eater dark both right and left.

Travis took two strides back to the pillar, fitted his palms once again
to its surface, with no result. This time his flesh did not adhere and
there was no possible way for him to climb that slick pole. He could
only hope that at some point the corridor would give him access to the
surface. But which way to go--?

At last he chose the right-hand path and started along it, pausing every
few steps to listen. But there was no sound except the soft pad of his
own feet. The air was fresh enough, and he thought he could detect a
faint current coming toward him from some point ahead--perhaps an exit.

Instead, he came into a room and a small gasp of astonishment was wrung
out of him. The walls were blank, covered with the same ripples of
blue-purple-green light which colored the pillar. Just before him was a
table and behind it a bench, both carved from the native yellow-red
mountain rock. And there was no exit except the doorway in which he now
stood.

Travis walked to the bench. Immovable, it was placed so that whoever sat
there must face the opposite wall of the chamber with the table before
him. And on the table was an object Travis recognized immediately from
his voyage in the alien star ship, one of the reader-viewers through
which the involuntary explorers had learned what little they knew of the
older galactic civilization.

A reader--and beside it a box of tapes. Travis touched the edge of that
box gingerly, half expecting it to crumble into nothingness. This was a
place long deserted. Stone table, bench, the towers could survive
through centuries of abandonment, but these other objects....

The substance of the reader was firm under the film of dust; there was
less dust here than had been in the upper tower chamber. Hardly knowing
why, Travis threw one leg over the bench and sat down behind the table,
the reader before him, the box of tapes just beyond his hand.

He surveyed the walls and then looked away hurriedly. The rippling
colors caught at his eyes. He had a feeling that if he watched that ebb
and flow too long, he would be captured in some subtle web of
enchantment just as the Reds' machine had caught and held the Tatars. He
turned his attention to the reader. It was, he believed, much like the
one they had used on the ship.

This room, table, bench, had all been designed with a set purpose. And
that purpose--Travis' fingers rested on the box of tapes he could not
yet