Beneath him the door slid down and swung aside, and the darkness below gave place to soft light. He saw a long tube stretching down vertically, with pegs protruding from the metal walls at regular intervals. It made a ladder. The bottom of the shaft was thirty feet below; its diameter was little more than the breadth of a big man’s shoulders.
HE STOOD still for a moment, looking down, his mind almost swimming with wonder and surmise. Old, very old it must be, for the stream had cut its own bed out of the rock whose walls rose above him now. Old—and yet these metal surfaces gleamed as brightly as they must have gleamed on the day they were put together—for what purpose?
The wind sighed again down the canyon, and Dantan remembered the Redhelms on his track. He looked around once more and then lowered himself onto the ladder of metal pegs, testing them doubtfully before he let his full weight come down. They held.
There might be danger down below; there might not. There was certain danger coming after him among the twisting canyons. He reached up, investigated briefly, and swung the door back into place. There was a lock, he saw, and after a moment discovered how to manipulate it. So far, the results were satisfactory. He was temporarily safe from the Redhelms, provided he did not suffocate. There was no air intake here that he could see, but he breathed easily enough so far. He would worry about that when the need arose. There might be other things to worry about before lack of air began to distress him.
He descended.
At the bottom of the shaft was another door. Its handle yielded with no resistance this time, and Dantan stepped across the threshold into a large, square underground chamber, lit with pale radiance that came from the floor itself, as though light had been poured into the molten metal when it had first been made.
The room—
Faintly he heard a distant humming, like the after-resonance of a bell, but it died away almost instantly. The room was large, and empty except for some sort of machine standing against the farther wall. Dantan was not a technician. He knew guns and ships; that was enough. But the smooth, sleek functionalism of this machine gave him an almost sensuous feeling of pleasure.
How long had it been here? Who had built it? And for what purpose? He could not even guess. There was a great oval screen on the wall above what seemed to be a control board, and there were other, more enigmatic devices.
And the screen was black—dead black, with a darkness that ate up the light in the room and gave back nothing.
Yet there was something—
“Sanfel,” a voice said. “Sanfel. Coth dr’gchang. Sanfel—sthan!”
Sanfel… Sanfel… have you returned, Sanfel? Answer!
It was a woman’s voice… the voice of a woman used to wielding power, quiet, somehow proud as the voice of Lucifer or Lilith might have been, and it spoke in a tongue that scarcely half a dozen living men could understand… A whole great race had spoken it once; only the shamans remembered now, and the shamans who knew it were few. Dantan’s godfather had been one. And Dantan remembered the slurring syllables of the rituals he had learned, well enough to know what the proud, bodiless voice was saying.
The nape of his neck prickled. Here was something he could not understand, and he did not like it. Like an animal scenting danger he shrank into himself, not crouching, but withdrawing, so that a smaller man seemed to stand there, ready and waiting for the next move. Only his eyes were not motionless. They raked the room for the unseen speaker—for some weapon to use when the time came for weapons. His glance came back to the dark screen above the machine. And the voice said again, in the tongue of ancient, Klanvahr:
“I am not used to waiting, Sanfel! If you hear me, speak. And speak quickly, for the time of peril comes close now. My Enemy is strong—”
Dantan said, “Can you hear me?” His eyes did not move from the screen. Out of that blackness the girl’s voice came, after a pause. It was imperious, and a little wary.
“You are not Sanfel. Where is he? Who are you, Martian?”
DANTAN let himself relax a little. There would be a parley, at any rate. But after that—
Words in the familiar, remembered old language came hesitantly to his lips.
“I am no Martian. I am of Earth blood, and I do not know this Sanfel.”
“Then how did you get into Sanfel’s place?” The voice was haughty now.
“What are you doing there? Sanfel built his laboratory in a secret place.”
“It was hidden well enough,” Dantan told her grimly. “Maybe for a thousand years, or even ten thousand, for all I know. The door has been buried under a stream—”
“There is no water there. Sanfel’s home is on a mountain, and his laboratory is built underground.” The voice rang like a bell. “I think you lie. I think you are an enemy—When I heard the signal summoning me, I came swiftly, wondering why Sanfel had delayed so long. I must find him, stranger. I must! If you are no enemy, bring me Sanfel!” This time there was something almost like panic in the voice.
“If I could, I would,” Dantan said. “But there’s no one here except me.” He hesitated, wondering if the woman behind the voice could be—mad?
Speaking from some mysterious place beyond the screen, in a language dead a thousand years, calling upon a man who must be long-dead too, if one could judge by the length of time this hidden room had lain buried. He said after a moment, “This place has been buried for a long time. And—no one has spoken the tongue of Klanvahr for many centuries. If that was your Sanfel’s language—” But he could not go on with that thought. If Sanfel had spoken Klanvahr then he must have died long ago. And the speaker beyond the screen—she who had known Sanfel, yet spoke in a young, sweet, light voice that Dantan was beginning to think sounded familiar… He wondered if he could be mad too.
There was silence from the screen. After many seconds the voice spoke again, sadly and with an undernote of terror.
“I had not realized,” it said, “that even time might be so different between Sanfel’s world and mine. The space-time continua—yes, a day in my world might well be an age in yours. Time is elastic. In Zha I had thought a few dozen—” she used a term Dantan did not understand, “—had passed. But on Mars—centuries?”
“Tens of centuries,” agreed Dantan, staring hard at the screen. “If Sanfel lived in old Klanvahr his people are scarcely a memory now. And Mars is dying. You—you’re speaking from another world?”
“From another universe, yes. A very different universe from yours. It was only through Sanfel that I had made contact, until now—What is your name?”
“Dantan. Samuel Dantan.”
“Not a Martian name. You are from—Earth, you say? What is that?”
“Another planet. Nearer the sun than Mars.”
“We have no planets and no suns in Zha.
This is a different universe indeed. So different I find it hard to imagine what your world must be like.” The voice died.
AND IT WAS a voice he knew. Dantan was nearly sure of that now, and the certainty frightened him. When a man in the Martian desert begins to see or hear impossibilities, he has reason to be frightened. As the silence prolonged itself he began almost to hope that the voice—the implausibly familiar voice—had been only imagination. Hesitantly he said, “Are you still there?” and was a little relieved, after all, to hear her say,
“Yes, I am here. I was thinking… I need help. I need it desperately. I wonder—has Sanfel’s laboratory changed? Does the machine still stand?