"We'll disperse and search carefully," Martin said.
"I wonder what the pattern was."
"... The reservoirs, Wass. The pattern will still be here for later
expeditions to study. So will we if we don't find a way to get out."
Their radios recorded Rodney's gasp. Then--"Martin! Martin! I think
I've found something!"
Martin began to run. After a moment's hesitation, Wass swung in behind
him.
"Here," Rodney said, as they came up to him, out of breath. "Here. See?
Right here."
Three flashlights centered on a dark, metal disk raised a foot or more
from the floor.
"Well, they had hands." With his torch Wass indicated a small wheel of
the same metal as everything else in the city, set beside the disk.
From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped
and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over.
"Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?"
Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily--almost too
easily--rotating the disk as it turned.
Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed
hinge.
The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the
six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that
drifted and eddied directly beneath them.
Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone.
"Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!"
Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the
opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down.
He was shaking.
* * * * *
After a time he said, "Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember
the wind? Air currents are moving it."
Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing.
Then--"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?"
Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him,
otherwise. He said merely, "At first I wasn't sure myself."
Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun
loosely, and his hand shook. "Then prove it. Open it again."
Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney
and he, too, had drawn his gun.
The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it,
outlined in the light of two torches.
For a little while he was alone.
Then--causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney--a
tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about
Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight,
obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange
objects.
Martin raised an arm, and the particles swirled in stately, shimmering
spirals.
Rodney leaned forward and looked over the edge of the hatch. He said
nothing. He eyed the sparkling particles swirling about Martin, and
now, himself.
"How deep," Wass said, from his safe distance.
"We'll have to lower a flashlight," Martin answered.
Rodney, all eagerness to be of assistance now, lowered a rope with a
torch swinging wildly on the end of it.
The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently
rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.
Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip
of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. "You'd rather monkey with the
switches and blow yourself to smithereens?"
Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him
disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into
the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom
of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He
stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing
jump. He sank no farther than his knees.
He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest
edge of the city. "I think we'll be all right," he called out, "as long
as we avoid the drifts."
Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney.
"All right, Wass," Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and
sank into the dust.
"Not me," the answer came back quickly. "You two fools go your way,
I'll go mine."
"Wass!"
There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening.
The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied
and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were
hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves.
"Are we going straight?" Rodney asked.
"Of course," Martin growled.
There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination.
The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously
plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times
without number.
Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. "The ship leaves in two hours,
Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?"
Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his
throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust,
his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.
A grate.