Tunnels 04, Closer

he whimpered, and began to tremble. "Not birds? It wasn't birds?" He knew then, knew exactly what Martha had been feeding him. He was violently and uncontrollably sick.
    "Oh, Chester, I'm sorry," Drake tried to console him.

    * * * * *

    "This is what I wanted to show you," Dr. Burrows said as Will leapt up the tiers to where his father had been waiting. At head height and overhung by a small ledge, there was a row of ten stones, all around five centimeters square and with symbols cut into their faces. They were slightly round on the surface, and when Dr. Burrows pushed on the nearest of them, it moved in.
    "Wow!" Will exclaimed. "Maybe there's something hidden behind it, like those skulls you found?"
    "That was what I thought at first, but there's something keeping these in place." Dr. Burrows demonstrated to Will that the stone block would only travel a small distance out, then he pushed it back in again. "And they're all like this." He went to the next stone in the row and did the same again, moving it in and out.
    "What's written on them?" Will asked, squinting at the glyph on the closest block to him. "Letters?"
    "Yes, each has a single letter on it, and if you read them from right to left, as with all the Ancients' records, the result is pure gobbledygook. I've even tried to mix up the letters, to see if it's an anagram, but the result is still the same," Dr. Burrows replied. "Doesn't mean a damned thing." Stooping to retrieve his journal, he began to whistle through his teeth as he opened it to the page where he'd copied down the letters.
    "You're going to need to get yourself a new one of those," Will commented, noting how few pages his father had left.
    "I'll worry about that when I need to," Dr. Burrows mumbled impatiently as he scrutinized the sequence of ten letters. "No, I don't get it. Everything I've seen on this pyramid tells me that the Ancients were a highly intelligent and, above all else, logical race. What they've left behind is a precis of their erudition in the fields of philosophy, medicine and mathematics and, I can tell you, in these areas they were far in advance of even the Greeks, who came centuries after them."
    "What about the stuff on astronomy?" Will put in.
    "Yes, that's highly significant because it shows that they'd been to the outer world, and for long enough to undertake a detailed survey of the night sky up there. And if they could get to the surface and back, then my guess is that they had a better means to travel there than our hit-or-miss jaunt past the crystal belt."
    Besieged by guilt, Will looked at his feet. He still hadn't told his father about the entrance to the tunnel that Elliott had discovered, and he felt terrible that he was holding back on information which could be vital to his father's research. Taking a breath, he was on the point of mentioning it when Dr. Burrows suddenly raised his head to the white sky, his expression distant. "Will, if you wanted to leave a record for posterity, something to tell future generations about yourself, how would you go about it?"
    "What do you mean?" Will asked, relieved that his father had moved onto another topic, and that the need to reveal the tunnel didn't seem to be so pressing now. Spilling the beans would have felt like a betrayal of Elliott.
    "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Dr. Burrows declaimed in a dramatic voice, sweeping his hand in a stagy way in front of him.
    "Huh?" Will said, wondering if his father had had too much sun.
    "It's from a poem called Ozymandias ," Dr. Burrows explained. What I'm talking about is the vanity of mighty races," he added, now looking at his son, but not really seeing him. "How do you leave a testament, a record, that can withstand the ravages of time? Paper's no good -- with the odd exception like the Dead Sea Scrolls, it doesn't survive. Libraries burn. In fact, buildings don't last either, do they? They're destroyed by natural disasters or by looting. By time."
    Will shrugged. "I dunno -- what do you do?"
    "We're standing on it, Will," Dr. Burrows said. "You build an edifice so large, so substantial, that nothing can wipe it from the face of the Earth." He shook his head, correcting himself. "Or from the guts of the Inner Earth, in this case. Except for the effects of weathering, this pyramid will last for eons, like the ones in Egypt which, chronologically speaking, are mere babes in comparison."
    Dr. Burrows' expression suddenly changed to that of frustration. "And I've