Chapter 11: Looking for a Way Out

Neither man could keep his eyes open in the intense light. Instinctively, they raised their hands to shield their eyes, but it did no good.

Fortunately, the brilliant blue-green light dimmed on its own a moment later. Gunsmith and John opened their eyes almost simultaneously and saw a bewildering change.

Their surroundings had changed. The metal room, originally square, was now cylindrical. The same black walls, the same light shining through the murals and writing. Only the room's shape was different.

“What did you just do?” John asked.

Gunsmith replied, “I found a symbol that looked like a handprint, so I tried pressing my palm against it. Then the light behind the symbol got brighter and brighter…”

“A switch that changes the room's shape?” John said.

“No… The room didn't change. The living things inside it were moved… I suppose that explains how we were moved again after sinking to the riverbed.” As he spoke, Gunsmith looked around, then walked toward a spot by the wall.

“Look, this cylindrical room has a handprint symbol too.” Gunsmith crouched down to examine it. “Smaller than an adult's palm. Looks like a child's…” He paused. “What does that remind you of?”

John's expression shifted slightly. “That black humanoid?”

“Right. And look how high it is. About where that creature could reach while standing. We'd have to bend down to touch it,” Gunsmith said.

“So?” John looked at Gunsmith, waiting for an answer.

“You can look at me as earnestly as you like, but I can't give you a definite explanation. I can only speculate… Maybe this Olmec civilization you mentioned really did have something to do with aliens? Or perhaps this civilization from more than a thousand years before the Common Era was far more advanced than we imagine today. Maybe they never died out, but survived underground after some great disaster or upheaval. The black creature we saw could be one of the survivors.”

John's expression changed several times as he listened. Finally, all he could say was, “Sounds like you'd have a better chance of winning a Nobel Prize if you wrote a paper…”

“I'm just guessing, but considering how that black creature was secretly following us earlier, I'd say my theory is fairly plausible. My plane crash and the disaster that hit your expedition were both caused by interference from some unknown magnetic field. These ruins were almost certainly responsible.

“God knows when that black creature we saw this afternoon started following us. It might have been tracking you and your team before the cannibals captured you. Or it might have crawled out of the spire I damaged. There might even be more than one of them…

“The only thing we can be sure of is that these ruins became active recently, and we had the bad luck to be here when it happened. Now, for some reason, the creature in these ruins doesn't want us leaving the rainforest above us. It's even possible… that it wants to lure us into this underground world.”

John thought for a moment. “Assuming all your conclusions are true, there's some advanced prehistoric life-form here that went dormant thousands of years ago and only woke up recently. If I were them, before returning to the surface, I'd catch a few specimens, study the current state of human civilization and evolution on Earth, then decide what to do.”

“Makes sense. Compared with natives who wear leaves and eat human flesh, you and I look like more valuable research subjects.” Gunsmith had now moved to the other side of the room. “There's another handprint here. Three of these marks in the whole room. I reckon different switches teleport us to different rooms.”

John immediately perked up. “So we've got a chance of getting out?!”

“The problem is, we can't read the writing in these rooms. We've no idea which mark leads where. And once we've moved, the only way to tell whether we've been somewhere before is by the room's shape. If there are thousands upon thousands of rooms, with lots of repeated shapes, we may never get out.”

Both men fell silent, unable to think of a good solution. In truth, they knew they were wasting time. In the end, all they could do was keep pressing switches and hope one of them would teleport them outside.

After a while, John spoke again. “Actually, have you noticed that these rooms don't seem to serve any purpose? Apart from the murals and writing, they're completely empty. Only a museum would be built like this. But what's the point of the different shapes?”

Gunsmith sighed. “Maybe this civilization is just too far beyond our understanding. It's like putting a jungle native in an elevator. Before getting in, he'd wonder what the big iron box was for. Then, when it stopped on another floor and the doors opened, the changed surroundings would be another mystery to him. Heh… Sounds quite a lot like what's happening to us.”

John stood up and walked over to one of the switches. “To hell with it. If we sit here waiting to die, we won't last more than two days. I'll just be a native who's stepped into an elevator. Press all those dozens of buttons, and sooner or later the doors have to open.” With that, he pressed the handprint symbol.

Blue-green light flared again, engulfing them both. Nearly ten seconds later, the light around them returned to normal.

This room zigzagged like a winding corridor, with Gunsmith and John in its middle section. They searched again. As before, the room held nothing but murals and writing, but this time there were no fewer than nine handprint symbols.

“Strange technology,” Gunsmith said. “One person presses a switch, and every living thing in the room gets sent to another space. Our clothes and everything we're carrying move with us too… Oh! Shall we try pressing two different handprints at the same time and see what happens?”

John wiped the cold sweat beading on his forehead. “I just thought of The Fly…”

“Hmm… Forget I said anything,” Gunsmith said.

After that, John took over all handprint-pressing duties. Whatever principle governed their movement between these rooms, they never encountered two with the same shape, so they never seemed to return to a room they'd already visited. Each press of a handprint sent them somewhere new.

Gunsmith kept a silent count as they went. They made twenty-nine room transfers in all. Several hours might have passed, or perhaps only half an hour. Neither had a watch, and they couldn't see the sun. It had been dusk when they fell into the river. It might now be the middle of the night, or morning already. In any case, both men had completely lost their sense of time.

At first, whenever they entered a room, they searched the walls for every handprint symbol, but eventually they stopped bothering. There was no pattern to the number of symbols. There could be as few as three or as many as nine. Whatever the number, they were simply sent somewhere they'd never been.

Something puzzled Gunsmith. Assuming it was now the middle of the night, he hadn't had anything to eat or drink since noon, unless the few mouthfuls of river water he'd choked on counted as filling his stomach. Why did he still feel no fatigue or hunger after all this time? However he looked at it, it had to have something to do with the ruins. Even if the temperature, humidity and air quality here were all quite good, people still got hungry when it was time to eat, and after more than twenty hours, they got tired. And… Gunsmith's expression suddenly turned very odd. He'd just realized he hadn't felt the slightest need to relieve himself either. Now that was strange.

Just as he was about to ask John whether he felt the same, blue-green light flashed before his eyes again. Before he could fully open them, John shouted, “Look! Charles! It's a passage!”

As his vision cleared, Gunsmith found himself in a straight corridor. It stretched far into the distance, with no end in sight. Two blue-green strips of light had replaced the murals and writing, and there were no handprint symbols anywhere around them.

“Do you think this is the way out?” John asked excitedly.

Gunsmith didn't look particularly excited. He simply replied, “We'll find out if we keep walking.”