“Let us hurry!” Penkawr pleaded.
Carse relaxed and grinned at his own forgetfulness. The scholar in him had for the moment superseded the looter.
“We’ll take all we can carry of the smaller jeweled things,” he said. “This first haul alone will make us rich.”
“But you’ll be twice as rich as I,” Penkawr said sourly. “I could have got an Earthman in Barrakesh to sell these things for me for a half share only.”
Carse laughed. “You should have done so, Penkawr. When you ask for help from a noted specialist you have to pay high fees.”
His circuit of the chamber had brought him back to the altar. Now he saw that behind the altar lay a door. He went through it, Penkawr following reluctantly at his heels.
Beyond the doorway was a short passage and at the end of it a door of metal, small and heavily barred. The bars had been lifted, and the door stood open an inch or two. Above it was an inscription in the ancient changeless High Martian characters, which Carse read with practiced ease.
The doom of Rhiannon, dealt unto him forever by the Quiru who are lords of space and time!
Carse pushed the metal door aside and stepped through. And then he stood quite still, looking.
Beyond the door was a great stone chamber as large as the one behind him.
But in this room there was only one thing.
It was a great bubble of darkness. A big, brooding sphere of quivering blackness, through which shot little coruscating particles of brilliance like falling stars seen from another world. And from this weird bubble of throbbing darkness the lamplight recoiled, afraid.
Something—awe, superstition or some purely physical force—sent a cold tingling shock racing through Carse’s body. He felt his hair rising and his flesh seemed to draw away from his bones. He tried to speak and could not, his throat knotted with anxiety and tension.
“This is the thing I told you of,” whispered Penkawr. “This is the thing I told you I saw.”
Carse hardly heard him. A conjecture so vast that he could not grasp it shook his brain. The scholar’s ecstasy was upon him, the ecstasy of discovery that is akin to madness.
This brooding bubble of darkness—it was strangely like the darkness of those lank black spots far out in the galaxy which some scientists have dreamed are holes in the continuum itself, windows into the infinite outside our universe!
Incredible, surely, and yet that cryptic Quiru inscription—fascinated by the thing, despite its aura of danger, Carse took two steps toward it.
He heard the swift scrape of sandals on the stone floor behind him as Penkawr moved fast. Carse knew instantly that he had blundered in turning his back on the disgruntled little thief. He started to whirl and raise the sword.
Penkawr’s thrusting hands jabbed his back before he could complete the movement. Carse felt himself pitched into the brooding blackness.
He felt a terrible rending shock through each atom of his body, and then the world seemed to fall away from him.
“Go share Rhiannon’s doom, Earthman! I told you I could get another partner!”
Penkawr’s snarling shout came to him from a great distance as he tumbled into a black, bottomless infinity.
II. Alien World
Carse seemed to plunge through a nighted abyss, buffeted by all the shrieking winds of space. An endless, endless fall with the timelessness and the choking horror of a nightmare.
He struggled with the fierce revulsion of an animal trapped by the unknown. His struggle was not physical, for in that blind and screaming nothingness his body was useless. It was a mental fight, the man’s inner core of courage reasserting itself, willing itself to stop this nightmare fall through darkness.
And then as he fell, a more terrifying sensation shook him. A feeling that he was not alone in this nightmare plunge through infinity, that a dark strong, pulsating presence was close beside him, grasping for him, groping with eager fingers for his brain.
Carse made a supreme desperate mental effort. His sensation of falling seemed to lessen and then he felt solid rock slipping under his hands and feet. He scrambled frantically forward, in physical effort this time.
He found himself quite suddenly outside the dark bubble again on the floor of the inner chamber of the Tomb.
“What in the Nine Hells…” he began shakily and then stopped because the oath seemed so pitifully inadequate for what had happened.
The little krypton-lamp hooked to his belt still cast its reddish glow, the sword of Rhiannon still glittered in his hand.
And the bubble of darkness still gloomed and brooded a foot away from him, flickering with its whirl of diamond motes.
Carse realized that all his nightmare plunging through space had been during the moment he was inside the bubble. What devil’s trick of ancient science was the thing anyway? Some queer perpetual vortex of force that the mysterious Quiru of long ago had set up, he supposed.
But why had he seemed to fall through infinities inside the thing? And whence had come that terrifying sensation of strong fingers groping eagerly at his brain as he fell?
“A trick of old Quiru science,” he muttered shakenly. “And Penkawr’s superstitions made him think he could kill me by pushing me into it.”
Penkawr? Carse leaped to his feet, the sword of Rhiannon glittering wickedly in his hand.
“Blast his thieving little soul!”
Penkawr was not here now. But he wouldn’t have had time to go far. The smile on Carse’s face was not pleasant as he went through the doorway.
In the outer chamber he suddenly stopped dead. There were things here now—big strange glittering objects—that had not been here before.
Where had they come from? Had he been longer in that bubble of darkness than he thought? Had Penkawr found these things in hidden crypts and arranged them here to await his return?
Carse’s wonder increased as he examined the objects that now loomed amid the mail and other relics he had seen before. These objects did not look like mere art-relics—they looked like carefully fashioned, complicated instruments of unguessable purpose.
The biggest of them was a crystal wheel, the size of a small table, mounted horizontally atop a dull metal sphere. The wheel’s rim glistened with jewels cut in precise polyhedrons. And there were other smaller devices of linked crystal prisms and tubes and things built of concentric metal rings and squat looped tubes of massive metal.
Could these glittering objects be the incomprehensible devices of an ancient alien Martian science? That supposition seemed incredible. The Mars of the far past, scholars knew, had been a world of only rudimentary science, a world of sword-fighting sea-warriors whose galleys and kingdoms had clashed on long-lost oceans.
Yet, perhaps, in the Mars of the even farther past, there had been a science whose techniques were unfamiliar and unrecognizable?
“But where could Penkawr have found them when we didn’t see them before? And why didn’t he take any of them with him?”
Memory of Penkawr reminded him that the little thief would be getting farther away every moment. Grimly gripping the sword, Carse turned and hurried down the square stone corridor toward the outer world.
As he strode on Carse became aware that the air in the tomb was now strangely damp. Moisture glistened on the walls. He had not noticed that most un-Martian dampness before and it startled him.
“Probably seepage from underground springs, like those that feed the canals,” he thought. “But it wasn’t there before.”
His glance fell on the floor of the corridor. The drifted dust lay over it thickly as when they had entered. But there were no footprints in it now. No prints at all except those he was now making.