But the little man was still puzzled. “That ain’t no cause for her to be doing me no favours. I ain’t no woman’s idol. Why don’t she give you no chow for free?”

Aton explained carefully so that the other would understand. Framy was incredulous. “You mean she don’t want to show how she’s soft on you, so she takes it out on me? ’Cause I’m your pal and don’t know nothing anyway?”

“Close enough.”

“It just don’t make no sense. No sense at all.”

•  •  •

They brought the half-eaten corpse in for everyone to see. A man had wandered too far out alone, downwind. He might have been searching for superior garnets, or perhaps for an exit from the lower caverns. The chimera had come. Help had come ten minutes after his agonized scream—but he had been dead ten minutes. Stomach and intestines had been ripped open and eaten; eyes and tongue were gone. Long dark streaks showed on the cavern floor, they said, where he had been found, where the blood had flowed and been licked up.

“Remind me never to go on the Hard Trek,” Hastings said sickly. “I’m too tender a morsel to be exposed to that.”

The black-haired beauty gave him a sidelong glance. “I hear there’s worse ‘n that downwind on the Hard Trek,” she said. “Ain’t no one ever made it out. You can hear the howls of the beast-men that once were people like us, before they got caught.”

“They live?” Hastings asked, obligingly setting up her punch line.

“Naw—but they howl.”

There was general laughter. It was an old joke, and not without a suspicion of accuracy.

This is my opportunity, Aton thought. Now—while it seems natural. Feign uncertainty, but get it out.

“I’m not sure, but it seems to me I heard about someone getting through,” he said.

Framy took him up immediately. “Somebody got out? Somebody made the Hard Trek?”

“There must be a way out,” Hastings said. “If we could only find it. The chimera had to get in somewhere.”

“Maybe them animals never did get in,” the black-haired woman said. Aton had never picked up her name. She had been subtly interested in him since that first discussion, but refused to make an overt play. Possibly she was afraid of Garnet—or just smarter. She certainly interested him more; she was able to fling her hair about in a kind of dress that hinted at the sensuality of clothing. Nothing, he had discovered here, was quite so sexless as complete nudity. “Maybe there ain’t no animals,” she continued. “We never see none.”

“I seen a salamander—” Framy began, then cut himself off.