“Mind if I slip in first, Jonnie?" said Angus. Jonnie took his shoulder pack so Angus could slide through. The mine lamp played on the interior. "Och! Enough dead men!” His oilcan was popping on hinges. “Try it, Jonnie.”
Jonnie put his shoulder to the doors and they swung back, shooting a blast of light down the stairs. Angus had stepped out of the way and was now wading on littered corpses, puffs of bone dust rising around his boots.
They all stood for a moment, looking down the steps, awed.
On this graveyard of a planet, they were no strangers to dead remains. They lay in structures and basements in abundance wherever there was any protection from wild animals or the weather, corpses more than a thousand years dead.
But reaching down this long flight of stairs were the remains of several hundred men. Protected from the air until a dozen years ago, their clothing, arms, and equipment were somewhat preserved, but the bones had gone to powder.
“They fell forward,” said Robert the Fox. “Must have been a regiment marching in. See? These two fellows at the top of the steps must have been closing the doors.”
“The gas,” said Jonnie. “They opened the doors to let the regiment in, looks like, and the gas hit them from the canyon.”
“Wiped the place out,” said Robert the Fox. “Listen, all of you. Don't go in there without a tight air mask.”
“We ought to bury these men,” said the parson. “They each have little tags on them,” he picked one up. " 'Knowlins, Peter, Private USMC No. 35473524. Blood Type B.' "
“Marines,” said the historian. “We've got a military base here all right.”
“Do you suppose,” said the parson to Jonnie, “that village of yours could once have been a marine base? It is different than other towns.”
“The village has been rebuilt a dozen times,” said Jonnie. “Robert, let's go in.”
“Remember your priorities,” said Robert to the group. “Inventory only. Don't touch records until they're identified. This is a big place. Don't stray or get lost.”
“We ought to bury these bodies,” said the parson.
“We will, we will,” said Robert. “All in good time. Gunners forward. Flush out and destroy any animals.”
Five Scots carrying submachine guns raced down the steps, alert for bears or snakes in hibernation or stray wolves.
“Ventilation team, stand by,” said Robert, and glanced over his shoulder to make sure the three assigned to carry the heavy mine ventilation fans were there and ready.
There was an uneven burst of fire below. The sub-Thompson ammunition was dud two rounds out of five, and to get a sustained burst one had to recock the bolt in mid-fire.
Robert's small limited-range radio crackled. “Rattlesnakes. Four. All dead. End com.”
“Aye,” said Robert the Fox into the mike.
There was another ragged burst of fire.
The radio crackled. “Brown bear. Hibernating. Dead. End com.”
“Aye,” said Robert.
“Second set of doors, tight locked.”
“Explosives team,” Robert called over his shoulder.
"Naw, naw!" said Angus. “We may need those doors!”
“Go ahead,” said Robert. “Belay explosives team, but stand by.” Into the mike, “Mechanic en route.”
They waited. The radio crackled. “Doors open.” A pause. “Area beyond seems airtight. Probably no hostile animals beyond. End com.”
“Ventilation team. Forward,” said Robert.
The last man on that team was carrying a cage of rats.
Presently a current of air began to come out of the tomb.
The radio crackled: “Rats still alive. End com.”
“There you are, MacTyler," said
Robert.
Jonnie checked his face mask and walked down through the dust of the stairs. He heard Robert firing the rest of the teams behind him and then giving orders to clean up the outside area and dust all traces with snow when the planes left. The orders sounded way off and thin in the booming caverns of the primary defense base of a long-dead nation.
Chapter 2
Jonnie's miner's lamp played upon the floors and walls of what seemed like endless corridors and rooms.
The place was huge. Offices, offices, offices. Barracks. Storerooms. Their footsteps resounded hollowly, disturbing the millennia-long sleep of the dead.
The first find was a stack of duplicated routing plans for the base. A Scot found them in a reception desk drawer. They were not very detailed, apparently intended to route visiting officers around. The Scot got permission to distribute and, racing up, miner's lamp bobbing, shoved a copy into Jonnie's hand.
Level after level existed. There was not just a maze at one level but also mazes down, down, and down.
He was looking for an operations office, someplace where dispatches might mount up, where information was collected. Operations...operations...where would that be?
Behind him an argument broke out. It was Angus and Robert the Fox at the other end of the corridor.
Angus's voice was raised. “I know it's all by elevators!”
There was a murmur from Robert.
“I know it's all electrical. I’ve been through all this before at the first school! Electrical, electrical, electrical! It takes generators. And they're just piles of congealed rust! Even if you got one to run, there's no fuel– it's just sludge in the tanks. And even if you put in juice, those light bulbs won't work and the electric motors are frozen solid.”
Robert murmured something.
“Sure the wires may be all right. But even if you got juice in them, all you'd have is an intercom and we've got that. So stick to miner's lamps! I’m sorry, Sir Robert, but there's just so much dinosaur you can revive from a pile of bones!”
Jonnie heard Robert laughing. He himself differed a little bit with Angus's point of view. They did not know that there weren't emergency systems that might work some other way, and they did not know that there might not be other fuels in sealed containers that might still function. The chances were thin, but they could not be ruled out. They were despairingly going to rig mine cables to get to the other levels when a Scot found ramps and stairwells going down.
Operations...operations...
They found a communications console, the communicator's remains at the desk. Under the dust that had been his hand was a message:
“URGENT. Don't fire. It isn't the
Russians.”
“Russians? Russians?” said a Scot. “Who were the Russians?”
Thor had come, absent without leave from his shift at the lode but intending to get back. He was part Swedish. “They're some people that used to live on the other side of Sweden. They were run by the Swedes once.”
“Don't disturb any messages,” said Robert the Fox.
Operations...operations...
They found themselves in an enormous room. It had a huge map of the world on a middle table. Apparently clerks with long poles pushed little models around on the map. There were sidewall maps and a balcony overlooking it. Miner's lamps flicked over maps, models, and the remains of the dead. Impressive and well preserved. There were lots of clocks, all stopped long ago.
A crude, hastily made cylinder model rested on the map just east of the Rockies. A long pole was still touching it, the last action of a dead arm. Another map on the wall was plotting the course of something and the last “X” was straight above this base.
It was too much data to sort out in a moment. Jonnie went on looking.
They found themselves in a nearby room. It had lots of consoles. “Top Secret” had been the name of this room.