Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions, past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another something which could have been anything at all.
The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall.
The edge of the city—the city which was a dome of force above and a bowl of metal below.
After a long time, Wass sighed. "Well, skipper...?"
"We go back, I guess," Martin said.
Rodney turned swiftly to face him. Martin thought the tall man was holding his gun. "To the switchboard, Martin?"
"Unless someone has a better idea," Martin conceded. He waited. But Rodney was holding the gun ... and Wass was.... Then—"I can't think of anything else."
They began to retrace their steps along the metal street, back past the same dancing shapes of metal, the partitions, the odd windows, all looking different now in the new angles of illumination.
Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall, matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty triumph in the rear.
Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn. But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a sort of racial insanity.