Cycle of Fire

VI. INVESTIGATION

A PERIOD of alternating rain and sunshine and the brief return and departure of Theer left the two travelers with the impression that the “Teachers” of the tribe which had captured them might be well disposed but were rather opinionated beings. When they said anything it was so. Unfortunately they had said that Nils Kruger and Dar Lang Ahn should remain available for talk, and the village of creatures who obeyed them implicitly were quite able to make it so.

Actually they were not completely prisoners. They could wander where they pleased within the village and its immediate environs, except into the hut where villagers went to talk to the Teachers. Also, when the unseen beings learned about Kruger’s watch, which was during the second interview, they quite obligingly agreed that the two need not even remain nearby, provided that they appear at certain regular intervals which were determined by mutual agreement on the spot. There was, Kruger realized, some pretty good psychology at work; at the same time this freedom was granted, a half-promise was made to Dar that his books would be returned before too long — the time was left vague. “Just now they were being examined with great interest.” Kruger noted that no request was made for Dar to give lessons in his written language, but the important fact was that Dar was chained to the neighborhood by that promise as securely as though metallic shackles had been used. He refused to consider for a moment any suggestion which involved deserting his precious books.

More as an experiment than anything else, Kruger asked on one occasion whether the law of the village forbidding entrance to the city applied to the captives. He expected a curt refusal and was pleasantly surprised when they were allowed to go there, on condition that nothing was removed or injured. He said nothing about the knife that Dar had appropriated and cheerfully made the required promise.

Dar was afraid that the villagers would resent this; it did seem a little odd, permitting the captives to do something that was illegal for the captors. However, no sign of such a feeling appeared and they finally concluded that the word of the Teachers must be the absolutely final authority for these people.

They took advantage of their permission several times, but found nothing more surprising than the things that had turned up during their first inspection. Kruger made a careful and well-planned search for the generating station that supplied power to the city wiring, but failed to find it. He was disappointed; he would have liked very much to know what the source of power of the city builders might have been.

The Teachers never asked how closely their condition was being followed, though one day the two had a bad scare during one of the conversations.

“Dar,” the speaker had asked, “what is the substance of which those harness buckles of yours are made?” The pilot appeared not to be bothered by the question, but Kruger suddenly realized what might lie behind it and answered hastily, “He had them before we came; they did not come from the city.”

“We realize that,” came the answer, “but that is not what we wanted to know. Dar?”

“They are of iron,” the pilot replied, truthfully.

“So we thought. Would you mind explaining how a person who is forbidden to have anything to do with fire, and whose people all live under the same law, came by such articles?”

“I can tell, but not explain,” Dar answered precisely. “I found them. A great deal of such material was found near and in the city when we first lived. We took what we wanted of it, since there was no law forbidding it. I did not know that iron had any connection with fire.” He looked uneasily down at the buckles.

This conversation ended there; as a matter of fact it was violently interrupted. One of the geysers a scant thirty yards from where the prisoners sat chose this moment to release some of its energy, and large quantities of boiling water began to appear. Dar and Kruger did not wait to say any farewells, they went, straight away from the disturbance and as rapidly as the clouds of vapor permitted.

Twice Kruger tripped over irregularities in the rock; both times he struggled back to his feet with scalding water almost on him. For what seemed to them both like hours, but which probably was rather less than a minute, no thought entered either of their minds except that of self-preservation; then they were safely beyond the reach of the disturbance.

Immediately, the instant they were sure of this, the two stopped; they both had the same thought, but it no longer dealt with their own safety. For a full hour, until long after the vapor had cleared away, they waited and watched, hoping to get a glimpse of the Teachers who would presumably have been driven out in the same way as their captives. Nothing moved in all that time, however, and when the clearing of the air was complete they could see the dome of rock sitting apparently unchanged with no sign that anyone or anything had moved in its vicinity. They went back and circled the pool beside which it lay, so as to see it from every side, for now if ever the entrance would be visible, but they found nothing…

Both were a trifle surprised when, on their return after the usual interval, discussion went on as though nothing had happened. Kruger wished he dared ask how the Teachers had escaped, but somehow failed to bring himself to the point of actually raising the question.

By this time he had told a good deal about his people. Dar had done the same. Kruger’s facility with the language had grown far more rapidly than in any similar period of his companionship with Dar alone.

Dar, by this time, had realized his original error about Kruger, though his ideas of astronomy were distinctly sketchy. The boy, however, was by no means convinced that Dar and the villagers were natives of the planet; the Teachers had always shied away from direct answers on that subject and there was no direct evidence which tended to disprove the original notion that they were maroons like himself — none, at least, that Kruger recognized as such.

