Annamarie Hudgins shuddered as she downed the sticky stuff, then lit a cigarette. As the lighter flared the robot turned his head to precisely the angle required to center and focus its eyes on the flame, then eye-fronted again.
"Attracted by light and motion," Stanton advised scientifically. "Stop trembling, Josey, there's worse to come. Say, is this the station?"
"It is," said Annamarie. "Now watch. These robots function smoothly and fast – don't miss anything." •
The metal monster, with a minimum of waste motion, was doing just that. It had clumped over to the door; its monstrous appendages were fighting the relays that were to drive the door open, and the robot was winning. The robots were built to win – powerful, even by Earthly standards.
Stanton rubbed his hands briskly and tackled the robot, shoving hard. The girl laughed sharply. He turned, his face showing injury. "Suppose you help," he suggested with some anger. "I can't move this by myself."
"All right – heave!" gasped the girl, complying.
"Ho!" added Josey unexpectedly, adding his weight.
"No use," said Stanton. "No use at all. We couldn't move this thing in seven million years." He wiped his brow. The train started, then picked up speed. All three were thrown back as the robot carelessly nudged them out of its way as it returned to its seat.
"I think," said Josey abruptly, "we'd better go back by the return car and see about the other side of the station."
"No use," said the girl. "There's a robot on the return, too."
"Then let's walk back," urged Josey. By which time the car had stopped at the next station. "Come on," said Josey, stepping through the door with a suspicious glance at the robot.
"No harm in trying," mused Stanton as he followed with the girl. "Can't be more than twenty miles." •
"And that's easier than twenty Earth miles," cried Annamarie. "Let's go."
"I don't know what good it will do though," remarked Stanton, ever the pessimist. These Martians were thorough. There's probably a robot at every entrance to the station, blocking the way. If they haven't sealed up the entrances entirely."
There was no robot at the station, they discovered several hours and about eight miles later. But the entrance to the station that was so thoroughly and mysteriously guarded was – no more. Each entrance was sealed; only the glowing teardrop pointers remained to show where the entrance had been.
"Well, what do we do now?" groaned Josey, rubbing an aching thigh.
Stanton did not answer directly. "Will you look at that," he marvelled, indicating, the surrounding terrain. The paved ground beneath them was seamed with cracks. The infinitely tough construction concrete of the Martians was billowed and rippled, stuck through with jagged ends of metal reinforcing I-beams. The whole scene gave the appearance of total devastation – as though a natural catastrophe had come along and wrecked the city first; then the survivors of the disaster, petulantly, had turned their most potent forces on what was left in sheer disheartenment.
"Must have been bombs," suggested the girl.
"Must have been," agreed the archaeologist. "Bombs and guns and force beams and Earth – Marsquakes, too."
"You didn't answer his question, Ray," reminded Annamarie. "He said: "What do we do now?" "
"I was just thinking about it," he said, eyeing one of the monolithic buildings speculatively. "Is your Martian as good as mine? See if you can make out what that says."
"That" was a code-symbol over the sole door to the huge edifice. "I give up," said Annamarie with irritation. "What does it say?"
"Powerhouse, I think."
"Powerhouse? Powerhouse for what? All the energy for lighting and heating the city comes from the sun, through the mirrors up on the surface. The only thing they need power for down here – the only thing – Say!"
"That's right," grinned Stanton. "It must be for the Mars-Tube. Do you suppose we could find a way of getting from that building into the station?"
"There's only one way to find out," Annamarie parroted, looking for Josey for confirmation. But Josey was no longer around. He was at the door to the building, shoving it open. The others hastened after him.
III
Pursuit
"Don't wiggle, Annamarie," whispered Josey plaintively. "You'll fall on me.
"Shut up," she answered tersely; "Shut up and get out of my way." She swung herself down the Martian-sized manhole with space to spare. Dropping three feet or so from her hand-hold on the lip of the pit, she alighted easily. "Did I make much noise?" she asked.
"Oh, I think Krakatoa has been louder when it went off," Stanton replied bitterly. "But those things seem to be deaf."
The three stood perfectly still for a second, listening tensely for sounds of pursuit. They had stumbled into a nest of robots in the powerhouse, apparently left there by the thoughtful Martian race to prevent entrance to the mysteriously guarded subway station via this route. What was in that station that required so much privacy? Stanton wondered. Something so deadly dangerous that the advanced science of the Martians could not cope with it, but was forced to resort to quarantining the spot where it showed itself? Stanton didn't know the answers, but he was very quiet as a hidden upsurge of memory strove to assert itself. Something that had been in the bobbin-books ... "The Under-Eaters." That was it. Had they anything to do with this robot cordon sanitaire?
The robots had not noticed them, for which all three were duly grateful. Ogden nudged the nearest to him – it happened to be Annamarie – and thrust out a bony finger. "Is that what the Mars-Tube looks like from inside?" he hissed piercingly.
As their eyes became acclimated to the gloom – they dared use no lights – the others made out the lines of a series of hoops stretching out into blackness on either side ahead of them. No lights anywhere along the chain of rings; no sound coming from it.
"Maybe it's a deserted switch line, one that was abandoned. That's the way the Tube ought to look, all right, only with cars going along it," Stanton muttered.
"Hush!" it was Annamarie. "Would that be a car coming –from the left, way down?"
Nothing was visible, but there was the faintest of sighing sounds. As though an elevator car, cut loose from its cable, were dropping down its shaft far off there in the distance. "It sounds like a car," Stanton conceded. "What do you think, Og – Hey ! Where's Josey?"
"He brushed me, going toward the Tube. Yes – there he is! See him? Bending over between those hoops!"
"We've got to get him out of there! Josey! " Stanton cried, forgetting about the robots in the light of this new danger. "Josey! Get out of the Tube! There's a train coming!"
The dimly visible figure of the Roentgenologist straightened and turned towards the others querulously. Then as the significance of that rapidly mounting hiss-s-s-s became clear to him, he leaped out of the tube, with a vast alacrity. A split second later the hiss had deepened to a high drone, and the bulk of a car shot past them, travelling eerily without visible support, clinging to and being pushed by the intangible fields of force that emanated from the metal hoops of the Tube.
Stanton reached Josey's form in a single bound. "What were you trying to do, imbecile?" he grated. "Make an early widow of your prospective fiancée?"
Josey shook off Stanton's grasp with dignity. "I was merely trying to establish that that string of hoops was the Mars-Tube, by seeing if the power-leads were connected with the rings. It – uh, it was the Tube; that much is proven," he ended somewhat lamely.
"Brilliant man!" Stanton started to snarl, but Annamarie's voice halted him. It was a very small voice.