"YOU’VE DONE IT!” Dane cried to Mura as Kosti
tore at the opening, forcing it larger—the door resisting as
if it had not moved for a long time.
“This isn’t the right way,” the jetman
protested even as he pushed.
“Not the corridor, no,” agreed Mura. “But this
is a way out of our present trap and as such it is not to
be despised. Also it is not one in general use, or so I would judge
by its stubbornness. Therefore, an even better path for us. I must
have hit upon a rarer sonic combination—” He wiped the
tiny pipe carefully and put it away.
Though Kosti forced the door open as wide as it would go, the
resulting entrance was a narrow one. Mura negotiated it without
trouble, but Dane and the jetman had to squeeze. And for one
dangerous moment it seemed that the latter might not be able to
make it. Only by shedding his bulky equipment belt and his outdoor
tunic could he scrape by.
They found themselves in a second corridor, one more narrow than
that in which they had been imprisoned. The same grey light glowed
from the walls. But as Dane stepped forward his feet were cushioned
and he looked down to see that his boots stirred fine dust, dust
thick enough to coat the floor an inch or more in depth.
Mura freed his belt torch and sent its beam ahead. Save where
they had disturbed it, that dust was smooth, without track. No one
had walked this way for a long, long time—perhaps not since
the Forerunners had left this mountain citadel.
“Hey!” Kosti’s startled cry drew their
attention. Where the narrow door had been was now once more smooth
wall. Their retreat had been cut off.
”They’ve trapped us again!” he added hoarsely.
But Mura shook his head.
“I think not. There is perhaps some closing mechanism that
operates automatically, which we activated merely by passing it. No
one uses this passage—or hasn’t for years. I am willing
to believe that Rich and the others do not even know of its
existence. Let us see where it will lead us.” He pattered
ahead eagerly.
The corridor paralleled for a space that wider hall which had
been turned into a trap. Its smooth walls showed no other hint of
openings. There might be innumerable doors along it, all attuned to
some combination of whistled notes, Dane thought, but they had
neither the time nor the energy to explore that possibility.
“Air—”
Dane did not need that exclamation from Mura—he had
already scented it. Cutting across the dusty, dead atmosphere of
the way was a breath of stronger air—a puff which carried
with it the chill of the outer world, and a very faint hint of
growing stuff which out in the open might not have been discernible
at all.
The three reached the point from which that came, and found an
opening in the wall. Beyond, audible above the beat of the
installation, was a rushing sound. Dane thrust his hand out into
the square of dark and the current of air, blowing as if sucked in
by the mountain, pulled gently at his fingers.
“Ventilation
system,” Kosti’s engineering knowledge was intrigued.
He put head and shoulders into the opening. “Big enough to
travel through,” he reported after using his torch up and
down the channel beyond.
“Something to keep in mind,” Mura agreed. “But
first let us get to the end of this particular way.”
In twenty minutes they got to the end, another blank wall. Kosti
was not disheartened this time.
“Bring out the tootler, Frank,” was his solution,
“and open her up for us—”
But Mura did not reach for the pipe. Instead he swept his torch carefully over the wall. This was not the smooth material
of the Forerunners’ work, but the rough native stone of the
mountain.
“I do not think that this will respond to any
tootling,” he remarked. “This is the end of the road
and it is truly sealed—”
“But a passage should lead somewhere!” Dane
protested.
“Yes. Undoubtedly there are many openings we cannot see.
And we do not know the sonic combinations to unlock them. I do not
think it wise to waste tune trying to find any such. Let us return
to that air duct. If it supplies a series of passages it may let us
out into another one—”
So they went back to the duct. As Kosti had said, it was large,
large enough that the jetman and Dane might travel it—if they
went on hands and knees. And it lacked the dust which carpeted the
side passage.
One after another they swung into it, and into the dark as they
moved from the entrance. For here was none of the ghostly radiance
which gave limited light to the corridors.
