Skeins of filmy material, like mosquito netting, spanned the spaces between most buildings. Many windows and balconies were also covered with a gauzy, sparkling sheen – screen coverings that I later learned held bits of sharp metal or broken glass. As the sun sank, Squid resembled a maze of glittering spiderwebs, festooned with drops of dew.

  Broad roadways were congested with cyclopean motor cars and lorries, all jostling for space and revving their engines before racing at top speed for an open parking space. I saw that every fourth avenue was a canal carrying boats of all description. My sinuses stung at the smell of ozone and unburnt hydrocarbons.

  “Well, will you looka that!”

  Our doctor pointed beyond the downtown area, to where jagged terrain rose steeply toward a rocky hill, its summit topped by striking silhouettes, totally unlike the metropolitan center. Scores of midget castles stood on those heights, with dark battlements and towers jutting from every slope. Earl Dragonlord sighed with gladness to see them, and motioned for us to follow.

  “Come along, cousins. Sunshine is bad enough, but we definitely should not be out by moonlight! At home I’ll fit you with more appropriate clothes. Then we can go to the Crown.”

  “Uh, is that where we’ll speak to your government leaders?” Captain Ohm asked. “We do have work to do, y’know.”

  The last part was directed at Nuts. Her resumed grip on our guide’s elbow might force a lesser fellow to cry uncle. Earl was clearly a man of stamina and patience, all the more alluring to a demmie female.

  “Government?” he answered. “Well, in a manner of speaking. Along the way, I’ll introduce you to our local council of Nomort elders. Unless… do you actually wish to meet the mayor of Squid? A Standard?” He glanced at me. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I assured. “Actually, I think our capt… our leader refers to government on a planetary scale. Or, in lieu of a world government, then some international mediation body—”

  Earl’s look of puzzlement was followed by a dawning light of understanding. But before he could speak, a low groaning sound interrupted from the city, rising rapidly to become an ululating wail. Our greenies drew their weapons. Earl’s dusky eyes darted nervously.

  “The sunset siren! A welcome sound to our kind, in most cities. But alas, not in poor Squid. We must go!”

  “Well then, lead on MacDuff,” Ohm said, nearly as eager to be moving along. Earl looked baffled for a moment. Then, with a swirl of his cape, he hurried east with our ship’s engineer clinging like a happy lamprey, pushing on toward the pile of gingerbread palaces that now seemed aglow against a swollen reddish sun.

  “It’s lay on, Captain,” I muttered to Ohm as we hurried along. “If you fancy quoting Shakespeare, you might try to get it right.”

  Lieutenant Morell chirped a chuckle from her guard position, covering our rear. Ohm winced, then ruefully grinned.

  “As you say, Advisor. As you say.”

  From the park, we dropped toward a dim precinct of low dwellings that lurked between us and yonder hilltop castles. I glanced back at the downtown area, noting with surprise that the streets and canals no longer thronged with traffic. In a matter of moments they had become completely, eerily, deserted.

  Dusk deepened and the largest of three moons rose in the east, about two thirds the size of Luna and almost as bright. Its phase was almost full.

  In order to reach the elegant towers where Earl lived, we first had to cross a sprawling zone of dark roofs and small, overgrown lots, laid along an endless series of curvy lanes and cul-de-sacs.

  “Urbs,” Earl Dragonlord commented with apparent distaste.

  “Hold on a minute,” offered Guts, rummaging through his medical bag. “I think I’ve got some bicarbonate for that.”

  “No, no.” The native grimaced. “Urbs. These are the surface dwellings where Lik’ems make their homes for the greater part of each month, feigning to live as Standards used to, long ago, before the Great Change, in tacky private dwelling places, depressingly alike. All blissfully equipped with linoleum floors and formica counter tops, with doilies on the armrests and bowling trophies on the mantelpiece. And never forget a lawn mower in the garage, along with the hedge trimmer, weed-eater, automatic mulcher, leaf blower, snow blower, and razor edged pole-pruner…”

  Of course these terms were produced in demmish by the translator in his throat. They might only approximate the actual meanings in Earl’s mind.

