by Philip Wylie
“And everything locked,” Tony said, having halted to try a door. The order of everything, and the utter stillness, was getting his nerves again. “Where’ve they gone? Where’d they go—leaving it like this?”
Eliot James did not answer; he had run ahead.
“Tables!” he called. “Tables and chairs! This was a restaurant!”
His nose was pressed against the glass, and Tony swiftly joined him. Within stood rows of metal tables and what were, unquestionably, chairs of metal. All bare; and all, of course, empty. It resembled nothing so much as a restaurant; and looking in, no one from earth could doubt that that was what it had been.
The place looked immaculate, as if put in order an hour ago—and then deserted.
“Where are they?” Eliot James appealed again. “Oh, Tony, where did they go?”
“What were they?” Tony countered. “That’s what I want to know. Were they huge ants? Were they human-brained reptiles? Were they—”
“They sat in chairs,” said Eliot James. “They ate at tables. They ran a car that steered by pedals and a wheel. Their equipment would fit us; their floors and steps are on our scale. Let’s break in here.”
He tried the door, which was fitted with a handle; but this did not turn or budge, however pulled or pressed. There was no keyhole; no locking device was anywhere apparent; but the door was to be moved no more than those that they had tried before.
Tony looked about. A shudder convulsed him. A thousand windows looked down on this stretch of the silent street; a thousand pairs of eyes once had looked down. It seemed to Tony that they must—they must do it again. Eyes of what? Huge, sentient, intelligent insects? Reptiles of some strange, semihuman sort?
What lay dead by the tens of thousands in those silent rooms overhead?
Tony was pulling at his pistol. Somehow, it reassured him to hold it in his hand. He reversed it, and beat the butt on the great glass pane behind which stood the strange metal tables and chairs.
The glass did not give way. It twanged, not like glass but like sheet metal—metal utterly transparent.
Tony caught the butt in his palm, and he pulled the trigger. The shot roared and reëchoed. But the metal pane was not pierced. The bullet he had fired lay at Tony’s feet. Hysterically, he emptied his pistol.
With the last shot, he jerked about again and stared up at the rows and rows of windows. Did something up there stir?
Eliot James jumped and pointed; and Tony stiffened as he stared.
Something fluttered a hundred yards overhead and farther down the street; something light, like a cloth or a paper. One way, now another, it fluttered as it fell in the still air of that strange sealed city. It reached the street and lay there.
Ten thousand eyes gazed down, it seemed to Tony. It seemed to him that if he could look up twice as quick, he would catch them at their windows gazing down at him. But he never could catch them. Always, when he looked up, they had anticipated him; they were gone; they had snatched their heads away.
So he never saw anything but glass and metal—and the single fluttering object which had fallen down.
“We’ll go see what that is,” he said to Eliot James, wetting his dry lips so he could speak.
But before they gained the object, they forgot it. A window, evidently the vitrine of a gallery of art, confronted them; within the glass was a portrait.
Simultaneously, Tony and Eliot saw it. They stopped as if they were struck; and their breath left them. Breath of relief, and wonder!
They looked at the likeness of a woman!
She was a young woman, strange and fascinating. She was not fair; nor was she dark of skin. Her hair and brows were black—hair arranged with an air that might be individual but which, these discoverers of her felt, was racial.
And of what race?
Not the Caucasian, not the Mongolian; not the Ethiopian, surely; not the Indian. She was of no race upon earth; but she was human.
More than that, she had been sensitive, eager, filled with the joy of living. Her bosom and body were like that of a lovely woman on earth, slight and graceful. Her eyes were wide apart and gray; her cheek-bones were very far apart; and her lips, which were bright red, perhaps because they had been rouged, were pleasant and amiable.
“So,” said Eliot James, who first succeeded in speaking, “so they were human! By God, you feel you’d like to know her.”
Tony relaxed his hands, which had clenched. “Where did she live, do you suppose, Eliot? Did she live up behind one of these windows?”
“She had a name,” said Eliot James. “And surely she had lovers. Where are they?”
“Dead,” said Tony. “Dead with her—maybe a million years ago. Let’s go on.”
“Why go on?” demanded Eliot James. “Why? To pick up a scarf on the street? We’ve got to get into one of these buildings somewhere. We can break in somehow—with nobody to stop us. We might as well begin here.”
So together they attacked the door, which, like those they had pushed and pulled at before, showed no lock, yet was secure.
The door, like the walls of the buildings, was of metal and glass. Indeed, it was difficult to distinguish by texture between the glass and the metal. The panes appeared to be transparent metal. Jeremiah Post had spoken conservatively when, after the examination of the wrecked vehicle discovered near camp, he had said that the People of Bronson Beta had far surpassed any people on earth in metallurgy.
This door evidently was designed to lift; it should rise and slip into the metal wall overhanging it; but no pushing or straining at it, no hammering and pounding, could cause it to budge. And the glass in it—the panel of transparent metal—was not to be broken.
Weary and sweating from their straining at it, Tony and Eliot stepped back.
Their own blows, their own thudding and their gasping for breath, had made the only sound in the silent city.
