But once up on the creature's back, behind the graying, bearded old man named Wingsmith—a cousin of Org Rider's mother, he had been told—Babylon began to revise his opinions. The stubby wings were marvelously flexible. The broad back was warm and comforting beneath him. The org responded to every wish of Wingsmith as if the two were part of the same compound creature; the nine winged dragons all sprang into the air at once and circled the dry lake bed—Doc Chimp with Zara, Pertin behind Org Rider, Babylon, Redlaw, Doris with other riders from the tribe. There were two other orgs, but the winged silver girl and the TWorlie disdained them; the extra orgs were given the packed supplies and equipment.
"All ready?" Org Rider cried, nodded at the answer, and led the way.
In single file they plunged down toward the ancient doorway and flew steadily into the interior of Cuckoo.
The T'Worlie could not keep up. It folded its filmy wings and hung on to the tail of Org Rider's mount, its tiny weight not even noticed by the powerful org. But its presence was essential. As they traced the convolutions of the tunnels they found themselves in a maze. A labyrinth; they would have been hopelessly lost in the first hour but for the T'Worlie. Its patient, supple mind had perceived the need for directions, and it had stored every scrap of data from the camera Doc Chimp had carried, from the glimpses obtained from the helmet, and from every other source, meticulously organizing them into a sort of strip map of the passages. When there was doubt, the T'Worlie supplied the answer. He had even plotted a route around the blocked stretch of tunnel that had defeated Te'ehala Tupaia; and they raced through the bowels of the immense artifact, down and down.
Babylon, hunched behind the gray-bearded rider, tried to count the number of days since his world had been stable and safe. It could not be more than a few weeks, but it seemed that since the beginning of time he had been thrust from one terrifying and unbelievable situation into another. His senses were saturated; his capacity for wonderment and even fear was almost exhausted. They sped through broad corridors and narrow, some so tight that Babylon could scarce believe the orgs were able to fly; they crossed immense flat spaces, with broad checkerboarded fields below them and ribbed metal ceilings above, the orgs unerringly darting between slender support columns. From time to time they saw traces of the party that had trudged these corridors before them—a discarded food packet, castoff bits of equipment. They stopped in one of the broad areas of growing things so that the orgs could forage and the riders take a break. The ceiling above them shone softly, and there was a steady drainage of chilled air that made Babylon shiver uncomfortably. He did not dare to eat the strange, soft-shelled nutlike things that grew on the land, and the machine-made food in the rations they had brought had a reek that took away his appetite. He was glad enough to be moving on—
And then they came to a sign of the party before them that was different from all the others. It was the body of a white-haired man. He had died with an expression of terror on his face, and the entire front of his torso had been ripped open.
The orgs halted while their riders stared down at the corpse. "Oh, I know what did that," Doc Chimp moaned. "It's that Watcher! The same one that killed me!" And his shoe-button eyes darted fearfully around, as if he were expecting the maddened being to plunge out at them from any niche or tunnel.
That was the first of the corpses. It was not the last. Less than a hundred meters farther there were two others, then another single body—
And then the passage they were flying through opened into an immense cavern, filled with machines and conduits and huge, strange devices of many sorts, and Babylon found his capacity for startlement suddenly born again. "I know this place!" he cried.
"Of course," called Zara from the org beside him. "We saw it on Doc's camera!"
"No, no!" Babylon stared around, wondering. "I'm sure! I've seen it in a dream! Those glowing walls. Those bright spots that look like jewels, only they're glowing. Only— only I remember seeing those broken beams, and ugly glass crabs swarming over them trying to fix them—" He paused, trying to sort out dream from what he had seen in the stereostage or via the helmet. He shook his head. "Something terrible happened here," he said positively, "and I dreamed about this place even before it happened!"
The other orgs were dancing around, and Redlaw, who had gone ahead out over the great terrifying void, returned to boom: "Terrible enough, Babylon. Look down there!"
At the base of the vertical drop there was a cluster of forms. The orgs swooped down dizzyingly, and they approached carefully.
But there was nothing to fear from the creatures at the bottom. They were all dead, humans and one which was not human. "The Watcher!" Doc Chimp chattered in terror. "Oh, that's the one that killed me! Please, Dr. Babylon—Ben—Zara—please, let's get away from here!"
"It's dead, Doc," Zara said soothingly, gazing down at the hideous creature, shrouded in what was left of its immense leathery wings. Its body was ripped and torn, and next to it were other bodies. A huge, golden-skinned man whom Babylon recognized with a sharp intake of breath— the Purchased Person he had seen way back in Boston, in the Tachyon Transport Base. And another more startling still.
"Why, it looks like that old man we saw already!" Zara gasped. "Only—only he's been changed—"
"Edited," Ben Pertin snapped "Reduced in size. Toughened, to stand this place when it was still bursting open. Changed in a lot of other ways, no doubt . . . But dead," he finished, almost with satisfaction, as he gazed down at the gnomelike shape. "No sense in standing around and gaping—let's get on with it!" And he tapped Org Rider's shoulder, and they spun away.
A scattering of the glassy, crablike creatures still worked at the machines in that great chamber, but they paid no attention to the orgs or their passengers. The party entered another passage, and another, and another—
Babylon lost count of how many tunnels and galleries and caverns they traversed, even of how many times they stopped for food or rest. They flew through a featureless space to a pale gray rectangle that opened up to become the mouth of a vast metal tunnel; they passed side passages and openings that he did not bother even to glance into. They flew down a sloping tunnel with a queerly triangular cross section, the walls joining in a peak over their heads, with what looked like a shifting surface of moving cinders under their passage; he did not care. They crossed a mossy plain with the ceiling above dark and so high that they could barely see it, and when they entered the next tunnel, narrower and darker than the others, the first orgs shied away from new bodies on the floor—more of the gnomelike travesties of Purchased People, Babylon saw as they passed, and hardly cared that he saw.
He lost all sense of distance and of time. He was half drowsing when he realized that all the orgs had stopped, and their riders were dismounting.
"What's going on?" he asked, and Doc Chimp whispered in alarm: "Not so loud, please, Dr. Babylon! They're very close now—Zara said she heard voices!"
Babylon stared around. They were in another down- sloping passage, this one brighter than most, for at the far end of it there was a queer radiance. He listened, but heard nothing, and wondered whether it had been Zara's imagination rather than a voice—
No. There was something. More a drum rattle than a human voice—a Scorpian robot! Very distant and very faint, but there was no doubt.
"I think we'd best leave the orgs here," Redlaw said, as softly as his deep voice could be made to sound. "Maybe the T'Worlie could go ahead and scout for us—"