48
THEY CAME TO AN ENORMOUS CLOSED DOOR ABOVE WHICH were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.
They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.
The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.
They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoon-like animals.
“They must’ve come here to get back to Nature,” Frigate said. “A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway.”
They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?
Starvation.
They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of all: A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.
Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.
Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.
He turned away, his eyes hurting.
“They’re wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councilors. The well must be of some material which enables us to see them.”
Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.
“Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here.”
Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.
Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn’t. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?
He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.
“I don’t know what this means, but we can’t stay here any longer.”
They’d passed a number of bays enclosing lift shafts with no upper passage. But after they’d gone a quarter of a mile, they came to one which extended up past their level.
“This may take us to the floor where the gateway is.”
Again, they waited until each person had gotten safely up the shaft before the next flew up.
The bay opened onto another corridor. There were thirteen doors along mis, each an entrance into a very large suite of luxuriously furnished rooms. In one was a table of some glossy reddish hardwood on which was a transparent sphere. Suspended in it were three doll-sized shapes.
“Looks like Monat and two other of his kind,” Burton said.
“Something like three-dimensional photographs,” Frigate said.
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “But there seems to be a family resemblance. Of course, I suppose they’d all look alike to anyone not familiar with the race. Still…”