Doc Harbin went down the first three or four levels before he had to rest and catch his breath and rub the beginning of stiffness from the muscles of his calves. He took a sip of water from the sealed canteen, rose to his feet, and continued the descent.
There was something so boring about the trip down that even his curiosity began to diminish after a time. There was nothing to see except naked stone walls and platforms and steps, which were all exactly the same to look at. He had been hoping for inscriptions, even graffiti, but found nothing.
And the silence was—as the saying goes—deafening. There was not the slightest sound, other than the rasp of his bootheels against smooth, dry rock and the wheeze of his breathing. Still, he toiled on. There was a mystery here, and Will Harbin was determined to seek it out… .
He had been keeping careful mental notes of the number of platforms he passed. After he had reached the tenth such, and knew that he was now well below the most distant part of the stair which they had been able to see from the doorway above, he stopped taking count and just plodded grimly down, and down, and down.
Then he became aware of something a little odd. The air was warmer than seemed natural … or was it the exertion? As Brant had done earlier, while cutting through the hinges with his power gun, Harbin turned down the heat-control of his suit, and eventually turned it off altogether. Before long, he unseamed his protective suit to the belly.
After a while, something else equally strange came gradually to his notice. It was so very unlikely, that at first he dismissed it from his mind as sheer imagination. Erelong, he was forced to admit that it was, after all, a fact.
The air was getting more humid the farther down he climbed.
Now this was, if not impossible, at least very mysterious. The slowly rising temperatures could be understood if you considered that the farther down beneath the planet’s surface he went, the nearer he came to whatever volcanic heat might still be lingering in the core of the ancient planet. And heat, trapped in this stone well, sealed for uncountable ages by that metal door, would have no place to go. But humidity—that was quite another thing.
There was no reason for the humidity, or, at least, none that he could think of.
But before long he was forced to recognize its existence as a simple fact. Resting his aching legs on a platform, he saw patches of dampness on the stone wall directly in front of him. He might not have noticed the phenomenon had it not been for the angle at which his lamp was set, which made the moisture glisten.
“Damndest thing!” the old man said to himself.
He rose after a time and continued down the stair, limping stiffly, staggering with fatigue, wondering if he would not be wise to pause for a nap at the next platform.
He did so, and let exhaustion drift him into slumber from which he woke, after an indeterminate time, to yawn and stretch, feeling every stiff and sore muscle his body possessed, each a clear and distinct pang.
“Not so young as I used to be,” he grunted to himself, trying to massage some of the stiffness out of his legs, at least.
He wondered how far down he had come by this point. It could easily have been a full mile, perhaps even more. He inwardly cursed himself for carelessly losing count of the total platforms he had reached and passed.
It had gotten so warm and humid by now, that he decided to remove the heatsuit entirely; it was lightweight nioflex and could easily be rolled up and thrust under his equipment belt. Under the suit he wore the usual one-piece garment called a liner, much the same sort of thing that spacemen wore under their insulated airsuits.
“There, that’s a little better!” he said to himself, wishing he had something wherewith to mop the perspiration from his face and throat. But handkerchiefs are seldom found on the desert world, where the air is so desiccated that people rarely perspire for any reason.
He limped and stumbled slowly down another six or seven flights of the stair, resting now at each platform as he reached it, and before long stretched out to sleep again.
When he awoke, quite suddenly, and with his pulses rising in alarm, he did not at once realize what had startled him to wakefulness.
A moment or two later, the sound came again, and he gasped in sheer amazement.
Human voices.
15 On the Stair
At first, the old scientist could not tell whether the voices came from above him, or from below, for the echoes that bounced from wall to wall not only rendered the voices incomprehensible, but made their source unguessable.
With his back against the wall of the platform, and one of Brant’s power guns in his fist, Will Harbin waited with a pounding heart to see what was going to happen.
Before long, he relaxed with a deep, heartfelt sigh. For the voices, he now discerned, came from above, and one of them was calling “Doc! Doc?” hoarsely.
“I’m down here, Jim,” he shouted back. “Just keep coming.”
In time they hobbled down to where he sat resting, Brant in the lead, helping a pale and staggering Zuarra, with the villainous Agila in the rear, helping along little Suoli. If one of his hands was furtively squeezing her plump breasts, she seemed too weary to object to the surreptitious caress.
They joined him on the platform, glad of another chance to rest their aching muscles. Looking his friends over, Will Harbin observed that they had endured the same changes in temperature and humidity that he had noticed, for all had stripped—Brant to ragged briefs, Agila to his loincloth, and the women had removed everything. All three were slick with oily sweat, but the natives seemed to have suffered more than had Brant.
This made sense to the scientist. After all, both he and Brant had been born and raised on Earth and were accustomed to a denser, warmer, damper, more oxygen-rich atmosphere than were the Martians. The two Earthsiders had undergone certain series of medical treatments, including surgical implants, which adjusted their lungs to the thinner, colder air and their metabolism to conditions on the surface of Mars. Akin to thermostats, these devices were self-regulating, and had now, probably, shut down, since the air was warm | and moist and rich in oxygen.
But the natives were thoroughly unaccustomed to these conditions, and were suffering. Stubborn children of a hardy race, they would erelong become acclimated, but it would take some time, he knew.
Resting on the platform, Harbin and Brant compared notes.
“What happened up above?” inquired Harbin. “Did Tuan and his band turn up?”
“They did that,” Brant grunted ruefully. “And we had to back off, they had so much firepower we couldn’t even get near enough to the mouth of the cave to return their fire.”
“So—what happened?”
“Since there wasn’t any cover in the cave, we came out the back door and down the stair, looking for you.”
“Do you think the outlaws will follow?” asked Harbin.
Brant shrugged. “Hard to say … maybe they’re just superstitious enough to shy away from this: you know how they fear and venerate the Ancients and their remains and ruins. Anyway, Agila and I got the metal door back in place and fused it with the lasers. That’s better than nothing.”
Will harbin nodded soberly. It wasn’t much to pin their hopes on, but Brant was right: it was better than nothing.
Just barely.
Brant was unhappy at having to turn and run for it, but there hadn’t been any other viable choice. It also griped him that they had be^p forced to abandon the lopers, most of the > gear, even the tents. They had only brought along the food stores, the weapons, and garments. And now, in this tepid, moist air, even the clothing could have been left behind, except that who could have imagined they’d find heat and moisture down here, so far below the surface?