skin of his hand and wrist smoking on the silicon.

"Damn that Templar," he shrilled, "drinking beer in the cool of the spheroid!"

"In the cool of the spheroid," cried the echoes.

"The spheroid," replied echoes of the echoes.

Hogan dropped his rifle with a clatter and sucked his wrist.

"Shake it up," shouted the Captain from the head of the worm.

"Hogan's hurt," Spencer called from the tail. But Hogan lurched forward hissing: "Tend your own jet hole."

The Captain was back there, tall and concerned, grabbing Hogan's arm, making him show the burn. Deftly he bandaged it. "You can go back to the ship if you want to."

"Hell no and let you guys find something worth something," Hogan retorted and spat near Spencer's foot.

The Captain watched the gob of saliva sizzle and vanish. He looked across into Hogan's red-veined eyes, then down into Spencer's wide gray ones. Spencer's cheeks were puffed, flaming red. His lips were puffed, cracked and quivering slightly as though he was getting ready to laugh or cry. He shivered when the Captain squeezed his shoulder.

Too young, the Captain thought. I shouldn't have brought him out here. But he didn't say anything, just squeezed Spencer's shoulder again and trotted back to the head of the worm.

The monster had a million legs and it was shiny blue. A smooth hemisphere, it squatted on the hub cap of the city, holding the dead lifelines, the puppet strings of the city, python-thick electrical conduits that radiated out in all directions to tie the city together, to integrate the myriad mechanisms of the ultra-technical city, to bleed the streams of electrons that were the life blood to the city. There was life in the old boy yet.

When the Captain stepped too near a conduit, lightning knocked him down. When Spencer started to help the Captain up, a four-inch spark bit his finger. Hogan hee-hawed. But when the Captain jumped up and, grinning, poked his finger an inch from Hogan's dished-in nose Hogan yelped with pain.

"Yes, Hogan," the 

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