Lete and the Nehogan general watched him curiously as he donned the spacesuit. He picked up the unwieldy gun, started through the soft black night for the city.
They went along with him discussing their plans. He answered in grunts, his voice harshly metallic coming through the diaphragm. At the front lines he left them behind and went on alone across the level plain like a robot in the cumbersome suit.
The impulse to run was almost uncontrollable. Suppose the Anolyn were suspicious. They might have been bluffing, Tabak and Reiloc might already be dead. He began to sweat.
He plodded on steadily through soft, plowed land. He reached a pasture and a herd of the long-tailed Begans ran up sniffing him curiously. The black, hairy men followed him, grunting, among themselves, to the opposite fence where they stopped. They had been trained not to climb fences.
All at once he realized that he had come to the beach. The walls of the city loomed darkly massive above him. Stars twinkled in the velvet sky.
He waded out into the water. The stars vanished as the _Dra Dur_ closed above his helmet. He snapped on his torch.
The light drove a lance through water ahead, revealing the sandy bottom, strange submarine creatures. He struggled on and on, the pitch of the sea floor becoming steeper. It was like a fairyland of grottoes and trailing seaweed. Then the rays from his torch struck the gaping mouth of a cave.
Only it wasn't a cave at all. It was more like a tunnel--a tunnel that the ancients had driven through the mountains.
Jupiter felt his heart leap into his throat. It was what he had been searching for--the mouth of one of the canals leading beneath the city by the _Dra Dur_.
He turned into it, his light revealing smooth composition walls, green and slick with algae. He must have gone a mile before he found a ramp leading to the surface.
As his helmet broke water, he saw that his luck was still holding. He was beneath the temple of the Radiant God. The ramp which continued on up into the temple proper was deserted.
He sat down, unwrapped the needle gun, then started up the ramp like some amphibious monster of the deep. Tabak and Reiloc, he was sure, were being confined in the temple. The breeding pens more than likely, since that was where most of the human guinea pigs were confined.