Immediately all question as to the nature of this place vanished. It could only be a military base. There's something recognizable about weapons, Craig mused, no matter how unfamiliar. Here were gathered great vehicles of war, bristling with the outsize cousins of the heat-tube Brulieres carried and with a myriad other menacing shapes. Yawning black tunnels led away at angles—probably, Craig thought, to hidden exits. Repair machines, some with their work partly finished, were scattered everywhere, silent and with a long-unused air about them. Nearly all of the aerial dreadnaughts (Craig was sure they were that) showed terrible wounds.
The group stared about the chamber in silent awe.
At one place, beneath a trio of round tunnels that aimed steeply upward, was what Craig took to be the main launching area, with ramps for loading ... what? The litter showed clearly where great ships had rested, and that the departure had been hasty. Craig drew in deep trembling breaths and imagined the vast alien argosies lifting upon their mysterious legs of force.
He could see the avarice in Rabar's eyes, and edged closer to the lieutenant. He wasn't going to let the man overpower Brulieres and take the weapons, nor was he going to let him pick up any that might be lying around. Not that Brulieres was being careless. Craig noticed that he kept his distance from everybody, and did not turn his back for long.
They must have stared at the alien machines for quite a while before the priest's deep voice echoed in the chamber. "Come. Another tunnel beckons."
Craig looked where the priest pointed. He saw a tunnel like the one they'd left, about a quarter of the way around the chamber. It glowed with light. All the rest were dark.
He looked again at Brulieres, and was startled at the man's face. It wore a look of glory. Craig shivered. Why, he thought, the man thinks God arranged this for him.
Apparently someone was arranging things, unless the tunnels and the lights were completely robotic. Craig, ignoring the edge of panic that cut at him, followed the priest toward the entrance to the lighted tunnel.
It was short, with two bends in it (probably, Craig thought, to contain possible explosions). It opened into a smaller, lower-ceilinged chamber which had evidently been an assembly hall for troops, or possibly a mess hall. Dark openings led off it which might lead to barracks. In the far end, a single tunnel glowed with light.
They entered that tunnel, which was another short one, and found that they were indeed in the living quarters. These, if the analogies applied, had been the officers'. There was a small assembly hall, and upon one wall of that were the pictures.
The lighting was arranged to fall mostly upon that side of the chamber. The rock had been smoothed to take the murals. The first glimpse shook Craig so that he walked mechanically toward that wall, momentarily forgetting his companions.
A part of his mind admired the basic technique. Outlines in low relief had been cut into the rock, details delicately etched in and colors brought up, apparently, by altering the composition of the rock itself. As for the style it was somewhere between realism and impressionism. Craig was no expert, but he thought the hand was defter, the viewpoint more penetrating, than any he'd ever seen. The slight alien air only increased the charm of the work.
Whatever sort of beings the aliens had been, they hadn't been an unfeeling race. Emotion leaped from every line of the murals.
The first few told concisely of the establishment on Earth of this outpost, of the local defeat and abandonment. There were some heroic scenes there, but Craig hurried through them, drawn to the next series of paintings, yet unwilling to turn his eyes to them.
They were Biblical and as stunningly familiar as if he'd lived with them all his life.
Feeling churned at his insides again.
One of the first immortalized Noah, or whoever had been the actual hero of the first version of the Flood story. The painting of the sea and the dark doomsday clouds over it was so real that Craig took a step backward. Mountainous wave masses were battered white by an incredible rain. Heaved aslant, decks tumbling water, dwarfed by the seas, was the wooden ship. A few half-drowned domestic animals stared in terror, lashed to their pens on deck. The bearded man who stood on wide-planted giant's legs, rope-like fingers gripping a tiller that strained to escape, was bedraggled but staunch and muscled to meet the sea. A woman clung to one arm. She had been painted not delicately, but with a strong beauty that spoke in thunder of the artist's piercing compassion.
There was the crossing of the Red Sea, and the painting showed clearly how some force held aside the water. The artist had evidently been fascinated by the still-puddled seabottom.
There were more, but Craig passed them, drawn like a fish on a line to the painting of the man on the cross. The body, more cruelly punished than the Bible recorded, strained in an agony that communicated itself to Craig's own. The face, twisted with pain, sagging with exhaustion, the tortured soft brown eyes, held no bitterness, no accusat............