"Gentlemen of Earth, the Manager and his council expect you in the office. Follow me." He turned, waited for them to come.
The Manager's messenger led them up a long, ascending tunnel meagerly lighted at intervals by small emanation tablets. After they had gone perhaps a hundred yards the hewn rock gave way to what was evidently a kind of concrete.
"This part of their city is built above the ocean floor," Kass remarked quietly. "They brought us in through airlocks. Passages lead to caves along the shore where the original refugees holed up. These are mostly their children, so marked and deformed even in embryo."
Their dish-faced guide now stepped aside as they entered a spacious chamber with a domed ceiling. Here and there it was wet. No doubt above there was the sea. Lents made a rapid mental calculation, rumbled into Sine's ear:
"Can't be so deep. Not over a hundred feet; maybe less. Otherwise those arches couldn't carry the weight."
A hush fell upon the room. The leader of this strange people—the one they called The Manager, was rising from his seat back of a desk. His head was very large, his eyes large, liquid and expressive. A total lack of eyebrows, of hair on his head, gave a mixture of the comical and the obscene to his appearance. But the respect with which his counselors, ranged on either side of him, regarded him, ignored his appearance. They were all, without exception, victims of the strange and terrible mutations of type induced by the First Race's callous disregard to the dangers of the rays. All wore loose garments of drab material which concealed their deformities to some extent.
The Manager's large, intense eyes fastened on the Earthmen, and he addressed them:
"Men of Earth: We have captured you in battle, but we would be friends with the Old World. Why did you try to fight us?"
"You were murdering helpless victims," Sine said shortly. "It was not our fight, but we could not stand by and permit such a thing."