Afterwards Troy could recall little of that
crazy falling-leaf descent that threw them from one side of the
pilot’s seat to the other. They were not quite helpless
before the force that had shaken them off course and out of the
sky, for the accident-safety ray had flashed on automatically,
bringing them down to ground level at a speed under that of a
direct crash. Troy fought the controls, beat at the lock with the
full force of his wrists and arms. Something gave and for an
instant or so the flitter was his again. He tried to put the nose
up and the flyer gave a giant hop.
If that action did not win them the sky again, it did carry the
flyer—with the effect of bursting through a taut
curtain—beyond the influence of the thing that had grabbed
them out of the air. Troy felt the flitter wheels strike, bouncing
them up. They flattened off in a second crash, and it was
dark—moon and stars blotted out.
His chest hurt and his head ached. In his mouth was the
unforgettable flat sweet taste of blood. Before him was darkness,
but from behind came a measure of light that he could sight as he
tried to turn his head.
“Out—out—” That was a plea rising to a
kind of frenzy. Troy could feel movement beside him, back and forth
across his bruised body until he grunted with pain.
Somehow he forced up his left arm, worked at the catch of the
cabin door, lunging against that stubborn barrier with the strength
of his shoulder. The panel gave, tumbling him out, and small paws
thudded on him as their owners raced into the open.
Troy pulled himself up and tried to see where they had come to
earth. Under him the surface of the ground seemed singularly
smooth. His hand, questing over it, scraped up the grit of sand
that lay in a drifted skim on stone or rock, very level stone or
rock. As he twisted fully around, he could see the shaft of
moonlight better. Behind—yes—the flitter had in some
incredible way fitted itself nose first into a crevice where an
arch of roof shut off the sky.
Troy worked his way around the wreckage to the light. But it was
after he had crawled those few feet that he realized what had
happened and how chance, the protective device of the Clans, and
his own last-moment attempt to control the flitter had landed them
in an unusual hiding place. Those rounded domes and crumbling
walls, blind of any window or door opening were set deep in the
sand of a desert waste. He had crashed straight into the heart of
Ruhkarv itself!
“Where—?” He tried to summon the
animals—and since he had no names to call, he pictured them
mentally. The cats, black and gray-blue, the foxes, russet and
cream, the kinkajou, where were they? Hurt? Still about?
“Come—come back!” He called softly aloud,
heard odd echoes reply from the ruins about. Outside now, he could
look around, see how the flyer had nosed into a dome that had a
crumbled opening in one side.
A shadow leaped from one of the broken arches, pattered to him.
The kinkajou had answered his call. It leaped to his shoulder,
coiling its flexible tail about his upper arm in a grip tight
enough to pinch. Troy reached up his other hand, caressed the round
head butting against his cheek.
Then the foxes returned in a swift lope, stopping before him,
their pointed noses up, testing the wind, their eyes agleam.
“Come,” Troy coaxed the cats. When there was no
answer, he detached the kinkajou, started back into the dome cave
to explore the wreck. In the pocket of the door he had wrenched
open he found an atom torch and thumbed its button. The cone of
light made clear the nose of the flyer embedded in the space of the
dome as a too thick thread might have been forced into the eye of a
needle.
Troy flashed the light into the machine and then stood very
still as he saw a small limp body. Blue eyes wide with pain were
raised to his. The gray-blue cat lay flat, its mouth open, panting.
Now and again it licked a foreleg that was clamped tight between
two buckled pieces of metal. Above it crouched its black mate, who,
upon seeing Troy, uttered a series of sharp, demanding cries.
Setting down the torch, Troy went to work to free the delicate
leg. Then he carried the cat into the open, placing it on the
ground until he could salvage the aid kit of the flyer.
By the time the first thin streaks of false dawn were in the
sky, he had done what he could. The leg had been set and treated.
He had dragged out of the flitter the food bag, the stunner, and
some of the kit tools, which he festooned from his own belt. As
time had passed and no one had invaded the forbidden area of the
ruins to gather them up prisoners. Troy began to believe that they
had been brought down by some automatic guard device and that on
foot they still had a chance to escape capture. But whether the
Clans had set other guards about Ruhkarv, which might now keep them
inside, he did not know.
The foxes and the black cat melted into the shadows, leaving
Troy to his collection of equipment. Only the kinkajou remained to
watch and at last to come to his aid, dragging small objects from
the wrecked flyer to pile by the dome. Troy sat back on his heels.
