The Old Man sighed. "How?" He peered at Jon with tired retreating eyes. "What is thought," he said then. "What was life, ever? Floods of gamma rays bathed them for centuries, and then they were living, and they had thoughts of their own. Humans never got a chance to find out what life was before he took it away from himself. He took it and gave it--to _them_." The Old Man dropped his face in his shaking hands. Jon had never heard a man crying before. He backed away slowly, then turned and ran out of the great cavern. * * * * * A grey dusky afternoon was dying when Jon crawled out of the small hall between rocks and started writhing down the hill. His eyes stayed open in fearful wonderment until tears rolled down his cheeks. The soft greens and browns of the great forest that thinned up into the hills. There was not the slightest hint that beneath this vast silent beauty, stretched the enormous grotesque underworld of Mammoth Hole. Nor that in those nameless caverns and corridors along the cold and rushing and naked rivers a few unkempt savages clung to dim memories of centuries-lost power and surface civilization. Jon stopped. An intangible yet powerful emotion surged in him. "I'm crawlin'," he gritted as he sat up. "I said I was sick a' crawlin.' I ain't a grub. I'm not crawlin' anymore. Not for them damn machines, not for anything. They can't do nothing but kill me, an' what's life down in that hole?" He stood up. He stood up straight and started walking down the rocky trail, and finally along the smooth greenness beside the river. His strides were long and unhesitating, but inside him was a deep growing horror, as he remembered those shiny silver giants that had stood so silently on the hill against the red sunset. The huge attentive waiting stillness, and the sudden terrible sweep of the red beamed eye and the reaching of the metal arms. He stopped and looked down at his thin white legs, starved of the sun, knotted and scarred from crawling over the harsh underground paths. He looked at his gnarled pallid fingers quivering in the cold. He looked up at the sky. A few stars were showing dimly, palely. "Oh God, give me a quick ending when my time comes, that's all I ask. Don't let me crawl anymore on my belly. Give me the guts to keep walkin', straight up, like I'm walkin' now." There was no answer. There was no sound except the cry of birds in the forest, the drone of insects and other louder noises from the river. He was alone. He walked faster. But he soon tired, because he had never walked far at a time. Underground, people crawled a lot of the time through narrow holes. And under there no one could walk far unless they went in circles.