The girl drew back to let them enter, flashing the beam of a hand radilume on each in turn. Her glance flicked each of them in examination sharp enough to draw blood. She received them in silence, for Teucrete's mind was not on the duties of a hostess to unexpected guests.
"Wait here," she ordered crisply. Then she went among the tangled avenues between cages and spoke soothingly to the caged brutes. Her voice crackled, purred, coughed, roared, hissed.
The bird people were the first to heed. Their bright, nervous chittering subsided into occasional geysers of chirping. Surly sand leopards from Mars paced their cages and vented sounds like needles caught in the grooves of antique disc recordings. Partially gaseous life forms from Saturn had no vocal apparatus, but showed their uneasy displeasures by flaring into sullen crimsons and bruised purples of luminosity.
Ferris followed the girl closely on her rounds, his eyes staring in wonder at the caged monsters revealed when her light bathed the barred cubicles. Some cages were not cages in the ordinary sense at all. Behind barriers of streaming light crouched protoplasmic entities of no set form. Moondogs sported aimlessly in pools of ionized gas. Wireflies battered themselves against invisible net barriers. Complex mysteries of Plutonian life-forms floated in magnetic fields. Metallic crystals built themselves into coral-like colonies resembling miniature castles.
Less _outre_ creatures inhabited the myriads of cell-blocks--the ordinary and extraordinary varieties of apes and cats and dogs, the bovines and marsupials, the squeaking rats and trumpeting elephants, the endless species of sea-creatures, the tree-haunters and the desert dwellers, the burrowers and the flyers. There were supposedly extinct saurians, and examples of tomorrow's freaks and mutants. There were brute clowns and tragedians. There were--
But Khaljean's has been described often enough in magazine articles, sometimes with tri-dimensional pictures in color. Any reader so inclined may look into the back files of _Inter-Planetary Magazine_ and stupefy himself with the famous issue of July, 2091.
Teucrete sensed that she was followed, but with pointed insolence, ignored Ferris and continued her rounds. Gradually, her eerie tones brought calm to the multiform excitements of the compound. She returned eventually to Pao Chung and Angel.