'And what lies beyond the door? I wonder,' put in Vas Oola.
I shook my head. Then I reached out and pressed another stud. The chamber began to vibrate slightly. Hastily I pressed the stud again and the vibration ceased. Pressing a third stud brought no apparent result.
A fourth produced a shrill, wining sound and a grating noise which, I quickly saw, indicated that the door was opening, sliding into the right-hand wall.
At first, peering into the aperture revealed, we saw nothing but pitch darkness and felt cold, cold air on our faces.
'Who do you think created this place?' I whispered to Hool Haji. 'The Sheev?'
'It could have been the Sheev, yes.' He did not seem very certain.
I reached my hand inside and felt about for a panel that should, logically, correspond with the one in the chamber in which we stood.
I found it I pressed the corresponding stud and light filled the other chamber.
There was no sand in this one. It was roughly the same shape as the one we were in but there were large, spherical objects set into the walls on one side. Beneath them were what were plainly controls of some kind.
Lying on the floor was a skeleton.
Seeing the remains of what had evidently been a blue giant of the Mendishar, Bac Puri let out a shriek and pointed a shaking finger at the bones.
'An omen! He, too, was curious. He was slain. There is some supernatural agency at work here!'
Affecting insouciance, I stepped into the chamber and bent towards the skeleton.
'Nonsense,' I said, stooping and wrenching a short-shafted spear from the remains. 'He was slain by this -look!' I held up the lance. It was light and strong, made all in one piece, again of advanced materials.
'I have seen nothing like that in my life,' Jil Deera said, joining me and looking curiously at the weapon. 'And see - these symbols engraved on the shaft - they are in no language I recognise.'
I also did not recognise the language as the basic common tongue of Mars. There were still sinJlarities - though much fainter - to ancient Sanskrit, however. The essential form of the script was the same.
'What is it, do you know?' I said, passing the spear to Hool Haji.
He pursed his lips. 'I have seen something like it in my wanderings. It is like that of the Sheev, but not quite.' His hand was not completely steady as he handed the spear back to me.
'Then what is it?' I asked, somewhat impatiently.
'It is -'
Then there came a chilling sound. It was high and preternatural - a kind of whisper which echoed through the chambers. It came from beyond the chamber in which we stood - from deep within the underground complex.
It was one of the vilest sounds I have heard in my life. It seemed to confirm Bac Puri's half-insane speculation of some supernatural residents of the place. Suddenly, from being a refuge, the underground chamber became a place full of fear - and a terror which was hard to control.
My first impulse was to fleet - and, indeed, Bac Puri was already inching towards the door through which we'd come. The others were less decisive but evidently they shared my feelings.
I laughed - or attempted to, the result being a kind of mirthless croak - and said: 'Come now - this is an ancient place. The sound could be made by some animal that inhabits the ruins; it could have its cause in machinery, or even the wind passing through the chambers .. .'
I did not believe a word I said and neither did they.
I changed my approach. 'Well,' I said with a shrug, 'what shall we do? Risk a danger that my be no danger at all, or go to certain death in the desert? It will be a slow death.'
Bac Puri paused. Some remnant of his earlier strength of character must have come to his assistance. He squared his shoulders and rejoined us.
I strode past the skeleton and pressed the stud to open the next door.
The door opened smoothly this time and I quickly found the next stud to illuminate the third chamber. This one was bigger.
In a sense it comforted me, for it was full of machinery. Of course, I did not recognise the function of the machines, but the thought that some high intelligence must have created them was comforting in itself. As a scientist, I could appreciate the workmanship alone. This was the work of ordinary, intelligent men - it had not been created by any supernatural being.
If inhabitants still lived in this honeycombe of chambers then they would be folk to whom logic would appeal. Perhaps they would bear us some animosity, perhaps they would possess superior weapons - but at least they would be a tangible foe.
So I thought.
I should have realised that there was a flaw in the argument which I so rationally gave to myself to quiet my feelings of disturbance.
I should have realised that the sound I had heard was animal in origin and malevolent in content. There had been no spark of true intelligence in it.
We moved on, chamber by chamber, discovering more machines and great lockers of materials; cloth not unlike parachute silk; containers of gas and chemicals; strong reels of cord similar to nylon cord but even stronger, laboratory equipment used in experiments with chemicals, electronics and the like; parts of machines, things that were obviously power units of some kind.
The further in to the great complex of chambers we moved, the less ordered were the things we found. They were neatly stacked and positioned in the earlier chambers, but in the later ones containers had been overturned, lockers opened and their contents strewn about. Had the place been visited by looters, represented by the dead man in the second chamber?
I don't know which chamber it was - perhaps the thirtieth - which I opened in the usual way. I reached in my hand to press the light stud - and felt something soft and damp touch my skin. It was a horrible touch. With a gasp I withdrew my hand and turned to tell my companions of what had happened.
The first thing I saw was Bac Puri's face, eyes wide and full of terror.
He was pointing into the chamber. A strangled sound escaped his throat. He dropped his hand and fumbled for his sword.
The others' hands also went to their swords.
I turned back - and saw them.
White shapes.
Perhaps they had once been human.
