The lift let them out onto a narrow platform beside a car that ran from a track through a tunnel hollowed roughly out of bedrock underneath the city. They got into it and the car shot through stale darkness relieved by a few dim lights. It went fast.
Birrel stole a glance at the other two men, and decided against any precipitate action. Vannevan had something hidden in his hand, and it would be something small and nastily potent as a weapon, he was sure. He'd wait, play it along—
There was light again, sudden and bright. The car burst into it, into vast and unexpected space. For a second Birrel thought they had come back to the surface again. Then he saw the rocky vault high overhead and the walls going away on either side and he knew it was a mammoth cavern.
The car stopped. They stepped out onto a platform.
"This way," said Wolt. "I want you to see it all."
They moved off the platform and onto a railed shelf cut out of the rocky wall. And Birrel stared in amazement.
The end of the tunnel and the shelf on which they stood were about halfway up the cavern wall. Below, and stretching away as far as he could see, rank upon rank of great metal shapes stood, some painted in dour red or gray, others naked, gleaming steel or copper. There was no one in the cavern, no sound, no movement—nothing but the brooding silence and the loom of the endless rows of enigmatic mechanisms.
Wolt and Vannevan looked down on them, with the faces of men who see a beautiful and splendid vision. And Wolt said,
"Do you know what those are?"