My wide, thick-soled shoes did not look suspicious for one who planned much walking on the caked Lowland ooze. But those fat soles were cleverly fashioned to hide a long, keen knife-blade, like a dirk. I could lift a foot and get the knife out of its hidden compartment with fair speed. This I had in one shoe. In the other, was the small mechanism of a radio safety recorder and image finder, with its attendant individual audiophone transmitter and receiver. A miracle of smallness, these tiny contrivances. With batteries, wires and grids, the whole device could lay in the palm of one's hand. Once past this field inspection I would rig it for use under my shirt, strapped around my chest. And I had some colored magnesium flares. * * * * * The field operator came panting. "Who are you?" "Philip Grant. From Great New York." I showed him my name etched on my forearm. He and his fellows searched me, but I got by. "You have no documents?" "No." My letter to the President of Nareda was written with invisible ink upon the fabric of my shirt. If he had heated it to a temperature of 180 deg.F. or so, and blown the fumes of hydrochloric acid upon it, the writing would have come out plain enough. I said, "You'll house and care for my machine?" They would care for it. They told me the price--swindlingly exorbitant for the unwary traveller who might wander down here. "All correct," I said cheerfully. "And half that much more for you and your men if you give me good service. Where can I have a room and meals?" "Spawn," said the operator. "He is the best. Fat-bellied from his own good cooking. Take him there, Hugo." I had a gold coin instantly ready; and with a few additional directions regarding my flyer, I started off. It had been hot and oppressive standing in the field; it was infinitely worse climbing the mud-slope into the village; but my carrier, trudging in advance of me along the dark, winding path up the slope, shouldered my bag and seemed not to notice the effort. We passed occasional tube-lights strung on poles. They illumined the heavy rounded crags. A tumbled region, this slope which once was the ocean floor twenty thousand feet below the surface. Rifts were here like gulleys; little buttes reared their rounded, dome heads. And there were caves and crevices in which deep sea fish once had lurked. * * * * * For ten minutes or so we climbed. It was past the midnight hour; the village was asleep. We entered its outposts. The houses were small structures of clay. In the gloom they looked like drab little beehives set in unplanned groups, with paths for streets wandering between them.