"I won't fail," Lynne told her with more assurance than she felt. "After all, I have Revere to think of—and you—and Rolf."
"I encourage myself with similar thoughts," said Lao. "Come—let us go on inside."
It was like entering a pagan cathedral. The tower in which Lynne's post was bore heavy over-marks of human habitation. Probably, she thought, it had long since been stripped by the archeologists of any objects of historical or cultural value. Save for its crystaline flying buttresses it might almost have been an Earth skyscraper.
But, outside of a few pieces of scaffolding, where restoration work or study was evidently in progress, this immense building had been left untouched by the new inhabitants of the red planet. Thanks probably to the thinness and dryness of the atmosphere, brilliant murals had retained their coloring intact. Yet in numerous patches the colors seemed to fade into neutral tints at variance with the brightness of the rest.
"Here." Lao took from a table, on which tools and other instruments had been laid, an odd-looking stereoptical device, handed it to Lynne, adding, "Adjust it and you'll get the full effect. A lot of their work was done below the human color-scale, in the infra-red."
Lynne gasped when she studied the hitherto drab patches in the murals through the double-eye-piece of the viewer. She saw strange beings, hauntingly near-human, engaged in fantastic gambols. Multi-faceted eyes leered out at her from the Capuchin heads of twin-bodied smaller creatures of a boldness that almost made her flinch. And there were endlessly varied poses of both sorts of beings....
"Rather disturbing, isn't it?" said Lao. "I didn't bring you out here just to see the sights, Lynne. From what little your brother was able to tell me, the odd little games those creatures are playing are very like those his invaders hinted at."
"You mean," said Lynne with a shudder, "that the zombies or whatever they are looked like that before they lost their bodies?"
"Or before they became invisible," said Lao quietly. "The near-humans seem to have been the dominant species. These others—the twin-bodied monkeylike things—seem to have been their pets."
"What disgusting games they played!" said Lynne. "They sound a lot like...." She hesitated, realising she was about to repeat Lao's remark.