"You mean--you wish I did?" The woman laughed aloud, and the light glinted in her hair as on dark waters. "In jest, then--I looked into Sark's brain, and when I saw the things I saw, I turned him and his crewmen free." Haral grimaced. "And he'll come back." "Of course. I saw that, too. But I do not care." Again Xaymar smiled her cryptic smile. "Now, come! You shall see why I await him without fear!" They walked on again. Then, at last, there was a door ahead and, beyond it, a long, dark passageway. Haral frowned as he strode through the murk beside the woman. Once more, as he had a dozen times before, he thought of Kyla, with her dreams and rippling golden hair and slim young body. She was so different from this dark voluptuary who was a living goddess. Yet she, too, had shared the dangers of this adventure with him. What had happened to her? He wondered. But something told him to make no query. Another door loomed. Xaymar cried, "Behold my warriors!" She flung the portal wide. Haral stared. For here were no coleoptera. Here lay what appeared to be a mausoleum, instead--another vast, echoing chamber, dim-lighted and stretching out as far as the eye could see, with banked, sealed crypts rising row on row from floor to ceiling, like some monstrous, many-celled honeycomb. Xaymar asked: "Now do you see why I slept so willingly for a thousand years, my warrior? In each cell here is sealed an egg, preserved secure from harm and the ravages of time. From each egg, when the time to strike has come, will spring one of my fighting coleoptera--" She broke off; hurried the blue man up a ramp to another level. Here were stacked Q-ray tubes, light-guns, and blasters, piled high in bins by millions upon millions. "Come! There is still more!" They climbed another ramp. At the top, before a heavy door, a huge coleopteron waited. * * * * * The woman who was the living goddess Xaymar paused, head tilted. It was as if she were listening to some silent message. Then she turned, half towards Haral, and her lips curved in a strange smile that was somehow infinitely evil. She spoke no word, but even the blue man could feel the hammering, affirmative impact of her thought-waves: "Yes ... yes ... yes...." The great scarlet beetle moved swiftly off down another corridor. Xaymar moved close to the door. Like magic, it opened before her. She said: "Beyond this door, no being but me has ever gone, blue warrior! But now you, too, shall enter!" Haral followed her across the threshold. The door swung shut behind them. The room in which they stood was cramped and box-like, with walls and floor and ceiling of dully gleaming metal. As the portal closed, a feeling of motion pulled at Haral's vitals. It dawned on him that they had entered some sort of carrier that even now was hurtling them upward with the speed of lightning.