He sighed. Norstrilia was safe and quiet compared to this.

He opened his umbrella too.

Acting on an odd premonition, he took his little hiering-spieking shell out of his ear and put it carefully in his coverall pocket.

That act saved his life.

Rod McBan remembered falling and falling. He shouted into the wet adhesive darkness, but there was no reply. He thought of cutting himself loose from his big umbrella and letting himself drop to the death below him, but then he thought of C’mell and he knew that his body would drop upon her like a bomb. He wondered about his desperation, but could not understand it (Only later did he find out that he was passing telepathic suicide screens which the underpeople had set up, screens fitted to the human mind, designed to dredge filth and despair from the paleocortex, the smell-bite-mate sequence of the nose-guided animals who first walked Earth; but Rod was cat enough, just barely cat enough, and he was also telepathically subnormal, so that the screens did not do to him what they would have done to any normal man of Earth — delivered a twisted dead body at the bottom. No man had ever gotten that far, but the underpeople resolved that none ever should.) Rod twisted in his harness and at last he fainted.

He awakened in a relatively small room, enormous by Earth standards but still much smaller than the storerooms which he had passed through on the way down.

The lights were bright.

He suspected that the room stank but he could not prove it with his smell gone.

A man was speaking, “The Forbidden Word is never given unless the man who does not know it plainly asks for it.”

There was a chorus of voices singing, “We remember. We remember. We remember what we remember.”

The speaker was almost a giant, thin and pale. His face was the face of a dead saint, pale, white as alabaster, with glowing eyes. His body was that of man and bird both, man from the hips up, except that human hands grew out of the elbows of enormous clean white wings. From the hips down his legs were bird-legs, ending in horny, almost translucent bird-feet which stood steadily on the ground.

“I am sorry, Mister and Owner McBan, that you took that risk. I was misinformed. You are a good cat on the outside but still completely a human man on the inside. Our safety devices bruised your mind and they might have killed you.”

Rod stared at the man as he stumbled to his feet. He saw that C’mell was one of the people helping him. When he was erect, someone handed him a beaker of very cold water. He drank it thirstily. It was hot down here — hot, stuffy, and with the feel of big engines nearby.

“I,” said the great bird-man, “am E’telekeli.” He pronounced it Ee-telly-kelly. “You are the first human being to see me in the flesh.”

“Blessed, blessed, blessed, fourfold blessed is the name of our leader, our father, our brother, our son the E’telekeli” chorused the underpeople.

Rod looked around. There was every kind of underperson imaginable here, including several that he had never even thought of. One was a head on a shelf, with no apparent body. When he looked, somewhat shocked, directly at the head, its face smiled and one eye closed in a deliberate wink. The E’telekeli followed his glance. “Do not let us shock you. Some of us are normal, but many of us down here are the discards of men’s laboratories. You know my son.”

A tall, very pale young man with no features stood up at this point. He was stark naked and completely unembarrassed. He held out a friendly hand to Rod. Rod was sure he had never seen the young man before. The young man sensed Rod’s hesitation.

“You knew me as A’gentur. I am the E’ikasus.”

“Blessed, blessed, threefold blessed is the name of our leader-to-be, the Yeekasoose!” chanted the under-people.

Something about the scene caught Rod’s rough Norstrilian humor. He spoke to the great underman as he would have spoken to another Mister and Owner back home, friendily but bluntly.

“Glad you welcome me, Sir!”

“Glad, glad, glad is the stranger from beyond the stars!” sang the chorus.

“Can’t you make them shut up?” asked Rod.

“’Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ says the stranger from the stars!” chorused the group.

The E’telekeli did not exactly laugh, but his smile was not pure benevolence.

“We can disregard them and talk, or I can blank out your mind every time they repeat what we say. This is a sort of court ceremony.”

Rod glanced around. “I’m in your power already,” said he, “so it won’t matter if you mess around a little with my mind. Blank them out.”

The E’telekeli stirred the air in front of him as though he were writing a mathematical equation with his finger; Rod’s eyes followed the finger and he suddenly felt the room hush.

“Come over here and sit down,” said the E’telekeli.

Rod followed.

“What do you want?” he asked as he followed.

The E’telekeli did not even turn around to answer. He merely spoke while walking ahead,

“Your money, Mister and Owner McBan. Almost all of your money.”

Rod stopped walking. He heard himself laughing wildly. “Money? You? Here? What could you possibly do with it?”

“That,” said the E’telekeli, “is why you should sit down.”

“Do sit,” said C’mell, who had followed.

Rod sat down.

“We are afraid that Man himself will die, and leave us alone in the universe. We need Man, and there is still an immensity of time before we all pour into a common destiny. People have always assumed that the end of things is around the corner, and we have the promise of the First Forbidden One that this will be soon. But it could be hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions. People are scattered, Mister McBan, so that no weapon will ever kill them all on all planets, but no matter how scattered they are, they are still haunted by themselves. They reach a point of development and then they stop.”

“Yes,” said Rod, reaching for a carafe of water and helping himself to another drink, “but it’s a long way from the philosophy of the universe down to my money. We have plenty of barmy swarmy talk in Old North Australia, but I never heard of anybody asking for another citizen’s money, right off the bat.”

The eyes of the E’telekeli glowed like cold fire but Rod knew that this was no hypnosis, no trick being played upon himself. It was the sheer force of the personality burning outward from the bird-man.

“Listen carefully, Mister McBan. We are the creatures of Man. You are gods to us. You have made us into people who talk, who worry, who think, who love, who die. Most of our races were the friends of man before we became underpeople. Like C’mell. How many cats have served and loved man, and for how long? How many cattle have worked for man, been eaten by man, been milked by men across the ages, and have still followed where men went, even to the stars? And dogs. I do not have to tell you about the love of dogs for men. We call ourselves the Holy Insurgency because we are rebels. We are a government. We are a power almost as big as the Instrumentality. Why do you think Teadrinker did not catch you when you arrived?”

“Who is Teadrinker?”

“An official who wanted to kidnap you. He failed because his underman reported to me, because my son E’ikasus, who joined us in Norstrilia suggested the remedies to the Doctor Vomact who is on Mars. We love you, Rod, not because you are a rich Norstrilian, but because it is our faith to love the Mankind which created us.”

“This is a long slow wicket for my money,” said Rod. “Come to the point, sir.”

The E’telekeli smiled with sweetness and sadness. Rod immediately knew that it was his own denseness which made the bird-man sad and patient. For the very first time he began to accept the feeling that this person might actually be the superior of any human being he had ever met.