Wailing Wall By ROGER DEE Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] An enormous weapon is forcing people to keep their troubles to themselves--it's dynamite! _Numb with the terror that had dogged him from the moment he regained consciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had no idea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of the Hymenop dome._ _The darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was far underground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere above him, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavy with the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images. Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr III village with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, on the hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and Xavier would be waiting for him in the disabled_ Marco Four. _Waiting for him...._ _They might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-years away._ _Six feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lighted for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary for an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without end._ _Behind him, his pursuers--human natives or Hymenop invaders, he had no way of knowing which--drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the maze._ _--To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him from ahead._ _It was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and he could not go back._ _He made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had been forced upon him._ _It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady threat of action never quite realized._ They _had known where he was going, and why._ _But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see--_ _He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and familiar._