They tried to unnerve him with jokes about the unreality of his plans, or maybe air rumors about a job they were due to go on. Even on this one. Horrocks had told him about some kind of fortune-teller or wise guy who was with the professors, calling Major Cobert, the unit’s CO, and saying that the workings were haunted by spirits of ancient alien builders . . . or something like that. Slezansky wasn’t sure if it was true, or just something they’d made up to rattle him.
He came to the gallery leading back toward the entrance cuttings. As he rounded a corner into brighter light, a grotesque shape flew at him, speeding silently over the walls and across the ceiling. Stifling a shout of alarm, Slezansky recoiled against the wall, at the same time fumbling to unsling his weapon; then he realized it was Delaney’s shadow being cast ahead as he advanced from the direction of the main access shaft, patrolling his half of the route. Flustered at the thought of appearing foolish, Slezansky hastily pulled the rifle back onto the shoulder grip of his suit and moved forward. But Delaney hadn’t even noticed. The expression on his face, when Slezansky flickered the flashlamp briefly across his visor, was distracted and tense.
“What is it?” Slezansky asked—communications worked in this kind of proximity.
“Something strange . . . I’m not sure. This whole place. Come see what you make of this.”
Delaney led the way back along the gallery, then into an opening on one side, beyond which a wide, irregular cavern lay between an undulating floor of boulders and rubble, and a roof of rock shapes hanging low and oppressive in the dim light from the gallery. He stood to one side, letting Slezansky peer past him. Even though Delaney’s figure was in shadow, Slezansky could sense the other trooper watching him, waiting for his reaction. Slezansky’s brow knotted as the doubts and premonitions that he had felt earlier came flooding back.
This place they were in was no mere hole dug into something dead, like a disused tunnel or an old mine. The very rocks around them were alive. As his eyes accommodated from the brighter gallery they had left, he could make out strange, softly glowing tongues of violet and blue, and in other places, ghostly background streaks of yellow, pink, and green, adding an ethereal depth to the surroundings and throwing intervening edges into starkly outlined silhouette.
“What do you make of it?” Delaney’s voice asked again.
Slezansky was about to reply, when he became aware of other sounds on the circuit—not more static or interference, but something that swelled and faded in sighing cadence like the surging of an ocean, distant yet hypnotically insistent, as if bringing fragments of voices from the far reaches of space or of time. What they were saying was beyond comprehensibility. Or—he could feel, now, the presence of the ancient beings who had created this place—was it something that required the comprehension of a different, totally alien kind of mind?
Slezansky stared fearfully, as if expecting apparitions from the past to arise out of the rocks, and glanced back the way they had come, unconsciously checking that their way out was clear. “How long do we have left on this watch?” he asked. His voice had turned dry and croaky.
“A little under an hour,” Delaney replied.
“I say we go back up now,” Slezansky said. “Tell ’em we’ve got a communications glitch.”
Delaney didn’t argue.
* * *
By the time they returned to the Venning troop carrier, Slezansky was already feeling that they had overreacted. But it turned out that the atmosphere there was far from settled either. Communications problems had been intermittently affecting the long-range link too, not just local channels. And the Zorken scientists in the Mule were puzzling over strange emissions of vapor and colored mists from places on the slopes above the camp. It seemed that things like that shouldn’t be happening. Even Horrocks didn’t have a wisecrack or disparaging remark to offer. There was a rumor that the fruitcake who was with the professors that the troops had kicked out had called the Zorken bigwigs at their headquarters to warn about some kind of plague breaking out.