He held out his hands and Dane clamped a hold about his wrists. Mura backed cautiously out of the vent and for a moment his weight pulled Dane forward. In that same instant the younger man felt Kosti’s grip about his hips giving him the anchorage he needed as he lowered the steward to the wall.
“Made it!” Mura trotted several feet to the right on the wall and stood waiting.
Dane turned to lower himself to the same level.
“Good luck!” Kosti said out of the shadows. Instead of crouching ready to follow, the jetman had moved back in the tube.
“What do you mean?” Dane asked, chilled by something in the other’s attitude.
“You’ve got to go this next stretch by yourselves, fella,” Kosti returned calmly enough. “I haven’t any head for heights. I can’t balance along on those walls down there—two steps and I’d be over the edge.”
Dane had forgotten the big man’s disability. But what were they going to do? The only way out of here lay across the maze of walls, a maze Kosti could not tread. On the other hand they could not leave the jetman here.
“Listen, boy,” Kosti continued. “You two will have to go on. I’ll stay right here. If there is a way out and you find it, well, then maybe I can make it. But, until you are sure, there’s no use in my going along to foul you up. That’s only good sense—”
Maybe it was good sense, but Dane could not accept it. However, a moment later he had no chance to protest. Kosti’s hands were iron about his wrists, the jetman pushed him to the edge of the duct and thrust him through, dangling him until his boots scraped the wall. Then Kosti let go.
“Kosti won’t come—He says he can’t make it!”
Mura nodded. “To walk these—” he indicated the maze of walls, “would be impossible for him now. But if we can find a way out—then we can return and guide him. We will move faster alone, and Karl knows that—”
Still feeling as if he were deserting Kosti, Dane reluctantly followed the steward, who picked a cat’s sure- footed way along the wall out into the scrambled pattern beyond. The walls were about twenty feet high and the rooms and corridors they formed were bare of any furnishings. There were no signs that anyone had been there for centuries. That is, there was not, until Mura gave a sudden exclamation and aimed the beam of his torch down into a narrow room.
Dane crowded up beside him to see it, too, a tangle of white bones, a skull staring hollow-eyed back at them. The maze had had an inhabitant once, one who remained for eternity.
Mura swung the beam in slow circles about the skeleton. There were some dark rags of clothing, and the light glimmered back at them from a buckle of untarnished metal.
“A prisoner,” said the steward slowly. “A man shut into this could wander perhaps forever and never find his way out—”
“You mean that he has been here since—since—” Dane could not name the stretch of time which had elapsed since the destruction of the city, the burn-off of Limbo.
“I think not. This one, he was human—like us. He has been here a long time certainly, but not so long as it has been since the builders left this maze. Others have found it, and a use for so puzzling a structure.”
Now as they went from one wall to the next, twisting and turning, but always aiming at the centre of the maze, they kept careful watch for other remains in the sections below. The whole space filled with this curious honey-comb erection was much larger, Dane came to realize, than it had appeared from the air duct. There must be several square miles of plain solid walls crossing, curving, and crisscrossing to shut in nothing but oddly shaped emptiness.
“For a reason,” Mura murmured. “This must have a purpose, been made for a reason—but why? The geometry is wrong—as were the lines of the buildings in the city. This is Forerunner work. But why—why should they conceive such a thing?”
“For a prison?” Dane suggested. “Put someone in here and they would never get out. Prison and execution chamber in one.”
“No,” Mura shook his head. “It is too large an undertaking—men do not go to such lengths to handle their criminals. There are shorter and less arduous methods for imposing justice.”
“But the Forerunners may not have been ‘men’.”
“Not our kind of ‘men’, perhaps. But what do we mean by the word ‘man’? We use it loosely to mean an intelligent being, able in part to rule both his environment and his destiny. Surely the Forerunners were ‘men’ by those tests. But you cannot lead me to think that they meant this merely as a prison and place of execution!”
In spite of the fact that they were both surefooted and had a head for heights, neither hurried on these high narrow ways. Dane discovered that to stare too much at the passages and the rooms had an odd effect on his sense of balance and it was necessary to pause now and then and gaze up into the neutral grey overhead in order to settle an uneasy stomach. And all the while through the walls there arose the beat of the mighty machine which must be housed somewhere within the mountain range of which this maze could be a not insignificant part. As Mura had pointed out, the geometry of the place was “wrong” in Terran sight, it produced in the Traders a sensation which bordered on fear.
They found the second dead man well beyond the first. And this time their light picked out a tunic with insignia they knew—a Survey man.
“It may not have been built for a prison,” Dane commented, “but they must be using it for one now.”
“This one has been dead for months,” Mura kept his light trained on the huddled body. But Dane refused to look again. “He may have been from the Rimbold—or from some other lost ship.”
“They could have bagged more than one Survey ship with that infernal machine of theirs. I’ll wager there’re good lot of wrecks lying about.”
“That is the truth.” Mura arose from his knees. “And for this poor one we can do no good. Let us go—”
Only too eager to get away from that mute evidence of an old tragedy, Dane started on, moving from one wall to the corner of an adjoining one.
“Wait—!” The steward raised his hand as well as his voice in that emphatic order.
Obediently Dane halted. The steward’s whole stance expressed listening. Then Dane too caught that sound, the ring of boots on stone, space boots with their magnetic sole plates clicking in an irregular rhythm as if the wearer was reeling as he ran. Mura listened, then he took a quick turn to the right and headed back in the general direction from which they had just come.
The sound died away and Mura quested about like a hunting hound, making short assays right and left, shining his torch into one narrow, angled compartment after another.
He was stopping above a section of corridor which ran reasonably straight when the click of those steps began again. But this tune they were slower, with intervals between, as if the runner was almost at the end of his strength. Some other poor devil was trapped in here—if they could only find him! Dane pushed on as avidly as Mura.
But in here sound was a tricky guide. The walls echoed, muffled or broadcast it, so that they could not be sure of anything but the general direction. They worked their way along, about two sections apart, flashing the light into each cornered room.
Dane followed his narrow footing halfway around a room which had six walls, each of a different length, and transferred to the top of one which was part of a curving hallway. Then he sighted movement at one of those curves, a figure who lurched forward, one hand on the wall for support.
“Over here!” he called to the steward.
The man below had come to the end of that hall—another wall—and as he half fell against the obstruction and slipped to the floor he groaned. Then he lay motionless, face down, twenty feet below his would-be rescuer. And Dane, eyeing that perfectly smooth expanse, did not see how they could get down to offer aid.
Mura ran lightly up the narrow footpath as if he had spent all his life travelling maze walls. His circle of light touched Dane’s as they spotlighted the body.
There was no mistaking the ripped tunic of their Service. The captive was a trader—one of their own. They did not know whether he was aware of their torches, but suddenly he moaned and rolled over on his back, exposing a face cut and bruised, the result of a skilful and brutal beating. Dane might not have been able to recognize him but Mura was certain.
“Ali!”
Perhaps Kamil heard that, or perhaps it was just his steel will which roused him. He moaned again and then
