"We may as well." The girl's whisper was thick with dread. "Before they take us out."
She pointed to the ports. A white wing flashed past. A company of the New Robots, I saw, were wheeling through the blood-red gloom, close about the ship. Gleaming in stream-lined grace, they were beautiful as a flock of silver birds. But every one of them held, in slender argent tentacles, a massive cathode gun. However beautiful, they were deadly!
Testing his two thin-tubed disruptor guns, Kel Aran looked anxiously at the pale girl.
"The Stone?" he asked. "Where is it?"
"I don't know." Verel shook her haggard head. "We can only try to search. Unless the Shadow comes—"
"Search?" The fat flesh of Zerek Oom was a livid color beneath his bright tattooing. His thick white hands fumbled a disruptor gun as if it were something utterly strange. "We can't go out, Kel!" he protested hoarsely. "Not against those winged things."
"That's what we came to do," said the Earthman.
And he led the way back toward the valve.
I don't know why I had not looked down. I had seen the titanic walls that leapt above us, and the wheeling host of robots. But I had not looked down. And now, when I came to step from the valve in the side of the helpless ship, something caught my breath. Something filled me with a sickness of infinite alarm.