“I remember—a drain, it looked to be.
We must see———”
They ran three hundred feet to a great door at the end of the hall, an immense, sliding grate of heavy black bars, crossed, close-set, fastened with a massive lock.
Through the bars they saw the black metropolis again—a storm raging over it.
Looming mountains of ebon metal, fantastic, colossal machines of unguessable function, all piled in titanic confusion, with no order visible to the human eye, no regularity of shape or size or position.
No streets; chasms merely, doors opening into breathtaking space.
Now the city was lashed with wild violence.
The four had weathered other storms, on their trek across the black continent, always toward the end of the week-long day, when swiftly chilling air caused sudden precipitation.
But this was a wilder fury.
It was almost dark.
A lurid pall of scarlet gloom shrouded the city’s nightmare masses.
Wind shrieked.
Yellow rain fell in sluicing sheets; it drenched them, stung them with its icy whip, even hi the shelter of the bars.
Blinding lightning flamed continually overhead, stabbed red swords down incessantly at black buildings that loomed like tortured giants.
Below the door was a mile-deep chasm, walled in completely by black, irregular buildings.
John Star could see no way visible to leave its misty, flood-drenched floor.
Aladoree shrank back instinctively from the chill rain that lashed through the bars, from the ominous glow of the sky and the fearful bellow of the wind and thunder.
Giles Habibula hastily retreated, muttering:
“Mortal me! I never saw such———”
“The lock, Giles!” Jay Kalam requested urgently.
“Bless my bones, Jay!” he howled above the roaring elements.
“We can’t go out into that!
Into that wicked storm, and a fearful pit a mile deep!”
“Please!”
“Ah, if you will, Jay.
Tis easier, now.”
His deft, steady fingers manipulated the levers of the lock, more surely, this time, more confidently.
Almost at once it clicked; the four men set their shoulders to the bars, and slid the huge grille aside.
Staggering against wind and rain that now drove in with multiplied force, they peered over the square metal ledge.
The smooth black wall dropped sheer, under them, for a long mile, sluiced with rain.
Jay Kalam braced himself against the howling gusts; he pointed, shouted into the roar of thunder:
“The drain!”
They saw it, beside them, ten feet away.
A huge, square tube, supported at close intervals by a metal flange that secured it to the wall.
Straight into the pit it fell, dwindling to a thin black line, lost at last in the redly flickering murk below.
“The flanges!”
Rather by watching his lips than by sound they caught the words.
“A ladder.
Too far apart.
Inconvenient shape.
But we can climb them. Down.”
“Bless my bones!” howled Giles Habibula, into the tempest.
“We can’t do that, Jay.
Not in this frightful storm.
We can’t even reach the mortal flanges!
Poor old Giles———”
“John———” Jay Kalam’s lips moved, his face a question.
“I’ll try!” he screamed.
He was the lightest, the quickest, of the four; he could do the thing if any of them could.
He nodded to Hal Samdu, smiling grimly.