"Sssh!” said Chell suddenly, bounding up. “Another cone. A bigger cone, I think."
The guard stiffened in the grip of the hairy ones. “I didn't make the routine communications check. Now they're coming to see what happened to me. It'll be a two-man cone, and armed."
"You treacherous human,” said Fife, and began to move swiftly in toward the guard.
Horne pushed him aside. “We didn't give him much chance to make his check, did we? Anyway, we still need him. Alive and unhurt, you understand. Now get him out of sight around that bend."
He handed Ewan — the gun he had taken from the guard. “See that nothing happens to him. Yso, I'll need you, and I'll need Chell."
He began in great haste to pull on the guard's red uniform. Yso said, “What are you going to do?"
"Put on a little play for them.” He paused briefly, frowning. “It'll be dangerous. We'll likely all get killed. If you and Chell don't want to risk—"
Yso said, “Let's not waste time, Horne. What is it that you want us to do?"
He told her while he was climbing into the cone. The idea had come to him quickly, very incomplete at first, but taking on a larger and fuller shape as he thought about it and considered what might be done afterward if it did what he hoped it would do.
Chell added the finishing touch.
"Use the arms of the cone,” he said. “See? They're both tools and weapons."
Horne saw now what he had not noticed before — a pair of jointed, arm-like appendages ending in iron claws, folded in under the rim of the metal cone.
"They can carry a current,” Chell said. “I know because I have seen slaves burned and shocked, even killed. So be careful. Pleassse?"
He bobbled swiftly back to Yso. Horne shut the canopy and worked the grav-shields to right the cone. He started the tiny compressed-air propulsion unit and the cone moved sedately at the pace of a man walking, back along the gallery the way it had come.
When the two-man cone rounded a curve, the guards in it saw Chell coming first of all, a huge furry green ball carrying Yso in three of his tentacles. Yso appeared to be unconscious, hanging limp with her yellow hair falling down like a banner and the scanty blue streamer fluttering from her waist.
With his two spare tentacles, Chell made gestures of warding off Horne in his cone, who was apparently herding him along with his burden. The powerful claw-handed arms were extended now from the cone, threatening him, and one was close enough to his fur to make Chell's gesture of alarm authentic enough. Even so, he was careful to keep as much of his bulk as possible between Horne and the others, to hide him.
Horne, keeping his face turned away, said over the speaker attachment, “I found this slave and the woman in the gallery. They attacked me and I was forced to subdue them. The woman may be badly hurt. I'm glad you came. Will you get out and see to her? It's vitally important that we take her alive to Ardric."
The two guards in the cone were staring fascinated at the white-skinned girl in Chell's grasp.
"Who is she?” one of them asked. “And how did she get into the gallery?"
"I don't know how she got in,” Horne said, “but I'm pretty sure I know who she is. I've seen her picture. That's Morivenn's daughter."
"Morivenn's daughter?” said the guard at the controls. His voice tightened and went up a notch. "Morivenn's daughter?"
"There isn't any doubt of it,” Horne said.
"Here in the Project?” the guard said. “You're right, this is vital!"
He set the cone down with a thump. The propulsion unit died. The canopy opened and both men jumped down and ran toward Yso.
Instantly Chell dropped her gently to the floor, let go of her, and flung his tentacles around the nearest guard, who bellowed in alarm. The other one reached for his gun and shouted for Horne to do something about Chell.
Horne touched two controls in swift succession. The cone shot forward several feet and a great iron hand reached out and gripped the man's arm with its amazingly flexible fingers. The gun splashed a brief fury of flame, against the rocky ceiling and then dropped as the man was hauled off his feet and held dangling.
Chell must have called to his friends, because they came swiftly and one took hold of the second man so that Horne could let go of him. Yso looked up excitedly at Horne and cried, “It worked! Now what?"
Horne neutralized the cone and jumped down. He was feeling good, and fighting it, because he knew that it was far too early in the game to start congratulating himself. He said grimly, “Now we finish the questioning and make our plans, and they'd better be good ones because we won't have any chance to change them later on."
"We had better hurry, too,” said Chell, “before yet another cone comes searching after these two."
They joined Fife and the other slaves and Ewan. Horne bent over their first captive.
"Now,” be said, “I want to know about those locked doors and the passages behind them."
From there on the actual planning did not take long. It was a wildly improbable venture and, Horne thought, almost certainly foredoomed to failure, but it offered the only possibility he could see and no one disputed him, or suggested anything better.
The locks of the iron doors were controlled by a frequency key in the guard's cone. The doors actually were access hatches for maintenance and repair in the labyrinthine corridors of the Project — the brain that already required most of a mountain to contain its cells and ganglia — vast memory banks, computing units, comparison centers, data analyzers, all the components of the human brain except that indefinable part from which man derives his emotions, his personality and his humanness.
With the feeling of one about to make an uncanny entrance into the very tissues of a quasi-living entity, Horne activated the frequency key and opened one of the doors into the brain.
The door had been carefully selected from the guard's information. Now the three Project men, bound and gagged, were pulled into the chamber beyond the hatch, where they would not be discovered too soon. Horne turned the small cone over to Ewan, who would have use for it.
Yso was already at the controls of the larger one, with Fife beside her. Chell and his two comrades would go with them. All the rest would come with Horne.
There was not, Horne thought, much to choose between the two groups in the probability of survival.
Horne and his group were to make their way secretly to the Administration Center and attack from within. Yso, Ewan and Fife, and the three from Chorann, were to make their way openly into the lower galleries where the slaves were working, rouse them to action, knock out the guards, and attack the Administration Center from without. They hoped to get, not only Ardric, but the brain itself. Then, if they died, they might at least wreck the brain while they were doing it.
"Make it good,” Horne said to Ewan.
"You, too,” said Ewan. His voice was determined, but it revealed no great note of hope.
Horne glanced at Yso, dazzling in her garish finery. He smiled.
"You're just what we need to lead a crusade,” he said. “Give it to them, Morivenn's daughter"
She nodded, shaking back her yellow hair, and he knew he did not have to give her either urging or encouragement. He knew she was thinking of her father. Horne felt a brief but remarkably sharp stab of regret that he would probably never have the chance to know this girl any better than he did now.
Fife smiled to himself and played hungrily with the weapon, keys on the board before him. Horne spoke to him and then held out his hand to Chell, who wrapped the tip of a tentacle around it.
"Okay,” said Horne. “Let's go."
He nodded to Lurgh and the purple gargoyle, and stepped in through the hatch door, and the whole weird crew padded after him into the secret corridors of the brain.