"We're beneath the main altar room. Ventilation ducts at bases of statues there. That's how Lake discovered this place."
Then abruptly they turned a corner and the subterranean chamber lay before them. It, unlike any of the other chambers Ramey had seen at Angkor Vat, was doored with a great barrier of bronze. They tumbled into the room, Syd O'Brien and Tomasaki, Red Barrett and the still bleating bonze, Sheng-ti, Lake and Sheila, Ramey and Dr. Aiken bringing up the rear. Ramey shut the huge door after them, clanged into place a ponderous lock-bar, and with a sigh of relief, turned to view his new surroundings.
This was a small room, barely more than twenty feet on a side and of equal height. A pallid light filtered down from a grilled mosaic at roof level. Lake O'Brien augmented this illumination by igniting a flambeau ensconced on the wall. The torch crackled and flamed high, casting a fitful, tawny gleam over carven walls, and—something else. The object Dr. Aiken had mentioned. The inexplicable cube of wrought metal standing in the middle of the room.
Ramey stared at the thing incredulously.
"Why, that—that thing's modern!"
Dr. Aiken nodded somberly. "By all laws of reason and logic," he assented, "it should be. But its location and the inscriptions argue differently, Winters."
Ramey tapped the thing with his pistol. It echoed metallically, hollowly. "But the ancients didn't know how to work with metals like this. This isn't silver or brass or even iron. It's—it's steel!"
"Guess again," grunted Syd. "It's not even steel. We haven't been able to figure what it is. Some unknown alloy."
He was, Ramey thought suddenly, getting almost as bad as Dr. Aiken. Fretting over archeological problems at a time like this. He abandoned the question for the time being.
"Well, no time to worry about it now. We've given the Japs the skip for the time being, but we're still not out of the woods. Now that we're down here, what do we do next?"