There was some light in the room beyond. The blast had broken most of the old-fashioned bulbs the Nazis had used, but here and there a light shone out, letting them see that they were in a large hail. Cargraves went cautiously ahead.
A room lay to the right from the hall, through an ordinary non-air-tight door, now hanging by one hinge. In it they found the reason why the field had been deserted when they had attacked.
The room was a barrack room; the Nazis had died in their bunks. ‘Night’ and ‘day’ were arbitrary terms on the moon, in so far as the working times and eating times and sleeping times of men are concerned. The Nazis were on another schedule; they had had the bad luck to be sleeping when Morrie’s bomb had robbed them of their air.
Cargraves stayed just long enough in the room to assure himself that all were dead. He did not let Ross come in at all. There was some blood, but not much, being mostly bleeding from mouths and bulging eyes. It was not this that caused his squeamish consideration; it was the expressions which were frozen on their dead faces.
He got out before he got sick.
Ross had found something. “Look here!” he demanded. Cargraves looked. A portion of the wall had torn away under the sudden drop in pressure and had leaned crazily into the room. It was a metal panel, instead of the rock masonry which made up the rest of the walls. Ross had pulled and pried at it to see what lay behind, and was now playing his light into the darkness behind it.
It was another corridor, lined with carefully dressed and fitted stones. But here the stone had not been covered with the sealing lacquer.
“I wonder why they sealed it off after they built it?” Ross wanted to know. “Do you suppose they have stuff stored down there? Their A-bombs maybe?”
Cargraves studied the patiently fitted stones stretching away into the unfathomed darkness. After a long time he answered softly, “Ross, you haven’t discovered a Nazi storeroom. You have discovered the homes of the people of the moon.”
Chapter 17: UNTIL WE ROT
FOR ONCE ROSS WAS ALMOST as speech-bound as Art. When he was able to make his words behave he demanded, “Are you sure? Are you sure, Doc?”
Cargraves nodded. “As sure as I can be at this time. I wondered why the Nazis had built such a deep and extensive a base and why they had chosen to use fitted stone masonry. It would be hard to do, working in a space suit. But I assigned it to their reputation for doing things the hard way, what they call `efficiency.’ I should have known better.” He peered down the mysterious, gloomy corridor. “Certainly this was not built in the last few months.”
“How long ago, do you think?”
“How long? How long is a million years? How long is ten million years? I don’t know — I have trouble imagining a thousand years. Maybe we’ll never know.”
Ross wanted to explore. Cargraves shook his head. “We can’t go chasing rabbits. This is wonderful, the biggest thing in ages. But it will wait. Right now,” he said, glancing at his watch, “we’ve got eleven minutes to finish the job and get back up to the surface — or things will start happening up there!”
He covered the rest of the layout at a fast trot, with Ross guarding his rear from the central hall. He found the radio ‘shack’, with a man dead in his phones, and noted that the equipment did not appear to have suffered much damage when the whirlwind of escaping air had slammed out of the place. Farther on, an arsenal contained bombs for the jeep, and rifles, but no men.
He found the storeroom for the guided missiles, more than two hundred of them, although the cradles were only half used up. The sight of them should have inspired terror, knowing as he did that each represented a potentially dead and blasted city, but he had no time for it. He rushed on.
There was a smaller room, well furnished, which seemed to be sort of a wardroom or common room for the officers. It was there that he found a Nazi who was not as the others.