Repeatedly, while they had worked at the door, each of them had spun about for a glance over his shoulder. The metal seemed so new—some one must be about this city standing all in such order.
Tony kept trying his game of looking up quickly, without warning, to catch the heads of the people behind the upper windows who always—so he felt—had jerked back in time.
Now, as the two men from earth stood side by side staring about them, the slightest of sounds reached them; and a door—not the door at which they had pushed and pounded, but a door some twenty steps beyond—began rising.
Tony and Eliot shrank closer together. They pulled out their pistols, which they had reloaded. Up, up steadily, slowly, the metal door was lifted.
“Counterbalanced!” exclaimed Tony to his companion; but his voice was husky. “It was counterbalanced, of course! Our pounding affected some mechanism inside!”
It was the reasonable, rational explanation. For the people of this city could not be alive; it was impossible that they had survived! Yet, here in their city, you could not believe that.
“They’re human, anyway,” whispered Eliot James.
“Yes,” said Tony, his eyes fastened on the aperture under the rising door. “See—anything?”
“Say it, Tony,” returned Eliot James. “Or I will.”
“All right,” said Tony hoarsely. “See—any one?”
“There’s nobody there,” argued Eliot, with himself as much as with his comrade. “They all died—they all died a million years ago.”
“Yes,” agreed Tony. The door was ceasing to rise; it had reached its limit and stopped, leaving the way into the great metal building open. “They all died a million years ago. But where did they go to die?”
“Who cares?” Eliot continued his argument. “Can a ghost live a million years? I don’t believe they can. Come on in, Tony. They can’t even haunt us.”
“A minute,” said Tony.
“Why?”
“I want to look around once more.” He was doing it. “All right now!” They approached the open doorway together; and together, n
either in advance or in the rear of the other, they entered it, pistols in hands. That was wholly irrational; and both knew it; but neither could help himself.
So, side by side, revolvers ready, they entered the door of the Million Years Dead.
The walls of the hall in which they found themselves were vemilion. It did not appear to be paint. Like the colors of the exteriors, the hue was a quality of the metal. Vermilion surrounded Tony and Eliot—vermilion and gray, in vigorous, pronounced patterns.
There was no furniture in the hall; no covering upon the floor. Perhaps there never had been one; the floor was smooth and even and of agreeable texture. It was not wood nor metal, but of some composition. It might have been meant to be a dance-floor or for a meeting-hall. Nothing declared its use. An open doorway invited to an apartment beyond; and side by side, but with their pistols less at alert, Eliot and Tony stepped into this.
It was blue—ultramarine, they would have called it on earth, with slashes of silver. Great long-beaked, long-legged birds, suggestive of cranes, flew across a marsh—a decoration done by some superlative artist.
But this room also was empty.
Tony and Eliot James went on.
“How do you feel?” demanded Tony, after they had entered the fifth great room in gay colors, with marvelous decoration, but empty.
“Feel?” repeated Eliot. “It feels to me that we’re in a building that never was used, into which they never moved.”
“Perhaps,” said Tony, “that goes for the whole city.”
“Too soon to say, much too soon to say. How do you go up, d’you suppose?”
“Elevators behind one of these doors, probably. No sign of stairs.”
“How do you open the doors?”
“Pound on one of the others, probably,” suggested Tony, “judging from recent experience.”
“How about the one we opened?” said Eliot. “Is it still up, d’you suppose?”
“What’d lower it?”
“What lifted it?” returned Eliot. “I’ll go back and look. Want to go with me?”
“No: I’ll stay here and try some of these.”
But he had accomplished nothing with any of them when Eliot came back.
“That closed, Tony,” he reported soberly.
Tony started. “You didn’t close it?”
“No.”
“All right!” Tony almost yelled. “Go ahead. Say it!”
“Say what?”
“What you’re thinking. Remote control of some sort! Somebody saw us, opened the door, let us walk in, closed it again.”
“Somebody!” said Eliot. “Let’s be sensible, Tony.”
“All right,” said Tony, jittering. “You be!… Damn it, look at that door. Look at it! That’s opening now!”
For a door at the farther edge of this room now slowly was rising.
“Were you working at it?” Eliot whispered.
“Yes.”
“Then, that’s it. You started another counterbalance working.”
“Sure,” said Tony. “Sure.”
They stepped to the opening. Utter darkness dropped below them. There was a shaft, there—a shaft which, under other circumstances, might have showed machinery. Now it was empty.
Tony and Eliot James knelt side by side at its edge. They shouted, and no voice came back to them.
Tony took a cartridge and dropped it. For so long did it fall silently that they were sure, as they listened, that it must have struck something which gave no sound; then they heard it strike. Tony dropped another, and they timed it. One more they timed, and they stepped back from the shaft carefully.
“Half a mile below!” said Eliot. “They went down almost as far as up; perhaps farther. Why?”
They stepped back from the shaft’s threshold carefully.
“There’s some control to these damn doors,” said Tony, “that probably made it utterly painless to operate them when everything was working. You maybe merely had to stand before them, and some electric gadget would work that’s jammed now because the power isn’t on. These doors can’t all be to shafts.”
