hey both had tasted it.
“There’s millions of bushels of this, Tony. Should we say ‘bushels’ or, like the Bible, ‘measures’? Well, we know there’s millions of measures of this that we’ve already found. If it’s food—and what else could it be?—we’ve solved our problem of provender indefinitely. And it’s foolish to have our people improvising shelter and equipment when all we have to do is to move into—this. Here’s equipment we never dreamed of!”
“Yes,” said Tony. “Yes.” But he remembered that contest that already had divided the camp. Did the emigrants from the earth dare to move into the city when found? Also, could the people from the earth sustain themselves on this grain or other supplies left by the vanished people? Though the kernels might have been preserved through the epoch of utter cold, had the vitamins—essential to life—remained?
But that was a matter for the experts of the camp to test and to decide. Tony could not doubt his duty to report the tremendous discovery.
“We’ll leave to-day, Tony,” Eliot pleaded, “but not until later. Let’s look about once more.”
And Tony agreed; for he too could not bear yet to abandon the amazements of the Sealed City.
It was later than they had planned, when at last they had loaded their ship with the objects—comprehensible and incomprehensible—which they had chosen to carry back to Hendron and his comrades. The sun—the old sun of the shattered world, the new sun of Bronson Beta—was low when Tony drew down once more the great metal ring which closed again the gate of the Sealed City.
“Let’s not fly back to the camp by the path we came,” said Eliot James.
“No,” agreed Tony. “Let’s loop to the south before we cut back to the seacoast.”
They were in the air again, supported on the rushing golden stream of fire that emerged from their rocket-tubes. They flew through the darkness, occasionally casting upon the ground underneath the bright ray of their searchlight, and still more often thrusting it ahead of them into the gloom. There were no lights anywhere beneath them to indicate that people lived or moved or had their being there.
Long after midnight they flew across what they judged to be either a huge lake or a great inland arm of the sea.
Toward morning they were planning to alight and rest before continuing their adventures, when suddenly they were transfixed. Not in the east, where the first gray bars of the rising sun might be expected to appear, but ahead of them, to the south, a single finger of light pointed upward to the sky—the only light except their own, and except the weird inhuman illumination of the great domed city, which they had seen on the surface of the planet.
CHAPTER VI
SALVATION
THEY were approaching the vertical beam of light at a high speed, but no sooner had its unnatural appearance made a mark in Tony’s consciousness than his hands leaped for the controls, and the plane slowed as much as was possible—he’d cut down its elevation.
He turned to James: “What do you think it is?”
“It looks like a searchlight pointed straight up in the air.”
“There seems to be a ridge between us and where it comes from.”
“Right,” James shouted back to him. Tony made a gesture which outlined the process of landing the plane, and James nodded.
When they had come upon the great bubble that covered the city, it had been daylight, and there had been no sign of life about it; but light implied an intelligent agency, and besides, it was night, and their sense of caution was stirred by the very primordial influence of darkness.
Now the plane was skimming low over the empty desert, and in the light of their abruptly switched-on beacon, they could make out racing beneath them a flat aridity.
There was no choice of spots on which to land. The thunder of the tubes had been cut off as Tony turned a switch, and his voice sounded very loud when he said: “How about it?”
“Let ’er go!” James answered, and an instant later they were racing over the ground, stirring up a cloud of dust that had been undisturbed for millennia.
They stopped. They stepped out.
The night around them was warm and clear. Its distant darknesses were weaving with the perpetual aurora of Bronson Beta. Far ahead of the waste in which the plane lay, the single finger of light pointed unwavering toward the stars.
“Shall we wait for day?” Tony asked.
Eliot James looked at the illuminated dial of his wrist-watch. “It’ll be several hours in coming yet,” he said after a pause. He grinned. “I’ve learned how to tell time by this watch in a mathematical process as complicated as the theory of relativity.”
Tony did not smile at James’ whimsy. He was staring at the light. “I should say, from the way it spreads, it must come together in some sort of a lens or reflector a couple of hundred feet below the other side of the ridge. If there’s anybody around the base of it, I don’t think they saw or heard us coming. If they saw anything, it could easily be mistaken for a meteor.” He was silent.
James spoke his thoughts in the quiet of the desert night. “It may be four miles away—it may be six. The walking’s pretty good; but the point is—shall we leave our ship?”
“I wonder—have we got time to get there and back before it’s light?”