Mura crawled first, his torch beaming on. They were in a tube of
generous proportions and around them passed air which had come from
the outside. But the steady beat of the installation crept up their
arms and legs from contact with the surface.
The steward switched off his torch. “Light
ahead—” his voice was no more than a husky whisper.
When Dane’s eyes adjusted to the lack of torchlight he saw
it too—a round circle of pale grey. They had found the end of
the vent.
But as they came up to that exit they found themselves fronted
by a grille of metal, a mesh wide enough to allow passage of their
hands through the squares. And beyond it lay a vast open space.
Mura looked through and for the first time since he had known him
Dane heard the unusually calm steward give a gasp of real surprise.
Dane prodded his back suggesting that he and Kosti also wanted to
see.
Mura flattened himself against the wall of the tube so that Dane
could take his place. The space beyond was huge—as if the
whole of a mountain interior had been hollowed out to hold a most curious structure. For, when the cargo-apprentice squirmed
forward he looked down upon the strangest building he had ever
seen.
It was roofless, its outer walls coming up to within six feet of
the ventilation grill. But those walls—they ran crazily at
curves and angles, marking off irregular spaces which bore small
resemblances to ordinary rooms. Corridors began nowhere and ended
in six- or eight-sided chambers without other exit. Or a whole
series of rooms were linked—for no purpose since the end ones
possessed neither entrance nor exit.
The walls were thick, at least three feet wide. A man could swing down and walk along them, so discovering the purpose
of the muddled maze, or winning completely across the cave. And since there was no way back for them, that is what the
Terrans must do. Dane inched back to allow Kosti his turn at the
grille.
With a grunt of surprise the jetman viewed the weird scene. “What’s it for?” he wanted to know. “It
doesn’t make sense—”
“Maybe not our brand of sense, no,” Mura agreed.
“But the solidity of the work suggests a very definite purpose. No
one builds such erections for a mere whim.”
Dane reached over Kosti’s shoulder to pull at the grille.
“We’ll have to get through this—”
“Yes, and then what?” the jetman wanted to know.
“Do we grow wings?”
“We can get down to the top of that wall. They’re
wide enough to walk on. So we can get across on
them—”
Kosti was very quiet. Then his big hands went out to the grille,
testing the fastenings. “Take a while to get this
loose.” From his belt he took his small tool kit and busied
himself about the frame of the netting.
They ate while they crouched there, rations from their emergency
kits. Since the grey light of the cave neither waxed nor waned,
there was no measurement of time save as recorded on their watches.
It might have been the middle of the night—their time
keepers said it was afternoon.
Kosti gulped his vita-cube and went back to work on the grille.
It was well into the second hour before he put away his tools.
“Now!” he pushed gently at the grille and it folded
out, leaving the end of the tube open. But he did not swing through
as Dane expected. Instead he crawled back and allowed the others to
pass him. Mura thrust his head through the opening and then looked
back at Dane.
“I shall have to have help to reach the wall. I am too
short—”
He held out his hands and Dane clamped a hold about his wrists.
Mura backed cautiously out of the vent and for a moment his weight
pulled Dane forward. In that same instant the younger man felt
Kosti’s grip about his hips giving him the anchorage he
needed as he lowered the steward to the wall.
“Made it!” Mura trotted several feet to the right on
the wall and stood waiting.
Dane turned to lower himself to the same level.
“Good luck!” Kosti said out of the shadows. Instead
of crouching ready to follow, the jetman had moved back in the
tube.
“What do you mean?” Dane asked, chilled by something
in the other’s attitude.
“You’ve got to go this next stretch by yourselves,
fella,” Kosti returned calmly enough. “I haven’t
any head for heights. I can’t balance along on those walls
down there—two steps and I’d be over the
edge.”
Dane had forgotten the big man’s disability. But what were
they going to do? The only way out of here lay across the maze of
walls, a maze Kosti could not tread. On the other hand they could
not leave the jetman here.
“Listen, boy,” Kosti continued. “You two will
have to go on. I’ll stay right here. If there is a way out
and you find it, well, then maybe I can make it. But, until you are
sure, there’s no use in my going along to foul you up.