Their stay in the village was not entirely composed of exploration and conversation. Several times life became fairly exciting, in fact. On one occasion Kruger fell into a concealed pit which had rather obviously been made to trap animals; only the fact that it seemed to have been made for rather large game enabled him to miss the sharpened stake in the bottom. Again, while leaving a building at one edge of the city well up the side of one of the volcanoes, Kruger and Dar were nearly engulfed by a slide of volcanic ash which had apparently been loosened by recent rain. They had ducked back into the building barely in time, and afterward had to make their way painfully — for Kruger, that is — through the structure to find an exit on the other side, the uphill doors having been completely blocked.

Several times Dar renewed his request for the return of the books; his time was running out, in more senses than one. The Teachers still professed interest in the volumes, however, and failed to give any definite time when the interest might be expected to wane.

Several times when he and Dar were alone Kruger suggested, more or less forcefully, that they simply fail to return to the village some day, get to the Ice Ramparts, and return with enough assistance to compel the return of Dar’s property; but the pilot refused to leave. It took a fairly complex combination of circumstances to change his mind.

They had covered the greater part of the city which lay toward the village but had done virtually nothing with the other side. Actually there was little reason to suppose that it would provide anything they had not seen already, and even Kruger was getting a little weary of rambling through deserted buildings, when Dar noticed that one street seemed to lead off from the farther side of the city around the second volcano, which they had never reached. This street was not noticeable from sea level; Dar saw it from the edge of the city well up the other hill — quite close, in fact, to the place where they had nearly been buried. The two decided to investigate immediately.

It took some time to descend one volcano, cross the level portion of the city, and climb the other to the point which Dar’s memory indicated as being the start of the street in question; when they reached it, enough time had passed to suggest that they might possibly be late for their next conversation with the Teachers. They had always been careful not to overstay their leave, feeling quite logically that their freedom might suffer should they do so, but this time they decided to take the chance.

The street went up the hill rather steeply, angling at first toward the seaward side of the cone. From below they had not been able to tell whether it formed a switchback leading to the top of the volcano or a spiral going around it; they learned fairly soon that it was the latter.

They rather hoped to get to the top so that they could get a better idea of the local geography than their walks had given them. Dar could see no sense in building a street that led to a mountain top, but was willing to suspend judgment until the evidence was in.

“In any case,” the pilot pointed out, “if you really want to get up there, there’s no need to follow a road. We’ve both climbed hills before.”

“Yes, but I don’t know about climbing this hill. Remember what happened over on the other side of town. It would be rather bad if another of those landslides started and we had no building to duck into.”

“I don’t think we need worry. The ground on this cone looks a lot firmer than that on the other, and I haven’t seen any marks suggesting recent landslides.”

“I didn’t see any on the other side, either — and probably no one has been climbing this. Our disturbance might be all it was waiting for.”

They might have spared themselves the discussion; they never reached the top. The road ceased to climb at about the time the last of the city except the submerged portion was lost to view, and without even discussing the question the two continued to follow the paved way. The view was already extensive; when they looked back the bottom of the harbor revealed the extent to which it must once have been dry land, as the street pattern of the city showed through the clear water. Ahead, the nearly straight coastline vanished in distance many miles away.

Inland, the jungle extended as far as the eye could reach. Even from this height — which was not, after all, very great — they could not begin to see across the distance separating them from the lava field where they had met. There seemed no reason, so far, for building the road at all; it seemed to lead nowhere. With mounting curiosity they hastened along it.

A quarter of a mile beyond the point where even the harbor had vanished from view they came upon the crater. There was virtually no warning; one moment the hillside sloped up and down away from the road at the usual angle; the next, the region downhill had vanished and the road was running perilously along the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff. A heavy metal guard rail was there and the two approached this and leaned over.

The crater, if that was what it had once been, was not in the top of the hill, but well to one side; the road had led them to the highest point of its rim and the cone went up several hundred more feet behind them as they stood looking into it. It was not a very orthodox crater; the inner walls were sheer cliffs, which at first made Kruger feel decidedly insecure. Then he saw that the inner wall of the pit was not made of the same material as the hillside in general, and very slowly it dawned on him that the whole thing was artificial.

The walls were of concrete, or some equivalent composition. They had been shaped by tools. The bottom was not the tapering cone of the usual small crater but neither was it completely level. There was a small lake, and vegetation floored most of the rest of the area. Around the edge the concrete wall material seemed to extend horizontally for a short distance, and on this there was no vegetation. Both watchers were able to see the mouths of caves or tunnels opening from the wall onto this ramp, and with one mind they started looking for a Way down.

There was nothing remotely resembling a ladder anywhere on the inner wall, so the logical thing to do seemed to be to follow the road, which must have been built in connection with this pit This quickly gave promise of being the right course, as the path, instead of continuing around the mountain at the height which it had maintained for so long, began to curve downward in order to follow the rim of the pit. At the steepest part of the downhill slope the smooth surface of the pavement changed for about two hundred yards into something that might have been steps with very narrow treads and low risers or simply a corrugation to provide traction.

