“This from a man who’s marooned us all? Who let poor Franz fall into that river?”
“Who just led you to the most exciting find in all history, if you have the sense to seize it. My God, here’s your magnetic anomaly, your underground cavity, your source for a hundred scientific papers and everlasting fame! And you don’t want to walk down this ramp? Fine! Then sit outside with the machine gun and keep watch for more interlopers like Benjamin Hood.”
“You’re not rid of me so easily. I want to keep an eye on you. I’m the only one here who retains common sense.”
“Then stop undermining morale and help lead the way. Live up to the ideals of the SS, Julius. The fact that no one remains is a blessing. We can explore the city in peace.” Raeder’s eyes burned.
They descended, Muller in reluctant lead. The main avenue remained the size of a train tunnel, and from it opened doors on both sides, dark rooms beyond. They peered into a couple but they were empty, with stairs leading both up and down into darkness. “It’s a vast hive, I’m guessing,” Raeder said. “See the size of the steps? These were people, just like us.”
They didn’t pause to explore any other rooms. Instead they kept to the main path, noticing more decay and detritus as they did so. There was broken pottery and scraps of odd material, flexible like cloth but stiffer and harder-canvas, or oilskin, but from a substance they’d never felt before. The deeper they went, the more cracks appeared in the tunnel’s walls and ceiling. From them water dripped, the leachate forming small stalactites. Some of the bas-relief carvings-presumably of kings and queens, courtesans and captains, royal pets and a zoo’s bestiary-seemed deliberately defaced. If Shambhala had been sealed, it had not been when it was in pristine condition.
“They were fleeing, I think, and dropped things behind,” said Keyuri.
“Or they were an army issuing forth,” said Raeder.
“Or they were fighting each other,” said Muller. “Rioting.”
At last the ramp leveled and they came into an enormous cavern the size of a train station, the ceiling so high that it was lost in darkness overhead. Raeder guessed the stone hall was a lobby or assembly area for this underground maze. Arched doorways directly ahead led to what had evidently been a huge dining room, with stone tables and benches, some of them shattered. Beyond was a stone counter and ovens. On the walls were faded murals of fantastically opulent gardens and pavilions, with brilliantly colored birds, huge butterflies, and grinning apes. Eden in a cave.
“I suspect they worked down here but didn’t live down here,” Diels said. “There’s too much love of nature. That’s what the valley was for.”
“Or they missed the nature they’d abandoned,” Keyuri said.
“But why dig underground at all?” Kranz was baffled but fascinated by his own bafflement. Here was a lifetime of research and prestige! “What was down here?”
“Come, before these glow staffs decide to dim,” Muller said.
“I don’t think they’ll ever dim,” Diels said. “I think that’s the tingling, that they replenish. Can you imagine a lightbulb that powers itself forever? That alone would make us rich, Kurt.”
“I just hope you’re right,” said Muller. “It’s a long climb back in the dark.”
They went back to the cavernous lobby. There were more small doors to the left side, leading to dark, tight chambers. To the right, however, was a large, garagelike opening. When they explored this, they realized there was a hangar door half-attached. It had been knocked askew into this new room but still hung by one hinge. This gigantic door was metal, and a solid red from rust. Flakes littered the floor like cinnamon.
Beyond was a vastness into which their light would not initially reach. There was a sensation of cold, empty space, and their footsteps on the stone floor echoed.
“Lift the staffs as high as you can,” Raeder ordered.
When the glow strengthened, its light was reflected ahead by vast, hulking machinery that filled the wall opposite the door. It reminded them of a factory or power plant, its engines extending into a cave hewn from rock. As they approached this apparatus, their light brightened even more and the staffs vibrated more. There was a faint insect hum.
“This is no ancient civilization,” Diels murmured. “This is some incomprehensible future.”
Some great beast of a machine, the size of a hundred locomotives, loomed above them, a great matrix of pipes, wheels, gears, drums, pistons, and levers receding into gloom. Cables looped like vines. Catwalks allowed access to higher levels. At the top, pipes branched out from the machine like the limbs of a tree to run and entwine along the ceiling. At the machine’s center, these pipes gathered into a trunk that dived into a faintly glowing pit in the earth, as if this apparatus had organically grown out of some kind of hell.
Some parts were metal, but other parts, including the piping, were of dull-colored material the Germans couldn’t guess at. There were no obvious wheels or buttons for control, and no obvious purpose to the contraption. It did have a focus, however. In the center of the machine, at floor level, horizontal tubes from left and right ended in a gap. In this gap was a stone cradle. And lying on this cradle was another staff, this one looking as if it were made of crystal. Its ends were aligned with the hollow pipes that ran in two directions from the machine.
These pipes disappeared into horizontal tunnels about ten feet in diameter at either end of the huge room. The tunnels themselves extended into darkness.
There were squat boxes at the base with blank screens. Diels passed his staff near one. It hummed, and then made a residual crackle when the staff lifted away. “Perhaps these boxes showed some kind of picture or signal,” the scientist hazarded. “They could be the controls.”
“But what does the machine do?” asked Kranz.
“I have no idea.”
“There are tunnels at either end of this big room,” Raeder said. “Let’s check them.”
These were more peculiar still. The hollow pipes near the crystal shaft became encased in larger pipes that ran through the tunnels, extending as far as their light would cast.
“Is it a pipeline?” asked Diels. “Is it to send some kind of oil or chemical from that machine, a refinery, to someplace else?”
“Or perhaps this is the refinery, and these tunnels conduct crude oil,” Kranz guessed.
“It must go to other parts of the city.” Raeder turned to Keyuri. “What do you know?”
“That to truly understand, we need wisdom.”
Nunnish nonsense, and he was tiring of it.
“Should we follow it?” Kranz asked.
“I think we need to figure out this big machine first,” said Diels.
“Look, more staffs,” said Muller. There was a rack of them near the squat boxes at the base of the machine, like a rack of arms. Some were dull and black, like carbon. Some were crystalline. Some were metal. When Muller took one, it flared brighter and whiter than the ones from above. They blinked in its illumination. “I can feel it vibrating,” the geophysicist said. “It’s like it’s a radio receiver for energy.”
“Are they more powerful light sticks?”
“I think they’re here to be charged in the machine’s cradle,” Raeder said. “I think they’re instruments of Vril. Weapons. Wands.”
The improved visibility from the new staff only deepened the mystery. Now they saw that some of the pipes at the ceiling had been torn and knocked askew. These walls, rough-hewn and undecorated, had black rays on them like blast marks from explosions. There had been some kind of accident.
And in the center of the machine, where pipes ran down into a circular well, was a high metal mesh to guard its perimeter.
Raeder took Muller’s staff and walked over to this, looking through the grill to peer down the shaft. Far, far below-impossible to say how far, but tremendously deep-was an eerie red glow. Heat wafted up. Stairways, pipes, and cables descended into the pit. On the sides of the shaft, gates led to new stone stairs that seemed to delve ever deeper.
“Perhaps I have led you to hell,” Raeder told the others. “Or a chute to the center of the earth.”
“What do you think the pit is for?” asked Kranz, looking down warily. It was dizzying how deep it delved.
“They’re getting energy from the earth,” Muller hazarded. “Heat energy, and perhaps electromagnetic energy as well. Or some new form of energy we can’t guess at. Perhaps they mined into this valley for this very connection, or went underground because their experiments would only work in places deep and dark. Maybe it was so
