Their bodies were brown as the sun-blistered rocks, their shoulder-plumes scarlet as heart-blood. Their girdles were scarlet, too, and the plumed bands that circled wrists and ankles. Monstrous footgear, broad as their lean, hard bodies, sprayed sand as they charged. Light flared in iridescent splendor from strange, outré weapons. Desperately, Jarl tried again to rise. But again, the eddying grit gave way beneath him. Then they were upon him--seizing him, dragging him up and out of the powder-dry morass that held him. The great webbed shoes they wore did not sink in, but, rather, skimmed the surface. Vainly, Jarl struck out and sought to struggle. But he was as a child in the grip of giants. The primitives' hands were like shackling bands of steel upon him. He let himself go limp. After all, was this not the very thing he'd come for? Unless they killed him here and now.... But they carried him back bodily to the sand-pool's edge, to a place where the serrate rocks rose in lowering, brooding ledges. A crevice yawned. Swiftly, they shoved him between the saw-toothed boulders, down into it. Now other hands reached up from the depths of an inner cavern to receive him. He found himself lifted into the black emptiness of a narrow tunnel. Then he was on his own feet once more. But the hands still gripped his arms, pushing him along as he stumbled through the ebon passage. Dimly, he became aware of a strange odor in his nostrils--a sweet yet musty scent he'd never smelled before. * * * * * The passage led on, ever downward. Steadily it grew cooler. Jarl began to lose the sense of draining pressure. His captors jabbered in the darkness. But their speech was like no tongue he'd ever heard before, all consonants and gutturals. It seemed they hurried on for miles. Then, at last, a dim light showed ahead. The party halted. Someone clamped a heavy metal mask upon Jarl's head--a mask with neither eye- nor ear-holes. It shut him off in a throbbing private night, through which the guttural voices drifted only as dim whispers. Once more, the primitives shoved Jarl ahead, and as they moved forward, he had a sudden feeling that they had left the tunnel and come out into a larger room. Then they were lifting him again; laying him down flat on some smooth surface; holding him there, rigid. He clenched his teeth, bracing himself for the torture that he knew would sooner or later be his lot. But no pain came. Instead, of a sudden, the surface on which he lay was vibrating, moving. Air whipped at him. With a shock, he realized that he and the others were hurtling through Womar's heart at jarring speed on some strange transport unit. It made his spine crawl, just a little. How primitive were these primitives? Had all the worlds been wrong about them? What dark secrets did they hold hidden, here in these black caves that honeycombed the rock beneath this satellite's blazing deserts?