“No matter.” She hefted the disc of colours. “Expect odder sights than this. Lock the car and let us be gone.”
They entered the plantation and began walking back, parallel to the road, hidden from it by the ordered ranks of pines. Afternoon light slanted through a sweet pungency and cast sunspeckles on the ground, which was soft with needles underfoot. “I get you,” Lockridge said. “We don’t want the car to draw attention to where we’re headed, if somebody happens by.”
“Silence,” Storm ordered.
A mile or so beyond, she led the way to the road and across. There a harvested grain field lay yellow and stubbly, lifting toward a ridge that cut off view of any farmhouse. In the middle stood a hillock topped by a dolmen. Storm slipped agilely through the wire fence before Lockridge could help and broke into a trot. Though her pack was not much lighter than his, she was still breathing easily when they reached the knoll, and he was a little winded.
She stopped and opened her belt. A tube came out, vaguely resembling a large flashlight with a faceted lens. She took her bearings from the sun and started around the hillock. It was overgrown with grass and brambles; a marker showed that this relic was protected by the government. Feeling naked under the wide empty sky, his pulse thuttering, Lockridge looked at the dolmen as if for some assurance of eternity. Grey and lichen-spotted, the upright stones brooded beneath their heavy roof as they had done since a vanished people raised them to be a tomb for their dead. But the chamber within, he recalled, had once been buried under heaped earth, of which only this mound was left. . . .
Storm halted. “Yes, here.” She began to climb the slope.
“Huh? Wait,” Lockridge protested. “We’ve come three-quarters around. Why didn’t you go in the other direction?”
For the first time, he saw confusion on her face. “I go widdershins.” She uttered a hard laugh. “Habit. Now, stand back.”
They were halfway up when she stopped. “This place was excavated in 1927,” she said. “Only the dolmen was cleared, and there is no further reason for the scientists to come. So we can use it for a gate.” She did something to a set of controls on the tube. “We have a rather special way of concealing entrances,” she warned. “Do not be too astonished.”
A dull light glowed from the lens. The tube hummed and quivered in her grip. A shiver went through the brambles, though there has no wind. Abruptly a circle of earth lifted.
Lifted—straight into the air—ten feet in diameter, twenty feet thick, a plug of turf and soil hung unsupported before Lockridge’s eyes. He sprang aside with a yell.
“Quiet!” Storm rapped. “Get inside. Quick!”
Numbly, he advanced to the hole in the mound. A ramp led down out of sight. He swallowed. The fact that she watched him was what mostly drove him ahead. He went into the hill. She followed. Turning, she adjusted the tube in her hand. The cylinder of earth sank back. He heard a sigh of compression as it fitted itself into place with machined snugness. Simultaneously, a light came on—from no particular source, he saw in his bewilderment.
The ramp was simply the floor of a barrel-vaulted tunnel, a little wider than the door, which sloped before him around a curve. That bore was surfaced overall with a hard, smooth material from which the light poured, a chill white radiance whose shadowlessness made distances hard to judge. The air was fresh, moving, though he saw no ventilators.
He faced Storm and stammered. She put away the tube. Harshness left her. She glided to him, laid a hand on his arm, and smiled. “Poor Malcolm,” she murmured. “You will have greater surprises.”
“Judas!” he said weakly. “I hope not!” But her nearness and her touch were, even then, exhilarating. He began to recover his self-possession.
“How the deuce is that done?” he asked. Echoes bounced hollowly around his voice.
“Shh! Not so loud.” Storm glanced at her colour disc. “No one’s here at present, but they may come from below, and sound carries damnably well in these tunnels.”
She drew a breath. “If it will make you feel better, I shall explain the principle,” she said. “The plug of earth is bound together by an energy web emanating from a network embedded in these walls. The same network blankets any effects that might occur in a metal detector, a sonic probe, or some other instrument that could otherwise detect this passage. It also refreshes and circulates the air through molecular porosities. The tube I used to lift the plug is merely a control; the actual power comes likewise from the network.”
“But—” Lockridge shook his head. “Impossible. I know that much physics. I mean—well, maybe in theory—but no such gadget exists in practice.”
“I told you this was a secret research project,” Storm answered. “They achieved many things.” Her lips bent upward—how close to his! “You are not frightened, are you, Malcolm?”
He squared his shoulders. “No. Let’s move.”
“Good man,” she said, with a slight, blood-quickening emphasis on the second word. Releasing him, she led the way down.
“This is only the entrance,” she said. “The corridor proper is more than a hundred feet below us.”
They spiralled into the earth. Lockridge observed that his own stupefaction was gone. Alertness thrummed in him. Storm had done that. My God, he thought, what an adventure.
The passage debouched in a long room, featureless except at the farther wall. There stood a large box or cabinet of the same lustrous, self-closing metal as Storm’s belt and a doorway some ten feet wide and twenty high. Curtained? No, as he neared, Lockridge saw that the veil which filled it, flickering with soft iridescence, every hue his eyes could see and (he suspected) many they could not, was immateriaclass="underline" a shimmer in space, a mirage, a sheet of living light. The faintest hum came from it, and the air nearby smelled electric.
Storm paused there. Through her clothes he saw how the tall body tensed. His own pistol came out with hers. She glanced at him.
“The corridor is just beyond,” she said in a whetted voice. “Now listen. I only hinted to you before that we might have to fight. But the enemy is everywhere. He may have learned of our place. His agents may even be on the other side of this gate. Are you ready, at my command, to shoot?”
He could only jerk his head up and then down.
“Very well. Follow me.”
“No, wait, I’ll go—”
“Follow, I said.” She bounded through the curtain.
He came after. Crossing the threshold, he felt a brief, twisting shock, and stumbled. He caught himself and glared around.
Storm stood half crouched, peering from side to side. After a minute she glanced at her instrument, and the pistol sank in her hand. “No one,” she breathed. “We are safe for the moment.”
Lockridge drew a shaky lungful and tried to understand what sort of place he had entered.
The corridor was huge. Also hemicylindrical, with the same luminous surfacing, it must be a hundred feet in diameter. Arrow straight it ran, right and left, until the ends dwindled out of sight—why, it must go for miles, he realised. The humming noise and the lightning smell were more intense here, pervading his being, as if he were caught in some vast machine.
He looked back at the door through which he had come, and stiffened. “What the hell!”
On this side, though no higher, the portal was easily two hundred feet wide. A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951, 4952. . . . Only the auroral curtain was the same.
“No time to waste.” Storm tugged at his sleeve. “I shall explain later. Get aboard.”