cleared. Lee could crawl forward a
little to bend over the prostrate body of the girl. He unloosened her
gas mask and shouted into her ear.

"Are you okay? The worst is over now; there are the fire brigades coming
up."

She nodded. Her face was a white blot in the semidarkness of the black
lights and Lee felt the weak, but reassuring pressure of her hand upon
his arms. Then, as from one racing train to another, they watched the
firefighters coming up, ghostly in their asbestos suits, with the snouts
of gas masks for faces, crouching under the foamite tanks on their backs
and clutching the funnel-shaped nozzles in their hands. Maintenance
engineers followed, laden with tools; and where the glideways branched
off one could already see them at work; fast but calm: disconnecting
nerve cables, closing circuits, setting up firescreens with a discipline
as magnificent as that of their invisible enemies, _ant-termes_, long
since consumed by the flames, but still sending the chain-reactions of
their destruction through The Brain.

* * * * *

A few minutes later glideway T shot into the 'lateral ventricle', huge
cavern of the Mid-Brain separated from the blast by the thick walls of
the pallium. It looked like the inside of a giant wind tunnel
brilliantly lit now with powerful searchlights. It was swarming with
personnel; white electricians, blue air-conditioners, weird, sponge
rubber-padded shapes of ray-proofed men, uniformed guards, even soldiers
in uniform rushed to the spot from outlying garrisons of The
Brains-preserve. It all seemed to rush up as the earth rushes up in a
low-altitude parachute jump; it looked like headquarters of an army on
the eve of a big drive, and then--

Lee and the girl felt themselves being violently derailed. Catchers had
been thrown across all incoming glide ways from The Brain. Irresistibly
they were propelled right into the arms of stretcher bearers in
Red-Cross uniforms.

"Are you hurt?" somebody yelled. "By God, those fellows must have come
through the flames. Look, they're all black with the smoke. Get a couple
of respirators, Jack."

Lee waved the helping hands away; he was already on his feet. Anxiously
he bent over Vivian. She had her head embedded in a stretcher-bearer's
lap; her eyes rolled around in their smoke-blackened sockets in great
surprise and her tongue licked parched lips, spreading rouge generously
all around mixing it with soot. She look