He had been so busy that he had not had time to consider the future
further than the next job to be done, for he had been driven by a
sense of working against time.
“Wall—wall that cannot be seen—” The
black cat stepped out from a neighboring dome and came directly to
the man.
“Wall around here?” Troy’s hand swept in a
gesture to indicate the ruins.
“Yes. We have tried to cross many places.”
One of Troy’s fears had materialized. The Clans must have
set a barrier about Ruhkarv. Intended to bar interlopers, it would
make him and the animals prisoners within. How he had managed to
pierce it with the flitter was a mystery.
“There are many dens—maybe hunting in
them—”
One of the foxes drifted into the open. The cat had gone to its
injured mate, was licking its head caressingly.
“Danger underground here.” Troy countered that half
suggestion from the prick-eared scout.
“Not now.” The report was emphatic and Troy
wondered. Before Fauklow’s expedition with the recaller had
turned the name of Ruhkarv into a synonym for nightmare, the upper
galleries of the strange city or structure had been explored with
impunity by a handful of the curious. If it had been only the
action of the recaller that had damned the place—well, the
rangers had put an end to the machine’s broadcasts, according
to Rerne, and the undersurface passages might give the fugitives
shelter for a time. He would have to have some rest, Troy knew, and
perhaps here in the heart of a forbidden territory they had found
temporary safety after all.
“We go then—to a safe den.”
With the food bag over his shoulder, the injured cat held as
comfortably as he could manage against his chest, and the stunner
ready in his free hand, Troy moved out. The kinkajou rode on his
shoulder, making small twittering noises and now and then patting
its two-legged steed with a forepaw as if to make Troy continually
aware of its presence. The foxes and the black cat guided him to
another dome, in which a large segment of wall had been cut through
in the past, either by one of the early treasure seekers or by the
ill-fated Fauklow men.
All the fantastic tales that had been told of this place were
peopling the dusk Troy faced with a myriad of nightmares, but the
readiness of the animals to explore was his insurance. Troy knew
that their senses were far keener and more to be relied upon than
his own, and that they would give warning of any trouble ahead. He
snapped on the atom torch he had slung from his belt, watched the
cone of light bob and wave across flooring and walls as it swung to
the rhythm of his walk.
There was nothing to be seen but walls and a pavement of blocks,
fitted together with precision and skill. At the far side of the
dome was the dark mouth of a ramp leading down into the real
Ruhkarv. That murk had a quality close to fog, Troy
thought—as if the dark itself swirled about with independent
motion. And even the atom light was sapped, weakened by it. Yet the
lead fox had already padded down into those depths, and its mate
and the cat were waiting for Troy almost impatiently.
“This is a place where there has been great danger,”
Troy warned, combining words with the mental reach.
“Nothing here—” He was sure that impatient
overtone came from the black cat.
“Nothing here,” Troy repeated even as his boots
clicked on that sloping length of stone, “but perhaps farther
on—”
“There is water.”
Troy was startled at that confident interruption. They had the
supplies from the flitter, but the problem of water had nagged at
him. If somewhere within this maze the animals had located water,
they were even better provided for than he had dared to hope.
“Where?”
“We go—”
The ramp carried him down through three levels of side
corridors, all empty as far as the beams of the atom light could
disclose, all exactly alike, so that Troy began to think a man
might well become lost in such a place without a guide. And he
tried to set his own entrance path in his head, memorizing each
corridor by counting.
Somewhere there must be an unseen air system, for the
atmosphere, though dry and acrid, remained breathable, and he was
sure that now and then from one of the offshoot corridors he
scented a whiff of some fresh import from the surface.
At the fourth level, though the ramp continued on to Korwarian
depths, Troy found the three scouts waiting for him. And now,
unless his sense of direction was completely bemused, they took a
way that headed directly east. For a moment he dared to wonder if
some one of these long hallways might not take them outside the
range of the blocking-wave wall so that they could emerge free in
the Wild.
Stark walls of red-gray stone, paved footing—nothing else,
save the fine sifting of centuries of dust, which arose almost
ankle-high and muffled the sounds of his own footfalls. Twice only
were those walls broken by round openings, but when he swung the
beam of the torch in, he saw nothing save a bare, circular cell
hardly large enough for a man to crouch in, without any other
opening. The purpose of such rooms—if rooms they could be
called—remained another of the Ruhkarv mysteries.