They were human no longer.
With a feeling of mingled horror and desperation, I too drew my sword, feeling that no ordinary weapon could possibly defend me against the apparitions that moved towards us out of the darkness.
CHAPTER SIX
The Once-were-men
Bac PuRi did not flee this time.
His face worked in a peculiar contortion. He took half a step backwards and then, before we could stop him, flung himself into the darkened chamber, straight at the corpse-white creatures!
They gibbered and fell back for a moment, a terrible twittering noise, like that of thousands of bats, filling the air and echoing on and on through the complex of chambers.
Bac Puri's sword swung to left and right, up and down, slicing off limbs, stabbing vitals, piercing the unnaturally soft, clammy bodies.
And then he was, as if by magic, a mass of spears. He howled in his pain and madness as javelins like the one we had seen earlier appeared in every part of his body until it was almost impossible to distinguish the man beneath.
He fell with a crash.
Seeing the creatures were at least mortal, I decided we should take advantage of Bac Puri's mad attack and, waving my sword, I leapt through the entrance, shouting:
'Come - they can be slain!'
They could be slain, but they were elusive creatures and sight and feel of them brought physical revulsion. With the others behind me, I carried the attack to them and soon found myself in a tangle of soft, yielding flesh that seemed boneless.
And the faces! They were vile parodies of human faces and again resembled nothing quite so much as the ugly little vampire bat of Earth. Flat faces with huge nostrils let into the head, gashes of mouths full of sharp little fangs, half-blind eyes, dark and wicked -
and insensate.
As I fought their claws, their sharp teeth and their spears, they slithered about, gibbering and twittering.
I had been wrong about them. There was not a trace of intelligence in their faces - just a demoniac blood-hunger, a dark malevolence that hated, hated, hated - but never reasoned.
My companions and I stood shoulder to shoulder, back to back, as the things tore at us.
When we saw that our heavy swords could affect them -and had in fact already despatched dozens of them - our spirits rose.
At length the ghouls turned and fled, leaving only the wounded flopping on the floor. We slew these. There was nothing else we could do.
We attempted to follow them through the far door, but it closed swiftly and, when we opened it, the creatures had passed on through the complex.
The light stud worked and showed us the dead creatures better.
Bac Puri, in his madness, had undoubtedly helped save our lives. In attacking the creatures he had taken most of their javelins into his body.
These inhabitants of the underground complex were slightly smaller than me and seemed, though this was incredible, to possess hardly any skeleton at all. Our weapons had sliced through flesh and muscle, had drawn blood - if the thin yellow stuff that stained our blades could be called blood - but had met no resistance from bone.
Steeling myself to inspect the corpses closer, I saw that there was a skeleton of sorts but the bones were so thin and brittle that they resembled fine, ivory wires.
What strange, aberrant branch of the evolutionary tree did these creatures spring from?
I turned to Hool Haji.
'What race is this?' I asked. ‘I think you had guessed earlier.'
'Not the Sheev,' he said with a faint, ironic grimace. 'Nor the Yaksha, either - and I suspected that it was the Yaksha before I saw them. These pitiful things are no real threat, unless it be to the mind!'
'So you thought they were a race called the Yaksha -why?'
'Because the language on their spears and on their instruments and cabinets is the written language of the Yaksha.'
'Who are the Yaksha? I seem to remember you mentioning them.'
‘Are? Perhaps were is a better word, for they still exist only in rumour and superstitious speculation. They are cousins of the Sheev. Do you not remember me telling you about them when we first met?'
Now it came back! Of course - the elder race who had seduced the Argzoon away from Mendishar in the first place, during the war the Martians called the Mightiest War.
‘I think these must be descendants of the Yaksha, however,' Hool Haji continued, 'for they bear slight similarities to that race, if I was told aright. They have probably existed down here for countless centuries, somehow remembering - in ritual form, doubtless - to keep the machinery running and defend the place against outsiders. Bit by bit they lost all intelligence and - you will notice - seem to prefer darkness to fight, although light is available to them. It is a fitting fate for the remnants of an evil race.'
I shuddered. I could sympathise in my own way with the creatures that had once been men.
Then another thought struck me.
'Well,' I said, somewhat more cheerfully, 'whatever they are biologically, they must have need of water. That means that somewhere here we shall soon find what we need.'
Our need seemed to have diminished with the finding of the underground chambers, but the fight had weakened us further and water was our prime necessity.
Warily, but with more confidence that we could meet and defeat any of the white creatures that attacked us, we moved on until we entered a chamber larger than the rest through which a little natural light filtered!
Looking up I saw that the fight seemed to come through a domed roof, much higher than the roofs of most of the chambers we had passed through. Sand had filtered in through some cracks in this roof, but the floor was not deep in the stuff.
And then I heard it!
A tinkling sound, a splashing sound. At first I thought ^°^ that thirst had driven me mad but then, as my eyes grew better accustomed to the gloom, I saw it - a fountain in the centre of the chamber. A large pool of cool water!
We moved forward and tasted the stuff cautiously before drinking. It was pure and fresh.
We drank sparingly, wetting our bodies all over whilst we took turns to stand guard against any possible attack from the local residents!
