He shook foggy poisonous vapor from his head and sat up. He was in a gigantic cavern of ominous, crushing size, a roughly arching height that disappeared into steamy vapor. Stalactites and stalagmites barred the openings of numerous side tunnels like monstrous teeth in gaping mouths.
From somewhere came the monody of dripping waters. A sickening, silent iridescence filled the chamber of horrors with a clear yellow light. Ward’s eyes focused on--
He shrank back away from the awesome height and the narrow slit of white light high, high above through the mist that might have been the new Martian sun. His eyes kept returning to the thing in the middle of the cavern floor. It rested in a transparent plastic bowl that sat on top of a huge iridescent bell-shaped stalagmite built up through thousands of years of dripping calcareous water.
Inside the bowl rested a giant slug-like body. It exuded a greyish glow as it pulsed and shimmied. Two vast compound eyes looked out into the cavern and a number of simpler eyes moved slowly about with a placid kind of rhythm.
“The Queen,” he whispered, repeating the word of the woman-creature. He’d thought it part of a nightmare. His whisper echoed violently through the cavern like a rising wind of fear. The Queen of the Mo-Sanshon. The Queen Mother. Summation, final cause, goal, archetype, of the State.
The woman-creature moved, eyes fixed on the bowl as though communicating.
She finally turned toward where Ward crouched helplessly on the cold, moist stone, his crushed leg projecting out uselessly. The nerveless face moved, gave out sounds like frost. “Our Queen has decided. You know where the cage of mercenaries is. You had it on the _Sol_. Because of your inferior nervous system which is so vulnerable to attack, you will soon give us the information we want. You and the cage are all that stands in our way.”
“I don’t know where it is,” said Ward truthfully. “So regardless of what you do to my inferior nerves, I can’t tell you where it is. Someone else took it with them from the _Sol_. Of course you don’t believe me.”
The great sentient blob of breeding-brain machinery called the Queen Mother, pulsed on without perturbation. The creature beside him seemed unaffected; yet both of them must be trembling with fear, hate and indecision. An organization of females. And up there was the one Queen Mother for the lot of them who layed all the eggs of her species, and dictated the policies for the rest. The workers, soldiers, nurses--everyone was female. Even those who had assumed male humanoid form, such as the Executive Officer on the _Sol_ and the Guard in the Federal Building, they were also female.