But their journey was not to continue so easily. The eastern
corridor ended in a huge well, and again a descending ramp faced
them, curving about the side of that opening, narrow enough to make
Troy thoughtful, though the slope was not too steep as far as he
could sight with the torch’s aid. Again the scouts moved
ahead, and there was nothing to do except follow.
As he went down, there was a change in the air—not a
freshness, but a rise of moisture. As the wall against which he
steadied himself from time to time began to grow clammy under his
fingers, he knew that the fox had been right. Somewhere below was a
source of water—a large one, if he could judge by the present
evidence.
As the moisture content grew, he was aware of a fetid under
scent—not exactly the stagnant stench of an undrained and
unrenewed pond under the sun, but the hint of something ill about
that water. However, there were trickles of damp on the walls and
his thirst grew.
Around and around—the coiled spring of the ramp inside the
well began to form a dizzying pattern. There was no break here made
by side corridors. Troy lost track of time; his legs ached, and
every bruise on his body added to his punishment. He was sure now
that if he should try to reverse his path and reach the
surface—or even the last corridor from which this drop had
issued—he would not be able to summon up strength enough to
finish. There was only the need to get to the bottom of the well,
out on the level somewhere where he could drop down and rest.
And finally the torch did show him a pavement. Troy reached it
in a long stride and flashed the light about the bottom of the
well. There was water right enough, but—as dry as his mouth
now was, as much as his body cried out for a drink—he could
not bring himself to approach closely that sullenly flowing
runnel.
The water was a ribbon of oily black, looking as thick and
turgid as if the substance were more than half slime, and it moved
with sluggish ripples on its surface from one side of the pit to
the other, filling to within a few inches of the pavement surface a
stone trough that had been constructed to carry it.
The inlet and outlet for that yard-wide flow were large circular
openings—the inlet situated under the rise of the ramp from
the floor. And except for those there was no other way
out—save the ramp down which he had just come. But the black
cat and the foxes were at the mouth of the inflow tunnel, and when
Troy walked to that point, he saw that the tunnel was larger than
the stream at floor level, leaving a narrow path to the right of
the water.
“Out?” he asked, and that single word echoed
hollowly until the boom hurt his ears. The kinkajou chattered
angrily, and the cat in Troy’s hold pressed the good foreleg
hard against his chest and added a protesting wail. But the three
animals before him glanced up and then away again, into the tunnel,
telling him as plainly as with words or the mind touch that this
was indeed the proper exit.
The ripples on the water, as Troy passed along so close to it,
began to take on a rather ominous and sinister significance, and he
wondered just how deep that trough really was, for some of the
ripples went against the current, suggesting action under the dark
surface of the flood—something or things moving independently
against the flow of the water. For an anxious while one such V of
ripples accompanied Troy at his own pace. Time and time again he
paused to flash the torch directly on that disturbance—to
sight nothing in the inky liquid.
That slight fetid odor was growing stronger, yet again he felt a
puff of renewing air, though through what channel in the walls he
could not guess. But the gleam of his torch began to pick up small
answering sparks of light along the walls. From pinpricks scattered
without apparent pattern they grew thicker, set in clusters. And
once, when he turned his head to watch a particularly large and
suspicious line of ripples, Troy saw that those sparks of light
behind him, awakened by the torchlight, did not lose their gleam
but continued as small patches with a bluish glow. He tried the
experiment of snapping the torch off for a moment and looked about
him. Where the atom light had touched, that blue glow remained. But
ahead the way was still dark. Whatever those flecks might be, they
needed the radiance from the light to set them actually
working.
The patches of such light grew larger, and now he thought he
could trace a kind of design—like a sharply peaked
zigzag—in their general setting, which argued that they were
not native to the rock blocks of which these walls were fashioned
but placed there with a purpose by the unknown builders. At last he
was backed by an eerie glow walling in the stream along which he
walked.
His torch found an opening in the wall ahead. The cat awaited
him there, but the foxes were not to be seen. Troy pushed on, eager
to be out of the tunnel and its attendant water channel.