Shortly after this they reached a point where the trees grew right up to the edge of the road, overhanging both it and the pit. This had prevented their learning the course of the road from above; as it turned out, it had also prevented their seeing a number of buildings which were spaced at fairly regular intervals down the slope. These appeared to be built in the same style as the ones in the city except that they were all single-storied. Dar and Kruger wondered whether to examine them in detail now or find where the road led and come back later if there was time. The second alternative won.

However, it did not take long to find where the road led. Another two hundred yards down the slope it opened out into a paved space which Kruger labeled “parking lot” in his mind without even thinking. Several minutes of thought and investigation revealed no better name for it, so the two explorers returned to the buildings. Once inside the first of these, all recollection of the fact that they were already late for their appointment with the Teachers vanished from Kruger’s mind.

His first supposition was that this must be the city power plant. An electric generator is going to look pretty much the same whoever builds it and whatever causes it to turn, and the objects in the first building were quite plainly electric generators. They were large, though Kruger lacked the knowledge to tell whether they were large enough to supply the whole city. Their great armatures were mounted on vertical axles, and apparently the source of mechanical energy was below ground level. With this in mind the two made a rapid search and were rewarded by finding the head of a ramp that led downward as expected.

The only difficulty was that the ramp was both narrow and low. Kruger would have to go down on his hands and knees, and the slope was steep. Even if he worked his way down backward return would be difficult if not impossible, for the ramp was floored with smooth metal and traction was very poor. Dar was in even worse case; the size question bothered him less, but his claws for the first time in the history of their acquaintance were less suited to the situation than Kruger’s feet. Kruger finally decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and postponed exploration of the lower level until the other buildings had been examined.

This took some time, for the place was fascinating. All sorts of technical equipment were to be found. All of it was much too big to move, to Kruger’s disappointment, but it left no doubt that the city builders were a highly civilized race. The generators and motors, furnaces and machine tools told all that was really important to know about them — except what had forced them to leave, to abandon their city and their equipment. War would have ruined both; plague should have left some traces of bodies, unless they were soft-bodied beings such as mollusks. Kruger, as a young man who had grown up on Earth during the first decade of interstellar exploration, was quite prepared to believe this last possibility, but even he did not take it for granted.

Always there were the conflicting facts: a partly submerged city which must have been abandoned for centuries — and machines with only a thin film of dust, pavings still free of vegetation, walls straight and uncracked with sound mortar and firm masonry which must have been maintained with care until fairly recently. It looked as though most of the machines would run if they were simply cleaned and power supplied to them.

The group of buildings, given time, would have served as a school in which any competent archaeologist could have learned practically anything which could be asked about their makers; one of them, in fact, might almost have been designed as a school. It concained a beautiful relief model of the two volcanoes, the city between, the harbor — though it did not show any water level — and the great pit beside which the building itself stood. In addition, many of the machines present full-scale in the other buildings were here in model form; the two investigators would probably have spent hours here alone had it not been for one fact.

There was another ramp leading downward from the single floor of this structure, and this time it was large enough for Dar to walk upright without difficulty. Also, its slope was much less than that of the preceding one, and the floor formed of a rough composition in which the little native’s claws could readily find a grip. Finally, it led in toward the pit; and without further ado, once this fact was digested, the two started down its gentle slope.

The light was not good, but enough came from the building they had left to enable them to see any branches in the tunnel. For some time there was none; then a number of open doorways appeared on each side. Judging by echoes, they led into empty rooms; it was now too dark to check this by sight. A moment later, however, a faint light appeared ahead of them.

They did not turn all their attention on this light at once, however. Another distracting circumstance arose. At almost the same moment that Dar caught the illumination a whistling roar sounded behind them and they felt a sudden wave of heat. As one they leaped forward; and as they did so, sound and heat subsided. A faint draft from the building they had left carried a cloud of water vapor around them and on toward the end of the tunnel.

“What in the Pleiades was that?” Kruger asked of no one in particular.

“Another geyser?” Dar’s response was only half a question.

“Awfully brief.” Kruger started carefully back toward the source of the disturbance, ready to leap toward the pit once more if it seemed necessary.

It did. It happened again. And after some minutes of experiment it became evident that jets of live steam which played across the corridor were released by the weight of anyone standing or walking on the corridor floor approximately ten yards from the nozzles that supplied the steam.

“Which is interesting,” Kruger concluded. “I suppose we should be thankful that they set the thing up to warn us. It would have been just as easy, I should think, to put the trigger right in front of their blasted pipes.”

“It would seem that they wanted to keep whatever was in here, inside,” was Dar’s contribution, “but didn’t care if anyone or anything came in from outside. I find myself quite interested in what may be present at the other end of this tunnel. Do you have your knife, Nils?”

“I do. I’m right behind you, Robin Hood!”

With crossbow cocked and pointing forward the little Abyormenite strode down the slope toward the brightening light. Kruger followed. It occurred to both of them that the recent sounds would have destroyed any chance of taking whatever lay ahead by surprise, but neither mentioned this aloud.