Waiting for him....
They might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-years away.
Six feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lighted for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary for an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without end.
Behind him, his pursuers—human natives or Hymenop invaders, he had no way of knowing which—drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the maze.
—To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him from ahead.
It was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and he could not go back.
He made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had been forced upon him.
It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady threat of action never quite realized. They had known where he was going, and why.
But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see—
He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and familiar.