Quester spun around and faced the creatures that were charging him. His toenails clawed great scratches in the floor and he hurled himself full-speed at the pack. His head swung right and left and his teeth met flesh and tore and the tunnel seemed to fill with the red haze of his rage.
The creatures all were fleeing now except for those upon the floor and some of these were crawling while others only lay and moaned.
Quester skidded to a halt and half sitting, his back legs bent, but his hindquarters not quite upon the floor, threw up his head and bayed — a cry of triumph and of challenge, the old, unknown-till-now ancestral cry of triumph and of challenge, that in olden days had rung across that far-off planet of drifted sand and snow.
The tunnel was blotted out and he seemed to smell again the clean, dry air of home rather than the strange stinks of this place where he found himself. And he was, most strangely, a very ancient quester, one of the old proud warrior race that in other days had battled far and deadly against the hordes of now almost forgotten scaly things which contested with the questers the dominance of the planet.
Then the odour of the place and its closeness and the harshness of the bright lights shattered off the walls, swept away the sense of other time and place and he rose to his feet again and swung about, uncertainly. The tunnel was clear ahead, but far behind there were creatures running and the air was clogged and murky with the fragmented, but massive mind-waves that came from all directions.
— Changer!
— The stairs, Quester. Get going for those stairs.
— Stairs?
— The door. The closed opening. The one with the sign above it. The little square with the red characters enclosed.
— I see it. But the door is solid.
— Push it. It will open. Use your arms and not your body. Please, remember. Use your arms. You use them so seldom that you forget you have them.
Quester leaped towards the door.
— Your arms, you fool! Your arms!
Quester struck it with his body. It yielded on one side and he slipped quickly through. He was in a cubicle and in the floor of the cubicle was a path of narrow ledges that went downwards. Those would be the stairs, he told himself.
He went down them cautiously at first, then faster as he caught the knack. He came to another cubicle and, across the short space of the floor, other stairs led downwards.
— Changer?
— Go down them. Go down three sets of them. Then go out of the door. It leads into a room, a large room. There'll be many creatures there. Go straight ahead until you reach a large opening to your left. Go out of that opening and you will be outdoors.
— Outdoors?
— On the surface of the planet. Outside the building (the cave) that we are in. They have caves on top of the ground here.
— Then what?
— Then run!
— Changer, why don't you take over? You can handle it. You are like these creatures. You can just walk out.
— I can't. I haven't any clothes.
— The coverings? The artificial skins?
— That's right.
— But that is silly. Clothes…
— No one stirs anywhere without them. It is the custom.
— And you are bound by custom?
— Look, you'll take the creatures by surprise. For a moment they'll be frozen at the sight of you. Just staring, not doing anything. You resemble a wolf and…
— You said that before. I do not like the thought. There is something dirty…
— A creature now extinct. A fearsome creature that struck terror into the hearts of people. They'll be frightened when they see you.
— OK, OK, OK. Thinker, how about it?
— You two go ahead, said Thinker. I have no data. I cannot be of help. We must rely on Changer. This is his planet and he knows it.
— All right, then. Here I go.
Quester went padding swiftly down the stairs. The thick, metallic sense of fear lay everywhere. The mind-waves pounded on relentlessly.
If we get out of this, thought Quester, if we get out of this…
He felt his own fear creeping in upon him, the descending weight of uncertainty and doubt.
— Changer?
— Go ahead. You're doing fine.
He went down the third flight and faced the door.
— This one?
— Yes, and be fast about it. Your arms this time, remember. Your body bumping the door might not open it wide enough. It could fall back and catch you.
Quester squared off, extruding his arms. He bunched his body and flung himself at the door.
— Changer, to the left? The opening on the left?
— Yes. About ten of your body lengths.
Quester's outstretched arms struck the door and slapped it open. His body catapulted out into the room. He had a confused sense of startled screaming, of open mouths, of creatures moving swiftly and there was the opening to his left. He pivoted and plunged towards it. A pack of creatures, he saw, were coming towards the opening from the outside — more of the strange creatures who peopled this planet, but draped in different kinds of artificial skins. They opened their mouths to shriek at him and lifted their hands, which held black objects which belched sudden flashes of fire, emitting bitter stenches.
Something smashed into metal very close to him and made a hollow whining sound and something else chewed with a crunching sound into a piece of wood. Then Quester, unable to stop even if he had wished, was among the creatures and the old war-cry was thundering through his body, his head jerking and slashing, his hands striking out. In among them for an instant, then through them and away, streaking along the front of the great cave which reared into the sky.
From behind him came sharp reports and some small, but heavy objects which travelled very fast gouged into the floor on which he ran, throwing up fragments of the material of which the floor was made.
It might be night, he thought, for there was no great star in the sky, although there were many distant stars shining in the sky and that was well, he thought, for it was unthinkable for a planet not to carry with it a canopy of stars.
And there were smells, but now the smells were different, not as acrid, not as sharp or harsh as had been in the building, but more pleasant, gentle smells.
Behind him the popping sound continued and tiny things went past him, then he was at the corner of the cave that went up into the sky, and around the corner, still running, remembering that Changer had said that he must run. And enjoying the running, the smooth, sleek slide of muscles, the feeling of the floor on which he ran, solid underneath his pads.
Now, for the first time since it all had started, he had the chance to gather in the aspects of the planet and it seemed, in many ways, a very busy place. And in other ways very strange, indeed. For who had ever heard of a planet that was floored? The floor ran out from the edge of the cave that reared up into the sky — out into the distance as far as he could see. And everywhere he looked there were other caves, stretching upward from the surface, many of them shining with yellow squares of light, and in front of many of them, and in little areas fenced in on the floor, were metallic or stony representations of the planet's residents. And why, Quester wondered, should things like this exist? Could it be, he wondered, that when those creatures died they were turned to metal or to stone and left standing wherever they had died? Although that did not seem reasonable, for many of the creatures turned to stone or metal seemed larger than life size. But it was entirely possible, of course, that the creatures came in many different sizes and perhaps only the larger ones were metamorphosed into stone or metal.