The space between the sand and the tops of the doorways was narrow, but he thought he could squeeze through. He picked out one, centering it in the brilliant disk of his head lamp - and stood there, in the middle of the avenue, reluctant to move.
He glanced back at the cubicle, as if for reassurance. It was still there, comfortably clear and sharp-lined, timeless. Now he realized what was troubling him. This city was dead - dead as the planet of the cliff or the planet of ice. The buildings were stone; they had crumbled under the weather. Their makers were dust.
He had agreed with Wolfert when the other had suggested that he was on a quest for knowledge; that he hoped the Doorway would eventually take him back to Sol, armed with knowledge, ready to remake the world. But it wasn’t true. That had been his conscious idea, but it was a dream, a self-delusion - an excuse.
He had no love for Earth, or any conviction that humanity must be rescued from its own weakness. If that force had driven him, there would have been no logic in leaving Earth. He could have stayed, worked himself into the governing elite, organized a revolution from within. His chance of success would have been small, but there would have been some chance.
Yes, he might have done it - and for what? To remove the one control that kept humanity from destroying itself?
That coin had the same face on both sides. Uncontrolled, mankind was not fit to colonize. Controlled, it dared not take the risk. Human civilization was not ready, was a dead end, an aborted experiment. Mankind was a dirty beast, ravaging its planet, befouling itself - capable of any imaginable perversion, degradation, horror.
But there had been another civilization once - one that had been worthy of the stars. Falk did not believe it was dead. Stone crumbled; metal rusted; and the races that used them vanished and were not mourned. The Doorways still lived, still functioned, defying time.
That race was not here; it had left no trace of itself except the Doorway. Without another glance at the buildings around him, Falk turned and went back to the brown glass cubicle.
When he was three yards away from it, he saw the footprints.
There were five of them, lightly impressed into the sand near the Doorway’s entrance. Search as he might, Falk could not find any more. Two, apparently, pointed away from the cubicle; the other three were the returning trail, for one overlapped one of the previous set.
They were smaller than Falk’s booted prints, oval, slightly flattened along the sides. Falk stared at them as if the mere act of looking would make them give up more information; but they told him nothing.
They were not human; but what did that prove?
They had been made long since the time when the Doorways had been built; Falk did not know what winds swept this world, but it could only have been a few years, at most, since the sands had dropped to their present level. But even that train of logic led nowhere.
They could be the trace of a Doorway builder. Or they could have been made by a wanderer like himself, another barbarian venturing in the paths of his betters.
The bitterest thing of all was that, having found the trail, he could not follow it. For it led through the Doorway - to any one of sixty billion suns.
Falk stepped into the cubicle and pressed the lever down once more.
III
White light that sealed his eyes with pain, and a vicious torrent of heat. Gasping, Falk groped frantically for the lever.
The afterimage faded slowly. He saw night again, and the stars. That last one, he thought, must have been the planet of a nova. How many of those was he likely to run into?
He stepped to the doorway. A wasteland: not a stick, not a stone.
He went back to the lever. Light again, of bearable intensity, and a riot of color outside.
Falk stepped cautiously to the entrance. Slowly his mind adapted to the unfamiliar shapes and colors. He saw a bright landscape under a tropic sun - gray-violet mountains in the distance, half veiled by mist; nearer, tall stalks that bore heavy leaves and fronds of a startling blue-green; and directly ahead of him, a broad plaza that might have been cut from one monstrous boulder of jade. On either side were low, box-shaped structures of dark vitreous materiaclass="underline" blue, brown, green, and red. And in the middle of the plaza stood a group of slender shapes that were unquestionably alive, sentient.
Falk’s heart was pounding. He stepped behind the shelter of the entrance wall and peered out. Curiously, it was not the cluster of live things that drew him, but the buildings on either side.
They were made of the same enduring, clean-edged substance as the Doorway. He had come, by blind chance, at last to the right place.
Now he stared at the creatures grouped in the middle of the plaza. For some reason they were disappointing. They were slender S-shapes, graceful enough in repose: lizard shapes, upright on two legs; pink of belly and umber of back. But in spite of the bandoliers slung from their narrow shoulders, in spite of their quick, patterned gestures as they spoke together, Falk could not convince himself that he had found the people he sought.
They were too manlike. One turned away while two others spoke; came back leaning at a passionate angle, thrust himself between the two, gesturing wildly. Shouted down, he again left and stalked a half circle around the group. He moved as a chicken moves, awkwardly, thrusting his long neck forward at each step.
Of the five others, two argued, two merely stood with drooping, attentive heads and watched; and the last stood a little apart, gazing around him disdainfully.
They were funny, as monkeys are funny - because they resemble men. We laughed at our mirrored selves. Even the races of man laugh at each other when they should weep.
They’re tourists, Falk thought. One wants to go to the Lido, another insists they see the Grand Canal first; the third is furious with both of them for wasting time, the next two are too timid to interfere, and the last one doesn’t care.
He couldn’t imagine what their reaction to him would be. Nothing welcome, at any rate; they might want to take him home as a souvenir. He wanted to get into those buildings, but he’d have to wait until they were out of sight.
While he waited, he got out the atmosphere-testing kit. The pressure gauge showed the merest trifle less than Earth normal; the litmus papers did not react; the match burned cheerfully, just as it would have on Earth. Falk turned off the oxygen, cracked the helmet valve cautiously, and sniffed.
After the stale air of the suit, the breath he inhaled was so good that it brought tears to his eyes. It was fresh, faintly warm, and sweet with flower fragrance. Falk opened the helmet seam, tipped the helmet back, and let the breeze wash over his face and hair.
He peered out, and saw to his dismay that the party was trooping directly toward him. Falk ducked his head back inside, glanced instinctively at the lever, then looked out again.
They were running now; they had seen him. They ran very clumsily, heads darting strenuously forward and back. The one in the lead was opening and shutting his triangular mouth, and Falk heard faint yawps. He leaped out of the cubicle, cut sharply to the right, and ran.
The nearest building with a visible opening, unfortunately, was some distance down the line, between Falk and the lizards. He glanced back when he was halfway there. The lizards were considerably strung out now, but the leader was only a few yards away.