That’s only good sense—”
Maybe it was good sense, but Dane could not accept it. However,
a moment later he had no chance to protest. Kosti’s hands
were iron about his wrists, the jetman pushed him to the edge of
the duct and thrust him through, dangling him until his boots
scraped the wall. Then Kosti let go.
“Kosti won’t come—He says he can’t make
it!”
Mura nodded. “To walk these—” he indicated the
maze of walls, “would be impossible for him now. But if we
can find a way out—then we can return and guide him. We will
move faster alone, and Karl knows that—”
Still feeling as if he were deserting Kosti, Dane reluctantly
followed the steward, who picked a cat’s sure-footed way along
the wall out into the scrambled pattern beyond. The walls were
about twenty feet high and the rooms and corridors they formed were
bare of any furnishings. There were no signs that anyone had been
there for centuries. That is, there was not, until Mura gave a
sudden exclamation and aimed the beam of his torch down into a
narrow room.
Dane crowded up beside him to see it, too, a tangle of white
bones, a skull staring hollow-eyed back at them. The maze had had
an inhabitant once, one who remained for eternity.
Mura swung the beam in slow circles about the skeleton. There
were some dark rags of clothing, and the light glimmered back at
them from a buckle of untarnished metal.
“A prisoner,” said the steward slowly. “A man
shut into this could wander perhaps forever and never find his way
out—”
“You mean that he has been here
since—since—” Dane could not name the stretch of
time which had elapsed since the destruction of the city, the
burn-off of Limbo.
“I think not. This one, he was human—like us. He has
been here a long time certainly, but not so long as it has been
since the builders left this maze. Others have found it, and a use
for so puzzling a structure.”
Now as they went from one wall to the next, twisting and
turning, but always aiming at the centre of the maze, they kept
careful watch for other remains in the sections below. The whole
space filled with this curious honey-comb erection was much larger,
Dane came to realize, than it had appeared from the air duct. There
must be several square miles of plain solid walls crossing,
curving, and crisscrossing to shut in nothing but oddly shaped
emptiness.
“For a reason,” Mura murmured. “This must have
a purpose, been made for a reason—but why? The geometry is
wrong—as were the lines of the buildings in the city. This is Forerunner
work. But why—why should they conceive such a
thing?”
“For a prison?” Dane suggested. “Put someone
in here and they would never get out. Prison and execution chamber
in one.”
“No,” Mura shook his head. “It is too large an
undertaking—men do not go to such lengths to handle their
criminals. There are shorter and less arduous methods for imposing
justice.”
“But the Forerunners may not have been
‘men’.”
“Not our kind of ‘men’, perhaps. But what do
we mean by the word ‘man’? We use it loosely to mean
an intelligent being, able in part to rule both his environment and
his destiny. Surely the Forerunners were ‘men’ by those
tests. But you cannot lead me to think that they meant this merely
as a prison and place of execution!”
In spite of the fact that they were both surefooted and had a
head for heights, neither hurried on these high narrow ways. Dane
discovered that to stare too much at the passages and the rooms had
an odd effect on his sense of balance and it was necessary to pause
now and then and gaze up into the neutral grey overhead in order to
settle an uneasy stomach. And all the while through the walls there
arose the beat of the mighty machine which must be housed somewhere
within the mountain range of which this maze could be a not
insignificant part. As Mura had pointed out, the geometry of the
place was “wrong” in Terran sight, it produced in the
Traders a sensation which bordered on fear.
They found the second dead man well beyond the first. And this
time their light picked out a tunic with insignia they knew—a Survey man.
“It may not have been built for a prison,” Dane
commented, “but they must be using it for one now.”
“This one has been dead for months,” Mura kept his
light trained on the huddled body. But Dane refused to look again.
“He may have been from the Rimbold—or from some other
lost ship.”
“They could have bagged more than one Survey ship with that infernal machine of theirs. I’ll wager there’re
good lot of wrecks lying about.”
