Dream thief

5

… THAT IT WAS A city he had no doubt. He had not noticed I that for the last four kilometers or so the roof of the cavern had been arching away gradually. By the time he reached the outskirts of this alien habitation he could not see the ceiling. He had been lumbering along oblivious to his surroundings when he saw something glimmering in front of him. Spence had raised his eyes and found himself standing before a weird assemblage of structures.

If pressed for a description, Spence would have said that the city appeared to him like a termite nest. He recalled pictures of the inside of such a nest from an entomology textbook, and looking upon the strange, elongated and flowing structures brought back the same image to him. On further inspection, though, the graceful interwoven cells looked like nothing at all that he had ever seen. And they gave not a hint of what kind of resident might have inhabited them.

This discovery brought none of the heady rapture of the explorer who believes he has found Eldorado at last, nor of the paleontologist who chances upon an unnamed saurian. He did not even feel the same elation experienced upon finding the footprint.

He just stood unmoving in his tracks, shaking his head in disbelief and wonder. It was simply too much to take in all at once. He did not know how to react, When he came to himself again he began threading through the winding pathways among the hivelike habitations, under curving arches and over half-buried burrow hills. He soon lost himself in the refined tangle of bending, interlacing shapes, as a small child in an enchanted forest.

His way was lit by the radiant lichen clinging to the sides of the dwellings. It was as if he moved through an elven world sparkling with magic and whispering voices. The voices were the swish of his steps as he passed hollow or curving shapely walls.

The more he saw of the city-formed of some kind of ado belike material such as ancient Indian settlements but harder, more durable-the further he walked, the more beautiful it seemed to him. And colorful. The dwellings were of various subtle hues: oranges, reds, violets, and browns in various subdued tones; deli cate earthen, or rather Martian, hues of ocher and sepia, madder and rust and buff, softly shimmering in their own faint light.

There were apertures and openings which he took to be windows and doors. These were of various shapes, all in keeping with the surrounding curve of the wall or archway of which they were a part. For this reason Spence could get no precise impressions of what the residents themselves might have looked like.

He poked his head into the darkened interiors of several dwellings and saw nothing at all to further the identification process. The rooms were the inner version of the outer structure, molded and graceful and, for all he could see, clean-swept and empty.

In his reverent ramble through the interlacing forms he struck upon a wide, meandering pathway between two ranks of towering structures. This he took to be a central trafficway.

The domiciles on either side of this street rose to a considerable height above the smooth, even surface he walked upon. Some of them branched over it in sinuous arches or tubes which wound snakelike to join a building on the other side.

The notion came to him that if he followed this trafficway he would end up in the center of the Martian city.

He was not wrong.

Within an hour of discovering the place he stood blinking in the center of a wide expanse surrounded on all sides by the queer architecture. The sheer alien beauty of the place still overwhelmed him. He had begun to think that the Martians, whatever their outward appearance, had been an elegant, peace-loving civilization. Such was the effect of the architecture on him. He did not for a moment consider that there might be any Martians still around. Everything he saw indicated a civilization which had long ago ceased to exist.

He sat down to rest on a smooth, mushroom-shaped projection, one of many which randomly dotted the central clearing. His vision blurred and wavered; he knew he was seriously dehydrated now. Dizziness played over him and he felt suddenly weaker, as if he were beginning to disintegrate. He imagined an exploring party of the future wandering into the square and finding his bones, and mistaking him for the last remaining Martian.

As Spence sat holding the last unraveling threads of his strength his gaze happened to fall on one of the hives across the square, set apart from the others. For some reason the structure took on an importance for him-he felt himself drawn to it, though outwardly it did not differ from any around it. It was roughly mound-shaped with bulging sides rising upward to become bulbous compartments and chambers.

Spence nodded in his remote inspection of the building. His eyes closed and he slid from the mushroom pod and rolled onto his side and fell asleep. …

HE WOKE AT ONCE. He would have sworn his head had barely touched the ground before his eyes snapped open again. But the burning in his throat and the throbbing in his head told him differently. He had perhaps been asleep for some time, but the pain was not what awakened him.

