twisted his head around and saw another form, similarly tied, lying
close to him. He gave a little cry of relief. It was Sue. And she was
conscious, her eyes on his face.
She spoke to him, but he could not understand her for the drone in his
ears, and when he spoke to her it was the same. But the professor did
not just then continue his effort to converse with her. His attention
was drawn to the borer, now dimly illuminated by its portable light,
which had been secured to the door. It was right side up, and appeared
to be undamaged. The broad ray of the searchlight fell far away on one
of the cavern's rough walls. He could just make out James Quade
standing there, his back towards them.
He was hacking at the wall with a pick. Presently he dropped the tool
and wrenched at the rock with bare hands. A large chunk came loose. He
hugged it to him and turned and strode back towards the two on the
floor, and as he drew near they could plainly see a gleam of triumph
in his eyes.
"You know what this is?" he shouted. Guinness could only faintly hear
him. "Wealth! Millions! Of course we always knew the radium was here,
but this is the proof. And now we've a way of getting it out--thanks
to your borer! All the credit is yours, Professor Guinness! You shall
have the credit, and I'll have the money."
Guinness tugged furiously at his bonds again. "You--you--" he gasped.
"How dare you tie us this way! Release us at once! What do you mean by
it?"
* * * * *
Quade smiled unpleasantly. "You're very stupid, Guinness. Haven't you
guessed by now what I'm going to do?" He paused, as if waiting for an
answer, and the smile on his face gave way to a look of savage menace.
For the first time his bitter feelings came to the surface.
"Have you forgotten how close I came to going to jail over those
charges of yours a year ago?" he said. "Have you forgotten the
disgrace to me that followed?--the stigma that forced me to disappear
for months? You fool, do you think I've forgotten?--or that I'd let
you--"
"Quade," interrupted the older man, "you know very well you were
guilty. I caught you red-handed. You didn't fool anyone--except the
jury that let you go. So save your breath, and, if you've the sense
you were born with, release my daughter and me. Why, you're crazy!" he
cried with mounting anger. "You can't get away with this! I'll have
you in jail within forty-eight hours, once I get back to the surface!"
With an effort Quade controlled his feelings and assumed his oily,
sarcastic manner. "That's just it," he said: "'once you get back!' How
stupid you are! You don't seem to realize that you're not going back
to the surface. You and your daughter."
Sue gasped, and her father's eyes went wide. There was a tense
silence.
"You wouldn't dare!" the inventor cried finally. "You wouldn't dare!"
"It's rather large, this cavern," Quade went on. "You'll have plenty
of room. Perhaps I'll untie you before I go back up, so--"
"You can't get away with it!" shouted the old man, tremendously
excited. "Why, you can't, possibly! Philip Holmes'll track you
down--he'll tell the police--he'll rescue us! And then--"
Quade smiled suavely. "Oh, no, he won't. Perhaps you remember the shot
that sounded from the water-hole? Well, when I and my assistant, Juan,
heard Holmes say he was going for water, I told Juan to follow him to
the water-hole and bind him, to keep him from interfering till I got
back up. But Mr. Holmes is evidently of an impulsive disposition, and
must have caused trouble. Juan, too, is impulsive; he is a Mexican.
And he had a gun. I'm afraid he was forced to use it.... I am quite
sure Philip Holmes will not, as you say, track me down."
David Guinness looked at his daughter's white face and horror-filled
eyes and suddenly crumpled. Humbly, passionately, he begged Quade to
take her back up. "Why, she's never done anything to you, Quade!" he
pleaded. "You can't take her life like that! Please! Leave me, if you
must, but not her! You can't--"
* * * * *
But suddenly the old man noticed that Quade was not listening. His
head was tilted to one side as if he was straining to hear something
else. Guinness was held silent for a moment by the puzzled look on the
other's face and the strange way he was acting.
"Do you hear it?" Quade asked at last; and without waiting for an
answer, he knelt down and put his ear to the ground. When he rose his
face was savage, and he cursed under his breath.
"Why, it's a humming!" muttered Professor Guinness. "And it's getting
louder!"
"It sounds like another borer!" ventured Sue.
The humming grew in volume. Then, from the ceiling, a rock dropped.
