"Some of us have wondered a lot lately, about that Ship. The Officers don't let us near it. They never have, no nearer than you out here in the gullies. But somebody _did_ get close to it, one man who believed in what he was doing, and he saw...." He told them what Jakk had seen, thinking about Jakk's blood running red through his fingers and the fire dying in his eyes. "I'm a Ship's man. I've been taught to hate and fear you. You killed my friend. But the Officers killed my father, without even trying to save him. And I think we're fools, we Hans and you Piruts. We're all just people, with empty stomachs and cold backs and kids that never get warm. Why should we kill each other at those walls?" He had them. He could hear the mob suck its breath in like one man. Samel's eyes were hot enough to burn. Kirk cried out: "It's the Officers we ought to hate! It's the Officers who hold the Ship, and hide the heat-stones in it! It's the Officers we ought to fight, not each other!" The mob screamed out of a single throat. Out of the tail of his eye Kirk saw the yellow girl spring up. Her hands were clenched and her face was a mask of horror, of hatred and a strange pleading. She was saying something, but the mob yell drowned her words, and when it died down somebody had the girl, holding her arms and her mouth. "All right," said Samel hoarsely, and licked his lips. "All right. What are you going to do about it? What's your scheme?" "I'm going to take you there, the secret way. I'm going to take you to the Ship, so that we can break the Officers and live, together." He did not look at the Captain's yellow daughter. * * * * * The northern escarpment of the plateau fell sheer into a deep gorge. Kirk led them into it, Samel and six hands of Pirut men and the yellow girl with a strip of hide to gag her mouth. The darkness had come down, so thick and black that pupils at their widest spread could hardly make anything from the starshine. They went slowly, but almost without sound. Kirk watched the dead Ship, thrusting high above them against the cold stars. Presently he stopped and whispered, "Here, I think." They stopped. Kirk went alone to the cliff wall and felt along it. His hands slipped behind a curtain of moss, into a crack barely big enough for a man's shoulder. There seemed to be a blank wall beyond, but he felt sideways, and found that Jakk had been right. There was a way. He went back to Samel. "It's there. Come on." "No!" Samel caught his arm. He was looking up, at the broken Ship on the cliff-top, and he was trembling. "Wait," he whispered. "I want to know this, to keep it." Kirk followed his rapt stare. The Ship, brooding over the plain, dominant even in death. The Ship that had brought them, Officers and Hans, in some strange forgotten way from some forgotten place, and died in the bringing. The Ship, Untouchable....