The small triangular room had no windows and only the single door. Wyk touched a mechanism and it slid closed. The place was a queer apartment indeed. The floor was convex, curving upward to the walls. The light radiance dimly glowed, as though inherent to the metal ceiling. There was strange metal furniture: a table and chairs, high and large; bunks of a size evidently for the ten-foot workers.
The door opened, and a worker brought us food and drink. Wyk sat apart and watched us while we consumed the meal. I noticed that he seldom let himself get close to us. He sat stiffly upright, with his jointed legs bent double under him, his many arms and pincers hanging inert, save the one short shoulder-arm with flexible fingers gripping his weapon. At his waist, and upon several hook-like protuberances of his chest, other weapons and devices were hanging.
Snap gazed up from where, on the floor, we were ravenously eating and drinking. "Aren't you hungry?" he asked Wyk.
"You eat often?"
"No."
An incurious, taciturn creature, this insect-like being. Snap whispered, "Got to talk to him; make him let us get close. That weapon...."
How the weapon operated, we did not know; but that a flash from it would bring instant death we well imagined.
Half of that hour of waiting was past.
I said to Wyk, "You would call this night on your world; the sun obviously is on the other hemisphere. When will it be day?"