After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

It was blue—ultramarine, they would have called it on earth, with slashes of silver. Great long-beaked, long-legged birds, suggestive of cranes, flew across a marsh—a decoration done by some superlative artist.

But this room also was empty.

Tony and Eliot James went on.

“How do you feel?” demanded Tony, after they had entered the fifth great room in gay colors, with marvelous decoration, but empty.

“Feel?” repeated Eliot. “It feels to me that we’re in a building that never was used, into which they never moved.”

“Perhaps,” said Tony, “that goes for the whole city.”

“Too soon to say, much too soon to say. How do you go up, d’you suppose?”

“Elevators behind one of these doors, probably. No sign of stairs.”

“How do you open the doors?”

“Pound on one of the others, probably,” suggested Tony, “judging from recent experience.”

“How about the one we opened?” said Eliot. “Is it still up, d’you suppose?”

“What’d lower it?”

“What lifted it?” returned Eliot. “I’ll go back and look. Want to go with me?”

“No: I’ll stay here and try some of these.”

But he had accomplished nothing with any of them when Eliot came back.

“That closed, Tony,” he reported soberly.

Tony started. “You didn’t close it?”

“No.”

“All right!” Tony almost yelled. “Go ahead. Say it!”

“Say what?”

“What you’re thinking. Remote control of some sort! Somebody saw us, opened the door, let us walk in, closed it again.”

“Somebody!” said Eliot. “Let’s be sensible, Tony.”

“All right,” said Tony, jittering. “You be!… Damn it, look at that door. Look at it! That’s opening now!”

For a door at the farther edge of this room now slowly was rising.

“Were you working at it?” Eliot whispered.

“Yes.”

“Then, that’s it. You started another counterbalance working.”

“Sure,” said Tony. “Sure.”

They stepped to the opening. Utter darkness dropped below them. There was a shaft, there—a shaft which, under other circumstances, might have showed machinery. Now it was empty.

Tony and Eliot James knelt side by side at its edge. They shouted, and no voice came back to them.