"Wait, Eben Petrovitch," she called. "We can only wait."

Hands felt over his garments. An instrument buzzed. A Zolotoyan reached into Holbrook's pocket and took out a jack-knife. His watch was pulled off his wrist, the helmet off his head. "Judas priest," he exclaimed, "we're being frisked!"

"Potential weapons are being removed," said Grushenko.

"You mean they don't bother to look at our spaceship, but can't tell a watch isn't a deadly weapon—hey!" Holbrook grabbed at a hand which fumbled with his air compressor.

"Submit," said Grushenko. "We can survive without the apparatus." He began to point at objects, naming them. He was ignored.

CHAPTER V

Beyond the chamber was another hall, and at its end was another room. It was a small, bare, windowless cell of the same blue stone. Dull light came from the walls themselves, a waste-disposal hole opened downward, a porous circle in the ceiling breathed fresh air. Otherwise the place was featureless. When the black guards had urged the humans through and the dilated wall had returned to a blank barrier, they were alone.

They felt drained and light-headed in the thin atmosphere. Its dryness caught at their throats and its cold gnawed toward their bones. But most terrible, perhaps, was the silence.

Holbrook said at last, for them all: "Now what?"

Unhelmeted, Ekaterina's sunlight-colored hair seemed to crackle with frost. Suddenly his living universe had narrowed to her—though he could do worse, he thought in the dimness—with Grushenko hovering on its fringes. Beyond, mystery; the stone walls enclosed him like the curvature of space. The woman said with a forlorn boldness, the breath smoking from her lips, "I suppose they will feed us. Else it would have been most logical just to shoot us. But they do not seem to care if we die of pneumonia."

"Can we eat their food?" muttered Holbrook. "The odds are against it, I'd say. Too many incompatible proteins. The fact we can live on Novaya is nearly a miracle, and Zolotoy isn't that Earthlike."

"They are not stupid," snorted Grushenko. "On the basis of our blood samples they can synthesize an adequate diet for us."

"And yet they took our metallic possessions—even the most harmless." Ekaterina sat down, shivering. 

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