They were looking at the cavern roof and saw it start, but they did
not hear it strike, for the ever-growing humming echoed loudly through
the cavern. They saw another rock fall; and another.
"For God's sake, what is it?" cried Guinness.
Quade looked at him and slowly drew out his automatic.
"Another earth-borer, I think," he answered. "And I rather expect it
contains your young friend Mr. Holmes. Yes--coming to rescue you."
For a moment Guinness and his daughter were too astounded to do
anything but gape. She finally exclaimed:
"But--but then Phil's alive?"
James Quade smiled. "Probably--for the moment. But don't let your
hopes rise too high. The borer he's in isn't strong enough to survive
a fifty-foot plunge." He was shouting now, so loud was the thunder
from above. "And," he added, "I'm afraid he's not strong enough to
survive it, either!"
CHAPTER II
_The Man-Hunt_
When Phil Holmes started off to the water-hole, his head was full of
the earth-borer and the imminent descent. Now that the long-awaited
time had come, he was at fever-pitch to be off, and it did not take
him long to cover the mile of sandy waste. His thoughts were far
inside the earth as he dipped the jug into the clear cool water and
sloshed it full.
So the rope that snaked softly through the air and dropped in a loop
over his shoulders came as a stark surprise. Before he knew what was
happening it had slithered down over his arms and drawn taut just
above the elbows, and he was yanked powerfully backwards and almost
fell.
But he managed to keep his feet as he staggered backward, and turning
his head he saw the small dark figure of his aggressor some fifteen
feet away, keeping tight the slack.
Phil's surprise turned to sudden fury and he completely lost his head.
What he did was rash; mad; and yet, as it turned out, it was the only
thing that could have saved him. Instinctively, without hesitating
one second, and absolutely ignoring an excited command to stand still,
he squirmed face-on to his aggressor, lowered his head and charged.
The distance was short. Halfway across it, a gun barked, and he heard
the bullet crack into the water jug, which he was still holding in
front of himself. And even before the splintered fragments reached the
ground he had crashed into the firer.
He hit him with all the force of a tackling lineman, and they both
went down. The man grunted as the wind was jarred out of him, but he
wriggled like an eel and managed to worm aside and bring up his gun.
Then there was a desperate flurry of bodies in the coarse sand. Holmes
dived frantically for the gun hand and caught it; but, handicapped as
he was by the rope, he could not hold it. Slowly its muzzle bent
upward to firing position.
Desperately, he wrenched the arm upwards, in the direction it had been
straining to go, and the sudden unexpected jerk doubled the man's arm
and brought the weapon across his chest. For a moment there was a test
of strength as Phil lay chest to chest over his opponent, the gun
blocked between. Then the other grunted; squirmed violently--and there
was a muffled explosion.
A cry of pain cut the midnight air, and with insane strength Holmes'
ambusher fought free from his grip, staggered to his feet and went
reeling away. Phil tore loose from the rope and bounded after him,
never feeling, at the moment, his powder-burned chest.
And then he halted in his tracks.
A great roar came thundering over the desert!
* * * * *
At once he knew that it came from the earth-borer's disintegrators.
The sphere had started down without him.
He stood stock still, petrified with surprise, facing the sound, while
his attacker melted farther and farther into the night. And then,
suddenly, Phil Holmes was sprinting desperately back towards the
Guinness camp.
He ran until he was exhausted; walked for a little while his legs
gathered more strength, and his laboring lungs more air; and then ran
again. As the minutes passed, the thunder lessened rapidly into a
muffled drone; and by the time Phil had panted up to the brink of the
hole that gaped where but a little time before the sphere was
standing, it had become but a distant purr. He leaned far over and
peered into the hot blackness below, but could see nothing.
Phil knelt there silently for some minutes, shocked by his strange
attack, bewildered by the unexpected descent of the borer. For a time
his mind would not work; he had no idea what to do. But gradually his
thoughts came to order and made certain things clear.
