But its appearance wasn’t right. While it was obviously artificial, one knew without being told that it was not made by men. Why? I don’t know. The surface of it was dull mirror, not a mark on it—not any sort of a mark; there was no way to tell how it had been put together. It was as smooth as a Jo block.
I could not tell of what it was made. Metal? Of course, it had to be metal. But was it? You would expect it to be either bitterly cold—or possibly intensely hot from its landing. I touched it and it was not anything at all, neither cold nor hot. Don’t tell me it just happened to be exactly ninety-eight and six-tenths. I noticed another thing presently; a ship that size, landing at high speed, should have blasted a couple of acres. There was no blast area at all; the brake around it was green and rank.
We went up to the parasol business, the air lock, if that is what it was. The edge was jammed down tight on the little mud turtle; the armor of the tank was crushed in, as one might crush a pasteboard box with the hand. Those mud turtles are built to launch five hundred feet deep in water; they are strong.
Well, I suppose this one was strong. The parasol arrangement had damaged it, but the air lock had not closed. On the other hand the metal, or whatever the spaceship’s door was made of, was unmarked by the exchange.
The Old Man turned to me. “Wait here with Mary.”
“You’re not going in there by yourself?”
“Yes. There may be very little time.”
The kid spoke up. “I’m to stay with you, sir. That’s what the commander said.”
“Very well, sir,” the Old Man agreed. “Come along.” He peered over the edge, then knelt and lowered himself by his hands. The kid followed him. I felt burned up—but had no desire to argue the arrangements.
They disappeared into the hole. Mary turned to me and said, “Sam—I don’t like this. I’m afraid.”
She startled me. I was afraid myself—but I had not expected her to be. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Do we have to stay? He did not say so, quite.”
I considered it. “If you want to go back to the car I’ll take you back.”
“Well . . . no, Sam, I guess we have to stay. Come closer to me.” She was trembling.
I don’t know how long it was before they stuck their heads over the rim. The youngster climbed out and the Old Man told him to stand guard. “Come on,” he said to us, “it’s safe—I think.”
“The hell it is,” I told him, but I went because Mary was already starting. The Old Man helped her down.
“Mind your head,” he said. “Low bridge all the way.”
It is a platitude that unhuman races produce unhuman works, but very few humans have ever been inside a Venerian labyrinth and still fewer have seen the Martian ruins—and I was not one of the few. I don’t know what I expected. Superficially the inside of the saucer was not, I suppose, too startling, but it was strange. It had been thought out by unhuman brains, ones which did not depend on human ideas in fabricating, brains which had never heard of the right angle and the straight line or which regarded them as unnecessary or undesirable. We found ourselves in a very small oblate chamber and from there we crawled through a tube about four feet thick, a tube which seemed to wind down into the ship and which glowed from all its surface with a reddish light.
The tube held an odd and somewhat distressing odor, as if of marsh gas, and mixed with it faintly was the reek of dead slugs. That and the reddish glow and the total lack of heat response from the wall of the tube as my palms pressed against it gave me the unpleasant fancy that I was crawling through the gut of some unearthly behemoth rather than exploring a strange machine.
The tube branched like an artery and there we came across our first Titanian androgyne. He—let me call it “he”—was sprawled on his back, like a child sleeping, his head pillowed on his slug. There was a suggestion of a smile on the little rosebud mouth; at first I did not realize that he was dead.