“That is the truth.” Mura arose from his knees.
“And for this poor one we can do no good. Let us
go—”
Only too eager to get away from that mute evidence of an old
tragedy, Dane started on, moving from one wall to the corner of an
adjoining one.
“Wait—!” The steward raised his hand as well
as his voice in that emphatic order.
Obediently Dane halted. The steward’s whole stance
expressed listening. Then Dane too caught that sound, the ring of
boots on stone, space boots with their magnetic sole plates
clicking in an irregular rhythm as if the wearer was reeling as he
ran. Mura listened, then he took a quick turn to the right and
headed back in the general direction from which they had just
come.
The sound died away and Mura quested about like a hunting hound,
making short assays right and left, shining his torch into one
narrow, angled compartment after another.
He was stopping above a section of corridor which ran reasonably
straight when the click of those steps began again. But this tune
they were slower, with intervals between, as if the runner was
almost at the end of his strength. Some other poor devil was
trapped in here—if they could only find him! Dane pushed on
as avidly as Mura.
But in here sound was a tricky guide. The walls echoed, muffled
or broadcast it, so that they could not be sure of anything but the
general direction. They worked their way along, about two sections
apart, flashing the light into each cornered room.
Dane followed his narrow footing halfway around a room which had
six walls, each of a different length, and transferred to the top
of one which was part of a curving hallway. Then he sighted
movement at one of those curves, a figure who lurched forward, one
hand on the wall for support.
“Over here!” he called to the steward.
The man below had come to the end of that hall—another wall—and as he half fell against the obstruction and
slipped to the floor he groaned. Then he lay motionless, face down,
twenty feet below his would-be rescuer. And Dane, eyeing that
perfectly smooth expanse, did not see how they could get down to
offer aid.
Mura ran lightly up the narrow footpath as if he had spent all
his life travelling maze walls. His circle of light touched
Dane’s as they spotlighted the body.
There was no mistaking the ripped tunic of their Service. The
captive was a trader—one of their own. They did not know
whether he was aware of their torches, but suddenly he moaned and
rolled over on his back, exposing a face cut and bruised, the
result of a skilful and brutal beating. Dane might not have been
able to recognize him but Mura was certain.
“Ali!”
Perhaps Kamil heard that, or perhaps it was just his steel will
which roused him. He moaned again and then uttered some
undistinguishable words through torn lips as his puffed and swollen
eyes turned up towards them.
“Ali—” Mura called. “We are here. Can
you attend—do you understand?”
Kamil’s blackened face was up, he forced out coherent
words. “Who—? Can’t see!”
“Mura, Thorson,” the steward identified them
crisply. “You are hurt?”
“Can’t see. Lost—Hungry—”
“How are we going to get down?” Dane wanted to
know. If they only had the ropes which had linked them to the
crawler in the fog! But those were behind and there were no
substitutes.
Mura unhooked his belt. “Your belt and
mine—”
“They aren’t long enough, even together!”
“No, not in themselves, but we shall see—”
Dane shed his belt and watched the steward buckle it end to end
with his own. Then the smaller man spoke to Thorson.
“You must lower me. Can you do it?”
Dane looked about doubtfully. The wall top was smooth and bare
of anything in the way of an anchor. If he couldn’t take
the weight of the steward he would be jerked over and they would
both fall. But there was no other way.
“Do my best—” He lay belly down on the wall,
hooking the toes of his boots on either side and thrusting his left
arm out and down into the neighbouring room. Mura had drawn his
blaster and was making careful adjustments to its barrel.
“Here I go—” With the blaster in one hand the
steward swung over, his other fist twisted in the rope of linked
belts. Dane held on grimly in spite of the tearing wrench in his
shoulders.
He blinked and ducked his head at a sudden flash of burning
fire. The fumes of blaster fire assaulted his throat and nose and
he understood at last what Mura was attempting. The steward was
burning out hand and foot holds in the smooth surface of the wall
as he descended, cutting a ladder to reach Ali.
