At the wall, C’mell said, “Now do exactly what you’re told. See the dust along the base of this crate?”

“I see it,” said Rod.

“That must be left undisturbed. Now watch. I’m going to jump from the top of this crate to the top of that one, without disturbing the dust. Then I want you to jump the same way and go exactly where I point, without even thinking about it, if you can manage. I’ll follow. Don’t try to be polite or chivalrous, or you’ll mess up the whole arrangement.”

Rod nodded.

She jumped to a case against the wall. Her red hair did not fly behind her, because she had tied it up in a turban before they started out, when she had obtained coveralls for each of them from the robot-servants of the Lady Frances Oh. They had looked like an ordinary couple of working c’people.

Either she was very strong or the case was very light. Standing on the case, she tipped it very delicately, so that the pattern of dust around its base would be unchanged, save for microscopic examination. A blue glow came from beyond the case. With an odd, practised turn of the wrist she indicated that Rod should jump from his case to the tipped one, and from there into the area — whatever it might be — beyond the case. It seemed easy for him, but he wondered if she could support both his weight and hers on the case. He remembered her order not to talk or think. He tried to think of the salmon steak he had eaten the day before. That should certainly be a good cat-thought, if a monitor should catch his mind at that moment! He jumped, teetered on the slanting top of the second packing case, and scrambled into a tiny doorway just big enough for him to crawl through. It was apparently designed for cables, pipes and maintenance, not for habitual human use: it was too low to stand it. He scrambled forward.

There was a slam.

C’mell had jumped in after him, letting the case fall back into its old and apparently undisturbed position.

She crawled up to him. “Keep going,” she said.

“Can we talk here?”

“Of course! Do you want to? It’s not a very sociable place.”

“That question, that big question,” said Rod. “I’ve got to ask you. You underpeople are taking charge of people, if you’re fixing up their new cultures for them, you’re getting to be the masters of men!”

“Yes,” said C’mell, and let the explosive affirmative hang in the air between them.

He couldn’t think of anything to say; it was his big bright idea for the day, and the fact that she already knew underpeople were becoming secret masters — that was too much!

She looked at his friendly face and said, more gently, “We underpeople have seen it coming for a long time. Some of the human people do, too. Especially the Lord Jestocost. He’s no fool. And, Rod, you fit in.”

“I?”

“Not as a person. As an economic change. As a source of unallocated power.”

“You mean, C’mell, you’re after me, too? I can’t believe it. I can recognize a pest or a nuisance or a robber. You don’t seem like any of these. You’re good, all the way through.” His voice faltered. “I meant it this morning, C’mell, when I asked you to marry me.”

The delicacy of cat and the tenderness of woman combined in her voice as she answered, “I know you meant it.” She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, in a caress as restrained as any touch could be. “But it’s not for us. And I’m not using you myself, Rod. I want nothing for myself, but I want a good world for underpeople. And for people too. For people too. We cats have loved you people long before we had brains. We’ve been your cats longer than anyone can remember. Do you think our loyalty to the human race would stop just because you changed our shapes and added a lot of thinking power? I love you, Rod, but I love people too. That’s why I’m taking you to the Aitch Eye!”

“Can you tell me what that is — now?”

She laughed. “This place is safe. It’s the Holy Insurgency. The secret government of the underpeople. This is a silly place to talk about it, Rod. You’re going beneath the ground. E’ikasus is one of His sons.”

“All of them?” Rod was thinking of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality.

“It’s not a them, it’s a him. The E’telekeli. The bird meet the head of it, right now.”

“If there’s only one, how did you choose him? Is he like the British Queen, whom we lost so long ago?”

C’mell laughed. “We did not choose Him. He grew and now He leads us. You people took an eagle’s egg and tried to make it into a Daimoni man. When the experiment failed, you threw the fetus out. It lived. It’s He. It’ll be the strongest mind you’ve ever met. Come on. This is no place to talk, and we’re still talking.”

She started crawling down the horizontal shaft, waving at Rod to follow her.

He followed.

As they crawled, he called to her, ”

“C’mell, stop a minute.”

She stopped until he caught up with her. She thought he might ask for a kiss, so worried and lonely did he look. She was ready to be kissed. He surprised her by saying, instead,

“I can’t smell, C’mell. Please, I’m so used to smelling that I miss it. What does this place smell like?”

Her eyes widened and then she laughed: “It smells like underground. Electricity burning the air. Animals somewhere far away, a lot of different smells of them. The old, old smell of man, almost gone. Engine oil and bad exhaust. It smells like a headache. It smells like silence, like things untouched. There, is that it?”

He nodded and they went on.

At the end of the horizontal shaft C’mell turned and said:

“All men die here. Come on!”

Rod started to follow and then stopped, “C’mell, are you discoordinated? Why should I die? There’s no reason to.”

Her laughter was pure happiness. “Silly C’rod! You are a cat, cat enough to come where no man has passed for centuries. Come on. Watch out for those skeletons. They’re a lot of them around here. We hate to kill real people, but there are some that we can’t warn off in time.”

They emerged on a balcony, overlooking an even more enormous storeroom than the one before. This had thousands more boxes in it. C’mell paid no attention to it. She went to the end of the balcony and raced down a slender steel ladder.

“More junk from the past!” she said, anticipating Rod’s comment. “People have forgotten it up above; we mess around in it.”

Though he could not smell the air, at this depth it felt thick, heavy, immobile.

C’mell did not slow down. She threaded her way through the junk arid treasures on the floor as though she were an acrobat. On the far side of the old room she stopped. “Take one of these,” she commanded.

They looked like enormous umbrellas. He had seen umbrellas in the pictures which his computer had showed him. These seemed oddly large, compared to the ones in the pictures. He looked around for rain. After his memories of Tostig Amaral, he wanted no more indoor rain. C’mell did not understand his suspicions.

“The shaft,” she said, “has no magnetic controls, no updraft of air. It’s just a shaft twelve meters in diameter. These are parachutes. We jump into the shaft with them and then we float down. Straight down. Four kilometers. It’s close to the Moho.”

Since he did not pick up one of the big umbrellas, she handed him one. It was surprisingly light.

He blinked at her. “How will we ever get out?”

“One of the bird-men will fly up the shaft. It’s hard work but they can do it. Be sure to hook that thing to your belt. It’s a long slow time falling, and we won’t be able to talk. And it’s terribly dark, too.”

He complied.

She opened a big door, beyond which there was the feel of nothing. She gave him a wave, partially opened her “umbrella,” stepped over the edge of the door and vanished. He looked over the edge himself. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing of C’mell, no sound except for the slippage of air and an occasional mechanical whisper of metal against metal. He supposed that must be the rib-tips of the umbrella touching the edge of the shaft as she fell.