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“Maybe everybody’s asleep,” said Eliot James, and knew he made no sense. “Maybe everybody’s taking a walk.”
“We’ll find them inside. We must find some of them inside,” said Tony.
“Dead, of course,” said Eliot.
“Yes,” agreed Tony. “Of course, they’re dead.” But he had never been further from believing it.
The city stood so in order that it seemed its inhabitants must be going about within. It seemed that, down the wide road to this gate, some one must be coming.
Tony suddenly spun about, startling Eliot who jerked around, also.
No one and nothing approached. The wide, smooth, hard road remained utterly deserted.
Again they looked at the gate.
“How do you suppose we can get in here?” Eliot asked.
“There’s something that looks very much like a knocker right over there.” Tony pointed to a heavy metal ring which was apparently fitted in the end of a lever in a slot at the side of the gate. They walked over to it. The gate itself was perhaps thirty feet in width and forty feet high. The ring was about at the level of Tony’s eyes. Above it was an inscription in the unknown language of the unknown inhabitants of Bronson Beta. Tony took hold of the ring and pulled it. Much to his astonishment two gates quietly and swiftly separated. Air blew from the city with a gusty sound, air that seemed age-old, and continued to blow as they hesitantly walked through the gate.
Inside, under the mighty glass dome, they were confronted by a stupendous spectacle. Straight through the heart of the circular city ran a highway along the edge of which were two rails, so that by leaning over they ascertained a moment later that underneath this top street were other thoroughfares at lower levels. On both sides of the street, which was wider than the main avenue of any of the earth’s cities, towered colossal buildings. The tallest of them, in the center of the city, must have been more than half a mile in height, and they were made of materials which took brilliant colors, which gave back in the sunlight myriad glittering hues. Exquisitely suspended bridges connected these buildings which rose at intervals of about a quarter of a mile. From their airplane the city had looked like a spangled toy town, but from its own streets it looked like the royal city of Titans. There was no sound in it. Except for the air that whispered through the open gates, not a murmur, not a throb, not a tinkle or a pulsation—just silence. Nothing moved.
A few feet from the gate by which they had entered was a big poster in bright red and white material which was covered by the strange writing of the inhabitants of Bronson Beta. They walked forward almost on tiptoe after looking at the runes beside the gate.
They stared down the avenue ahead of them and aside along the ways that crossed it.
“Where are they, Tony?” Eliot James whispered. He meant not, “Where are living beings?” For he knew the people who built this city must be dead; but he expected, at least, their bodies.
Tony, too, had failed to drive away such expectation. If not living, where were the dead? He could not help expecting the streets to be, somehow, like those of Pompeii after the débris and ash of Vesuvius was cleared away; he could not help expecting to see bones of the Beings, fallen in flight from their city.
But conditions here had been the opposite of those in Pompeii. There it was sudden destruction of fiery blasts, and burial from volcanic ash, that had overwhelmed the people and caught and buried them. Here, instead of sudden, consuming heat, had come slow, creeping cold—cold and darkness, of the coming of which they had been warned for generations. Such a death could have caught no one unprepared on the streets of the city.
“Where are they, Tony?” Eliot James whispered again, as his senses reminded him of the situation. “Where did they go to die? Did they stay
in their homes, do you think? Will we find them in these buildings?”
“I don’t think so,” Tony tried to say steadily, improving his tone above a whisper.
“Where will we find them, then?”
“We won’t find them—any of them here, I think,” Tony said.
“Why? What did they do?”
“What would such people do?” Tony returned. “Such people as could build this city? What would they do against annihilation which they could see coming for a century?”
“They eliminated themselves, of course: they ceased to reproduce themselves; they ceased to have children.”
“That,” said Tony, “seems certainly the logical thing to do; and these people appear to have been logical. But there must have been some group who were the last. They could scarcely have buried themselves after they died. Somewhere we will find—somebody.”
“It’s marvelous,” said Eliot James, “how they left this city. They’d covered it over and closed it almost as if they meant to preserve it for us.”
“How could they dream of us?” challenged Tony.
“Of course they didn’t. Shall we move on?”
“All right,” agreed Tony, and ended their paralysis of amazement. “This was a store, I suppose,” he said, turning from the stupendous vistas of the streets to the building beside him.
The face of the building was glass, streaked but yet remarkably clear over much of its surface. Behind the glass was an empty area which suggested space for display of goods; but none showed behind the huge high window. The ceiling was perhaps twenty feet high; and above, up and up, stretched glass divided by sills and panels of the multicolored metals.
