Her hand was hard and dry, running down his torn arm like a deadly scorpion. The aperture in the wall opened further and a hot, stinking wind belched out. He dropped as paws gripped his booted ankles from behind. He twisted, thrust his sword into a shaggy throat. His hand felt the harness he had lost. He dragged it inside with him, into a black, forgotten hole. The opening closed. There was an invisible stench of stale bodies and drug vapor. He could hear the old woman's hoarse breathing. He hooked the broken harness about his waist. "Light," he gasped. "What's this, a tomb?" "It will be, dear boy," she said. "We must move quickly down into the catacombs. I wear the receiver band. I feel them groping, but it's you they want. They don't know I'm helping you, and they don't want an old bag of bones like me. But hurry. They'll blast in the wall." Flame glowed. She lighted a smoky taper. He saw a bent ragged packet of animated bones, a mop of gray hair and a narrow hawked beak. In niches along the winding cavern, shapes stirred. Moisture dripped. Turgid Lethean vapors from escapist drugs curled sluggishly. Skeletal faces stared, glazed and unseeing, dying. Cadmus swore. Three worlds were dying like this. A vast social system that had stopped moving, evolving, so it was dying. Fast! A yellow Martian girl's luminous eyes stared vacantly into shadows, buried in some dream far from the hopeless, meaningless reality. Cadmus studied the old woman with growing suspicion. The amnesia was a throbbing ache of unknowing. If he only knew more. There was so much he felt he had to know, right now, but he couldn't remember! Who was this sudden benefactress? Not from the Asteroids, for she wore the disciplinary band. Yet she had saved him, preserved him a little longer to carry out an impossible task. She turned, anticipating his suspicion. "Zaleel sent me. You can trust me, Cadmus. I know these catacombs. I'm old Pirri who sells her Lethean drugs along the forgotten places of Akal-jor. You Cadmeans have a few sympathizers. Some still have hope. The Cadmean society is that hope." A wave of fear blew through Cadmus' fogged brain. "Cadmeans. My--memory! Johlan erased almost everything. I remember nothing--yet--there's something--something I've got to remember!" She didn't answer. They walked on. A Martian half-breed ogled them from a niche in the stone, jaws chewing the mind-shattering pulp of the Venusian thiln-flower. Wrecks of three worlds. They believed in nothing but their dreams--and the Gray God in the valley. The former they believed in as an only escape from a hopeless reality. The latter, because they had been conditioned to regard it as a god, as omnipotent. You may fear a god, and hate a god, Cadmus mused, but you cannot desert a faith with impunity. "You know a lot of Cadmus and the Cadmeans," he said as they walked deeper into the gloom. "I know nothing. Nothing! Listen, who is Cadmus?" He frowned. A ridiculous question.