"YOU’VE DONE IT!” Dane cried to Mura as Kosti
tore at the opening, forcing it larger—the door resisting as
if it had not moved for a long time.
“This isn’t the right way,” the jetman
protested even as he pushed.
“Not the corridor, no,” agreed Mura. “But this
is a way out of our present trap and as such it is not to
be despised. Also it is not one in general use, or so I would judge
by its stubbornness. Therefore, an even better path for us. I must
have hit upon a rarer sonic combination—” He wiped the
tiny pipe carefully and put it away.
Though Kosti forced the door open as wide as it would go, the
resulting entrance was a narrow one. Mura negotiated it without
trouble, but Dane and the jetman had to squeeze. And for one
dangerous moment it seemed that the latter might not be able to
make it. Only by shedding his bulky equipment belt and his outdoor
tunic could he scrape by.
They found themselves in a second corridor, one more narrow than
that in which they had been imprisoned. The same grey light glowed
from the walls. But as Dane stepped forward his feet were cushioned
and he looked down to see that his boots stirred fine dust, dust
thick enough to coat the floor an inch or more in depth.
Mura freed his belt torch and sent its beam ahead. Save where
they had disturbed it, that dust was smooth, without track. No one
had walked this way for a long, long time—perhaps not since
the Forerunners had left this mountain citadel.
“Hey!” Kosti’s startled cry drew their
attention. Where the narrow door had been was now once more smooth
wall. Their retreat had been cut off.
”They’ve trapped us again!” he added hoarsely.
But Mura shook his head.
“I think not. There is perhaps some closing mechanism that
operates automatically, which we activated merely by passing it. No
one uses this passage—or hasn’t for years. I am willing
to believe that Rich and the others do not even know of its
existence. Let us see where it will lead us.” He pattered
ahead eagerly.
The corridor paralleled for a space that wider hall which had
been turned into a trap. Its smooth walls showed no other hint of
openings. There might be innumerable doors along it, all attuned to
some combination of whistled notes, Dane thought, but they had
neither the time nor the energy to explore that possibility.
“Air—”
Dane did not need that exclamation from Mura—he had
already scented it. Cutting across the dusty, dead atmosphere of
the way was a breath of stronger air—a puff which carried
with it the chill of the outer world, and a very faint hint of
growing stuff which out in the open might not have been discernible
at all.
The three reached the point from which that came, and found an
opening in the wall. Beyond, audible above the beat of the
installation, was a rushing sound. Dane thrust his hand out into
the square of dark and the current of air, blowing as if sucked in
by the mountain, pulled gently at his fingers.
“Ventilation
system,” Kosti’s engineering knowledge was intrigued.
He put head and shoulders into the opening. “Big enough to
travel through,” he reported after using his torch up and
down the channel beyond.
“Something to keep in mind,” Mura agreed. “But
first let us get to the end of this particular way.”
In twenty minutes they got to the end, another blank wall. Kosti
was not disheartened this time.
“Bring out the tootler, Frank,” was his solution,
“and open her up for us—”
But Mura did not reach for the pipe. Instead he swept his torch carefully over the wall. This was not the smooth material
of the Forerunners’ work, but the rough native stone of the
mountain.
“I do not think that this will respond to any
tootling,” he remarked. “This is the end of the road
and it is truly sealed—”
“But a passage should lead somewhere!” Dane
protested.
“Yes. Undoubtedly there are many openings we cannot see.
And we do not know the sonic combinations to unlock them. I do not
think it wise to waste tune trying to find any such. Let us return
to that air duct. If it supplies a series of passages it may let us
out into another one—”
So they went back to the duct. As Kosti had said, it was large,
large enough that the jetman and Dane might travel it—if they
went on hands and knees. And it lacked the dust which carpeted the
side passage.
One after another they swung into it, and into the dark as they
moved from the entrance. For here was none of the ghostly radiance
which gave limited light to the corridors.