He had been deliberately ambushed. Only by luck had he escaped, he
told himself. If it hadn't been for the water jug, he'd now be out of
the picture. And on the heels of the ambush had came the surprising
descent of the earth-borer. The two incidents coincided too well: the
same mind had planned them. And two, men, at least, were in on the
plot.... It suddenly became very clear to him that the answer to the
puzzle lay with the man who had ambushed him. He would have to get
that man. Track him down.
Phil acted with decision. He got to his feet and strode rapidly to the
deserted Guinness shack, horribly quiet and lonely now in the bright
moonlight. In a minute he emerged with a flashlight at his belt and a
rifle across his arm.
Once again he went over to the new black hole in the desert and looked
down. From far below still came the purr, now fainter than ever. His
friend, the girl he loved, were down there, he reflected bitterly, and
he was helpless to reach them. Well, there was one thing he could
do--go man-hunting. Turning, he started off at a long lope for the
water-hole.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later he was there, and off to the side he found the marks
of their scuffle--and small black blotches that could be nothing but
blood. The other was wounded: could probably not get far. But he might
still have his gun, so Phil kept his rifle handy, and tempered his
impatience with caution as he set out on the trail of the widely
spaced footprints.
They led off towards the nearby hills, and in the bright moonlight
Phil did not use his flashlight at all, except to investigate other
round black blotches that made a line parallel to the prints. As he
went on he found his quarry's steps coming more closely together:
becoming erratic. Soon they showed as painful drags in the sand, a
laborious hauling of one foot after the other.... Phil put away his
light and advanced very cautiously.
He wondered, as he went, who in the devil was behind it all. The
radium-finding project had been kept strictly secret. Not another soul
was supposed to know of the earth-borer and its daring mission into
the heart of the earth. Yet, obviously, someone had found out, and
whoever it was had laid at least part of his scheme cunningly. An old
man and a girl cannot offer much resistance: he, Phil, would have been
well taken care of had it not been for the water jug. So far, there
were at least two in the plot: the man who had ambushed him and the
unknown who had evidently kidnapped both Professor and Sue Guinness.
But there might be still more.
There might be friends, nearby, of the man he was tracking. The fellow
might have reached them, and warned them that the scheme hadn't gone
through, that Phil was loose. They could very easily conceal
themselves alongside their partner's tracks and train their rifles on
the tracker....
The trail was leading up into one of the cañons in the cluster of
hills to the west. For some distance he followed it up through a slash
of black below the steep moonlit heights of the hills to each
side--and then, suddenly, he vaguely made out the forms of two huts
just ahead.
Immediately he stooped low, and went skirting widely off up one side.
He proceeded slowly, with great caution, his rifle at the ready. At
any moment, he knew, the hush might be split by the cracks of
waylaying guns. Warily he advanced along the narrow cañon wall above
the huts. No lights were lit, and the place seemed unoccupied. He was
debating what to do next when his attention was attracted to a large
dark object lying in the cañon trail some twenty yards from the
nearest hut. Straining his eyes in the inadequate moonlight, he saw
that it was the outstretched figure of a man. His quarry--his
ambusher!
* * * * *
Phil dropped flat, fearful of being seen. Keeping as best he could in
the shadows, fearing every moment to hear the sharp bark of a gun, he
crawled forward. It took him a long time to approach the sprawled
figure, but he wasn't taking chances. When within twenty feet, he rose
suddenly and darted forward to the man's side.
His rapid glance showed him that the fellow was completely out: and
another quick look around failed to show that anyone else was
watching, so he returned to his examination of the man. It was the
ambusher, all right: a Mexican. He was still breathing, though his
face was drawn and white from the loss of blood from a wound under the
blood-soaked clothing near his upper right arm. A hasty search showed
that he no longer had his gun, so Phil, satisfied that he was
powerless for some time to come, cautiously wormed his way towards the
two shacks.
There was something sinister in the strange silence that hung over
them. One was of queer construction--a windowless, square, high box
of galvanized iron. The other was obviously a dwelling place.
Carefully Phil sneaked up to the latter. Then, rifle ready, he pushed
its door open and sent a beam of light stabbing through the darkness
of the interior.
There was no one there. Only two bunks, a table, chair, a pail of
water and some cooking utensils met his view. He crept out toward the
other building.