When he came out, he was not in another corridor or
room—but he stepped into what might have once been some vast
underground cavern adapted by the unknown builders of Ruhkarv to
their own peculiar uses. His torch beam was swallowed up by the
vastness of the open expanse and he halted, a little daunted by
what faced him. Here was a city in miniature, open ways running
between walls of separate, roofless enclosures. And yet the
substance of those walls—! It was from here that the fetid
odor had come. He could not be sure, yet somehow he shrank from
putting his guess to the test of actually laying his hand upon one
of those slimily moist surfaces—but it looked at first, and
even after a more careful examination, as if those walls grew out
of the ground, that they were giant slabs of an unknown fungus.
There was an open space of white-gray soil, neither sand nor
gravel but possessing a granular appearance, between the mouth of
the water tunnel and the beginning of the first of those
structures, and Troy was in no hurry to cross it.
“A road around—”
One or all of his guides had picked his feelings of repugnance
out of his mind, and he knew then that they shared it in a
measure.
“Come!” The last was urgent and Troy broke into a
clumsy trot, not sure now just how long he could keep moving at
all. He rounded an outthrust suburb of the fungus town and saw
something else—a shaft of brightness that was so clean, so
much of the world that he knew, that he threw himself toward it,
his trot lengthening into a run.
There was an island of sanity in the midst of what was not of
his world, nor, he suspected, of any human world. From some break
in the arch overhead, through what unknown trick of nature—or
of the architects of this place—he would never know, a shaft
of sun struck here. And there was water, a small pool of it fed by
a runnel through the sand. Clear water with none of the turgid
rolling of the stream that had led them here. Troy put down the
injured cat where it could lap beside its mate, scooped up a
palmful to wet lips and chin as he sucked avidly.
Two, three tiny plants, frail as lace, grew on the bank of that
pool. Troy drank again blissfully and then opened the supply bag,
sharing its contents among his band, taking himself the
concentrates that would give him days of energy.
Was there any other way out of this dead, fungoid world? At the
moment he was too tired to care. With his head pillowed on the food
bag, Troy curled up, weak with exhaustion, aware that the animals
were gathering in about him, as if they, too, distrusted what lay
beyond the circle of sunlight.
Did anything live here? The ripples in the water had been
suggestive. And there might be other creatures to whom the
fungus-walled streets were home. But Troy could no longer summon
the strength to stand guard. He felt the warmth of small furred
bodies pressed against his, and that was the last he
remembered.
Afterwards Troy could recall little of that
crazy falling-leaf descent that threw them from one side of the
pilot’s seat to the other. They were not quite helpless
before the force that had shaken them off course and out of the
sky, for the accident-safety ray had flashed on automatically,
bringing them down to ground level at a speed under that of a
direct crash. Troy fought the controls, beat at the lock with the
full force of his wrists and arms. Something gave and for an
instant or so the flitter was his again. He tried to put the nose
up and the flyer gave a giant hop.
If that action did not win them the sky again, it did carry the
flyer—with the effect of bursting through a taut
curtain—beyond the influence of the thing that had grabbed
them out of the air. Troy felt the flitter wheels strike, bouncing
them up. They flattened off in a second crash, and it was
dark—moon and stars blotted out.
His chest hurt and his head ached. In his mouth was the
unforgettable flat sweet taste of blood. Before him was darkness,
but from behind came a measure of light that he could sight as he
tried to turn his head.
“Out—out—” That was a plea rising to a
kind of frenzy. Troy could feel movement beside him, back and forth
across his bruised body until he grunted with pain.
Somehow he forced up his left arm, worked at the catch of the
cabin door, lunging against that stubborn barrier with the strength
of his shoulder. The panel gave, tumbling him out, and small paws
thudded on him as their owners raced into the open.
Troy pulled himself up and tried to see where they had come to
earth. Under him the surface of the ground seemed singularly
smooth. His hand, questing over it, scraped up the grit of sand
that lay in a drifted skim on stone or rock, very level stone or
rock. As he twisted fully around, he could see the shaft of
moonlight better. Behind—yes—the flitter had in some
incredible way fitted itself nose first into a crevice where an
arch of roof shut off the sky.
Troy worked his way around the wreckage to the light. But it was
after he had crawled those few feet that he realized what had
happened and how chance, the protective device of the Clans, and
his own last-moment attempt to control the flitter had landed them
in an unusual hiding place. Those rounded domes and crumbling
walls, blind of any window or door opening were set deep in the
sand of a desert waste. He had crashed straight into the heart of
Ruhkarv itself!
