by Perry Rhodan
Marshall easily guessed the full extent of his excited thoughts. "And if you also consider," he added to Bell's explanation, "that the shaft appears to have been built artificially, it leaves no other conclusion—but that it serves as a storage area for something which is best kept at 57.7°F for the purpose of preservation or some other reason."
Bell looked at him with an impenetrable expression as he spoke. Finally he corrected him: "57.3, not 57.7. Reading figures isn't your strongest point!"
Marshall grinned. "But this is your theory, isn't it?"
"Exactly. I'm convinced that something is hidden behind these walls. The tunnel has been constructed by intelligent beings and serves a certain purpose. It apparently connects the subterranean storage rooms with the outside world. The tunnel itself can't be the storage room or we'd have found something. It probably houses some important objects. That's why the entrances to the repositories have been concealed. We've encountered a number of races in the Galaxy who have shown a preference for seamless invisible doors."
He moved over to the left side and crawled a few feet along the wall of the tunnel. When this didn't bring any results he rose up with a sigh and returned in as erect a posture as the low ceiling permitted. Then he tapped against the wall with the gloves of his spacesuit. The wall was a wall. There was no sign of a secret access to the presumed depots.
Bell went down on his knees again and pondered. "Maybe," he murmured, "we haven't reached our goal yet. This tunnel is only effective as a temperature filter if it's long enough to level out all temperature fluctuations." He looked at Marshall. "We'll go on and watch the thermometer. If the temperature changes we'll have overshot our goal."
• • •
Three hours later the temperature still remained at 57.3°F. The telepathic probing noise of the weird adversary had faded away. Now they could have returned to the entrance of the tunnel and climbed back to the surface without danger.
However nobody considered it any longer because meanwhile they were overcome by a search fever. At first only Marshall and Betty Toufry noticed that the hitherto monotonous situation underwent a change. They received thought-impulses which were, however, rather confused and too indistinct to be understood, but they showed, on the other hand, that somewhere in the neighborhood an at least semi-intelligent being was present. Unfortunately Betty's and Marshall's capacity of perceiving extraneous thoughts was not direction-oriented in an exact manner. They could do no more than indicate that the strange subject was 'somewhere ahead' and Betty believed she felt that the impulses came from an oblique direction below. Bell didn't know how to cope with it. He reduced their speed of walking—which could better be called crawling speed—and asked the telepaths to report to him continually. Betty and Marshall registered that the impulse became more intensified. But the corridor remained empty as far as their lamps reached.
Bell felt uneasier by the second. He had already pulled out his impulse-beamer and kept it in front of him as he advanced farther into the corridor. He was terribly startled when Marshall suddenly shouted with all his might: "Look out!" He stopped. Lying flat on his belly, he asked: "What's the matter now?"
"Something has detected us," Marshall hastily answered. "I'm getting a regular barrage of hostile impulses."
"Are they more pronounced than what you heard so far?"
"A little, but they're far from clear thoughts."
"Does it want to attack us?"
"Wait a minute... no, I believe it can't do it."
"Great!" Bell rejoiced. "With such..."
Somebody grabbed him by the arm. It was Ras Tschubai. "Quiet!" he whispered. "I hear something."
Bell held his breath. The others didn't react as quickly as he did; he could hear their rapid breathing in his helmet-speaker. But there were also other sounds: scratching and scraping noises such as he had heard before when the Gom monster attacked them a few hours earlier. "The lacquer is here again!" he snapped angrily. "Hold your weapons ready to shoot but be careful that you don't shoot at each other! Let's go!"
Suddenly he was in a hurry. He crawled through the tunnel as quickly as he could. Marshall's information kept coming at regular intervals with the same monotonous voice: "... stronger... stronger... stronger..."
This referred to the hostile impulses he was receiving. Therefore, danger lay ahead.
What irritated Bell was that the passage still seemed to be completely empty. The scraping and scratching he had heard before must have come from the tunnel itself. But where was whatever caused it? "... stronger... stronger..." Marshall continued. Then he suddenly paused.
Bell stopped in his tracks again. "What...?" "There!" Marshall pointed over Bell's shoulder. Bell saw nothing except a thin black line on the wall of a few feet ahead. "What is it?"
Marshall didn't answer. He pushed Bell to the side and crawled forward. When he reached the line he stopped and called: "Come here and look at it!"
Bell came closer and the others followed him. The line was about the width of a finger above the floor of the tunnel. The floor was a little uneven at this spot. It curved up close to the line and obscured it slightly.
It looked as if someone had drawn an 18-inch-long line on the light wall with a sharp pencil. Bell didn't know what to think of it. Marshall understood his bewilderment. "Remove the wall around it carefully!" he suggested. "Then you'll see what it is."
Bell lifted up his thermo-beamer, raised himself on his elbows and set his beam on the lowest magnitude. Then he aimed the weapon at the small bulge on the floor. The needle-thin energy stream of the beamer melted the substance; it dissolved and spread over the floor, giving off a burst of smoke.
"Higher!" Marshall said.