About fifteen minutes later, they had opened another that exposed a circular passage, leading both upward and downward.
“Ah!” said Eliot. “This is the stuff. No machinery. They probably had it for emergencies.”
* * *
Tony, awakening, stretched, rubbed his eyes and gazed up at the ceiling. His eyes followed mechanically, forgetfully, the graceful, tenuous lines of decoration which traced down over the walls of the pleasant, beautiful chamber.
He still did not fully recollect where he was, but he realized that he was lying on a couch of soft, agreeable material. Then he saw Eliot James, in trousers and shirt but without his coat, seated at a table, writing. And Tony remembered.
Eliot and he were in the Sealed City—the amazing, stupendous metropolis of the Other People, the People a Million Years Dead.
The light diffused through this chamber, so pleasantly and evenly—it seemed to be spread and intensified somehow by its refraction through the peculiar metal-glass of one wall—was the light of the dawn of the third long Bronson Beta day since Eliot James and Tony Drake, refugees from earth, had discovered and entered the Sealed City.
The amazements of their two days of exploration passed through Tony’s mind like reviewing a dream; but they remained reality; for instead of becoming dimmer and dimmer as he sought to recall them, they became only sharper and clearer. Moreover, here before him in a heap upon one of the tables of the Other People, and piled also on the floor, were the proofs of the actuality of what Eliot and he had done. Here were the objects—some of them understandable, more of them utterly incomprehensible as to their purpose or utility—which they had collected to carry with them back to Cole Hendron and the camp.
Eliot was writing so intently and absorbedly that he did not know that Tony was awake. They were in utter stillness; not a sound nor a stir in the Sealed City; and Tony lay quiet watching his companion attempting to deal through words with the wonders they had encountered.
What could a man say that would be adequate?
Tony fingered the stuff of the couch upon which he lay—material not wool, not cotton, not silk. It was soft, pliant fiber, unidentifiable. How old? A million years old, perhaps, in rigidly reckoned time; but not five years old, probably, in the practical period of its use.
It might have been new a million years ago, just before Bronson Beta was torn from its sun; thereafter the time that passed merely preserved it. It was in the utter cold and dark of space. Not even air brushed it. The air was frozen solid. Then this planet found our sun; and time which aged materials, was resumed.
So it was with all the stuff which Eliot and he had collected; those objects might be a million years old, and yet new!
Eliot halted his writing and arose; and glancing at Tony, saw he was awake.
“Hello.”
“Hello. How long you been up?”
“Quite a while.”
“You would be,” complained Tony admiringly. It had been late in the long night, and both had been utterly exhausted, when they lay down to sleep. “It’s the third day, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“We ought to go back now.”
“Yes,” agreed Eliot, “I suppose so. But how can we?”
Tony was sitting up. “How can we leave?” he agreed. “But also, how can we stay—without letting Cole Hendron and the rest of them know?”
“We can come back, of course,” Eliot James reluctantly assented.
“Or we may find another city or something else.”
“By ‘something else,’ do you mean the place where ‘they’ all went, Tony? God, Tony, doesn’t it get you? Where did they go? Not one of them—nor the bones of one of them! And all this left in order.”
He stood at the table and sifted in his fingers the kernels of a strange grain. Not wheat, not corn, not rice nor barley nor rye; but a starchy kernel. T
hey both had tasted it.
“There’s millions of bushels of this, Tony. Should we say ‘bushels’ or, like the Bible, ‘measures’? Well, we know there’s millions of measures of this that we’ve already found. If it’s food—and what else could it be?—we’ve solved our problem of provender indefinitely. And it’s foolish to have our people improvising shelter and equipment when all we have to do is to move into—this. Here’s equipment we never dreamed of!”
“Yes,” said Tony. “Yes.” But he remembered that contest that already had divided the camp. Did the emigrants from the earth dare to move into the city when found? Also, could the people from the earth sustain themselves on this grain or other supplies left by the vanished people? Though the kernels might have been preserved through the epoch of utter cold, had the vitamins—essential to life—remained?
But that was a matter for the experts of the camp to test and to decide. Tony could not doubt his duty to report the tremendous discovery.
“We’ll leave to-day, Tony,” Eliot pleaded, “but not until later. Let’s look about once more.”
And Tony agreed; for he too could not bear yet to abandon the amazements of the Sealed City.
It was later than they had planned, when at last they had loaded their ship with the objects—comprehensible and incomprehensible—which they had chosen to carry back to Hendron and his comrades. The sun—the old sun of the shattered world, the new sun of Bronson Beta—was low when Tony drew down once more the great metal ring which closed again the gate of the Sealed City.
“Let’s not fly back to the camp by the path we came,” said Eliot James.
“No,” agreed Tony. “Let’s loop to the south before we cut back to the seacoast.”
They were in the air again, supported on the rushing golden stream of fire that emerged from their rocket-tubes. They flew through the darkness, occasionally casting upon the ground underneath the bright ray of their searchlight, and still more often thrusting it ahead of them into the gloom. There were no lights anywhere beneath them to indicate that people lived or moved or had their being there.