hey took him into a snow-joint over on Chloride Street. The man led, the Neptunian followed. They went down many flights of stairs carved in the solid purple lava and finally into an elevator. They went farther down.
This, then, was Relegar's headquarters. The Uranian couldn't stand radiation for any length of time. Out on Uranus they had almost none, and so Venus, with its very heavy clouds that filtered the sunlight, was one of the few planets where a Uranian could live. Even so, the Uranians on Venus, having an instinctive dread of sunlight because sunlight usually meant radiation, preferred to stay underground. Perhaps it was more like their native world that way, for they lived underground even on Uranus.
They got out of the elevator in a rock cavern and walked a hundred feet. They passed two guards and went through a steel door. They were in a big room, dimly lighted by red bulbs. Giant didn't like the dimness and he didn't like the smell. He tried to see.
"Here he is," said the man.
There was an odd bass rambling which Grant recognized as the voice of a Uranian. He shivered. Then there were words, and Grant knew the Uranian, wherever he was—maybe in a different room—was using a modifier to turn his sounds into Earth-language: "Walk closer," ordered the queer voice. "I want to watch your face."
It scraped the marrow in his bones, that queer voice. He saw a big tunnel, and at the far end of it, barely discernible in the dim light, was Relegar. Grant stared, chilled. His eyes became used to the queer light, and then he began to make out details. The tunnel was round and big enough so that a man could have walked into it, and at the far end the big Uranian seemed to be standing on his side, with his sixteen huge jointed legs supporting him, half of them on the floor and half on the ceiling. His purple, hairy body was supported in the middle almost as from a web. His two semi-globular eyes, seemingly opaque, were surrounded by six smaller ones. Grant knew the smaller ones could detect infra-red, and now he felt his face growing warm and knew they had on infra spot on him.
"What did you find in the swamp?" asked that dissonant voice.
Grant swallowed and licked his lips. "Nothing," he said finally.
The great maw of the spider, rimmed in red, opened wide as if the Uranian was yawning. It showed long, curving white fangs. Then Relegar said, "You found stones of the echindul."