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It was Farn zem Marur who noticed the 'fairies' he thought of them as demons first. He was
too horrified to speak, and could only point with a shaking hand.
The 'fairies' perhaps nine or ten of them were flying swiftly through the air at an altitude of
about one hundred metres. They seemed to be heading towards the green bubble, and they seemed to be
responsible for a curious kind of low, even humming that reminded Russell of the sound made by a musical
spinning top he had once possessed long ago in the bright world of childhood.
But there was hardly time to form any impression at all; for, suddenly, the 'fairies' vanished. In
mid-flight, they seemed to wink out of existence as if someone, somewhere, had just thrown a switch and
abolished them.
Russell rubbed his eyes, blinked, and felt his knees be-come unsteady. He regretted bitterly that no
brandy had been included in the stores.
"You saw them?" He turned to Anna. But before she could reply, he already knew the answer.
"I saw them." Her voice was shaking. "I saw them .. Russell, Russell, I want to go back." Her
voice rose in pitch and intensity. "Please take me back to our friends. Please, please take me back! If we
go any further, we are all going to go mad ... We shall die, and then "
He slapped her, and the hysterical torrent of words was cut off. Anna pulled herself together.
"Thank you," she said simply. When she had calmed down a little, she said with a faint smile: "I am
reminded that a Russian woman is, after all, only a woman."
"I didn't hurt you?"
"Only enough."
Russell turned to Farn zem Marur. "Pathfinder, we have seen what we have seen. Is it your wish
to go forward and, perhaps, encounter yet stranger things?"
Farn zem Marur's voice was none too steady. "It is my wish and my duty to follow the lord Russell
Grahame, that I may not be dishonoured in the eyes of my sept lord and in my own eyes."
"Let us go then. The answer to such mysteries as we have seen may lie ahead."
"Lord, they were not demons?"
"No, Farn, they were not demons."
"Nor were they fairies," said Anna. "I was reminded of something ... I was reminded of large
dragonflies ... Per-haps they are only some kind of great insect."
"Insects which can disappear at will," said Russell drily. "I can see why Paul Redman thought they
were fairies, though the brilliant wings, the golden hair..."
Anna laughed somewhat unsteadily. "They were not fairies. They had no wands. Only, I think, four
legs."
Presently, when the sun was high in the sky, they came to the first group of buildings, which lay no
more than a kilo-metre from the base of the great column. The buildings were low, windowless,
igloo-shaped and constructed of what appeared to be a plastic similar to that of the 'coffin' from which
Russell had emerged on his first day on Erewhon.
Cautiously, the explorers approached the nearest build-ing. They were aware of a kind of muted
throbbing, such as might emanate from very powerful engines. They felt the vibrations first through the
soles of their feet; but as they came closer it seemed as if the air around them was somehow charged with
great pulses of energy.
Even if they had wanted to and they were not entirely eager they were unable to investigate the
source of the throbbing further, for what were clearly the entrances to the buildings, squat tunnel-like
protrusions about a metre high and a metre wide, were closed. The doors were made of metal, and there
was no visible means of opening them.
The next group of buildings, similar in shape and size, were, however, open to inspection. Leaving
his companions outside, Russell entered the first one and found that it con-tained stores of some kind long,
low racks on which were neatly stacked metal, plastic and ceramic objects. Some of them looked as if they
might be machine parts, while others looked like vessels of some kind. He stared at the long racks and was
no wiser.
But in the second building, whose door was open, he dis-covered a workshop or laboratory staffed
and operated by a number of spider robots. Russell sensed that they were aware of his presence; but they
ignored him and scuttled about their tasks with complete indifference. He stayed for a while, trying to find
out what they were doing. But their actions and the equipment they were using made little sense to him.
Finally, when Anna called out anxiously, he went out into the sunlight and recounted what he had
seen. It was only while he was trying to describe the interior to Farn zem Marur that Russell realized he
had seen no source of light in the buildings, yet everything had been as visible as if the structures were
made out of transparent glass, and the igloos were penetrated by daylight.
With time passing, the sun having passed its zenith, Russell became impatient to press on to the
column and the green translucent bubble that rested on top of it, vast and awe-inspiring, yet still looking so
insubstantial that it might drift away on the next breath of wind. But, before they reached the column, they
saw yet another group of build-ings that were of an entirely different character from the previous ones.
There were five of the buildings altogether, each made out of stone or concrete and shaped like a cone.
The buildings were about thirty metres high, with small V-shaped openings in the walls near the bases.
Russell crawled through one of the openings it was not big enough for him to walk through and found
himself in semi-dark-ness. When his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he found that the building contained
nothing but a series of plastic poles, each set horizontally in the wall, at right angles to it, and parallel with
the floor. If all the poles, ten or twelve cen-timetres in diameter, had been extended they would have met in
the centre of the building like the spokes of a giant wheel whose rim was embedded in the walls. But each
of the spokes was only four or five metres long. And there were many of them. Too many to be counted
easily...
They reminded him of something, but he could not recol-lect what it was until he was out in the
sunlight once more, telling Anna and Farn zem Marur what he had seen.
Then he remembered. The poles reminded him of perches in a chicken house. And was it his
imagination, or had there really been a trace of sweet-scented droppings on the floor of the gloomy interior?
In retrospect, he felt that he had been oddly aware of recent occupation. But there was no evidence of this
and he dismissed it as a trick of the mind suggested, perhaps, by his comparison of the poles with perches
for fowls to roost upon.
Now, as the three of them stood at the base of the great metal column that rose giddily into the sky,
supporting its green surrealistic bloom that cast a strange penumbra over the whole scene, Russell reviewed
the events of the morning and was aware of two things. The first was that, apart from a brief glimpse of
'fairies' or 'demons', they had seen no living creatures. The second was that it was impossible to make any
sense out of the evidence of civilization that had been discovered so far.
He was discouraged. He had lost his fear now, and was simply discouraged. He did not know what
he had really expected to find. Yet he had certainly not expected indiff-erence and emptiness. He was
beginning to think that they would have to go back to the boat without having discovered anything that
would enable them to establish contact with their captors or that would explain some of the mystery of their
predicament.
The column and the bubble were massive, silent, inscru-table. They might be nothing more, thought
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