The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

number of the Brotherhood’s members assembled here, and we can’t fight them all.”
    His eyes suddenly lit and he took the blazing jeweled stars from his pocket. “These badges! With them we can pose as members of the Brotherhood, perhaps long enough to find your wife.”
    “But Chandra Dass will be there, and if he sees us—”
    Campbell shrugged. “We’ll have to take that chance. It’s the only course open to us.”
    The current of the inflowing tide was still bearing them smoothly onward through the winding water-tunnel, around bends and angles where they scraped the rock, down long straight stretches. Sturt used the motors to guide them around the turns. Meanwhile, Inspector Campbell and Ennis quickly ripped from the cutter its police-insignia and covered all evidences of its being a police craft.
    Sturt suddenly snicked off the searchlight. “Light ahead there!” he exclaimed.
    Around the next turn of the water-tunnel showed a gleam of strange, soft light.
    “Careful, now!” cautioned the inspector. “Sturt, whatever we do, you stay in the cutter. And try to have it ready for a quick getaway, if we leave it.”
    Sturt nodded silently. The helmsman’s stolid face had become a little pale, but he showed no sign of losing his courage.

    The cutter sped around the next turn of the tunnel and emerged into a huge, softly lit cavern. Sturt’s eyes bulged and Campbell uttered an exclamation of amazement. For in this mighty water-cavern there floated in a great mass, scores of sea-going craft, large and small.
    All of them were capable of breasting storm and wind, and some were so large they could barely have entered. There were small yachts, big motor-cruisers, sea-going launches, cutters larger than their own, and among them the gray motor-launch of Chandra Dass.
    They were massed together here, those with masts having lowered them to enter, floating and rubbing sides, quite unoccupied. Around the edges of the water-cavern ran a wide rock ledge. But no living person was visible and there was no visible source for the soft, strange white light that filled the astounding place.
    “These craft must have come here from all over earth!” Campbell muttered. “The Brotherhood of the Door has assembled here—we’ve found their gathering-place all right.”
    “But where are they?” exclaimed Ennis. “I don’t see anyone.”
    “We’ll soon find out,” the inspector said. “Sturt, run close to the ledge there and we’ll get out on it.”
    Sturt obeyed, and as the cutter bumped the ledge, Campbell and Ennis leaped out onto it. They looked this way and that along it, but no one was in sight. The weirdness of it was unnerving, the strangely lit, mighty cavern, the assembled boats, the utter silence.
    “Follow me,” Campbell said in a low voice. “They must all be somewhere near.”
    He and Ennis walked a few steps along the ledge, when the American stopped. “Campbell, listen!” he whispered.
    Dimly there whispered to them, as though from a distance and through great walls, a swelling sound of chanting. As they listened, hearts beating rapidly, a square of the rock wall of the cavern abruptly flew open beside them, as though hinged like a door. Inside it was the mouth of a soft-lit, man-high tunnel, and in its opening stood two men. They wore over their clothing shroud-like, loose-hanging robes of gray, asbestos-like material. They wore hoods of the same gray stuff over their heads, pierced with slits at the eyes and mouth. And each wore on his breast the blazing star-badge.
    Through the eye-slits the eyes of the two surveyed Campbell and Ennis as they halted, transfixed by the sudden apparition. Then one of the hooded men spoke measuredly in a hissing, Mongolian voice.
    “Are you who come here of the Brotherhood of the Door?” he asked, apparently repeating a customary challenge.
    Campbell answered, his flat voice tremorless. “We are of the Brotherhood.”
    “Why do you not wear the badge of the