behind; each Plosc had only the one room, which she never
left.
The gutting of the castles took hardly fifteen minutes. The
day was just beginning to end when Lavon emerged with Phil
at the mouth of a turret to look down upon the first. City of
Man.
He lay in darkness, his forehead pressed against his
knees, as motionless as a dead man. The water was stuffy,
cold, the blackness complete. Around him were the walls of a
tube of Flosc’s castle; above him a Para laid another sand
grain upon a new domed roof. The rest of the army rested in
other tubes, covered with other new stony caps, but there was
no sound of movement or of voices. It was as quiet as a ne-
cropolis.
Lavon’s thoughts were slow and bitter as drugged syrup. He
had been right about the passage of the seasons. He had had
barely enough time to bring all his people from the hall to the
castles before the annual debacle of the fall overturn. Then
the waters of the universe had revolved once, bringing the
skies to the Bottom, and the Bottom to the skies, and then
mixing both. The thermocline was destroyed until next year’s
spring overturn would reform it.
And inevitably, the abrupt change in temperature and
oxygen concentration had started the spore-building glands
again. The spherical amber shell was going up around Lavon
now, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was an in-
voluntary process, as dissociated from his control as the beat-
ing of his heart. Soon the light-generatin)? oil which filled the
spore would come pouring out, expelling and replacing the