He turned back to Eric Ulnar.
“In the next cell, you say.
Is there a guard?”
“Don’t let him touch me,” came the abject, lifeless whine.
“Yes, one of the Medusae always watches in the great hall above.”
“If we could get past the guard, is there any way out?”
“Out of the city, you mean?”
“Yes,” Jay Kalam spoke up and his quiet voice held a calm, surprising confidence.
“We’re going to rescue Aladoree.
We’re going to take her outside the city, and let her set up her weapon.
Then the Medusae will come to us for orders—unless we decide to destroy the whole city out of hand.”
“No, you could never get out of the city,” returned the dull voice of that beaten thing.
“You can’t even leave the hall.
It opens over a pit a mile deep.
Just a sheer, blank wall below the door.
Even if you got down, you’d have no way to cross the city.
The Medusa? have no streets; they fly.
“But there’s no use even to talk of that.
You can’t even get out of this cell, or get Aladoree out of hers.
The sliding doors are locked. •You are unarmed prisoners. Talking of stealing something the Medusae are guarding in their securest fortress!”
His voice died in dull contempt.
With the impatience of a trapped animal, John Star gazed about the cell.
A bare metal chamber, square, twenty feet wide.
Ten feet overhead was the rectangular opening through which they had been dropped, closed now with a sliding grille of square metal bars.
Green light filtered through the bars from the dim, lofty hall above.
His eyes, searching for any weapon or device to aid their escape, found no movable thing in the cell.
It was simply a square box of that eternal black alloy.
Hal Samdu was pacing back and forth on the hard bare floor, his eyes roving like those of a caged beast, sometimes casting a glance of savage rage at Eric Ulnar.
“You can’t get out of this cell, even,” insisted that flat, no longer human voice. “For they will kill you soon.
They will be coming back to make me try again to get the plans from Aladoree.
She will tell, this tune.
They are preparing a ray that burns with all the pain of fire, and yet will not kill her too quickly.
But they will let us all die as soon as she tells.
They’ve promised to let me die, when she tells.”
“Then,” John Star muttered fiercely, “we must get out!”
Hal Samdu beat with his fists on the hard black walls.
They gave out a dull, heavy reverberation, a melancholy roll of doom; he left blood from his knuckles.
“You can’t get out,” droned Eric.
“The lock———”
“One of us has a certain dexterity,” said Jay Kalam.
“Giles, you must open the door.”
Giles Habibula got to his feet in the corner of the cell, wiping tears from his fishy eyes.
“Ah, yes,” he wheezed, in a brighter tone.
“One of us has a certain slight dexterity.
It came of the accident that his father was an inventor of locks. Even so, it cost him weary years of toil, to develop an aptitude into a skill.
“A blessed dexterity!
Ah, as dear life knows, it has never been given the credit it has earned.
Ah, me!
Lesser men have won riches and honor and fame, with half the genius and a tenth the toil.
And to old Giles Habibula his talent and his unremitting effort have brought only poverty and obscurity and disgrace!