"Home," Ogden answered immediately. "Home and to bed. But these robots took the tunnel we're in. So let's turn back and take the other one."
"How do you know?"
"Observation and deduction. I observed that I am standing in something warm and squishy, and I deduced that it is the corpse of a recent light-head."
"No point in taking the other tunnel, though," Annamarie's voice floated back. She had advanced a few steps and was hugging the tunnel wall. "There's an entrance to another tunnel here, and it slopes back the way we came. I'd say, offhand, that the other tunnel is just an alternate route."
"Noise," said Stanton. "Listen."
There was a scrabbling, chittering, quite indescribable sound, and then another one. Suddenly terrific squalling noises broke the underground silence and the three ducked as they sensed something swooping down on them and gliding over their heads along the tunnel.
"What was that?" yelped Josey.
"A cat-fight, I think," said Stanton. "I could hear two distinct sets of vocables, and there were sounds of battle. Those things could fly, glide or jump – probably jump. I think they were a specialized form of tunnel life adapted to living, breeding, and fighting in a universe that was long, dark, and narrow. Highly specialized."
Annamarie giggled hysterically. "Like the bread-and-butter-fly that lived on weak tea with cream in it."
"Something like," Stanton agreed.
Hand in hand, they groped their way on through the utter blackness. Suddenly there was a grunt from Josey, on the extreme right. "Hold it," he cried, withdrawing his hand to finger his damaged nose. "The tunnel seems to end here."
"Not end," said Annamarie. "Just turns to the left. And take a look at what's there!"
The men swerved and stared. For a second no one spoke; the sudden new vista was too compelling for speech.
"Ray!" finally gasped the girl. "It's incredible ! It's incredible!"
There wasn't a sound from the two men at her sides. They had rounded the final bend in the long tunnel and come out into the flood of light they had seen. The momentary brilliance staggered them and swung glowing spots before their eyes.
Then, as the effects of persistence of vision faded, they saw what the vista actually was. It was a great cavern, the hugest they'd ever seen on either planet—and by tremendous odds the most magnificent.
The walls were not of rock, it seemed, but of slabs of liquid fire—liquid fire which, their stunned eyes soon saw, was a natural inlay of incredible winking gems.
Opulence was the rule of this drusy cave. Not even so base a metal as silver could be seen here; gold was the basest available. Platinum, iridium, little pools of shimmering mercury dotted the jewel-studded floor of the place. Stalactites and stalagmites were purest rock-crystal.
Flames seemed to glow from behind the walls colored by the emerald, ruby, diamond, and topaz. "How can such a formation occur in nature?" Annamarie whispered. No one answered.
" 'There are more things in heaven and under it —' " raptly misquoted Josey. Then, with a start, "What act's that from?"
It seemed to bring the others to. "Dunno," chorused the archaeologist and the girl. Then, the glaze slowly vanishing from their eyes, they looked at each other.
"Well," breathed the girl.
In an abstracted voice, as though the vision of the jewels had never been seen, the girl asked, "How do you suppose the place is lighted?"
"Radioactivity," said Josey tersely. There seemed to be a tacit agreement—if one did not mention the gems neither would the others. "Radioactive minerals and maybe plants. All this is natural formation. Weird, of course, but here it is." There was a feeble, piping sound in the cavern.
"Can this place harbor life?" asked Stanton in academic tones.
"Of course," said Josey, "any place can." The thin, shrill piping was a little louder, strangely distorted by echoes.
"Listen," said the girl urgently. "Do you hear what I hear?"
"Of course not," cried Stanton worriedly. "It's just my—I mean our imagination. I can't be hearing what I think I'm hearing."
Josey had pricked his ears up. "Calm down, both of you," he whispered. "If you two are crazy—so am I. That noise is something—somebody—singing Gilbert and Sullivan. "A Wand'ring Minstrel, I", I believe the tune is."
"Yes," said Annamarie hysterically. "I always liked that number." Then she reeled back into Stanton's arms, sobbing hysterically.
"Slap her," said Josey, and Stanton did, her head rolling loosely under the blows. She looked up at him.
"I'm sorry," she said, the tears still on her cheeks.
"I'm sorry, too," echoed a voice, thin, reedy, and old; "and I suppose you're sorry. Put down your guns. Drop them. Put up your hands. Raise them. I really am sorry. After all, I don't want to kill you."
IV
Marshall Ellenbogan
They turned and dropped their guns almost immediately, Stanton shrugging off the heavy power-pack harness of his blaster as Josey cast down his useless heat-pistol. The creature before them was what one would expect as a natural complement to this cavern. He was weird, pixyish, dressed in fantastic points and tatters, stooped, wrinkled, whiskered, and palely luminous. Induced radioactivity, Stanton thought.
"Hee," he giggled. "Things!"
"We're men," said Josey soberly. "Men like – like you." He shuddered.
"Lord," marvelled the pixy to himself, his gun not swerving an inch. "What won't they think of next! Now, now, you efts –you"re addressing no puling creature of the deep. I'm a man and proud of it. Don't palter with me. You shall die and be reborn again – eventually, no doubt. I'm no agnostic, efts. Here in this cavern I have seen – oh the things I have seen." His face was rapturous with holy bliss.
"Who are you?" asked Annamarie.
The pixy started at her, then turned to Josey with a questioning look. "Is your friend all right?" the pixy whispered confidentially. "Seems rather effeminate to me."
"Never mind," the girl said hastily. "What's your name?"
"Marshall Ellenbogan," said the pixy surprisingly. "Second Lieutenant in the United States Navy. But," he snickered, "I suspect my commission's expired."
"If you're Ellenbogan," said Stanton, "then you must be a survivor from the first Mars expedition. The one that started the war."
"Exactly," said the creature. He straightened himself with a sort of somber dignity. "You can't know," he groaned, you never could know what we went through. Landed in a desert. Then we trekked for civilization – all of us, except three kids that we left in the ship. I've often wondered what happened to them." He laughed. "Civilization! Cold-blooded killers who tracked us down like vermin. Killed Kelly, Keogh. Moley. Jumped on us and killed us – like that." He made a futile attempt to snap his fingers. "But not me – not Ellenbogan – I ducked behind a rock and they fired on the rock and rock and me both fell into a cavern. I've wandered – Lord! how I've wandered. How long ago was it, efts?"
The lucid interval heartened the explorers. "Fifty years, Ellenbogan," said Josey. "What did you live on all that time?"
"Moss-fruits from the big white trees. Meat now and then, eft, when I could shoot one of your light-headed brothers." He leered. "But I won't eat you. I haven't tasted meat for so long now ... Fifty years. That makes me seventy years old. You efts never live for more than three or four years, you don't know how long seventy years can be."
"We aren't efts," snapped Stanton. "We're human beings same as you. I swear we are! And we want to take you back to Earth where you can get rid of that poison you've been soaking into your system! Nobody can live in a radium-impregnated cave for fifty years and still be healthy. Ellenbogan, for God's sake be reasonable!"