  “Sounds awful,” Guts commiserated, patting the arm not held in a hammerlock by Nuts.

  “Yes. But that is just the beginning. For under the floor of each innocent-looking house, there lurks—”

  He paused as the demmies all leaned toward him, wide-eyed.

  “Yes? Yes? What lurks!”

  Earl’s voice hushed.

  “There lurks a trap door…”

  “A secret entrance?” Captain Ohm asked in a whisper.

  Our guide nodded.

  “…leading downward to catacombs below the urb. In other words, to the sub-urbs, where…”

  I cut in, coughing behind my hand. I did not want my crewmates slipping into a storytelling trance right then.

  “Hadn’t we better move on then, while there’s still light?”

  Earl cast me a sour glance. “Right. Follow me this way.”

  Soon we passed down an avenue lined by bedraggled trees. No light shone from any of the rusty lampposts onto narrow ribbons of buckled sidewalk bordering small fenced lots. Most of the houses were dark and weedy, with broken tile roofs and missing windows, but one in four seemed well-tended, with flower beds and neatly edged lawns. Dim illumination passed through drawn curtains. Once or twice, I glimpsed dark silhouettes moving within.

  The demmies, their eager imaginations stirred by Earl’s testimony, kept swiveling nervously, peering into the darkness, shying away from the gaping storm drains. Our greenies, especially, looked close to panic. They kept dropping back from their scout positions, trying to get as close to the captain as possible, much to his annoyance. At one point, Ohm dialed his blaster and shot Corporal Jums with a dose of itch-nanos. The poor fellow yelped and immediately ran back to position, scratching himself furiously, effectively distracted from worrying about spooks for a while.

  I admired how efficiently Earl had accomplished this transformation. His uninformative hints managed to put my crewmates into a real state. I wondered – did he do it on purpose?

  Remember, students, almost anything can set off demmie credulity. Once, during an uneventful voyage, I read aloud to the crew from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.”

  Mistake! For a week thereafter we kept getting jittery reports of thumping sounds, causing Maintenance to rip out half of the ship’s air ducts. The bridge weapons team vaporized nine or ten passing asteroids that they swore were “acting suspicious,” and the infirmary treated dozens for stun wounds inflicted by nervous co-workers. Actually, if truth be told, I never had a better time aboard the Clever Gamble, and neither did the demmies. Still, Healer Paolim took me aside afterward and demanded that I never do it again.

  The urb became a maze. Few of the streets were straight, and most terminated in outrageously inconvenient dead-ends that the translator described as culled-socks – an uninviting and unappetizing name. Even in better days, it must have been a nightmare journey of many kilometers to travel between two points only a block apart.

  I felt as if we had slipped into a type of warped space, like a fractal structure whose surface is small, but whose perimeter is practically infinite – a true nightmare of insane urban planning. We might march forever and never get beyond this endless tract of boxlike houses. Captain Ohm shared my concern, and while the other demmies peered wide-eyed at shadows, he kept his sidearm nonchalantly poised toward Earl’s back, in case the native showed any sign of bolting.

  I scanned selected dwellings with my multispec. Blurry infrared signals indicated humanoid forms within. From carbon scintillation counts, it seemed this part of the city must be as old as the downtown area. I wondered about the apparent fall in population. Were things like this planetwide? Or did these symptoms relate particularly to the local crisis our guide had mentioned?

  Surreptitiously, I pressed my uniform collar, turning it into a throat microphone to call the ship with an info-quest. Soon, the nanos in my ear canal whispered with the voice of Ensign Nota Taken, now on duty at the Clever Gamble’s sensor desk.

  “Planetary surface scanning underway, Advisor Montessori. Preliminary indications show that paved cities comprise over six percent of total land area, an unusually high proportion, even for a world passing through stage eighteen, though much contraction appears to have occurred recently. Gosh, I wish I was down there exploring with you guys, instead of stuck up here.”

  “Ensign Taken,” I murmured firmly.

