by Andre Norton
Mura freed his belt torch and sent its beam ahead. Save where they had disturbed it, that dust was smooth, without track. No one had walked this way for a long, long time—perhaps not since the Forerunners had left this mountain citadel.
“Hey!” Kosti’s startled cry drew their attention. Where the narrow door had been was now once more smooth wall. Their retreat had been cut off.
”They’ve trapped us again!” he added hoarsely. But Mura shook his head.
“I think not. There is perhaps some closing mechanism that operates automatically, which we activated merely by passing it. No one uses this passage—or hasn’t for years. I am willing to believe that Rich and the others do not even know of its existence. Let us see where it will lead us.” He pattered ahead eagerly.
The corridor paralleled for a space that wider hall which had been turned into a trap. Its smooth walls showed no other hint of openings. There might be innumerable doors along it, all attuned to some combination of whistled notes, Dane thought, but they had neither the time nor the energy to explore that possibility.
“Air—”
Dane did not need that exclamation from Mura—he had already scented it. Cutting across the dusty, dead atmosphere of the way was a breath of stronger air—a puff which carried with it the chill of the outer world, and a very faint hint of growing stuff which out in the open might not have been discernible at all.
The three reached the point from which that came, and found an opening in the wall. Beyond, audible above the beat of the installation, was a rushing sound. Dane thrust his hand out into the square of dark and the current of air, blowing as if sucked in by the mountain, pulled gently at his fingers.
“Ventilation system,” Kosti’s engineering knowledge was intrigued. He put head and shoulders into the opening. “Big enough to travel through,” he reported after using his torch up and down the channel beyond.
“Something to keep in mind,” Mura agreed. “But first let us get to the end of this particular way.”
In twenty minutes they got to the end, another blank wall. Kosti was not disheartened this time.
“Bring out the tootler, Frank,” was his solution, “and open her up for us—”
But Mura did not reach for the pipe. Instead he swept his torch carefully over the wall. This was not the smooth material of the Forerunners’ work, but the rough native stone of the mountain.
“I do not think that this will respond to any tootling,” he remarked. “This is the end of the road and it is truly sealed—”
“But a passage should lead somewhere!” Dane protested.
“Yes. Undoubtedly there are many openings we cannot see. And we do not know the sonic combinations to unlock them. I do not think it wise to waste tune trying to find any such. Let us return to that air duct. If it supplies a series of passages it may let us out into another one—”
So they went back to the duct. As Kosti had said, it was large, large enough that the jetman and Dane might travel it—if they went on hands and knees. And it lacked the dust which carpeted the side passage.
One after another they swung into it, and into the dark as they moved from the entrance. For here was none of the ghostly radiance which gave limited light to the corridors.
Mura crawled first, his torch beaming on. They were in a tube of generous proportions and around them passed air which had come from the outside. But the steady beat of the installation crept up their arms and legs from contact with the surface.
The steward switched off his torch. “Light ahead—” his voice was no more than a husky whisper.
When Dane’s eyes adjusted to the lack of torchlight he saw it too—a round circle of pale grey. They had found the end of the vent.
But as they came up to that exit they found themselves fronted by a grille of metal, a mesh wide enough to allow passage of their hands through the squares. And beyond it lay a vast open space. Mura looked through and for the first time since he had known him Dane heard the unusually calm steward give a gasp of real surprise. Dane prodded his back suggesting that he and Kosti also wanted to see.
Mura flattened himself against the wall of the tube so that Dane could take his place. The space beyond was huge—as if the whole of a mountain interior had been hollowed out to hold a most curious structure. For, when the cargo-apprentice squirmed forward he looked down upon the strangest building he had ever seen.
It was roofless, its outer walls coming up to within six feet of the ventilation grill. But those walls—they ran crazily at curves and angles, marking off irregular spaces which bore small resemblances to ordinary rooms. Corridors began nowhere and ended in six- or eight-sided chambers without other exit. Or a whole series of rooms were linked—for no purpose since the end ones possessed neither entrance nor exit.
The walls were thick, at least three feet wide. A man could swing down and walk along them, so discovering the purpose of the muddled maze, or winning completely across the cave. And since there was no way back for them, that is what the Terrans must do. Dane inched back to allow Kosti his turn at the grille.
With a grunt of surprise the jetman viewed the weird scene. “What’s it for?” he wanted to know. “It doesn’t make sense—”
“Maybe not our brand of sense, no,” Mura agreed. “But the solidity of the work suggests a very definite purpose. No one builds such erections for a mere whim.”
Dane reached over Kosti’s shoulder to pull at the grille. “We’ll have to get through this—”
“Yes, and then what?” the jetman wanted to know. “Do we grow wings?”
“We can get down to the top of that wall. They’re wide enough to walk on. So we can get across on them—”
Kosti was very quiet. Then his big hands went out to the grille, testing the fastenings. “Take a while to get this loose.” From his belt he took his small tool kit and busied himself about the frame of the netting.
