'But you are prisoners.'

And then Hfathon said a strange thing.

'We must be cautious when we deal with the Sons of Darkness.'

Orme bristled. 'What do you mean by that?'

'It will be made clear to you. Meanwhile, let's go to your new home.'

On the way, while riding in a car. Orme said, 'In an early conversation, you said something about Jesus Christ. Will you tell us about Him? Are you worshippers of Him or are you really Jews?'

'We are Jews who know that Jesus is the Messiah. No, we don't worship Jesus. He is a man, and there is only One we worship. But Jesus is with us.'

Hfathon pointed at the bright globe hanging below the roof of the cavern.

'He lives there.'

Sometimes, Hfathon came alone after breakfast to talk to them. Other times, Sha'ul or Ya'aqob came alone. Occasionally, they were accompanied by people from different branches of the government or professors of science, the arts, or humanities. Before entering, they asked permission, apparently to give the Earthmen the impression that the house was their home and so put them more at ease.

In the afternoons the Terrestrials were free to stroll or ride where they wished, within limits. Now and then Hfathon or Sha'ul would drive them through the tunnels to other caverns. There were forty of these, and a new one was being carved out to make room for the expanding population. The four went once to watch the excavations. Here giant lasers were disintegrating hard granite and basalt as easily as an acetylene torch burned paper.

'You have the same type of laser equipment, of course,' Hfathon said.

Orme nodded.

'When you do communicate with your people, you must tell them that if they send a ship here, it must not be equipped with such burners. Or with fission or neutron bombs. In fact, with any tools for waging war. We would regard that as a hostile move.'

Hfathon smiled as if as to weaken the sting.

'We've now set up detection equipment and weapons on the surface. It's a purely defensive measure. But I can assure you that no armed enemy vessel or missiles would get within 50,000 miles of here before being destroyed.'

Orme asked how the Martians could board a ship in space to check for weapons. After all, they had no spacecraft.

'Had is correct.'

The Krsh wouldn't say any more about that, but Orme supposed that the wrecked ship had been repaired. However, if this was so, then the surveyor satellites would have reported this to Earth. Or had the wreck been left untouched while another ship, or ships, was built underground? And why, since the Martians could have built space vessels any time in the last fifteen hundred years, had they waited until now?

He didn't ask Hfathon about this, but he did inquire about why the magnetometer instruments on the Terrestrial satellites had not detected the many immense hollows under the surface.

'We have means to give false readings,' Hfathon replied.

On the way back they stopped at a restaurant. As always, the four from Earth were given a table to themselves.

'It makes you feel unclean,' Orme said in a low voice.

'Which, ritually speaking, we are,' Bronski said. 'But what's the difference? We get the same food as they do, and it's good. We also get a chance to talk among ourselves without being monitored.'

Orme said, 'I'm not so sure of that. How do we know we're not being bugged?'

Madeleine said, 'But we use English. They don't know that language.'

'So they say,' Orme said. 'How do we know they don't? Because they say so? Maybe that's so we'll talk freely, and they can find out if we're planning anything.'

'Have you found out where the tunnels are that lead to outside?' Shirazi said.

'No, and it wouldn't do any good if I did,-' Orme said. 'Now that they've got their ship in readiness, they could overtake us easily even if we did get aboard the Aries.'

'You're sure of that?' Bronski said.

'Their ship has to be a hell of a lot faster than ours.'

'Perhaps,' the woman said, 'they just told us that so we would abandon any plans to escape.'

'It wouldn't make any difference. Their lasers could easily burn us out of the sky. If, that is, they have set them up outside. Maybe they're lying about that. But should I - we - take the chance that they are?'

When they re-entered their 'home' cavern, Orme pointed up at the globe.

'He's supposed to appear from there in a month. Do you think they mean symbolically or are they putting us on?'

Bronski said, 'They'll tell us which when they think the time's right. Or perhaps they'll wait until the event and let us see for ourselves.'

They passed a marketplace in which several hundred people were trading or buying cattle, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, ducks, pheasants, turkeys, parrots, and many small birds striped orange, black, and green which sang like no other birds they had ever heard. These were descended from pets the Krsh had brought from their native planet, Thrrillkrwillutaut. Orme had told Hfathon how beautiful he thought they were, and the next day the Krsh had given him two. They didn't need a cage since they were housebroken.

There were also agricultural goods, art objects, and many household items. All were paid for, when not bartered, in thick plastic money of various sizes, shapes, and colours. The crowd was noisy but good-humoured. Everybody seemed to be happy.

From what Orme had seen, this society was far more congenial and free of crime and vice than any on Earth. If what Hfathon said was true, the last case of theft had been ten years ago, the last murder, six years ago. What other population of a million could boast of that?

'Sounds great,' Orme said. 'How do you know so much about this?'

'I've talked to our teachers and to the people in the street, both human and Krsh.'

'They may be feeding you a line of bull. Maybe, though, they are sincere. But you know how reality fails to match the ideal, though people will tell you only about the ideal.'

Bronski said, 'I've a feeling they're telling the truth, not just as they see it, but as it is. Anyway, there's an intense family relationship here, a beneficial one. Though I suppose there are disadvantages, just as there are in everything. But the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.

'Here, the former Hebrew word for cousin has been borrowed by Krsh to mean citizen. Everybody's related. You should see the genealogical tables, which have been kept faithfully since the day they landed. These include gene charts, by the way.

'But I'm getting off the subject. There are no orphanages here; an orphan is adopted by his closest relative in most cases. Of course, there are very few orphans, since most people live out their full life span. Anyway, members of a family and the aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews are all very intimate, and they keep a close watch on each other, but mainly to make sure that everybody is loved.'

'Great!' Orme said. 'But what do they mean by love? You know how meaningless the word is on Earth. It's interpreted in a hundred ways and perverted in a thousand.'

Bronski shrugged and said, 'They're human beings, and you know what they are. But then there's the influence of the Krsh - whatever that is.'

Bronski believed that the Martians had a near-Utopia because of the unique religious-social-political system.

'Its roots are their religion, and so is the stalk and the flowers. But it's not a rigid system. It's open-ended, ready for any beneficial evolutionary change.'

'What's their definition of beneficial?’

'Let's wait and see. Sha'ul told me that the time may come when we'll be invited to live in a Martian home for a while so we can soak up the atmosphere of their way of life.'