Mura crawled first, his torch beaming on. They were in a tube of
generous proportions and around them passed air which had come from
the outside. But the steady beat of the installation crept up their
arms and legs from contact with the surface.
The steward switched off his torch. “Light
ahead—” his voice was no more than a husky whisper.
When Dane’s eyes adjusted to the lack of torchlight he saw
it too—a round circle of pale grey. They had found the end of
the vent.
But as they came up to that exit they found themselves fronted
by a grille of metal, a mesh wide enough to allow passage of their
hands through the squares. And beyond it lay a vast open space.
Mura looked through and for the first time since he had known him
Dane heard the unusually calm steward give a gasp of real surprise.
Dane prodded his back suggesting that he and Kosti also wanted to
see.
Mura flattened himself against the wall of the tube so that Dane
could take his place. The space beyond was huge—as if the
whole of a mountain interior had been hollowed out to hold a most curious structure. For, when the cargo-apprentice squirmed
forward he looked down upon the strangest building he had ever
seen.
It was roofless, its outer walls coming up to within six feet of
the ventilation grill. But those walls—they ran crazily at
curves and angles, marking off irregular spaces which bore small
resemblances to ordinary rooms. Corridors began nowhere and ended
in six- or eight-sided chambers without other exit. Or a whole
series of rooms were linked—for no purpose since the end ones
possessed neither entrance nor exit.
The walls were thick, at least three feet wide. A man could swing down and walk along them, so discovering the purpose
of the muddled maze, or winning completely across the cave. And since there was no way back for them, that is what the
Terrans must do. Dane inched back to allow Kosti his turn at the
grille.
With a grunt of surprise the jetman viewed the weird scene. “What’s it for?” he wanted to know. “It
doesn’t make sense—”
“Maybe not our brand of sense, no,” Mura agreed.
“But the solidity of the work suggests a very definite purpose. No
one builds such erections for a mere whim.”
Dane reached over Kosti’s shoulder to pull at the grille.
“We’ll have to get through this—”
“Yes, and then what?” the jetman wanted to know.
“Do we grow wings?”
“We can get down to the top of that wall. They’re
wide enough to walk on. So we can get across on
them—”
Kosti was very quiet. Then his big hands went out to the grille,
testing the fastenings. “Take a while to get this
loose.” From his belt he took his small tool kit and busied
himself about the frame of the netting.
They ate while they crouched there, rations from their emergency
kits. Since the grey light of the cave neither waxed nor waned,
there was no measurement of time save as recorded on their watches.
It might have been the middle of the night—their time
keepers said it was afternoon.
Kosti gulped his vita-cube and went back to work on the grille.
It was well into the second hour before he put away his tools.
“Now!” he pushed gently at the grille and it folded
out, leaving the end of the tube open. But he did not swing through
as Dane expected. Instead he crawled back and allowed the others to
pass him. Mura thrust his head through the opening and then looked
back at Dane.
“I shall have to have help to reach the wall. I am too
short—”
He held out his hands and Dane clamped a hold about his wrists.
Mura backed cautiously out of the vent and for a moment his weight
pulled Dane forward. In that same instant the younger man felt
Kosti’s grip about his hips giving him the anchorage he
needed as he lowered the steward to the wall.
“Made it!” Mura trotted several feet to the right on
the wall and stood waiting.
Dane turned to lower himself to the same level.
“Good luck!” Kosti said out of the shadows. Instead
of crouching ready to follow, the jetman had moved back in the
tube.
“What do you mean?” Dane asked, chilled by something
in the other’s attitude.
“You’ve got to go this next stretch by yourselves,
fella,” Kosti returned calmly enough. “I haven’t
any head for heights. I can’t balance along on those walls
down there—two steps and I’d be over the
edge.”
Dane had forgotten the big man’s disability. But what were
they going to do? The only way out of here lay across the maze of
walls, a maze Kosti could not tread. On the other hand they could
not leave the jetman here.
“Listen, boy,” Kosti continued. “You two will
have to go on. I’ll stay right here. If there is a way out
and you find it, well, then maybe I can make it. But, until you are
sure, there’s no use in my going along to foul you up.
