Down to a Sunless Sea

14 Behind the Door

With Agila at his side, Brant began working on the portal. The others withdrew to the middle section of the narrow cave, with Will Harbin and Zuarra keeping watch at the cave mouth against the expected arrival of the outlaw band.

Adjusting his power gun to the narrowest setting, Brant aimed a needle-beam at the topmost hinge. Sparks flew crackling in all directions, illuminating the dark cavern with an eerie blue-white glare.

The metal glowed with heat and began gradually to soften. The heat at the far end of the cavern became at first uncomfortable, then hard to endure. Brant withdrew, gesturing curtly to Agila to take up the work, and turned down the controls on his suit.

Before long, he turned the heat off entirely and even unseamed the insulated garment from throat to navel. By this time, Agila had stripped naked save for a cloth wound about his loins. His coppery-red body glistened with oily perspiration.

Brant replaced him and let him withdraw to cooler parts of the cavern. They had cut entirely through the topmost hinge by this time, and Brant began working on the midmost hinge.

There was no real danger that this work would exhaust the power cells in the pistol, for they automatically recharged themselves by the use of dialetric accumulators, as did the pressure-still and the heating elements in the insulated suits the two Earthsiders wore. But it was hot, nasty work, the air reeking with ozone and stinking of hot, dripping metal.

Brant persevered. When he turned the job over to Agila, and strolled to the entrance of the cave to cool off, Harbin greeted him cheerfully.

“No sign of our friends yet, Jim. How’s the work going?”

“Almost done,” Brant grunted, sucking in lungfuls of clean, cold, pure air. “Doc, I’m gonna need that geologist’s pick you use for cutting fossils out of the rocks. Need something to help pry the door loose, once we got the three hinges cut through.”

“Certainly. The pick is in my saddlebags. You take over here, and I’ll find it for you.” The scientist went to where the lopers lay curled in fitful slumber and began rummaging through his baggage.

Left alone with Zuarra, Brant glanced at the woman.

“You all right?” he inquired gruffly. “Not frightened, are you?”

She leveled a scornful glance at him, then relented, smiling a little. He had not noticed what a lovely smile she had until just now. Her teeth were white and even in her copper mask of a face.

“Only a fool or a madman would not feel a little frightened in such a place, O Brant, with enemies nigh upon us and nowhere left to ran. But Zuarra is not so frightened that she cannot maintain her vigilance!”

He patted her on the shoulder. “Good girl,” he said heavily.

A short while later, Agila yelled in an excited voice from the back of the cave. None of them could quite make out what the lean wolf said, but all could easily guess the meaning of his cry, drowned in booming echoes as it was in that narrow space between walls of solid rock.

The third and last hinge was cut through, Brant guessed. And he was right.

Using the point of the pick for leverage, and wedging their fingertips into the slight cranny between the edge of the metal door and the rock into which it was set, the two half-naked men toiled like demons in the glare of Harbin’s light. The job was rendered much more difficult than it would otherwise have been, because the metal door was fiercely hot to the touch in places.

But it got done, that job, and the portal came loose. Holding the light high, Harbin was the first to peer within the black opening and to discover what might lie behind the portal that had been sealed and forgotten so many eons before. He uttered a dazed exclamation.

“What d’you see, Doc?” Brant demanded. The older man handed him the light, stepping out of the way.

“Look for yourself, Jim,” he breathed excitedly.

It was a stair.

A narrow stair, cut out of the bedrock of the continent, winding down and down, to unguessable depths of black mystery below.

Drowned in a darkness deeper than the gloom of Erebus or Hades itself was that ancient, winding stair. What might be waiting discovery in the Stygian deeps below where they stood none of them could imagine. But something was down there, that was for certain—or else, why cut those steps into the stone at all, or seal the thing up with a metal door?

Brant said as much to Doc, who nodded. The three natives took a look in turn, Agila hungrily, greedy for treasure, Suoli timidly, eyes wide, Zuarra boldly, but warily. No matter how they held the light, or directed its beam, all they could see was the stone stair going down and down. After thirty steps, there was a square stone platform. Then the stair turned at an angle to continue into the depths.

They could see as far as seven platforms down, before the light failed them.

“Two hundred and ten steps, at least,” muttered Brant. “That’s gotta be a good two hundred feet down under the surface. And God knows how far down the stair goes. But— why? And—to what?”

“There’s only one way to find out, my boy!” said Doc jubilantly. Brant grinned at him understanding^. The excitement and enthusiasm in the older man’s face made him look absurdly youthful, even boyish.

“Yeah … I know,” he muttered. “I got an itch so see what’s at the bottom of the stair, too. But what are we gonna do about the lopers? We sure can’t lead them down the stair, ;ind there’s no food for them in the cave. Of course, we could unsaddle them and take off their bits and bridles and turn ‘em loose. On their own, they’d have no trouble finding food along the edges of the cliff … but that would mean, when we came back to the surface, we’d have to go afoot from here on.”

“I know, I know!” Harbin burst out impatiently. “I’m not trying to suggest we all make the descent, just one or two of us! Of course, that would be a little unfair, because if we’re going to be in a fight with those people following us, it would leave the defenders short-handed. …”

Brant grinned sourly. “Well, we could hardly be more short-handed than we are right now,” he pointed out. “And look how few guns we have between us, as it is!”

