Snow smiled, and left through a rocky archway.
I lay there looking about me. With Snow in the room, I hadn't paid attention to my less stimulating environment. Now I found myself gazing over dark crimson walls, smooth and glossy looking. The room was just a bubble in the rock, about ten feet in diameter, with an artificially leveled floor.
Light came from a narrow ridge that ran around the walls near the top, a sort of ledge covered with fuzzy stuff that glowed pallidly white.
I threw back the coverlet and eased myself to my feet, and was grateful to find my trousers folded neatly upon a small hump of rock that probably served a sugarfoot as a stool. I slipped them on hurriedly, then investigated the stuff on that ledge.
It seemed to be a kind of crumbly dry fungus, not unlike the stuff found in dead logs on Earth, the phosphorescent foxfire. But it was a lot brighter, and also gave off a detectable amount of heat, too, which explained why I wasn't still turning blue.
I left off looking at the heaps of fungi, and went to the archway for a look. Beyond the room, the cave dissolved into a riot of diverging tunnels. I decided to stay put, rather than risk getting myself entombed in some pahoehoeal cavity, and succumbing to the fate Baxter had planned for me.
And besides, those tunnels were black as oil, further off from the chamber I was in. My feet might find me a quick shortcut to the center of the planet, in that treacherous gloom.
Sugarfeet, I decided, could either see in the dark, or else they carried a handful of that white-glowing fungus with them when they went for a stroll.
I went back to the cot, and sat down to wait for Clatclit's appearance, passing the time by struggling back into my durex boots. I felt a bit more competent, once trousered and shod, than I had felt while lying beneath that coverlet in my shorts. A man without his pants is only half a man, somehow.
From the corridor, there came a series of sharp, regular clicks, and then Clatclit waddled in. When not going full speed, in that gravity-defying bound of theirs, the sugarfeet moved rather clumsily, like an old sailor rocking down the street on legs trained to fight a rolling deck. I think it was the tail's weight that accounted for that lumbering gait. It was fully as long as the legs, and nearly as thick, except where it dwindled at the end to a solitary prismatic red spike. I rather judged that that four-inch crystalline dagger came in handy during a fight.