Refreshed and in good spirits, we filled our belt canteens. The stopper of mine was stuck, clogged by the dust. I took the little skinning knife from the right-hand side of my harness - a knife which every blue Martian carries. It is half hidden in the decoration of the leather so that, if captured by an enemy, that enemy might overlook the knife and give the captured warrior a chance to escape. I worked the stopper loose, then returned the knife to its hidden sheath in my harness.
What now?
We had no inclination to explore the remaining chambers. We had seen enough for the moment. We took the precaution, however, of going to the far door through which the white things had doubtless fled, and blocked it as best we could with sand and loose masonry.
I next discovered a ladder consisting of rungs let into the wall and leading up towards the roof where a narrow gallery ran around the chamber, at the point where the dome began. I climbed this ladder and climbed on to the gallery. It was just large enough to take me and had evidently been intended simply for the use of workmen either repairing or decorating the dome.
The dome was not made of the same durable synthetic material as the rest of the place. I put my eye to a crack and looked out over a seemingly endless expanse of black desert, shining now, like crystal, in the sun. The dome seemed half buried and was probably all but invisible from outside.
A piece of the material came away in my hand. It was in an advanced stage of corrosion and would soon collapse altogether. It was transparent - evidently designed to admit light into the chamber of the fountain. Probably the place had been the central hall for relaxing when the Yaksha had been sane and human. The dome had not been planned for 182 any purely functional purpose so much as for decoration. This must be why it would soon collapse. When it did the sand would come in, the fountain would be blocked, and I did not think the inhabitants of the underground city would have the intelligence to clear the sand away - or, for that matter, repair the dome.
Repairs had been made earlier in the roof, but I guessed by more intelligent ancestors of the present dwellers.
I returned to the ground, an idea slowly taking shape in my mind.
At its base the dome was some thirty feet across - ample space for a large object to pass through.
'Why are you looking so thoughtful, my friend?' asked Hool Haji.
'I think I know a way of escape,' I said.
‘From this place? We need only retrace our steps.’
‘Or break through the roof, for that matter,' I said, pointing upwards. 'It is very flimsy - eroded from the outside by the sand. But I meant escape from our main predicament - escape from the desert.'
'Have you found a map somewhere?'
'No, but I have found many other things. All the artifacts of a great scientific culture - strong, airtight fabric, cord - gas containers. I hope they still contain gas and that it is the kind I need.'
Hool Haji was completely mystified.
I smiled. The others were now looking at me as if I had followed Bac Pun's example and was losing control of my mind.
'It was the dome gave me the idea, for some reason,' I said. 'It struck me that if we had a - flying ship we could cross the desert in no time.'
‘A flying ship! I have heard of such things - some Southern races still possess a few, I believe.' It was Jil Deera who spoke now. 'Have you found one?'
'No.' I shook my head, still thinking deeply.
'Then why speak of such a thing?' Vas Oola spoke somewhat sharply.
'Because I think we could make one,' I said.
'Make one?' Hool Haji s
miled. 'We have not the knowledge of the old races. It would be impossible.'
'I have some little technical knowledge,' I said, 'though not as much as was once possessed, evidently, by this vanished race. I had not thought of building an aircraft of so advanced a kind as theirs.'
'Then what?'
‘A primitive aircraft could be built, I think.'
The three blue men regarded me in silence - still a trifle suspicious.
There was no word for the kind of aircraft I had in mind - no Martian word. I used the English derivation from the French.
'It would be called a balloon,’ I said.
I began to sketch in the sand, explaining the principle of the balloon.
'We should have to make a gas-bag from the material we found back there,' I said. 'There will be difficulties, of course - the bag must be airtight for a start. From it we suspend ropes attached to a cabin - that will be the thing in which we ride...'
By the time I had finished talking and sketching, the intelligent men of Mendishar believed me and largely understood me - which was remarkable considering they came from a society which was mainly non-technical. Once again I had experienced the robust open-mindedness of the Martian who, on the whole, can be taught any concept in a very short time if it is explained to him in sufficiently logical terms. They were an old race, of course, and had the example of the earlier, highly-civilised races - the Sheev and the Yaksha - to show them that what often seemed impossible need not necessarily be.
Enthusiastically, we returned through the underground chambers selecting the things we needed.
I was not at all sure that the right gas would be found in the banks of containers that occupied several of the rooms. 1 took my life in my hands and began to sniff a little of each gas. The containers had valves which still worked perfectly.
Some of the gases were unfamiliar, but none seemed particularly poisonous, though one or two made me a trifle dizzy for a short time.
At last I found the set of containers I needed. They contained a gas with the atomic number 2, the symbol He, atomic weight 4.0023, a gas which took its name from the Greek word for the sun - Helium. Non-inflammable and very light, it was what I had been seeking - the perfect gas for filling my balloon! The search became intensive after I had ascertained that the basic things we needed were there - the light fabric, the gas, the ropes. Next I began to inspect the motors we had found. I did not take them to pieces since I guessed they had some kind of nuclear base - that the power came from a tiny atomic engine. But I did find out how they operated and saw that they would be very simple to harness to propellers.