They ate while they crouched there, rations from their emergency kits. Since the grey light of the cave neither waxed nor waned, there was no measurement of time save as recorded on their watches. It might have been the middle of the night—their time keepers said it was afternoon.
Kosti gulped his vita-cube and went back to work on the grille. It was well into the second hour before he put away his tools.
“Now!” he pushed gently at the grille and it folded out, leaving the end of the tube open. But he did not swing through as Dane expected. Instead he crawled back and allowed the others to pass him. Mura thrust his head through the opening and then looked back at Dane.
“I shall have to have help to reach the wall. I am too short—”
He held out his hands and Dane clamped a hold about his wrists. Mura backed cautiously out of the vent and for a moment his weight pulled Dane forward. In that same instant the younger man felt Kosti’s grip about his hips giving him the anchorage he needed as he lowered the steward to the wall.
“Made it!” Mura trotted several feet to the right on the wall and stood waiting.
Dane turned to lower himself to the same level.
“Good luck!” Kosti said out of the shadows. Instead of crouching ready to follow, the jetman had moved back in the tube.
“What do you mean?” Dane asked, chilled by something in the other’s attitude.
“You’ve got to go this next stretch by yourselves, fella,” Kosti returned calmly enough. “I haven’t any head for heights. I can’t balance along on those walls down there—two steps and I’d be over the edge.”
Dane had forgotten the big man’s disability. But what were they going to do? The only way out of here lay across the maze of walls, a maze Kosti could not tread. On the other hand they could not leave the jetman here.
“Listen, boy,” Kosti continued. “You two will have to go on. I’ll stay right here. If there is a way out and you find it, well, then maybe I can make it. But, until you are sure, there’s no use in my going along to foul you up. That’s only good sense—”
Maybe it was good sense, but Dane could not accept it. However, a moment later he had no chance to protest. Kosti’s hands were iron about his wrists, the jetman pushed him to the edge of the duct and thrust him through, dangling him until his boots scraped the wall. Then Kosti let go.
“Kosti won’t come—He says he can’t make it!”
Mura nodded. “To walk these—” he indicated the maze of walls, “would be impossible for him now. But if we can find a way out—then we can return and guide him. We will move faster alone, and Karl knows that—”
Still feeling as if he were deserting Kosti, Dane reluctantly followed the steward, who picked a cat’s sure-footed way along the wall out into the scrambled pattern beyond. The walls were about twenty feet high and the rooms and corridors they formed were bare of any furnishings. There were no signs that anyone had been there for centuries. That is, there was not, until Mura gave a sudden exclamation and aimed the beam of his torch down into a narrow room.
Dane crowded up beside him to see it, too, a tangle of white bones, a skull staring hollow-eyed back at them. The maze had had an inhabitant once, one who remained for eternity.
Mura swung the beam in slow circles about the skeleton. There were some dark rags of clothing, and the light glimmered back at them from a buckle of untarnished metal.
“A prisoner,” said the steward slowly. “A man shut into this could wander perhaps forever and never find his way out—”
“You mean that he has been here since—since—” Dane could not name the stretch of time which had elapsed since the destruction of the city, the burn-off of Limbo.
“I think not. This one, he was human—like us. He has been here a long time certainly, but not so long as it has been since the builders left this maze. Others have found it, and a use for so puzzling a structure.”
Now as they went from one wall to the next, twisting and turning, but always aiming at the centre of the maze, they kept careful watch for other remains in the sections below. The whole space filled with this curious honey-comb erection was much larger, Dane came to realize, than it had appeared from the air duct. There must be several square miles of plain solid walls crossing, curving, and crisscrossing to shut in nothing but oddly shaped emptiness.
“For a reason,” Mura murmured. “This must have a purpose, been made for a reason—but why? The geometry is wrong—as were the lines of the buildings in the city. This is Forerunner work. But why—why should they conceive such a thing?”
“For a prison?” Dane suggested. “Put someone in here and they would never get out. Prison and execution chamber in one.”
“No,” Mura shook his head. “It is too large an undertaking—men do not go to such lengths to handle their criminals. There are shorter and less arduous methods for imposing justice.”
“But the Forerunners may not have been ‘men’.”
“Not our kind of ‘men’, perhaps. But what do we mean by the word ‘man’? We use it loosely to mean an intelligent being, able in part to rule both his environment and his destiny. Surely the Forerunners were ‘men’ by those tests. But you cannot lead me to think that they meant this merely as a prison and place of execution!”
In spite of the fact that they were both surefooted and had a head for heights, neither hurried on these high narrow ways. Dane discovered that to stare too much at the passages and the rooms had an odd effect on his sense of balance and it was necessary to pause now and then and gaze up into the neutral grey overhead in order to settle an uneasy stomach. And all the while through the walls there arose the beat of the mighty machine which must be housed somewhere within the mountain range of which this maze could be a not insignificant part. As Mura had pointed out, the geometry of the place was “wrong” in Terran sight, it produced in the Traders a sensation which bordered on fear.
They found the second dead man well beyond the first. And this time their light picked out a tunic with insignia they knew—a Survey man.
