Bonwitt examined the controls again. "It's a gravity lift," he decided. "Nothing like it on Earth. Suppose Peterson's found an underground civilization here?"
The ethertype man grinned. "I knew you'd get it. Peterson told me or I'd never have guessed. Until I saw the damn creatures."
"You did see them?"
"Hundreds. They're queer—like Pauchek."
"So-o. That explains a lot. Peterson's been here before, often. I still don't get it about Pauchek, though."
The lift slowed down and stopped. Crane led the way out onto a second balcony, a gigantic sweeping curve of it.
They were in a vast hollowed-out space. An inner world within the moon! Damply warm and redolent of life. Its vastness stretched off into the distance, beyond sight. Most amazing was its source of light, an enormous green-white globe that loomed in the near distance. A cold but luminous sun within the moon!
"It's real," chuckled Crane, watching Bonwitt.
Below them was a wider balcony, a ledge on which were ordered rows of great machines with naked little brown men scurrying in their midst.
To the right was the great grandad of all of those machines, a huge drum-like affair with tapered helices at crazy angles and with the big steel shaft they'd seen up above projecting from its vertical upper bearing and vanishing through the bore in the rock overhead.