there was no strength in them, and as Tupaia/kobold fought free of them he realized that the monster was dead. Gasping and retching, he thrust the stinking form away and saw it float down into the depths of the cavern. He shouted with exultation and turned to his flesh brother.
There was no answering shout.
The long beak had finished what the earlier wounds had begun. The kobold looked, sorrowing, at the great golden- skinned form of himself, still now in death, yet holding the broken spear.
The boy moved behind him, and reached to put his hand in Tupaia's, the bright green eyes sad in the comic gnome's face.
"I'm really sorry about your friend," he offered. And, a moment later, "What should we do now?"
Tupaia did not answer at once. He had no answer to give. He released the boy's hand and stepped forward to the low rail, peering down into the misty distances of the cavern. Most of the damage had been repaired by the hard-working crabs, and he could see that hordes of them were slowly removing broken beams and replacing them with new. The party of Purchased People with their bizarre captors was vanishing into another tunnel far away. He lowered his gaze and reached out to touch the calm brow of his dead other self.
What should they do now? What a good question that was!
Apart from the obvious practical problems, Tupaia discovered an internal problem. He was having a sort of crisis of conscience. He had always had strict priorities governing every act of his life—the cause first, himself second, every other claim on his loyalties far behind. But Free Polynesia was despairingly far away. And this child, this innocent victim—could Tupaia just walk away from his needs?
He could not. He took the boy's hand in his own again and said, "We'll follow the others. Far back, keeping out of sight. And then—"
But there was no way of finishing that sentence. "Let's go," he said instead. "Hold onto my hand. You can close your eyes if you want to."
And the two strange figures stepped off the rail into the immense abyss.
If the boy became a hindrance, Tupaia would abandon him. If the boy resisted, he would kill him. Tupaia's decision was clear and hard as the steel point of a javelin. And yet as time went on, and they went farther down and farther, the hard edges of the decision softened and receded into the background of his consciousness. The boy did not question. He obeyed every instruction Tupaia gave him; he followed without argument even when it was into a place, and through a means, terrifying even to Tupaia. The great leap into the cavern was not the last such jump they had to take, nor the worst. And still they went down and down and down.
They were lucky—in two ways they were lucky. The first was that the party they were following was heedless of pursuit; they left bits of wornout equipment, twice dead kobold-shapes, and very often there were bits of food in the trash. That heaviest of burdens, the somehow sinister translucent block, they did not leave behind. But everything else seemed expendable. So they were easy to follow, and their leavings helped keep the pair alive. The second bit of fortune was that their downward path passed now and then through caverns or wide galleries where things grew and even small animals moved about in the vegetation. Some were edible. Unfortunately, they could not know which until they tried, for city-bred David and island-born Tupaia had little experience of trying to live off the flora of a dozen different climates and environments. Appearances could not be trusted. In one rose-lit tunnel they found vines with a bright orange, fist-sized bud growing in profussion; they looked almost like rather misshapen papayas, and Tupaia plucked one in hope. It felt slightly warm, and the slick surface yielded a little, like a tightly inflated balloon. But a faint sweetish odor clung to his fingers, and he sliced into it with the broad knife that had once belonged to the Watcher.
The glowing orange skin yielded to the edge, then ruptured with a sharp pop. David cried out in alarm, as a puff of reddish vapor exploded toward Tupaia, almost like a spray of blood. The odor was strange and unpleasant— almost etherlike, edged with something sharply acrid. The vapor filled Tupaia's nose and lungs like the quick, hard rush of a narcotic; he flung the fruit away, but he was dizzy and trembling, and for the next hour and more it was the boy who guided Tupaia's steps, until the toxins worked their way out of his system. Eventually the gallery broadened and became distinctly warmer, and off to one side there was a tepid pool of water. They drank their fill. When they saw one of the great glassy crab shapes sidling along the bottom of the pool they ignored it; there were too many other worries and wonders, the glass crabs had lost their power to interest them.