ting it so quickly as
to cause a sinking sensation in the stomach. From overhead came a
creaking, and a band of light appeared and widened, grew dazzling as a
circular trapdoor opened on daylight.

Dworn caught his breath. He hadn't reckoned with its being daytime;
evidently he had been unconscious longer than he had supposed. But he
couldn't worry about that.

"Go on!" he rasped. "Outside!"

The machine clambered stiffly out of its burrow; sand crunched under its
steel feet. Blinking at the sun, Dworn saw that the trap opened on a
stretch of boulder-strewn wasteland; it must not be far from the foot of
the great slide. The trapdoor was coated with sand to make it appear
only a half-buried rock, and in the near distance were other, closely
similar outcroppings that were very likely the entrances to other
spiders' burrows.

"Get us away from here! Quick!" ordered Dworn shakily.

Still wordlessly, her face smooth and mask-like, the girl set the
walking machine in motion. It moved with a queer rolling gait which made
Dworn dizzy, though it stilted over the irregularities of the ground
with scarcely a jar. Dworn felt nakedly exposed, riding high above the
ground in broad daylight, but he gritted his teeth and tried not to
think of the probability of attack by some day-faring marauder. He
supposed the spider girl, accustomed likewise to a nocturnal life, would
have felt the same fear of the light, if she hadn't been hypnotized.

Under the drug's influence she apparently couldn't speak unless spoken
to. However, there were questions he wanted to ask her.

First--"What do you know about the attack on the beetles last night?"

"I know there was a battle," said Qanya flatly, without looking up from
the controls. "I didn't see it, but the Mother and some others were
prowling at the time, and saw. It was the flying things, which have
given us too so much trouble."

That, if true--and he judged that it _must_ be true--confirmed his prior
suspicion, and killed another suspicion he had entertained for a little
while--that the spiders themselves might have been the ambushers. He
demanded, "What do you know about those night-fliers?"

"Very little. We do not know just what they are or where they came from.
They began appearing hereabouts only four months ago, which was three
months after the Rim collapsed and the Mother decided that we should
descend and try the hunting on this side. Since then they've grown more
and more n