  “Um… survey also shows considerable environmental degradation in agricultural zones and coastal waters, with twenty-eight percent loss of topsoil accompanied by profound silting. Say, will you bring me back a souvenir? Last time you promised you’d—”

  “Ensign—”

  “All right, so you didn’t exactly promise, but you didn’t say no either. Remember the party in hydroponics last week? You were talking about detection thresholds for supernova neutrinos, but I could tell you kept looking down my—”

  “Ensign!”

  “The worst environmental damage seems to have occurred about a century ago, with gradual reforestation now underway in temperate zones. Um, I’ve just been handed a preliminary estimate of the decline in the humanoid population. Approximately sixty percent in the last century! Now that’s puzzling, I see no sign of major warfare or disease. And there are some other anomalies.”

  “Anomalies?”

  “Bio section urgently asks that you guys send up some live samples of the planet’s flora and fauna. Two of every species will do, if that won’t be too much trouble. Male and female, they say… as if a brilliant man like you would ever forget a detail like that.”

  Exerting patience, I sighed. Subvocalizing lowly, I repeated—

  “Anomalies? What anomalies are you talking about?”

  “It’s got me worried. I admit it. I haven’t seen you since the party. You don’t answer my calls. Doctor… was I too forward? Why don’t you come to my quarters after you get back and I’ll make it up to—”

  I let go of my collar. The connection broke and my ear-nanos went quiet, letting night sounds float back… including a faint rustling that I hadn’t noticed before. A creaking… then a scrape that might have been leather against pavement.

  The captain halted abruptly and I collided with his back. Through his tunic I felt the tense bristles of demmie hackle-ridges, standing on end. Ohm’s pompadour just reached my eyes, so I couldn’t see ahead. But a glance left showed the ship’s healer also stopped in his tracks, staring, utterly transfixed by something.

  Lieutenant Morell hurried forward and gasped, fumbling the dial of her blaster.

  A sudden, grating sound echoed behind me, followed by a clang of heavy metal on concrete.

  As I turned, a horrific howl pealed. Then another, and still more from all sides, baying like hounds from hell.

  Before I could finish spinning about, a dark, flapping shape descended over me, enveloping my face in stifling folds and choking off my scream.

  3.

  Consciousness returned in fits and starts, accompanied by a rhythmic, irritating, “plinking” sound – the repetitive dripping of water into some pool. Even before I opened my eyes, mineral aromas and stony echoes told me that I must be underground, lying on some cold, gritty floor.

  Spikes of yellow light stabbed when I cracked my eyelids, but I tried not to move or make a sound as blurry outlines gradually formed into steady images – a stretch of rocky wall; a smoldering torch set in an iron sconce; stacks of wooden crates covered with frayed tarps; a rough wooden table, where lay a platter, stacked with raw meat steaks. A glass tankard frothed with some kind of brownish ale.

  A pair of pale, squinting eyes peered over the tankard’s rim as it rose to meet a broad face, nearly covered by a riot of dark fur.

  The meniscus level of ale dropped swiftly, accompanied by slurping gulps as the tankard swung horizontal, draining down that hairy gullet. With a deep satisfied sigh, the furry one licked the goblet’s rim with a prodigious tongue. Overall, the shape of the skull was much like a person’s. The eyes, though recessed, were green and still somewhat humanoid. Only where Earl Dragonlord had possessed canine uppers even pointier than a demmy’s, this fellow had huge, heavy lower tusks, jutting up to graze his shaggy cheeks.

  The flagon slammed down and he started toward the pile of steaks, salivating prodigiously… then he stopped, sniffing the air. A matched pair of splendidly huge eyebrows arched as he turned toward me, grinning impressively.

  “Snarsh glimp? Naggle scraggle. Yowzuh nowzuh, whutchuh-briggle…”

  My captor must not have come into contact with the translator-converter. Or else the device was knocked out during the ambush. No matter. I never believed in that method of dealing with language differences, anyway. “When in Rome…” begins an old human expression that’s good advice for any traveler.

  I tongued one of my molars, turning on the interpreter nanos in my own ear canal.

