He tried to answer, but the moment's hesitation was fatal. The girl arrowed downward, a slim, lovely shadow in the artificial dusk. Her sweet, chiming voice drifted back tauntingly.
"Explain to the beasts!"
For a moment Andreson hung motionless in his harness, keenly aware that he was perhaps the loneliest man since Adam. The city looked like a tinsel toy below him, and all around him was darkness and silence; the nearest human being was the only one within millenia of him, and among the Varese he had just one friend—maybe.
Out of the murk a voice called mockingly. "What are you dreaming, Earthman? Or should we say—plotting?"
Andreson recognized the voice for Atel's, but could not place its direction. "I'm on my way to join my friend at the apex of the dome," he said shortly. "I'm not plotting anything, except getting home as soon as possible."
"Oh? That's odd." The Varan's voice roughened, then regained its first silkiness with obvious effort. "I passed Jina on the way up. I thought you two might have been having a talk."
"Suppose we were?" Andreson demanded. "What's that to you?"
The voice was closer now, and its tone was cold and hard. Andreson rested his fingers lightly on the levitator controls, still looking about him in the blackness.
"A great deal to me. When the Council voted to let your scientist accomplice have a free hand, I had to go along. But I still think you're both spies, and up to something dangerous." He paused, and at the same moment Andreson spotted him—circling with silent, outspread wings, about twenty-five feet up from where the Earthman hung. He went right on looking, as if he had seen nothing, turning his head from side to side in apparent bewilderment.
"Follow us around, then, if you have the time to waste," he said. "Two men against a city—you can afford to be brave. The odds are all on your side."