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Wooley and Mavra switched their suit radios to a different frequency—the Yaxa had to do it for the handless horse—so as not to disturb the others.

For a while there was silence between them, and of course little noise penetrated the suits, either. Finally Wooley said, "Sure is still around here."

Mavra nodded. "It's completely dark now. You can see some stars up there—and nothing down here but the plants. Of course, I don't have much vision now, but I haven't seen anything. You?"

"Nothing," the Yaxa admitted. "Perhaps we'll get lucky and it'll stay this way. There seems to be nothing at all alive here except the plants. The only things moving are those wisps of gas—I think they're chlorine from their color, but I can't be sure."

Mavra strained and did manage to make out cloudy patches here and there. "You don't suppose . . . ?"

"The clouds? I've been thinking the same thing. They don't seem to drift in any particular direction, as with a wind. But they're just wispy puffs. Even if they are the Pugeesh, they can't harm us much. Even the worst of these suits could take a bath in pure sulfuric acid without harm."

Mavra considered it. "But napalm wouldn't be very effective against them, would it?"

There wasn't much to say.

"You're an Entry, aren't you?" Mavra asked the Yaxa. "I can tell by some of your expressions."

The Yaxa nodded slowly. "Oh, yes. Not from any place you've ever heard of, though. I've been a little of everything—farmer, politician, cop. Finally I just got old, and rejuves take something out of you mentally each time, so we—I—decided the hell with it, I'd done all I could, more than most people ever do. I went out with that frame of mind, and wound up getting suckered by a Markovian gate. They're triggered by that, you know—a desire to end it all, despondency, all the things the Markovians would feel when they used it to come here. But it's been a good life since, too. I don't regret much of my past or present. You?"

Mavra was surprised at the Yaxa's candor; some genuine emotion came through, at least in intent, despite the ice-cold monotone. It was because she was an Entry, Mavra decided.

The once human horse chuckled dryly. "Me? Nothing much to tell that you wouldn't already know. As for regret—I don't know, really. Some individual things I would like to do differently. Stop my husband from that meet where they killed him. Not touch that damned stone in Olborn that changed me into a half-donkey. Maybe not have been so damned complacent these last years. I still don't understand why I stayed in Glathriel and accepted it so calmly."

"If it makes you feel any better, you had little choice in that," the Yaxa told her. "Every six months the Ambreza gave you a physical. One of the devices they used for checking you was also a hypno gadget. Bit by bit they carefully changed your attitudes—slowly this time, so you'd never even be conscious of it."

Anger grew within her. "So that's it," she said in a tone devoid of emotion. "That explains a lot."

"But in a crisis the old you returned in full," Wooley pointed out. "They didn't dare hypno too strongly or too deeply, or you'd have been no use to them later. And that brings up your stake in all this. Only that computer up there can restore you to humanity, you know—or the Well itself, which might make you something other than what you want to be. I guarantee that if you somehow escaped they'd find a way to keep you from the Well just so your knowledge wouldn't fall into others' hands. They'd do a full brain scan, maybe using a Yugash to keep you from Well processing. You'd be a dumb horse."

Mavra considered that. She wasn't sure it was possible to return to the South without Well processing, but a lot more impossible things had happened. "I'm not sure I care," she said softly.

Wooley was startled. "Huh? How's that?"

"I keep going over and over my life," Mavra responded, "and I keep wondering what I'm trying to get back to. Sometimes I feel like the Markovians—money, some power that