  “Grimble gramble gnash… so-o-o it’s no-o-o yoosh pretending-g-g,” rumbled the deep, slurred voice, which grew steadily easier to understand. “I ken when a man’s scannin’ me, though ’is gaze be narrow as a Nomort’s charity.”

  I opened my eyes fully and sat up on one elbow, wincing just a little from sharp twinges.

  “I suppose I’m your prisoner,” I said, subvocalizing first in my own language, then relaxing to let my laryngeal nano-woofers fashion the equivalent in local dialect.

  The hirsute fellow replied with what I took to be a shrug, using shoulders the size of hamhocks. When he next opened his mouth, what emerged was a hearty, majestic belch.

  I made certain to look impressed.

  “Hm. Well said. I take it you are what they call a Lik’em.”

  If he winced at my use of the term, it was hidden by the mat of hair covering all but his nose and eyes.

  “This week I seek no relief, ’xcept to be what I be, and am what I am. You should see me elsetimes. Handsome bugger, or so says my mirror. An’ what about you? What’s your fate? To eat, or be ate?”

  A queer question. It made me glance, against my better wishes, at the stack of bloody cutlets on his plate.

  “My name is Dr. Alvin Montessori. And I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Someone recently told me that I looked like a… a Standard.”

  My host grunted expressively. “So does a corpambulist, when he’s new an’ not too smelly. So’s a Nomort, in daylight. Heck-o, you should see me most days when there’s no moon in view. Smooth as a baby an’ don’t say maybe!” He guffawed heartily, a friendly sound that would have cheered me, were not beads of saliva running down his yellow tusks and pooling on his lower lip before they spilled on the deeply stained tabletop.

  Questions had been swirling in my head ever since we met Earl Dragonlord, about the social class structure on this world. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like the answers.

  “Let’s say I am a Standard. Does that automatically mean I’m slated for somebody’s dinner table?”

  My host sniggered, as if amused by my ignorance.

  “In some measure that’s up to the Standard hisself.”

  “And I suppose Lik’ems and corpsic—”

  “Corpambulists,” he corrected. “Though they prefer bein’ called Zoomz. T’is easier to pronounce, especially in their condition.”

  “Zooms?” I’m afraid I rolled my eyes. “Then Lik’ems and Zooms are devourers of—”

  “Hey. Don’t pin the whole rap on us! There’s Nomorts, too, y’know.”

  Nomorts… such as Earl Dragonlord. The native I last saw guiding my captain and crewmates toward his home. His lair.

  I felt a chill that had little to do with the dank, underground cold. Turning toward the torch, I squinted so that its light pierced between my eyelids in sharp, diffracting rays. My nose began to tickle.

  “So,” I asked. “What must a Standard do in order to keep from being someone’s dinner?”

  The furry humanoid grinned, his tusks gleaming. “You mean you really don’t know? Then as we suspected—”

  The tickling light beams struck a nerve at last. I gasped… then bellowed a ferocious sneeze.

  The abrupt noise sent my captor toppling backward, off his chair. If my intent had been to jump him, that would have been the time. But I only took the occasion to gather myself up to one knee, pulling in my collar tab.

  A fleecy, dark mane reappeared in view, rising above the table, followed by peering eyes.

  “Wha… what was that?”

  “Just a sneeze. It’s freezing down here, don’t you think? Doesn’t a solitary captive like me deserve a blanket, after being attacked on the darkened streets of your urb district, knocked out, and dragged underground, away from my friends?”

  “That was a sneeze? It sounded like a cross ’tween a hellion howl and a razortooth’s roar.” He blinked some more. “I thought you said you was a Standard.”

  I divided my attention, as another voice buzzed in my ears.

  “Advisor Montessori, this is Commander Talon, on the bridge. Thank heavens you’re all right! I assume from your phrasing that you’re alone underground, under some type of coercion, and out of contact with the Captain. Is that correct?”

  Demmies are sharp and quick, when they decide to focus, and Talon took focus seriously. I shivered to reinforce the impression that I must keep my hand on my collar. Facing the Lik’em, I spoke sharply, as if to answer his question.