"This way."
Tharol Sen was coldly aloof, and seemed both preoccupied and depressed, which was natural. She went ahead, wordlessly, and Torry followed, lost in his own reflections. At the far end of Sen Bas' wrecked garden was a steel-arched doorway, high, sombre and gothic. Beyond, and below, lay the sprawling vastness of vaults and caverns which was the Martian underworld. Long, curvings ramps led downward into a complex of subsurface workings far below New Chicago.
They descended and slipped quietly across large, echoing platforms whose dimensions were lost in gloom. Metal-shod stairways spiraled upward and downward into invisible infinities. Deep shafts vibrated with strange sounds the ear could not catch or identify. Freight tunnels were yawning maws of darkness, like the staring, sightless eyes of some mythical monster created on too large a scale for man to understand.
Torry grew tense and nervous. He began to sense patterns of shivering, eery movement about him. Walls and ceilings closed in suddenly, and he could make out vague, monstrous forms set into niches within walls carved of bedrock. Old-Martian gods in sculpture—leering stone spectres, goblin-like, and subtly obscene.
Tharol Sen paused. Her hand sought Torry's and drew him close, but not in friendliness. She whispered harshly, warning him to silence and extreme caution.
"I was wrong. The police have broken through. Some are already in the vaults."
She followed a maze of barely visible threadlike guidelines of luminosity set into the metallic tiling. A few steps more brought them to a wide platform, from which many tunnel mouths opened. Along one wall ranged banks of elevators. Beyond were ranks of empty pneumatic tube cars on tracks which angled in sharp descent into wells a level below the platform. Spidery Martian hieroglyphs labeled various shafts and the tube terminals. Tharol Sen studied the markings closely before making her choice.
"I have been here only once before," she complained. "It is not easy to find the way. But I think the police will have more trouble."
She selected a pneumatic tube car. Torry boosted her to the door flap. She settled herself in the tiny seat cradle, then from inside, extended him a helping hand. For the first time she noticed his blistered palms and raw fingers. He grunted painfully as she drew him up beside her.
"I should have bandaged your hands," she mused.