“Sounds awful,” Guts commiserated, patting the arm not held in a hammerlock by Nuts.

“Yes. But that is just the beginning. For under the floor of each innocent-looking house, there lurks—”

He paused as the demmies all leaned toward him, wide-eyed.

“Yes? Yes? What lurks!”

Earl’s voice hushed.

“There lurks a trap door…”

“A secret entrance?” Captain Ohm asked in a whisper.

Our guide nodded.

“…leading downward to catacombs below the urb. In other words, to the sub-urbs, where…”

I cut in, coughing behind my hand. I did not want my crewmates slipping into a storytelling trance right then.

“Hadn’t we better move on then, while there’s still light?”

Earl cast me a sour glance. “Right. Follow me this way.”

Soon we passed down an avenue lined by bedraggled trees. No light shone from any of the rusty lampposts onto narrow ribbons of buckled sidewalk bordering small fenced lots. Most of the houses were dark and weedy, with broken tile roofs and missing windows, but one in four seemed well-tended, with flower beds and neatly edged lawns. Dim illumination passed through drawn curtains. Once or twice, I glimpsed dark silhouettes moving within.

The demmies, their eager imaginations stirred by Earl’s testimony, kept swiveling nervously, peering into the darkness, shying away from the gaping storm drains. Our greenies, especially, looked close to panic. They kept dropping back from their scout positions, trying to get as close to the captain as possible, much to his annoyance. At one point, Ohm dialed his blaster and shot Corporal Jums with a dose of itch-nanos. The poor fellow yelped and immediately ran back to position, scratching himself furiously, effectively distracted from worrying about spooks for a while.

I admired how efficiently Earl had accomplished this transformation. His uninformative hints managed to put my crewmates into a real state. I wondered – did he do it on purpose?

Remember, students, almost anything can set off demmie credulity. Once, during an uneventful voyage, I read aloud to the crew from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.”

Mistake! For a week thereafter we kept getting jittery reports of thumping sounds, causing Maintenance to rip out half of the ship’s air ducts. The bridge weapons team vaporized nine or ten passing asteroids that they swore were “acting suspicious,” and the infirmary treated dozens for stun wounds inflicted by nervous co-workers. Actually, if truth be told, I never had a better time aboard the Clever Gamble, and neither did the demmies. Still, Healer Paolim took me aside afterward and demanded that I never do it again.

The urb became a maze. Few of the streets were straight, and most terminated in outrageously inconvenient dead-ends that the translator described as culled-socks – an uninviting and unappetizing name. Even in better days, it must have been a nightmare journey of many kilometers to travel between two points only a block apart.