Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 11 (1949).pdf/62

 "Flashes on," spoke Jensen briefly. The three snapped the buttons on their pitifully tiny flashlights, bulbs barely capable of lighting dimly a few feet around them. Yet, to them, this was a good light and they felt a certain security in its pale glow.

At the end of the corridor, they met another, larger party, and the combined forces moved on to other expanses of darkness.

Old Jep's breathing became painfully apparent.

"Wait!" he cried out suddenly. "They's somethin' followin' us!"

At his cry, the entire party halted, as flashbeams were thrown in all directions and guns poised in readiness. Weak eyes strained themselves still further trying to pierce the ink blackness about them.

"Nothing there, pop," said Jensen finally.

"There is! There is!" the old man insisted. "I've felt it followin' us, an' now I just seen it. It ain't nothing human; it's a big patch of blackness, but I kin see it movin' behind us—like that critter the old people called a cat."

Startled murmurs resounded from the party at the old man's words, as expressionless faces lit up with fear.

"There!" the old man cried, pointing.

Again, the barrage of tiny lights flared.

"There's nothing there, Jep," stated Jensen kindly, but firmly. "Come, we have to move on."

"But I tell you—I seen—" protested the old man, then slumped limply into the arms of Olney. Quickly they laid him on the floor as a doctor examined him.

"Heart," was the laconic diagnosis. "Delirious at the end."

The party moved on.

In the gloomy corridors all leading to a central point they passed other groups moving in the same direction. All displayed the same degree of interested lassitude, all were headed by two or more individuals more awake and alive than the others. Their garb was generally the same, the utilitarian tunic, and leather and metal shoes. From their belts hung regulation heat-expansion pistols and the tiny flashlights. More often than not, both were rusted and useless. They had not been replaced for many years as the machines making them had broken down. Only the ammunition supply continued.

The fortress was constructed like a gigantic cylinder, several times as wide as it was high and with the rounded domed top through which protruded the immense cannon which fired endlessly and aimlessly at the world above. The mechanical operation of the City was centered mainly at the flat bottom and occupied several deep levels. The area at the top was designed entirely for the guns. Between were three levels set aside for living quarters, recreation, food supply manufacture and a small part of the atmosphere plant. Here too was a central hall which served as a crude sort of control point, crude because the ancient precision controls were mostly dead. The City itself 98