“So what do you suggest we do, Jim?” inquired the other.

Brant chuckled and clapped a big hand on his thin shoulder. “Aw, hell, Doc, you’re dyin’ to find out what’s down there, so you go ahead. Here—take one of my guns and leave the rifles with us. We’ll be able to hold ‘em off when they come. Suoli won’t amount to anything, sure, but I’ll bet Zuarra is a dead shot.”

Will Harbin didn’t need much more urging. They bade him good-bye for a time, wished him luck, and watched as the older man, lighting his way before him, started down the stone stair.

He went down and down, dwindling from view. After a while, even the light from his lamp was merely a spark, dim and faint, in the Stygian darkness.

Then they returned to where Suoli was standing guard at the mouth of the cave. There still was no sign of the men who had been following them, but Brant felt inwardly certain that by now they had all descended to the foot of the cliff and were not very far away. Probably, they were even at that moment watching the entrance of the cave from places of concealment, and debating between themselves whether to try to rush the entrance or ask for a parley.

Time had almost run out for them, Brant knew. And he rather wished he was on the stair with Harbin at that moment, and not crouching here, awaiting a battle… .

Whoever the unknown hands had been who shaped the stair, they had been superb masons, for the stonework was cut to a nicety. On earth, the steps would have been foul and slick with moss or mold or lichen in these subterranean depths, but here on Mars, where any kind of moisture was rarer than rubies and far more precious than pearls, such flora could not survive, and the steps were dry and clean underfoot.

Doc Harbin went down the first three or four levels before he had to rest and catch his breath and rub the beginning of stiffness from the muscles of his calves. He took a sip of water from the sealed canteen, rose to his feet, and continued the descent.

There was something so boring about the trip down that even his curiosity began to diminish after a time. There was nothing to see except naked stone walls and platforms and steps, which were all exactly the same to look at. He had been hoping for inscriptions, even graffiti, but found nothing.

And the silence was—as the saying goes—deafening. There was not the slightest sound, other than the rasp of his bootheels against smooth, dry rock and the wheeze of his breathing. Still, he toiled on. There was a mystery here, and Will Harbin was determined to seek it out… .

He had been keeping careful mental notes of the number of platforms he passed. After he had reached the tenth such, and knew that he was now well below the most distant part of the stair which they had been able to see from the doorway above, he stopped taking count and just plodded grimly down, and down, and down.

Then he became aware of something a little odd. The air was warmer than seemed natural … or was it the exertion? As Brant had done earlier, while cutting through the hinges with his power gun, Harbin turned down the heat-control of his suit, and eventually turned it off altogether. Before long, he unseamed his protective suit to the belly.

After a while, something else equally strange came gradually to his notice. It was so very unlikely, that at first he dismissed it from his mind as sheer imagination. Erelong, he was forced to admit that it was, after all, a fact.

The air was getting more humid the farther down he climbed.

Now this was, if not impossible, at least very mysterious. The slowly rising temperatures could be understood if you considered that the farther down beneath the planet’s surface he went, the nearer he came to whatever volcanic heat might still be lingering in the core of the ancient planet. And heat, trapped in this stone well, sealed for uncountable ages by that metal door, would have no place to go. But humidity—that was quite another thing.

There was no reason for the humidity, or, at least, none that he could think of.

But before long he was forced to recognize its existence as a simple fact. Resting his aching legs on a platform, he saw patches of dampness on the stone wall directly in front of him. He might not have noticed the phenomenon had it not been for the angle at which his lamp was set, which made the moisture glisten.

“Damndest thing!” the old man said to himself.

He rose after a time and continued down the stair, limping stiffly, staggering with fatigue, wondering if he would not be wise to pause for a nap at the next platform.

He did so, and let exhaustion drift him into slumber from which he woke, after an indeterminate time, to yawn and stretch, feeling every stiff and sore muscle his body possessed, each a clear and distinct pang.

“Not so young as I used to be,” he grunted to himself, trying to massage some of the stiffness out of his legs, at least.

He wondered how far down he had come by this point. It could easily have been a full mile, perhaps even more. He inwardly cursed himself for carelessly losing count of the total platforms he had reached and passed.

It had gotten so warm and humid by now, that he decided to remove the heatsuit entirely; it was lightweight nioflex and could easily be rolled up and thrust under his equipment belt. Under the suit he wore the usual one-piece garment called a liner, much the same sort of thing that spacemen wore under their insulated airsuits.

“There, that’s a little better!” he said to himself, wishing he had something wherewith to mop the perspiration from his face and throat. But handkerchiefs are seldom found on the desert world, where the air is so desiccated that people rarely perspire for any reason.

He limped and stumbled slowly down another six or seven flights of the stair, resting now at each platform as he reached it, and before long stretched out to sleep again.

When he awoke, quite suddenly, and with his pulses rising in alarm, he did not at once realize what had startled him to wakefulness.

A moment or two later, the sound came again, and he gasped in sheer amazement.

Human voices.