That’s only good sense—”
Maybe it was good sense, but Dane could not accept it. However,
a moment later he had no chance to protest. Kosti’s hands
were iron about his wrists, the jetman pushed him to the edge of
the duct and thrust him through, dangling him until his boots
scraped the wall. Then Kosti let go.
“Kosti won’t come—He says he can’t make
it!”
Mura nodded. “To walk these—” he indicated the
maze of walls, “would be impossible for him now. But if we
can find a way out—then we can return and guide him. We will
move faster alone, and Karl knows that—”
Still feeling as if he were deserting Kosti, Dane reluctantly
followed the steward, who picked a cat’s sure-footed way along
the wall out into the scrambled pattern beyond. The walls were
about twenty feet high and the rooms and corridors they formed were
bare of any furnishings. There were no signs that anyone had been
there for centuries. That is, there was not, until Mura gave a
sudden exclamation and aimed the beam of his torch down into a
narrow room.
Dane crowded up beside him to see it, too, a tangle of white
bones, a skull staring hollow-eyed back at them. The maze had had
an inhabitant once, one who remained for eternity.
Mura swung the beam in slow circles about the skeleton. There
were some dark rags of clothing, and the light glimmered back at
them from a buckle of untarnished metal.
“A prisoner,” said the steward slowly. “A man
shut into this could wander perhaps forever and never find his way
out—”
“You mean that he has been here
since—since—” Dane could not name the stretch of
time which had elapsed since the destruction of the city, the
burn-off of Limbo.
“I think not. This one, he was human—like us. He has
been here a long time certainly, but not so long as it has been
since the builders left this maze. Others have found it, and a use
for so puzzling a structure.”
Now as they went from one wall to the next, twisting and
turning, but always aiming at the centre of the maze, they kept
careful watch for other remains in the sections below. The whole
space filled with this curious honey-comb erection was much larger,
Dane came to realize, than it had appeared from the air duct. There
must be several square miles of plain solid walls crossing,
curving, and crisscrossing to shut in nothing but oddly shaped
emptiness.
“For a reason,” Mura murmured. “This must have
a purpose, been made for a reason—but why? The geometry is
wrong—as were the lines of the buildings in the city. This is Forerunner
work. But why—why should they conceive such a
thing?”
“For a prison?” Dane suggested. “Put someone
in here and they would never get out. Prison and execution chamber
in one.”
“No,” Mura shook his head. “It is too large an
undertaking—men do not go to such lengths to handle their
criminals. There are shorter and less arduous methods for imposing
justice.”
“But the Forerunners may not have been
‘men’.”
“Not our kind of ‘men’, perhaps. But what do
we mean by the word ‘man’? We use it loosely to mean
an intelligent being, able in part to rule both his environment and
his destiny. Surely the Forerunners were ‘men’ by those
tests. But you cannot lead me to think that they meant this merely
as a prison and place of execution!”
In spite of the fact that they were both surefooted and had a
head for heights, neither hurried on these high narrow ways. Dane
discovered that to stare too much at the passages and the rooms had
an odd effect on his sense of balance and it was necessary to pause
now and then and gaze up into the neutral grey overhead in order to
settle an uneasy stomach. And all the while through the walls there
arose the beat of the mighty machine which must be housed somewhere
within the mountain range of which this maze could be a not
insignificant part. As Mura had pointed out, the geometry of the
place was “wrong” in Terran sight, it produced in the
Traders a sensation which bordered on fear.
They found the second dead man well beyond the first. And this
time their light picked out a tunic with insignia they knew—a Survey man.
“It may not have been built for a prison,” Dane
commented, “but they must be using it for one now.”
“This one has been dead for months,” Mura kept his
light trained on the huddled body. But Dane refused to look again.
“He may have been from the Rimbold—or from some other
lost ship.”
“They could have bagged more than one Survey ship with that infernal machine of theirs. I’ll wager there’re
good lot of wrecks lying about.”
