It was hot in that cabinet. Aton licked at the salt and grime on his lips as rivulets itched down his neck and soaked into the rough prison shirt. In the sweating surface of the book he carried he saw a dark-haired, clean-shaven man.

Normal features, average stature—was this the person of a criminal? Am I, he thought, am I…?

It did not matter. Chthon was the prison of the damned, and the man incarcerated here was damned, whether there was justice in it or no. Legally damned and legally dead: no one escaped from Chthon.

The prison was deep, natural cavity far beneath the surface of a secret planet and hidden forever from the stars. No cells were there, no guards; only the living refuse of man’s empire, dying in unthought wealth. For Chthon was a garnet mine, the moderate value of its individual stones complemented by their enormous number. The manner of its enterprise was this: every twenty-four hours the single elevator went down, loaded with food. It came up again with several hundred garnets. If the value of the stones was not enough, the next shipment of food was reduced.

Aton understood this much of Chthon, and it was as much as any free man could know. Now he was to learn the other side of it, the underside. The close cage shuddered, grinding on down into the fevered bowels, and Aton rocked with its motion. He felt the heat increase; smelled his own reek.