The beam ate a hole in the wall and Bell could see that a dark surface extended deeper behind the line into the stone. He continued applying his weapon and burned a hole into the wall and the floor which was big enough to admit his head in his helmet. What appeared as a line before now looked like a dark-brown lid covering the top of the hole and lying under a solid mass of stone. Suddenly Bell realized what he had exposed. With a grunting sound of surprise he lowered his weapon and switched it off. "A lacquer-flounder!" he moaned.
He pressed his helmet against the floor and was thus able to view the strange creature out of one eye from underneath. He noted that it didn't move although the temperature of the rock around it probably exceeded many times the level it was used to in its normal surroundings. A number of theories flashed through Bell's mind He turned around to ask Marshall's opinion but at the same moment Betty called out: "Watch out! Something's wrong!"
She noticed—as clearly as Marshall—that the hostile impulses so full of hate which had accompanied them the last quarter hour suddenly ebbed away. Something else took their place, giving the impression that the weird being from whom the impulses originated was extremely busy.
A few seconds later the flounder lodged inside the wall began to move. Scraping softly it retreated deeper into the wall. Bell tried to hold it back but the object smooth as varnish, slipped through his coarse gloves. A few moments later the mysterious object had disappeared.
Almost at the same time a sharp gust of wind whistled through the tunnel. They were caught so unawares that Bell whirled around with a hoarse gasp of amazement and searched the tunnel to find an opening through which the air could have blown in.
There was nothing at all. The wind, which came from nowhere, was very cold as the thermometer indicated. As a result of Bell's discharging his thermo-beamer the temperature at the place in the corridor where they had discovered the flounder had risen to over 100°F. The wind now blowing at a steady velocity through the corridor caused it to sink rapidly. Within a few minutes it was down to 57°F. The wind died down and the thermometer slowly climbed back to 57.3°F. again where it remained. The procedure was so obvious that it took no guesswork: automatic temperature regulation from a reservoir.
What made Bell jittery however was the fact that he neith
er knew where the reservoir was located nor had any idea how the air was made to flow.
Meanwhile the lacquer-flounder was completely gone. Bell pressed his helmet against the floor and stared into the semi-circular hole he had carved out with his weapon. He made a decision: "We're going to follow that thing. It's going to be a lot of trouble but somehow we've got to determine what we got into."
Marshall read the other thoughts which were also on his mind: there probably are, after all, no hidden doors in the walls of the tunnel. If the installation was indeed constructed by the Gom creatures, then a certain porosity of the walls sufficed to permit passage of the lacquer-flounders whose bodies were less than five-thousandths of an inch thick.
Bell motioned his people to stand aside and began to enlarge the hole with his thermo-beamer. He adjusted the output of the gun to a higher magnitude which not only had the effect of making the hole grow faster than before but also triggered the automatic temperature regulator, causing it to blow such a storm through the passage that they had to brace themselves to keep from being swept away.
Betty Toufry and John Marshall perceived that the feeling of effort and strain emanating from the strange being increased substantially.
Bell followed a definite direction. He branched off from the floor of the shaft at an angle down into the rock. When he had progressed about 15 feet he proved to be right with his assumption: the lacquer-flounder showed up again. The steady fire-ray unearthed a part of its body as it dug in. Now it seemed to dislike the increased heat of its surroundings and it rushed to escape from it.
But Bell stayed on its track. The slanted branch was driven into the stone foot by foot. It was narrow when the flounder moved quicker and became wider when it hesitated.
Then suddenly the energy-beam penetrated, a void. A circular hole emerged at the end of the shaft. The flounder disappeared through the opening into the darkness which lay behind it.
Bell switched off his weapon when the hole was big enough. He turned around and let his feet dangle into the darkness. Then he bent forward and shone into the opening with his helmet-lamp. What he saw was part of an apparently circular room which, though not much higher than 6 feet, was remarkably wide. Bell slid forward until he could barely hold on to the edge of the hole; then he dropped down and called to the others: "You can come down! Be careful when you jump!"
While they slipped through the hole one by one, Bell tried to illuminate the entire room. He noticed that in contrast to the tunnel through which they had passed the natural rock was nowhere to be seen. The walls and floor were covered with a dark coating reflecting the light of his lamp as if it were polished. The flounder they had followed seemed to have vanished. Bell was unable to detect it anywhere.
On the other hand Marshall made a discovery: "It seems to be chockfull of thought-impulses in here as if we were marching right through the brain of some gigantic being."
"Any danger?" Bell inquired.
"No, it has no tendency and doesn't concern us at all."
Bell was dissatisfied. "Now we trudged half a day long through the rock and chewed our way in here by the sweat of our brow. All this only to land in a subterranean room? Where the devil did that flounder go that led us here?"
Marshall opined: "It might very well be right around here. It would be hard to recognize against this dark background."
Bell skidded around on his knees, searching the floor inch by inch. Ras Tschubai. and Tako Kakuta wanted to help him but at this moment a high-pitched rustling sound came from the low ceiling. Bell rolled over on his side to look up. He saw a piece of the shiny coating peeled off the ceiling and started to float down.
It fell to the floor between Marshall and the Japanese—a 50-square-foot big paper-thin sheet. It immediately broke up in 4 parts which hastily got on the move again. Scraping and rustling they slid across the floor to the nearest wall.
