Tony took a cartridge and dropped it. For so long did it fall silently that they were sure, as they listened, that it must have struck something which gave no sound; then they heard it strike. Tony dropped another, and they timed it. One more they timed, and they stepped back from the shaft carefully.
“Half a mile below!” said Eliot. “They went down almost as far as up; perhaps farther. Why?”
They stepped back from the shaft’s threshold carefully.
“There’s some control to these damn doors,” said Tony, “that probably made it utterly painless to operate them when everything was working. You maybe merely had to stand before them, and some electric gadget would work that’s jammed now because the power isn’t on. These doors can’t all be to shafts.”
About fifteen minutes later, they had opened another that exposed a circular passage, leading both upward and downward.
“Ah!” said Eliot. “This is the stuff. No machinery. They probably had it for emergencies.”
* * *
Tony, awakening, stretched, rubbed his eyes and gazed up at the ceiling. His eyes followed mechanically, forgetfully, the graceful, tenuous lines of decoration which traced down over the walls of the pleasant, beautiful chamber.
He still did not fully recollect where he was, but he realized that he was lying on a couch of soft, agreeable material. Then he saw Eliot James, in trousers and shirt but without his coat, seated at a table, writing. And Tony remembered.
Eliot and he were in the Sealed City—the amazing, stupendous metropolis of the Other People, the People a Million Years Dead.
The light diffused through this chamber, so pleasantly and evenly—it seemed to be spread and intensified somehow by its refraction through the peculiar metal-glass of one wall—was the light of the dawn of the third long Bronson Beta day since Eliot James and Tony Drake, refugees from earth, had discovered and entered the Sealed City.
The amazements of their two days of exploration passed through Tony’s mind like reviewing a dream; but they remained reality; for instead of becoming dimmer and dimmer as he sought to recall them, they became only sharper and clearer. Moreover, here before him in a heap upon one of the tables of the Other People, and piled also on the floor, were the proofs of the actuality of what Eliot and he had done. Here were the objects—some of them understandable, more of them utterly incomprehensible as to their purpose or utility—which they had collected to carry with them back to Cole Hendron and the camp.
Eliot was writing so intently and absorbedly that he did not know that Tony was awake. They were in utter stillness; not a sound nor a stir in the Sealed City; and Tony lay quiet watching his companion attempting to deal through words with the wonders they had encountered.
What could a man say that would be adequate?
Tony fingered the stuff of the couch upon which he lay—material not wool, not cotton, not silk. It was soft, pliant fiber, unidentifiable. How old? A million years old, perhaps, in rigidly reckoned time; but not five years old, probably, in the practical period of its use.
It might have been new a million years ago, just before Bronson Beta was torn from its sun; thereafter the time that passed merely preserved it. It was in the utter cold and dark of space. Not even air brushed it. The air was frozen solid. Then this planet found our sun; and time which aged materials, was resumed.
So it was with all the stuff which Eliot and he had collected; those objects might be a million years old, and yet new!
Eliot halted his writing and arose; and glancing at Tony, saw he was awake.
“Hello.”
“Hello. How long you been up?”
“Quite a while.”
“You would be,” complained Tony admiringly. It had been late in the long night, and both had been utterly exhausted, when they lay down to sleep. “It’s the third day, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“We ought to go back now.”
“Yes,” agreed Eliot, “I suppose so. But how can we?”
Tony was sitting up. “How can we leave?” he agreed. “But also, how can we stay—without letting Cole Hendron and the rest of them know?”
“We can come back, of course,” Eliot James reluctantly assented.
“Or we may find another city or something else.”
“By ‘something else,’ do you mean the place where ‘they’ all went, Tony? God, Tony, doesn’t it get you? Where did they go? Not one of them—nor the bones of one of them! And all this left in order.”
He stood at the table and sifted in his fingers the kernels of a strange grain. Not wheat, not corn, not rice nor barley nor rye; but a starchy kernel. T