"Ahoy, there! We'd almost given you up."
Torcred advanced warily. The stranger did not flicker nor vanish. A door was open, and the white light poured out from a chamber that must have been a natural hollow, laboriously enlarged in the stone. Torcred's hand shot out and gripped the man's arm above the elbow; the stranger started, then relaxed, and Torcred caught a flash of the grin he had seen before.
"I'm real," said the stranger. "I wasn't the other times we've met—but that's one of the things Captain Relez will explain to you. Now come inside, before the air out here gets any thicker."
Cautiously Torcred edged into the brightly-lit room, keeping in front of Ladna. He saw in the cramped space a glittering confusion of unfamiliar devices—it was the flimsiness of most of the apparatus that was most surprising; the terrapins and other races built mostly machinery designed to withstand heavy mechanical forces, but a blow of the hand would shatter most of those things of wire and glass tubes. A young man, hunched over a complex control panel beside a glass screen on which a darkly indistinct image floated, glanced up with narrowed eyes, and an older one with a small pointed beard met Torcred's suspicious gaze benignly, over a small table on which a map was spread, studded with colored pins.
Then Torcred heard the door click, and whirled, hand on his knife.
"It's not locked," the bearded man said calmly. "You can leave if you like—but we've gone to a good deal of trouble to persuade you here for a talk."
Torcred faced him again, still tensely ready. The setup here didn't look dangerous, only incomprehensible. But he sensed power in this little room; the deep potent hum he had heard in the fissure was at home here, though he could not locate its source.
"My name is Relez." The bearded man rose from behind his table, "Dunu, you can take care of the chart."
"Aye, aye, sir," said the young man they had seen as a phantom in the desert, and Torcred bristled again at the alien jargon. But Relez' casual manner was reassuring.