Solaris threw the great lever to center and then delicately jockeyed the stick back along the notched path to reverse. The great globe stirred back a few inches along the path into the tunnel we had just used in entering, then stopped. Solaris gave it more and more juice, finally pulling it back all the way. A cloud of the fine, time reveiling dust of the caverns rose about us as the force field's flows aroused fury contended around us, but the globe held still as though frozen in place.
"Heh, heh!" cracked a fiendish crackle in our ears. "The little innocents think to escape."
"Grandma, they sure walked into it, didn't they?" It was a child's voice, one of those we had learned to fear, a child who has never had any pleasure except the sadistic thrills of watching his evil elders torment some unfortunte. A voice from an older man, masculine.
"We'll have rare sport with these fools before they die."
I looked at Nydia and she looked back—a hopeless look.
"This is it, Rich! There isn't a chance from the sound of them."
"They'll boil us alive," moaned Solaris, "and when we ask them why, since we're perfect strangers, they'll tell us: "Why it's customary, we always do.' These damned mad ones of the caves."
"Do you know who they are? Is that why you are so sure?"
"Their actions tell us they are the mad ones."
I swung my own view ray up the cliffy side of the building, which was really a great shaft of the natural rock, shaped somewhat rectangularly, and bored with round chambers and air-shaft apertures. Windows, as such, are rare in the caverns. But my penetrative beam blinked out as soon as it struck the stone of the wall. A series of pops inside the case told me the antique, irreplaceable, incalculably valuable and well nigh indestructible tubes had been blown from the distance.
"How do they blow the tubes like that?" I asked.
"Just hit 'em with a powerful dis-ray. The overload burns them out rapidly."
So it was that we left our ship, hanging there a foot off the rock on her degravity beams. With a painful heat ray burning our buttocks, we entered the great open doors of the forgotten den of Zigor Mephisto, Eg Notha. The howling noise which the old record with the strange voice had spoken of was present. To me it seemed to be water flowing from far overhead down through great metal tubes, down and down into the rock, under the great hulk of stone work that was the home of past power. For some of the vast dynamos one sees deep in the under-rock, I surmised. Time had marred the weird building little, and the huge stone figures of animals that never existed in modern man's ken; winged dragons flanked the doorway and across the stone face was sprawled a fretwork of sculpured figures of hybrid animals—hybrid of some mad-man's dream with the life forms of the ancient vari-form technique, or perhaps none of them had ever existed outside the imagined weirdness of some artist's mind. I could not venture an opinion, nor had I time for one. These stone figures glared down at us from a dozen impossible angles of the walls, constructed as they were by a mind with a vaster knowledge of geometry and the qualities of structural material than any man now living.
Up the many tall three-foot steps we scrambled as best we might, the heat ray hastening us more rapidly than our natural reluctance to be so coerced. Through the open valves of the monstrous doors, the deep dust swirling dryly in the still air, and settling slowly as we passed. The dust is the one true tell-tale of the awful time that has passed since the caverns were lived in by the multitudes that did live there when they were built. It is ever present, choking, cloying, smelling of eons of dry forgotten time, and concealing with its death-grey blanket the beauty of the antigue master-work.
Down the long corridors, with their height-shadowed, vaulting ceiling, the place echoing our footsteps above the eery howling of the water in the depths—and about us now showed some sign of occupancy later than the original gigantic men who built the place—signs not reassuring. For a skeleton, clothed, lay here; a thonged whip rotted over there; and nearby a long old sword blade had not yet rusted away. Relics of a near past that no one now alive here had the grace to remove. Then we were in the lower levels of the place,
