He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: "We're in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level--" Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope. "I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!" The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, "_Quiet!_" Stryker's metallic whisper said: "We're tracking your carrier, Arthur. Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their images going. Keep busy!" Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on glass. "_Give me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have Counsel...._" Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the swelling sense of outrage. There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting and struggling. The whimpering stopped. The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice, stronger as it came closer. "Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming, Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!" Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder, straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen, grasped, fought with. He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out of the darkness: "Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored." There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness. Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a silently dispersing throng of Sadrians. Then he passed out. * * * * * He was strapped to his couch in the chart room when he awoke. The _Marco Four_ was already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could see a dwindling crescent of Sadr III, and behind it, in the black pit of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins. "We're headed out," he said, bewildered. "What happened?" Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back to his gambit.