“It may not have been built for a prison,” Dane commented, “but they must be using it for one now.”
“This one has been dead for months,” Mura kept his light trained on the huddled body. But Dane refused to look again. “He may have been from the Rimbold—or from some other lost ship.”
“They could have bagged more than one Survey ship with that infernal machine of theirs. I’ll wager there’re good lot of wrecks lying about.”
“That is the truth.” Mura arose from his knees. “And for this poor one we can do no good. Let us go—”
Only too eager to get away from that mute evidence of an old tragedy, Dane started on, moving from one wall to the corner of an adjoining one.
“Wait—!” The steward raised his hand as well as his voice in that emphatic order.
Obediently Dane halted. The steward’s whole stance expressed listening. Then Dane too caught that sound, the ring of boots on stone, space boots with their magnetic sole plates clicking in an irregular rhythm as if the wearer was reeling as he ran. Mura listened, then he took a quick turn to the right and headed back in the general direction from which they had just come.
The sound died away and Mura quested about like a hunting hound, making short assays right and left, shining his torch into one narrow, angled compartment after another.
He was stopping above a section of corridor which ran reasonably straight when the click of those steps began again. But this tune they were slower, with intervals between, as if the runner was almost at the end of his strength. Some other poor devil was trapped in here—if they could only find him! Dane pushed on as avidly as Mura.
But in here sound was a tricky guide. The walls echoed, muffled or broadcast it, so that they could not be sure of anything but the general direction. They worked their way along, about two sections apart, flashing the light into each cornered room.
Dane followed his narrow footing halfway around a room which had six walls, each of a different length, and transferred to the top of one which was part of a curving hallway. Then he sighted movement at one of those curves, a figure who lurched forward, one hand on the wall for support.
“Over here!” he called to the steward.
The man below had come to the end of that hall—another wall—and as he half fell against the obstruction and slipped to the floor he groaned. Then he lay motionless, face down, twenty feet below his would-be rescuer. And Dane, eyeing that perfectly smooth expanse, did not see how they could get down to offer aid.
Mura ran lightly up the narrow footpath as if he had spent all his life travelling maze walls. His circle of light touched Dane’s as they spotlighted the body.
There was no mistaking the ripped tunic of their Service. The captive was a trader—one of their own. They did not know whether he was aware of their torches, but suddenly he moaned and rolled over on his back, exposing a face cut and bruised, the result of a skilful and brutal beating. Dane might not have been able to recognize him but Mura was certain.
“Ali!”
Perhaps Kamil heard that, or perhaps it was just his steel will which roused him. He moaned again and then uttered some undistinguishable words through torn lips as his puffed and swollen eyes turned up towards them.
“Ali—” Mura called. “We are here. Can you attend—do you understand?”
Kamil’s blackened face was up, he forced out coherent words. “Who—? Can’t see!”
“Mura, Thorson,” the steward identified them crisply. “You are hurt?”
“Can’t see. Lost—Hungry—”
“How are we going to get down?” Dane wanted to know. If they only had the ropes which had linked them to the crawler in the fog! But those were behind and there were no substitutes.
Mura unhooked his belt. “Your belt and mine—”
“They aren’t long enough, even together!”
“No, not in themselves, but we shall see—”
Dane shed his belt and watched the steward buckle it end to end with his own. Then the smaller man spoke to T
horson.
“You must lower me. Can you do it?”
Dane looked about doubtfully. The wall top was smooth and bare of anything in the way of an anchor. If he couldn’t take the weight of the steward he would be jerked over and they would both fall. But there was no other way.
“Do my best—” He lay belly down on the wall, hooking the toes of his boots on either side and thrusting his left arm out and down into the neighbouring room. Mura had drawn his blaster and was making careful adjustments to its barrel.
“Here I go—” With the blaster in one hand the steward swung over, his other fist twisted in the rope of linked belts. Dane held on grimly in spite of the tearing wrench in his shoulders.
He blinked and ducked his head at a sudden flash of burning fire. The fumes of blaster fire assaulted his throat and nose and he understood at last what Mura was attempting. The steward was burning out hand and foot holds in the smooth surface of the wall as he descended, cutting a ladder to reach Ali.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
THE HEART OF LIMBO
All at once Mura’s weight was gone, the strain on his shoulders no longer pulled him apart. Dane looked over the edge of the wall. A series of holes, black near him, still glowing red farther down, were clear to see in the gloom. His aching fingers released hold on the belts and they clattered to the floor.
When the red faded from the last of the holes the blaster had cut, Dane pulled on the gloves, clipped to his tunic cuffs against the cold of Limbo, and swung over to test the ladder. Though it ended well above the floor, he dropped the last few feet without difficulty.
Mura had out his aid kit and was working on Ali’s beaten face as Dane came up.
“The torch,” the steward ordered impatiently, “give me some light here !”
So Dane provided the light needed for the job of temporary patchwork. When the steward was done, Ali was able to see a little and had been supplied with a vita-cube and a limited drink of emergency stimulant. He could not twist his battered features with a smile, but some of the old light tone was back in his voice as he spoke: