"But what of my friends? I can't escape and leave Jhul Din and Korus Kan here, or the others either."
He thought for a moment. "For your cruiser's crew there is no hope." he said, "for the rulers would order them slain at once. If your two friends seemed of any importance, though, there is a chance that they would have been let live for a while, prisoned there in the ruler's building."
"Then it's for us to get them out," I said, and he laughed shortly.
"That's all," he agreed. "Well, one thing seems hardly more hopeless than another, and we may as well try it. But we must get your friends soon if ever, for these creatures of darkness will surely kill their prisoners to the last one before they leave."
We stood up, then ventured cautiously into the narrow street. Looking along its violet-lit length I could see in the broader street that crossed it innumerable dark shapes hastening this way and that. The buildings on each side of the streets were tall rectangular ones a few hundred feet in height, their walls smooth and black like the paving of the streets. They had doors but no windows whatever, seeming like great boxes. It was with an effort that I remembered that in unending darkness there was small need for windows.
Zat Zanat pointed out over the city to a great block-like building that towered above all others, and on whose top I could make out the shapes of resting space-ships.
"The building of the rulers," he whispered. "It's there your friends are, if they still live."
"Lead on, then," I said, and without further words we started down the narrow way.
As we came toward the broader avenue that crossed it we went more carefully, and it was here that I had my first real glimpse of the creatures of darkness with whom I had struggled and from whom and among whom I had fled. They were much as my touching hands had informed me, great upright bodies of dark flesh moving on two flap-like lower limbs and with two similar arms. In the upper part of the body the only features were the small opening of the mouth and great cup-like ears set on each side of it.
As I watched, with something of a recurrence of my former horror, I saw that the creatures seemed to judge all their movements by hearing, avoiding one another when they heard the sound of steps, and avoiding walls and other obstacles evidently by listening to the echo of their own steps. The product of evolution in the unending darkness of the cosmic cloud, hearing meant to them all that sight could mean to children of light.