"I'll find Spencer," Grimes pleaded. "Please, sir." With that he kicked the Captain's wrist and escaped. Sitting up, the Captain watched Grimes' light vanish into the depths. After a moment of hesitation he followed. He wanted to go back, to get another gun, to stop and think this thing out, but he kept on walking, part of his brain reassuring him that he was doing the right thing, searching for his men, doing his duty. But he knew that wasn't right. He was being pushed.
When the ramp levelled off he managed to stop again, sitting down determinedly on the stones. He slapped his face and shook his head, but when he arose he shuffled forward again until his light cast a dark shadow on the floor. Happy for an excuse to stop, he dropped on his knees beside it. A toy? A tiny monstrosity with a sausage-shaped thorax, six webbed feet beneath, nearly a dozen hands or feelers on top, some of them specialized pincers or hooks, others as generalized as the hands of a man, all of them semi-retractable. It had a rubbery feel. What bothered him was the head. There really wasn't any, only a mount for two froglike eyes, no space for a brain. Where the neck should have been clung a small blob of waste. But he had difficulty in pulling it off, and when he did he saw it was part of the design, an auxiliary creature bloated like a woodtick, a bladder and a fang-ringed mouth, nothing more than a toy parasite.
Repressing a shudder he fitted the toy back together and dropped it in his pocket. Then his feet hurried him down the ramp. It was plunging again, steeper and steeper until he tripped and rolled, cradling his flashlight, and banged against something hard and vibrant. All around him in the darkness, water-choked voices sang: "Go on, go on, go on," until he flashed his light about and his eyes assured his ears that the voices were only the sounds arising from tall, glass cylinders of rhythmically perking mercury.
Abruptly he realized that the mercury columns operated the tall black machine in the center and that this was a hydraulic press which in turn fed the humming electric motor beside it. Piezoelectricity on a practical scale, electricity produced from the compression-expansion of rock crystals in the press, power for the press produced from the expansion of mercury vapor, the heat for expansion drawn from the core of the planet, the whole set-up was as immortal as machinery could be. It might have been running for thousands of years.
But everything was swept from his mind by the overpowering vision of a round red door with a handle shaped like the letter S, and his body hurried across the room, down another passageway, around a curve and there was the door, with Grimes and Spencer struggling to turn the handle.
They didn't bother to look up until he shoved them aside. Seizing Grimes' rifle, he jammed the barrel into the S and levered the handle, oblivious of the fact that he was smashing the front sight. Slowly the door opened from its center, widening like Spencer's camera's eye.
"Stay back, that's an order," he heard his voice say. Then his body lunged through the aperture into freezing darkness. The cold room arched away in all directions, drawing his flashlight through metal grillwork into nothingness. The light caught something black and swollen up there, almost directly above his head. But the foul odor at his feet drew the light down onto black, ruptured sacks that had fallen from their perches in the grill and spoiled and smeared the floor with corruption. Unwillingly he knelt to touch one of them. Cold, and the floor was icy cold, throbbing gently beneath his feet, refrigerated.
Overhead something hissed, and his mind tried to break for the door. He saw himself doing it, rushing past the two faces in the doorway, fleeing up the ramp to the surface. But he was still there, almost devoutly kneeling when the thing rustled silkily and plopped upon his neck.
He gasped instinctively throwing up his arm to knock it off. But it froze his arm midway, and he knelt there, a statue, trying to make his arm obey. A sharp pain told him it was boring into his neck. Then he fell on his side, his legs kicking like a dying rabbit's. In a moment he couldn't even do that. By the time Spencer reached him he was completely paralyzed and voiceless. But his mind was clear again, clearer than it had been since he approached the great control dome on the surface, almost as though the thing had to devote its entire tele-force to the control of his body. There was none left for Spencer and Grimes. As they raised his head and chafed his hands and made ineffectual suggestions they seemed perfectly normal again. He realized that in the semi-darkness they had not noticed it on his back.