The boy suddenly looked up, turned, and stared straight at where Phrnnx was crouching behind the bole of a large pine. He started to stroll over.
Phrnnx ran. He ran hard, fast, and unthinkingly. He was not sure what a “bad mans” was, but he had no wish to be included in that category—none whatsoever. No sirree. He ran in a blind panic with all four legs and a great sorrow that his ancestors had traded their wings for intelligence. Ahead, a dark, cavelike depression appeared in the ground. Without breaking stride, he instinctively threw himself into the protective opening.
And into the closet of the world.
Phrnnx awoke with the equivalent of a throbbing headache. He almost panicked again when he remembered that last moment before blacking out. A touch of the hard, unresisting metal underneath reassured and calmed him. He had thrown himself in a cave— only it hadn’t been a cave. It had been a hole. A hole filled with machinery. Yes, that’s right! He remembered falling past machinery—levels and levels and levels of it. He did not know it, but he had fallen only a mile before the first of the automatic safety devices had analyzed his alien body chemistry, pronounced him organic, alive, and reasonably worth saving, and brought him to a comfortable resting place at the fifty-third level.
He staggered to his feet, becoming aware of a faint susurration around him. Warm air, and the faint sounds of the almost silent machines. A slow look around confirmed the evidence of his other senses . . . and he almost wished it hadn’t. Machines. Machine