“That is the truth.” Mura arose from his knees.
“And for this poor one we can do no good. Let us
go—”
Only too eager to get away from that mute evidence of an old
tragedy, Dane started on, moving from one wall to the corner of an
adjoining one.
“Wait—!” The steward raised his hand as well
as his voice in that emphatic order.
Obediently Dane halted. The steward’s whole stance
expressed listening. Then Dane too caught that sound, the ring of
boots on stone, space boots with their magnetic sole plates
clicking in an irregular rhythm as if the wearer was reeling as he
ran. Mura listened, then he took a quick turn to the right and
headed back in the general direction from which they had just
come.
The sound died away and Mura quested about like a hunting hound,
making short assays right and left, shining his torch into one
narrow, angled compartment after another.
He was stopping above a section of corridor which ran reasonably
straight when the click of those steps began again. But this tune
they were slower, with intervals between, as if the runner was
almost at the end of his strength. Some other poor devil was
trapped in here—if they could only find him! Dane pushed on
as avidly as Mura.
But in here sound was a tricky guide. The walls echoed, muffled
or broadcast it, so that they could not be sure of anything but the
general direction. They worked their way along, about two sections
apart, flashing the light into each cornered room.
Dane followed his narrow footing halfway around a room which had
six walls, each of a different length, and transferred to the top
of one which was part of a curving hallway. Then he sighted
movement at one of those curves, a figure who lurched forward, one
hand on the wall for support.
“Over here!” he called to the steward.
The man below had come to the end of that hall—another wall—and as he half fell against the obstruction and
slipped to the floor he groaned. Then he lay motionless, face down,
twenty feet below his would-be rescuer. And Dane, eyeing that
perfectly smooth expanse, did not see how they could get down to
offer aid.
Mura ran lightly up the narrow footpath as if he had spent all
his life travelling maze walls. His circle of light touched
Dane’s as they spotlighted the body.
There was no mistaking the ripped tunic of their Service. The
captive was a trader—one of their own. They did not know
whether he was aware of their torches, but suddenly he moaned and
rolled over on his back, exposing a face cut and bruised, the
result of a skilful and brutal beating. Dane might not have been
able to recognize him but Mura was certain.
“Ali!”
Perhaps Kamil heard that, or perhaps it was just his steel will
which roused him. He moaned again and then uttered some
undistinguishable words through torn lips as his puffed and swollen
eyes turned up towards them.
“Ali—” Mura called. “We are here. Can
you attend—do you understand?”
Kamil’s blackened face was up, he forced out coherent
words. “Who—? Can’t see!”
“Mura, Thorson,” the steward identified them
crisply. “You are hurt?”
“Can’t see. Lost—Hungry—”
“How are we going to get down?” Dane wanted to
know. If they only had the ropes which had linked them to the
crawler in the fog! But those were behind and there were no
substitutes.
Mura unhooked his belt. “Your belt and
mine—”
“They aren’t long enough, even together!”
“No, not in themselves, but we shall see—”
Dane shed his belt and watched the steward buckle it end to end
with his own. Then the smaller man spoke to Thorson.
“You must lower me. Can you do it?”
Dane looked about doubtfully. The wall top was smooth and bare
of anything in the way of an anchor. If he couldn’t take
the weight of the steward he would be jerked over and they would
both fall. But there was no other way.
“Do my best—” He lay belly down on the wall,
hooking the toes of his boots on either side and thrusting his left
arm out and down into the neighbouring room. Mura had drawn his
blaster and was making careful adjustments to its barrel.
“Here I go—” With the blaster in one hand the
steward swung over, his other fist twisted in the rope of linked
belts. Dane held on grimly in spite of the tearing wrench in his
shoulders.
He blinked and ducked his head at a sudden flash of burning
fire. The fumes of blaster fire assaulted his throat and nose and
he understood at last what Mura was attempting. The steward was
burning out hand and foot holds in the smooth surface of the wall
as he descended, cutting a ladder to reach Ali.