"Try to eat it," Mack said. "There's some of it over by the wall. If that's what we've been living on, no wonder we're starved."
"He? Food?" I stammered.
Since Blaine had found himself here, what seemed like perhaps twelve hours had passed. Our captor had come twice. They had only seen him dimly.
"But he's human—semi-human, anyway," Shorty said. "And he seems to talk English a little."
"Look!" Vivian suddenly murmured. "Here he comes again."
The red glow across the cave for an instant brightened. It seemed as though a rock had slid aside and closed again. A dim upright shape moved toward us; stopped and stood regarding us with eyes that gleamed green, smouldering in the dimness.
"The Great Mind—ready—see you soon," the figure's weird, guttural voice said.
I moved forward, unsteadily on my feet. "I want to talk to you," I said. I could see him now, quite plainly. A man? I suppose you could call him that. He was about five feet tall, squat and square, with high square shoulders, a rectangular torso and two legs which seemed encased in a flexible metal grey fabric. His head was round, set upon a triangular neck with its apex under his chin—a bullet head, hairless, with a weird, box-like face, square-chinned and broad square nose. His two arms, long and powerful-looking, dangled at his sides.
This, we were soon to learn, was a Radak. I recall my first clear impression that there was about him a queer sense of power. And something else, mysterious, yet even more apparent. An automaton-like quality. It was as though here were an individual who was only acting his role as a tiny part of some great, organized thing. A cog in a machine. The German Nazis of my father's boyhood, must have been like that. And here with these Radaks of the Crimson Comet it seemed intensified to be almost gruesome. You could not tell why, but you could sense it. Human individuals who lived only to do what they were told. A great mental force dominating them from birth to death, so that they thought what they were told to think; only did what they were told to do.