THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

48

THEY CAME TO AN ENORMOUS CLOSED DOOR ABOVE WHICH were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.

They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.

The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.

They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoon-like animals.

"They must've come here to get back to Nature," Frigate said. "A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway."

They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?

Starvation.

They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of all: A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.

Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.

Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.

He turned away, his eyes hurting.

"They're wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councilors. The well must be of some material which enables us to see them."

Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.

"Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here."

Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.

Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn't. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?

He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.

"I don't know what this means, but we can't stay here any longer."

They'd passed a number of bays enclosing lift shafts with no upper passage. But after they'd gone a quarter of a mile, they came to one which extended up past their level.

"This may take us to the floor where the gateway is."

Again, they waited until each person had gotten safely up the shaft before the next flew up.

The bay opened onto another corridor. There were thirteen doors along mis, each an entrance into a very large suite of luxuriously furnished rooms. In one was a table of some glossy reddish hardwood on which was a transparent sphere. Suspended in it were three doll-sized shapes.

"Looks like Monat and two other of his kind," Burton said.

"Something like three-dimensional photographs," Frigate said.

"I don't know," Alice said. "But there seems to be a family resemblance. Of course, I suppose they'd all look alike to anyone not familiar with the race. Still..."

Croomes had not said a word for a long time. Her grim face had indicated, though, that she was struggling terribly to accept the reality of this place. Nothing here had been what she expected; there had been no welcoming choir of angels, no glory-blazing God on a throne with her mother standing at His right hand to greet her.

Now she said, "Those two could be his parents."

There were many things to investigate in the rooms, but Burton hurried them on out.

They had gone about two hundred feet when they came to a bay, the first they'd seen on the right-hand wall. Burton got out from the chair and looked along the shaft. Its bottom was level with the floor; the top wasn't more than fifty feet up.

Wisps of fog rushed across it, apparently drawn from the outside and through vents in the wall opposite.

He withdrew his head.

"That might lead to the dome on the outside, the one which only Piscator could enter."

The Japanese had been intelligent and brave. He'd probably done as Burton had, tested the invisible field in the shaft, figured out that it would hold him, and then descended. But how could he have activated the field if he didn't know the codeword or whatever it was that operated it?

However, this shaft was different from the others. It was very short, and there was only one way to go if you were at the top. Sensors might determine that the field was activated if someone came in from the top. The sensors could detect that there was only one person and that he wouldn't be standing in the field unless he wanted to go down. To go up would require a codeword of some sort. Or maybe it didn't, the bottom part of the field would act like the top, only in the reverse direction.

Where was Piscator?

To test his theory, Burton stepped into the shaft. After three seconds, he was lifted slowly upward. At the top of the shaft, he stepped out into a short metal corridor. It curved near its end and undoubtedly opened into the corridor in the dome.

Fog billowed around the corner, but the lights were strong enough to pierce it.

He walked into the corridor and at once felt a very slight resistance. Its strength increased as he advanced struggling.

When he was panting and unable to go even an inch farther, he turned back. His way was unimpeded to the shaft. When he returned to the lower level, he gave a short report.

"The field works both ways," he concluded.

The Moor said, "According to the Parseval report, there was only one entrance. Yet.. .there must be an opening, a door of some kind, for the aircraft to come in. There were none on top of the tower. I think, however, that they just weren't visible. Also, there must be ethical fields in the entrances for the aircraft. Otherwise, anybody could go in that way. Including X. Surely he must have gone out on legitimate business from time to time in an aerial vessel."

"You forget about the hypothetical wathan distorter," Burton said. "That would've enabled X to get through the dome entrance, too."

"Yes. I know that. What I'm getting at is that if we could find the hangar for the aircraft, and then find out how to operate them, we could leave here at any time we pleased."

"They'd better be easier and simpler to fly than an airplane," Frigate said.

"No doubt they are."

"Say, I've got an idea," Frigate said, gri

The Moor gri

"You'd like to see if I really am as advanced as I should be, wouldn't you? And what happens if I can't get out? Or, if I do, can't get back in? No, Peter. It would be a waste of time and an exhibition of pride on my part. You know that, yet you urge me to do it. You are teasing me. As a disciple, you sometimes lack the proper reverent attitude toward your master."