“Where—?” He tried to summon the
animals—and since he had no names to call, he pictured them
mentally. The cats, black and gray-blue, the foxes, russet and
cream, the kinkajou, where were they? Hurt? Still about?
“Come—come back!” He called softly aloud,
heard odd echoes reply from the ruins about. Outside now, he could
look around, see how the flyer had nosed into a dome that had a
crumbled opening in one side.
A shadow leaped from one of the broken arches, pattered to him.
The kinkajou had answered his call. It leaped to his shoulder,
coiling its flexible tail about his upper arm in a grip tight
enough to pinch. Troy reached up his other hand, caressed the round
head butting against his cheek.
Then the foxes returned in a swift lope, stopping before him,
their pointed noses up, testing the wind, their eyes agleam.
“Come,” Troy coaxed the cats. When there was no
answer, he detached the kinkajou, started back into the dome cave
to explore the wreck. In the pocket of the door he had wrenched
open he found an atom torch and thumbed its button. The cone of
light made clear the nose of the flyer embedded in the space of the
dome as a too thick thread might have been forced into the eye of a
needle.
Troy flashed the light into the machine and then stood very
still as he saw a small limp body. Blue eyes wide with pain were
raised to his. The gray-blue cat lay flat, its mouth open, panting.
Now and again it licked a foreleg that was clamped tight between
two buckled pieces of metal. Above it crouched its black mate, who,
upon seeing Troy, uttered a series of sharp, demanding cries.
Setting down the torch, Troy went to work to free the delicate
leg. Then he carried the cat into the open, placing it on the
ground until he could salvage the aid kit of the flyer.
By the time the first thin streaks of false dawn were in the
sky, he had done what he could. The leg had been set and treated.
He had dragged out of the flitter the food bag, the stunner, and
some of the kit tools, which he festooned from his own belt. As
time had passed and no one had invaded the forbidden area of the
ruins to gather them up prisoners. Troy began to believe that they
had been brought down by some automatic guard device and that on
foot they still had a chance to escape capture. But whether the
Clans had set other guards about Ruhkarv, which might now keep them
inside, he did not know.
The foxes and the black cat melted into the shadows, leaving
Troy to his collection of equipment. Only the kinkajou remained to
watch and at last to come to his aid, dragging small objects from
the wrecked flyer to pile by the dome. Troy sat back on his heels.
He had been so busy that he had not had time to consider the future
further than the next job to be done, for he had been driven by a
sense of working against time.
“Wall—wall that cannot be seen—” The
black cat stepped out from a neighboring dome and came directly to
the man.
“Wall around here?” Troy’s hand swept in a
gesture to indicate the ruins.
“Yes. We have tried to cross many places.”
One of Troy’s fears had materialized. The Clans must have
set a barrier about Ruhkarv. Intended to bar interlopers, it would
make him and the animals prisoners within. How he had managed to
pierce it with the flitter was a mystery.
“There are many dens—maybe hunting in
them—”
One of the foxes drifted into the open. The cat had gone to its
injured mate, was licking its head caressingly.
“Danger underground here.” Troy countered that half
suggestion from the prick-eared scout.
“Not now.” The report was emphatic and Troy
wondered. Before Fauklow’s expedition with the recaller had
turned the name of Ruhkarv into a synonym for nightmare, the upper
galleries of the strange city or structure had been explored with
impunity by a handful of the curious. If it had been only the
action of the recaller that had damned the place—well, the
rangers had put an end to the machine’s broadcasts, according
to Rerne, and the undersurface passages might give the fugitives
shelter for a time. He would have to have some rest, Troy knew, and
perhaps here in the heart of a forbidden territory they had found
temporary safety after all.
“We go then—to a safe den.”
With the food bag over his shoulder, the injured cat held as
comfortably as he could manage against his chest, and the stunner
ready in his free hand, Troy moved out. The kinkajou rode on his
shoulder, making small twittering noises and now and then patting
its two-legged steed with a forepaw as if to make Troy continually
aware of its presence. The foxes and the black cat guided him to
another dome, in which a large segment of wall had been cut through
in the past, either by one of the early treasure seekers or by the
ill-fated Fauklow men.
All the fantastic tales that had been told of this place were
peopling the dusk Troy faced with a myriad of nightmares, but the
readiness of the animals to explore was his insurance. Troy knew
that their senses were far keener and more to be relied upon than
his own, and that they would give warning of any trouble ahead. He
snapped on the atom torch he had slung from his belt, watched the
cone of light bob and wave across flooring and walls as it swung to
the rhythm of his walk.
