"We'll find them," Rick promised with a drunken sort of confidence. "And they should work if they aren't smashed. Preservation is perfect."
They moved as in a dream. But Rick was right. They descended a ramp. The frost of air around them was unmarked by footprints other than their own. They crept into a projectile-like car on a track, and fastened the door. The marvelous simplification of controls was evidence of an advanced technology. Was it so strange after all that when Rick pressed the throttle gingerly, a blast of atomic flame burst from the stern of the car, setting it in motion after so long?
Speed mounted. Colliding with anything in that tunnel would have brought the men unknowing death. But now the throttle was limp and unresponsive. So what was there to do but rely anxiously on probable automatic guiding devices? In minutes the car covered four thousand miles, and then stopped by itself with a soft, innocuous jolt.
Finden undogged the portal of the projectile by working levers not made for human hands. Again the glowing walls gave light. Boots made grating sounds. So there was air, too. Gaseous, not frozen.
Again they wandered through passages and rooms. Here was a great underground fortress and supply depot. Metal crates and boxes were stacked high. There were hugely buttressed walls, some of them ruptured and repaired. Martian and Xian corpses, relics of a last battle, lay dried out and blackened on the floor.
At last the men came to a long vaulted hall. Near them was the breech of a colossal tube, ten yards in diameter. Beyond it was another and another, a whole bank of them, fifty in a row, slanting slightly upward and disappearing into the metal wall.
The men sensed it at once—in this colossal setup must be what they had come to see. Here was the mysterious center of things.
They might have spoken of this aloud. But in this age-old place they were warned to silence. And it wasn't all intuition and wariness. For along the center of that hall, the dust was almost obliterated by human bootprints.
Stepping very lightly, Rick and his companions hid behind a metal column where a mummified Martian sprawled on the pavement amid heaps of parchment. Nearby was an Xian corpse.