tures turned out to be walls and pillars arranged around
the central building, evidently in relation to their religious
significance. This main building, ornately decorated, was windowless,
and the several closed doors represented metallic and forbidding
barriers. It must have covered thirty acres, rising about thirty feet
from the ground.

As Burl frantically examined it, the leaders of the Neptunians moved
discreetly with him. They gestured at the doors, indicating their own
inability to open them. Apparently they thought that Burl might succeed
where they had failed.

Burl wasn't sure he could. He supposed there might be controls similar
to those that released him from the dome, but he thought first he had
better determine a plan of action. Somewhere within, Russ was sealed
up--an exhibit among the living dead of many planets.

He managed to convey this thought to the three stick-men. There was an
unmistakable nod of assent from one of them, and a twiglike arm
indicated that Burl should follow him. They rapidly crossed the area to
the outlying fringes of a frigi-plasmic forest.

Here towering crystalline masses pushed up from the dark ground. It
seemed to be a weird jumble of broken glass--broken glass ten and
fifteen feet high! The Neptunians led Burl into this amazing landscape
through a narrow path. He walked behind them, feeling thick and heavy in
comparison with their fragile bodies. But, in spite of appearances, they
were not fragile, nor were the growths that made up the fantastic
Neptune-transplanted vegetation of Triton.

They came to a clearing amid the forest of blue and green and orange
crystals, and there were the rest of the Neptunian survivors. Burl
counted about forty, rooted in pools of liquid gas, absorbing renewed
energy while waiting for commands. As he entered the clearing, most of
them lifted their root tentacles and crowded around him. He was as
strange a being to them--helmeted and bundled in plastic and rubber and
metal--as they seemed to him.

Burl noticed that many of them must have been wounded--there were signs
of missing arms or of burned roots, and a few had odd poultices smeared
over their round, blue heads.

The Neptunian commander pointed out their store of arms. They had long
spears of some glistening translucent substance, a projector which fired
darts of the same material, and a number of the Plutonian globe-and-rod
instruments--obviously captured from the enemy.

He exa