There was nothing to be seen but walls and a pavement of blocks,
fitted together with precision and skill. At the far side of the
dome was the dark mouth of a ramp leading down into the real
Ruhkarv. That murk had a quality close to fog, Troy
thought—as if the dark itself swirled about with independent
motion. And even the atom light was sapped, weakened by it. Yet the
lead fox had already padded down into those depths, and its mate
and the cat were waiting for Troy almost impatiently.
“This is a place where there has been great danger,”
Troy warned, combining words with the mental reach.
“Nothing here—” He was sure that impatient
overtone came from the black cat.
“Nothing here,” Troy repeated even as his boots
clicked on that sloping length of stone, “but perhaps farther
on—”
“There is water.”
Troy was startled at that confident interruption. They had the
supplies from the flitter, but the problem of water had nagged at
him. If somewhere within this maze the animals had located water,
they were even better provided for than he had dared to hope.
“Where?”
“We go—”
The ramp carried him down through three levels of side
corridors, all empty as far as the beams of the atom light could
disclose, all exactly alike, so that Troy began to think a man
might well become lost in such a place without a guide. And he
tried to set his own entrance path in his head, memorizing each
corridor by counting.
Somewhere there must be an unseen air system, for the
atmosphere, though dry and acrid, remained breathable, and he was
sure that now and then from one of the offshoot corridors he
scented a whiff of some fresh import from the surface.
At the fourth level, though the ramp continued on to Korwarian
depths, Troy found the three scouts waiting for him. And now,
unless his sense of direction was completely bemused, they took a
way that headed directly east. For a moment he dared to wonder if
some one of these long hallways might not take them outside the
range of the blocking-wave wall so that they could emerge free in
the Wild.
Stark walls of red-gray stone, paved footing—nothing else,
save the fine sifting of centuries of dust, which arose almost
ankle-high and muffled the sounds of his own footfalls. Twice only
were those walls broken by round openings, but when he swung the
beam of the torch in, he saw nothing save a bare, circular cell
hardly large enough for a man to crouch in, without any other
opening. The purpose of such rooms—if rooms they could be
called—remained another of the Ruhkarv mysteries.
But their journey was not to continue so easily. The eastern
corridor ended in a huge well, and again a descending ramp faced
them, curving about the side of that opening, narrow enough to make
Troy thoughtful, though the slope was not too steep as far as he
could sight with the torch’s aid. Again the scouts moved
ahead, and there was nothing to do except follow.
As he went down, there was a change in the air—not a
freshness, but a rise of moisture. As the wall against which he
steadied himself from time to time began to grow clammy under his
fingers, he knew that the fox had been right. Somewhere below was a
source of water—a large one, if he could judge by the present
evidence.
As the moisture content grew, he was aware of a fetid under
scent—not exactly the stagnant stench of an undrained and
unrenewed pond under the sun, but the hint of something ill about
that water. However, there were trickles of damp on the walls and
his thirst grew.
Around and around—the coiled spring of the ramp inside the
well began to form a dizzying pattern. There was no break here made
by side corridors. Troy lost track of time; his legs ached, and
every bruise on his body added to his punishment. He was sure now
that if he should try to reverse his path and reach the
surface—or even the last corridor from which this drop had
issued—he would not be able to summon up strength enough to
finish. There was only the need to get to the bottom of the well,
out on the level somewhere where he could drop down and rest.
And finally the torch did show him a pavement. Troy reached it
in a long stride and flashed the light about the bottom of the
well. There was water right enough, but—as dry as his mouth
now was, as much as his body cried out for a drink—he could
not bring himself to approach closely that sullenly flowing
runnel.
The water was a ribbon of oily black, looking as thick and
turgid as if the substance were more than half slime, and it moved
with sluggish ripples on its surface from one side of the pit to
the other, filling to within a few inches of the pavement surface a
stone trough that had been constructed to carry it.
The inlet and outlet for that yard-wide flow were large circular
openings—the inlet situated under the rise of the ramp from
the floor. And except for those there was no other way
out—save the ramp down which he had just come. But the black
cat and the foxes were at the mouth of the inflow tunnel, and when
Troy walked to that point, he saw that the tunnel was larger than
the stream at floor level, leaving a narrow path to the right of
the water.
