The girl let her glance rove over the wondrous spectacle on the stage that had emerged from the floor in the center of the hall, and, her smile was an adventure as she replied:
"Venusin ... weaver of chimeras ... like all this," she waved an alabaster hand, "illusion ... dreams. But even our greatest dreams betrays us sometimes. Yes, let it be Venusin!"
Julian wondered, straining all his faculties, whether the veiled warning were a prophecy of things to come, or the ironical skating on thin ice of the enemy itself! And was aware that part of his mind kept harping on the loveliness of this cryptic stranger. What was her purpose? Had she penetrated his disguise? Was she there to make sure that under the miracle of art there was some one far more dangerous than a dissipated Martian fop? His answer came from her slender, fragile hands. They were twining and untwining like lilies bending before the wind!
"Let's dance," Julian said suddenly with an emotion he would not analyze. He rose and caught her roughly up to him. He saw her eyes go expressionless with surprise, she was stunned a little. And before she could recover, the irresistible power of Julian's arms had borne her to the greater anonymity of the dance floor in seconds. One moment the lyric quality of the atmosphere was part of them, and then the illusion was shattered as the frost-trellised bower vanished almost simultaneously with their leaving it. Lurid pencils of unleashed power impinged on the crysto-plast table charring it, while the fragile walls disappeared under the barrage. Julian saw a burly Mutant searching for him, atom-blast in hand, while beside him another Dynast, his face stamped with the excesses of Vanadol slipped into the pandemonium the dance-floor had become.
With cold ruthlessness Julian aimed his electro-beam and saw the upper part of the Mutant's torso disappear. He saw the other one near the conveyor and the "electro" flashed again. The beam went through the creature and struck the great conveyor releasing the imprisoned waters. An icy geyser of liquid shot upward, and pandemonium broke loose. All the lights went out and madness stalked the swirling humanity that desperately sought to escape. He was in a maelstrom of fighting, shrieking beings and a chaos of noise as tables and chairs crashed.
"Let me lead ... my eyes are conditioned to darkness!" Julian felt a tiny hand grasp his arm.
"So are mine ... but who...." He could see dimly a tiny, slender figure, scarcely five feet in height, completely masked. Then he remembered the slurred accents of the artist who had achieved his disguise. The Ganymedean already was scurrying toward the same direction in which Julian wanted to go, to the right of where the conveyor had been. Icy water already swirled around his ankles, and the babel of sounds had risen to a crescendo of unleashed fear, when Julian reached the plastic wall. The Ganymedean was ahead of him, and Julian saw him press a spot in the smooth barrier. A draft of icy air struck his face as an aperture appeared. He dived in.
They must have traveled miles before Julian's Ganymedean guide began to falter, then stopped. The being had silently ignored every question thus far, and twice had asked for silence. Now he turned on a tiny pencil beam and surveyed their surroundings. It was a cavern, musty and icy in temperature; great festoons of dust held together by age-old cobwebs hung from the curved ceiling.
The Ganymedean went directly to a section of the rocky wall on the left, and searched the crumbling surface minutely with the pencil-beam until he found what he sought; he made an odd twisting motion with fingers pressed to the wall, and a circular section slid inward; beyond was another tunnel ending in a seemingly blank wall.