Bell was so flabbergasted, seeing them vanish through the dark coating into the wall-like the lacquer-flounder that had shown them the way to this room—that he was barely able to control his reactions. "Flounders!" he shouted. "The whole room is made of flounders!"
He turned around and looked up to the ceiling. The spot from where the 4 weird Gom creatures had dropped down looked exactly as the other surfaces of the ceiling, walls and floor. However this didn't shake Bell's theory one whit.
Marshall and the two teleporters had given up their search. Marshall probed the environs but was unable to sense anything other than the indecipherable conglomeration of thoughts. "What do you make of it?" he asked Bell.
"Nothing," Bell replied impulsively, "except that it must be the flounders' idea of fun to paper the walls of this room with their own bodies."
"And for what purpose?"
"Who can tell?"
Marshall shrugged his shoulders. He was about to ask something else but Betty broke in: "I can't help the feeling," she said in a low but rather excited voice, "that there's a third type of individual in the vicinity.
Somewhere over there..." She waved her hand across a wide area of the wall.
Bell perked up at once. "Marshall?"
Marshall shook his head. "No, I don't notice a thing. But don't let that bother you: Betty has always been a better telepath than I."
Bell crawled to the place Betty had pointed out. Warily he raised his hand to tap against the wall. His first try already caused him to shrink away with an outcry.
His hand had found almost no resistance. It sounded as if he had torn tissue paper when he made a hole. "This way!" Bell panted. "This is where it goes on!"
He hit other areas of the wall with the same result. Wherever he touched it, he ripped it apart and it was easy to pull the edges of the tear open. In less than a minute he made a hole big enough for a man to pass through.
He inquired suspiciously: "Marshall, didn't you notice anything yet?"
Marshall answered in the negative.
"Strange, extremely strange," Bell murmured.
They crawled through the opening in the wall and entered a room which looked exactly like the one they had just left—with one small exception. They noticed the small detail only after they had repeatedly inspected the room by the light of their helmet lamps. It was no more than a slight roughness in the rear of the room.
"I believe that's where it comes from," Betty said a little uncertainly.
Marshall focused on it. "Yes, she's right. I can feel it too. It resembles the bad dream of a sleeper."
Bell crawled toward the slight mound.
After his experience with the wall it was simple for him to remove the floor covering. Bell impatiently ripped it off with his sturdy gloves. At first he exposed a piece of grey leather-like material. Remnants of a once silvery cover were attached to some portions of it; this was the first sign which fascinated his imagination. With a few quick rips he unearthed what resembled a human torso.
One more tug—and a head became visible. The head was inside a space helmet. The faceplate was a bit turbid but the likeness of the man was easily recognized. It was Ivanovich's face. Bell heard gasps of surprise behind him. A few seconds later he had also laid bare the head of Ivan the elder and from then on it didn't take long till the two-headed mutant was completely freed from his living encasement. The eyes of both heads were tightly closed but they could see the nostrils move rhythmically: the mutant was breathing. Bell tried to awaken him. He slapped his shoulders and pulled his legs.
Marshall finally interrupted him. "I don't think it'll be that simple. He's probably still under some post-hypnotic influence."
"But how did he get here, for heaven's sake?" Bell exclaimed desperately. "And where are the other 3: Ishibashi, Sengu, Yokida?" He kept looking around. The headlamps filled the round room with bright light. There were no more mounds on the floor. The 3 mutants were certainly not in this room, if they were down here at all.
"Look at his spacesuit!" Marshall murmured. Doesn't it look as if they'd tried to decompose it?"
>
Bell agreed, shaking his head. Meanwhile Tako Kakuta had begun to scrutinize the fragments of the dark encasing which Bell had pulled off and thrown away. "Flounders, without doubt," he claimed.
"I'm surprised you had no trouble tearing it off, sir."
"Surprised? Why?"
Tako showed him one of the pieces. "They can be torn only in one direction, like this... Look! Not in the other. You must always pull in the right direction."
Bell nodded thoughtfully. Then he turned his attention again to Goratschin and pulled him to the side with Marshall's help. In doing so they found that the mutant didn't lie on the bare floor but on another dark brown layer of living flounders.
"A weird world!" Bell marveled. "If I could only understand what they're trying to do!"
"Maybe Goratschin can tell us more about it when he regains consciousness," Marshall speculated. "We've got to get him out of here. I doubt he'll ever recover down here. When I..." Betty interrupted him in the middle of his sentence with a frightened scream. "Watch out! We're going to be attacked!"
Marshall tensed up and listened. "She's right!" he gasped, horrified. "Let's get out of here! The flounders want to hold us back."
"Betty first!" Bell ordered. "All others will help me with Ivan!"
Betty crawled away as quickly as she could. When she reached the wall—she called back: "I can't find the break any more."
"Make a new one!" Bell instructed her.
Betty went to work. However, for some reason she didn't get anywhere. Either the flounders had undergone some change in the meantime or she didn't have the same knack as Reginald Bell for this kind of work.
When the men with the motionless Goratschin caught up with her, she sobbed in frustration: "I can't do it!"