“Out?” he asked, and that single word echoed
hollowly until the boom hurt his ears. The kinkajou chattered
angrily, and the cat in Troy’s hold pressed the good foreleg
hard against his chest and added a protesting wail. But the three
animals before him glanced up and then away again, into the tunnel,
telling him as plainly as with words or the mind touch that this
was indeed the proper exit.
The ripples on the water, as Troy passed along so close to it,
began to take on a rather ominous and sinister significance, and he
wondered just how deep that trough really was, for some of the
ripples went against the current, suggesting action under the dark
surface of the flood—something or things moving independently
against the flow of the water. For an anxious while one such V of
ripples accompanied Troy at his own pace. Time and time again he
paused to flash the torch directly on that disturbance—to
sight nothing in the inky liquid.
That slight fetid odor was growing stronger, yet again he felt a
puff of renewing air, though through what channel in the walls he
could not guess. But the gleam of his torch began to pick up small
answering sparks of light along the walls. From pinpricks scattered
without apparent pattern they grew thicker, set in clusters. And
once, when he turned his head to watch a particularly large and
suspicious line of ripples, Troy saw that those sparks of light
behind him, awakened by the torchlight, did not lose their gleam
but continued as small patches with a bluish glow. He tried the
experiment of snapping the torch off for a moment and looked about
him. Where the atom light had touched, that blue glow remained. But
ahead the way was still dark. Whatever those flecks might be, they
needed the radiance from the light to set them actually
working.
The patches of such light grew larger, and now he thought he
could trace a kind of design—like a sharply peaked
zigzag—in their general setting, which argued that they were
not native to the rock blocks of which these walls were fashioned
but placed there with a purpose by the unknown builders. At last he
was backed by an eerie glow walling in the stream along which he
walked.
His torch found an opening in the wall ahead. The cat awaited
him there, but the foxes were not to be seen. Troy pushed on, eager
to be out of the tunnel and its attendant water channel.
When he came out, he was not in another corridor or
room—but he stepped into what might have once been some vast
underground cavern adapted by the unknown builders of Ruhkarv to
their own peculiar uses. His torch beam was swallowed up by the
vastness of the open expanse and he halted, a little daunted by
what faced him. Here was a city in miniature, open ways running
between walls of separate, roofless enclosures. And yet the
substance of those walls—! It was from here that the fetid
odor had come. He could not be sure, yet somehow he shrank from
putting his guess to the test of actually laying his hand upon one
of those slimily moist surfaces—but it looked at first, and
even after a more careful examination, as if those walls grew out
of the ground, that they were giant slabs of an unknown fungus.
There was an open space of white-gray soil, neither sand nor
gravel but possessing a granular appearance, between the mouth of
the water tunnel and the beginning of the first of those
structures, and Troy was in no hurry to cross it.
“A road around—”
One or all of his guides had picked his feelings of repugnance
out of his mind, and he knew then that they shared it in a
measure.
“Come!” The last was urgent and Troy broke into a
clumsy trot, not sure now just how long he could keep moving at
all. He rounded an outthrust suburb of the fungus town and saw
something else—a shaft of brightness that was so clean, so
much of the world that he knew, that he threw himself toward it,
his trot lengthening into a run.
There was an island of sanity in the midst of what was not of
his world, nor, he suspected, of any human world. From some break
in the arch overhead, through what unknown trick of nature—or
of the architects of this place—he would never know, a shaft
of sun struck here. And there was water, a small pool of it fed by
a runnel through the sand. Clear water with none of the turgid
rolling of the stream that had led them here. Troy put down the
injured cat where it could lap beside its mate, scooped up a
palmful to wet lips and chin as he sucked avidly.
Two, three tiny plants, frail as lace, grew on the bank of that
pool. Troy drank again blissfully and then opened the supply bag,
sharing its contents among his band, taking himself the
concentrates that would give him days of energy.
Was there any other way out of this dead, fungoid world? At the
moment he was too tired to care. With his head pillowed on the food
bag, Troy curled up, weak with exhaustion, aware that the animals
were gathering in about him, as if they, too, distrusted what lay
beyond the circle of sunlight.
Did anything live here? The ripples in the water had been
suggestive. And there might be other creatures to whom the
fungus-walled streets were home. But Troy could no longer summon
the strength to stand guard. He felt the warmth of small furred
bodies pressed against his, and that was the last he
remembered.