Someone called his name. And it sounded as 'if it had come from the hive across the square.

The word had been so quickly spoken he could not say that he did not imagine it. But unlike imagined voices, this one hung in the air as a present thing. Spence slowly lifted off his helmet and put it down.

The air in this part of the cavern, though dry and stale, seemed more conducive to oxygen breathing, for he found he did not gasp as before. The deathly silence of the place alarmed him. He heard nothing at all, not even the suggestion of an echo. At least inside his helmet he had heard the constant, rhythmic pattern of his own breathing.

All at once it came to him that he had drifted off to sleep because his oxygen had run low in his helmet-the pellets had given out. If not for the voice which had stirred him once more he would never have awakened again. He would have suffocated in his sleep.

He stood looking down at his helmet with a mixture of relief and longing. He did feel relieved to have escaped this subtle death after braving so many other, greater dangers. On the other hand, it would have been a peaceful, painless death-to sleep and not wake up again to the ache in his stomach and head and the stinging fire of his thirst.

As he stood contemplating whether or not to put on his helmet again and so end the game, he heard his name again. He heard it ring in his ears and register in his brain, but it came from another place, though where or how that could be he could not say. The dying often hear voices, he reminded himself. Such occurrences were well documented.

But Spence felt an inner tug at him toward the hive-shaped dwelling across the quad. He stepped forward hesitantly, uncertain whether to give in to his hallucination so easily. He shrugged, remembering that he had nothing at all to lose, though he knew he would find nothing of interest or of any possible value to him within. All the other hives he had peered into had been uniformly barren.

Still, the inexplicable pull directed his steps and he gave himself over, lacking the strength to fight it. In a few moments he stood gaping at the exterior of the hive and at the darkened hole of the entrance.

Spence swayed unsteadily on his feet as he shuffled in and knocked against something standing just inside the door. It was hard and unyielding and he went down in a heap, without the strength to fall gracefully.

Darkness dwelt in the cool interior, had dwelt there undisturbed for perhaps a thousand centuries. He sank back on the floor and let the darkness cover him, surrendering to it, become a part of it. He longed to just lay there panting and never stir again. But his curiosity overcame him.

What had he bumped up against when he entered? It was flat and hard and he still felt the chill of it against his side where he hit it. What could it be?

If it was to be his last act, so be it. But at least he would know what he had found. He dragged himself to his knees and lurched forward across the floor toward the unseen object. His cheek struck a hard, flat edge and he pressed his palms against a smooth surface and raised himself up.

Now what? He wondered. I have found something here in this dark place… now what?

He thought to try moving it with the idea that he might be able to take it out into the relative light of the cave. But try as he might, in his weakened state he could not budge the thing, nor even find a place to grasp it.

He let his hands run over the surface of the object to give him some idea of its size and shape. He felt like a blind man trying to guess the nature of an object he had never seen. He discovered it to be uniformly smooth and rather boxlike, its surface composed of flat planes joined at shallow angles like plates of armor or the facets of a gemstone.

Spence brought his hands once more toward the top of the rectangular object and felt a long cylindrical portion rise from the plane of its surface. Following the cylinder up he discovered it was surmounted by a large sphere. He found two more cylinders and spheres at either end of the rectangle.

Now he was thoroughly intrigued. He stood abruptly-too quickly for his condition-and the dizziness flowed over him in a dark wave. He staggered backward and fell against a smaller object directly behind him. The thing caught him at the back of the legs just below the knees and he toppled over it. The sound of a brittle crash filled his ears.

He was there in the darkness, listening. For there had been something else in that crash that he heard. Something he had been listening unconsciously for since he first entered the tunnel.

He recognized it now, but it seemed out of place and almost eerie in the silence.

In the darkness, somewhere close at hand, he heard the wonderful liquid splash of water dripping on the floor.