In Deep (17 page)

Down went the lever again. Now it was still night—but when Falk went to the Doorway, he saw an avenue of great buildings under the stars.

Now
the pressure gauge came out—low, but the compressor could handle it. The litmus papers—negative. The match burned—weakly, and only for an instant, but it burned.

Falk started the compressor and shut off the flow of air from the tanks slung at his back. Then he turned on his helmet light and marched off down the avenue.

The buildings were variations on a theme: pyramid, cone, and wedge shape, they sloped away as they rose, so that for all their enormous bulk they did not hide the sky. Falk looked up when he had taken a few steps, subconsciously expecting to see the half-circle constellation. But it was not there, and he realised with a shock that, for all he knew, he might be halfway across the galaxy from the spot where he had stood five minutes ago.

He drew a picture of the galaxy in his mind, an oval clot of mist against blackness. Near one focus of the ellipse he put a dot of brightness that stood for Sol. Then he made another dot and drew a shining line between them. Then another dot, and another line; then another. They made a sprawling letter N across the misty oval.

It was incomprehensible. A race that could span the galaxy, but could not choose one destination from another?

The only other alternative was: there was some function of the Doorways that men had failed to grasp, some method of selection had evaded them, as a savage might be bewildered in a modern tubeway system. But Falk’s mind rejected that. The mechanism was simple and clear. A cubicle and a lever. Function is expressed by shape; and the shape of the Doorway said “Go”; it did not say “Where?”

He looked again at the buildings. The upper quarter of them, he saw now, was badly eroded: layers inches deep had been eaten away. He glanced at the fine orange sand that paved the avenue and saw that it filled doorways almost to the top. Evidently this city had lain all but buried for many years, and in some recent time the shifting sands had uncovered it again.

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 realised 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, organised 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 control that kept humanity from destroying itself?

That coin had the same face on both sides. Uncontrolled, mankind was not fit to colonise. Controlled, it dared not take risk. Human civilisation 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 civilisation 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.

Falk stepped into the cubicle and pressed the lever down once more.

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. The 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 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 material: 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 hall 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.

They were faster than they looked. Falk put his head down and tried to make his heavy boots move to a quicker rhythm. Almost to the door, he looked back again. The lizard was one jump away, its grimy, ball-tipped fingers outspread.

Falk turned in desperation and, as the lizard came up, swung a knotted fist to the point of its snout. He heard its steam-whistle screech, saw it collapse, and then he was diving through the open door ahead.

The door closed gently behind him—a sheet of glassy substance, the same blue as the walls, gliding down to seal the opening.

Falk stared at it. Through its transparency he could see the dark shapes of the lizards crowding around, leaning to pry at the bottom of the door, gesticulating at each other. It was plain, at any rate, that the door was not going to open for them.

Whether it would open for him, when he wanted it to, was another matter.

He looked around him. The building was a single huge room, so long and deep that he could barely see the far walls. Scattered over the floor, patternless, were boxes, or chests, racks, shelves, little ambiguous mounds. Nearly all the objects , Falk could see were fashioned of the same glass-like material.

There was no dust in the room; but now that Falk thought of it, he realised that there had been none in any of the Doorways, either. How that was done he could not conjecture. He moved to the nearest object, a file, or rack formed apparently to take many things of diverse shapes and sizes. It was a quarter empty now, and the remaining contents had a jumbled look.

He picked up an orange glass spindle, full of embedded threads, or flaws that looped in a curious pattern from one end to the other. He put it down, took a hollow sphere of opal. It was made in halves and seemed to be empty, but Falk could find no way to take it apart. He replaced it and took a brown object shaped like a double crescent, with a clear fracture plane running diagonally through it…

Half an hour later he realised that he was not going to find any picture books or engineering manuals or any one thing that would unlock the mystery of the Doorway people for him. If there were any knowledge to be gained here, it would have to come from the building as a whole.

The lizards distracted him. He could see them through the walls of the building, pressing their snouts against the glass, staring with little round eyes, gesturing at him. But he learned things from them.

The group broke up finally, leaving only one to guard the exit; the others dispersed. Falk saw one go into the building directly across the plaza. The door closed behind him. A little later another one approached and pounded on the door; but it did not open until the first lizard came close to it inside. Some automatic mechanism, beyond Falk’s fathoming, evidently responded to the presence or absence of any living thing inside each building. When the last person left, the door stayed open; when another person entered, it shut and would not open for the next unless the first person allowed it.

That added one item to the description of the Doorway people that Falk was building in his mind. They were not property-conscious—not afraid that thieves would enter in their absence, for the doors stood open when they were gone—but they respected each other’s love of privacy.

Falk had previously thought of this building as a vast factory or laboratory or dormitory—a place designed to serve a large number of people, anyhow. Now he revised his opinion. Each building, he thought, was the private domain of one person—or, if they had family groups, only two or three. But how could one person use all this space, all these possessions?

He made the comparison that by now was becoming automatic. He asked himself what a cliff dweller would make of a millionaire’s triplex apartment in New York.

It helped, but not enough. The objects around him were all specialised tools; they would not function for him and so told him nothing about the Doorway builders. There was nothing that he could compare to a bed, to a table, to a shower bath. He could not see the people who had lived here.

With an effort, he forced himself to stop thinking in terms of men. The facts were important, not his prejudices. And then what had been a barrier became a road. There were no beds, tables, showers? Then the Doorway people did not sleep; they did not eat; they did not bathe.

Probably, thought Falk, they did not die.

They were fit to live among the stars…

The riddle of the deserted chamber mocked him. How, having built this city, would they leave it? How would they spread the network of the Doorways across the face of the galaxy, and then leave it unused?

The first question answered itself. Looking at the littered chamber, Falk thought of his comparison of the cliff dweller and the millionaire and humbly acknowledged his presumption. Not a millionaire’s triplex, he told himself… a tent.