-18-

strange object in their hands. It resembled a fountain pen flashlight with a large, round, bulb-like affair on the back end and a grip something like a German luger. They pointed them at us.  After seeing what had happened to our erstwhile captors I thought that our turn was next, whatever it was. But one spoke to us.

   "Are you surface people?"

   "I guess we are, as that is where we came from very recently."

   "Where did the hairlike find you?"

   "If you mean those guys there," I pointed to the five motionless figures, "back there a few hundred miles." I pointed toward the way we had come in our wild ride.

   "You are very fortunate that we came this way," he told us. "You would have also become hairlike and then we would have had to kill you also."  That was   the first time I had realized that the others were dead.

   They put their strange weapons away and seemed friendly enough, so I ventured to ask him the who and why of everything we had run into. I told him of our search for guano and how we had encountered the five hor1oks, as he called them. And also asked him about the machines and their operation and could we get out again? He smiled and told us.

   "I could not tell you too much as you could not understand. There are so many things to explain and you could not grasp enough of what I could myself tell you. The people on the surface are not ready to have the things that the ancients have left. Neither I nor anyone in any of the caverns know why these things work, but we do know how to operate some of them. However, there are a great many evil people here who create many unpleasant things for both us and the surface people. They are safe because no one on the surface believes us or them.