Come close, Phil found that a dun-colored canvas had been thrown over
the top of it, making an adequate camouflage in daytime. The place was
about twenty feet high. He prowled around the metal walls and
discovered a rickety door. Again, gun ready, he flung it open. The
beam from his flash speared a path through the blackness--and he
gasped at sight of what stood revealed.
There, inside, was a long, bullet-like tube of metal, the pointed end
upper-most, and the bottom, which was flat, toward the ground. It was
held in a wooden cradle, and was slanted at the floor. In the bottom
were holes of two shapes--rocket tubes and disintegrating projectors.
It was another earth-borer.
* * * * *
Phil stood frozen with surprise before this totally unlooked-for
machine. He could easily have been overcome, had the owner been in the
building, for he had forgotten everything but what his eyes were
staring at. He started slowly around the borer, found a long narrow
door slightly ajar, and stepped inside.
This borer, like Guinness's, had a double shell, and much the same
instruments, though the whole job was simpler and cruder. A small
instrument board contained inclination, temperature, depth and
air-purity indicators, and narrow tubes led to the air rectifiers. But
what kept Holmes' attention were the wires running from the magneto to
the mixing chambers of the disintegrating tubes.
"The fools!" he exclaimed, "--they didn't know how to wire the thing!
Or else," he added after a moment, "didn't get around to doing it." He
noticed that the projectile's interior contained no gyroscope: though,
he thought, none would be needed, for the machine, being long and
narrow, could not change keel while in the ground. Here he was
reminded of something. Stepping outside, he estimated the angle the
borer made with the dirt floor. Twenty degrees. "And pointed
southwest!" he exclaimed aloud. "This borer would come close to
meeting the professor's, four miles under our camp!"
* * * * *
At once he knew what he would do. First he went back to the other
shack and got the pail of water he had noticed, and took this out
where the Mexican lay outstretched. He bathed the man's face and the
still slightly bleeding bullet wound in his shoulder.
Presently the wounded man came to. His eyes opened, and he stared up
into a steel mask of a face, in which two level black eyes bored into
his. He remembered that face--remembered it all too well. He trembled,
cowered away.
"No!" he gasped, as if he had seen a ghost. "No--no!"
"Yes, I'm the man," Holmes told him firmly, menacingly. "The same one
you tried to ambush." He paused a moment, then said: "Do you want to
live?"
It was a simple question, frightening in its simplicity.
"Because if you don't answer my questions, I'm going to let you lie
here," Phil went on coldly. "And that would probably mean your death.
If you do answer, I'll fix you up so you can have a chance."
The Mexican nodded eagerly. "I talk," he said.
"Good," said Phil. "Then tell me who built that machine?"
"Señor Quade. Señor James Quade."
"Quade!" Phil had heard the name before. "Of course!" he said.
"Guinness's old partner!"
"I not know," the Mexican answered. "He hire me with much money. He
buy thees machine inside, and we put him together. But he could no
make him work--it take too long. We watch, hear old man go down
to-night, and--"
* * * * *
The greaser stopped. "And so he sent you to get me, while he kidnapped
the old man and his daughter and forced them under the ground in their
own borer," Holmes supplied, and the other nodded.
"But I only mean to tie you!" he blurted, gesturing weakly. "I no mean
shoot! No, no--"
"All right--forget it," Phil interrupted. "And now tell me what Quade
expects to do down there."
"I not know, Señor," came the hesitant reply, "but...."
"But what?" the young man jerked.
Reluctantly the wounded Mexican continued. "Señor Quade--he--I think
he don' like thees old man. I think he leave heem an' the girl down
below. Then he come up an' say they keeled going down."
Phil nodded grimly. "I see," he said, voicing his thoughts. "Then he
would say that he and Professor Guinness are still partners--and the
radium ore will belong to him. Very nice. Very nice...."
He snapped back to action, and without another word hoisted the
Mexican onto his back and carried him into the shack. There he
cleansed the wound, rigged up a tight bandage for it, and tied the man
to one of the cots. He tied him in such a fashion that he could reach
some food and water he put by the cot.
"You leave me like thees?" the Mexican asked.
"Yes," Phil said, and started for the door.
"But what you going to do?"
Phil smiled grimly as he flung an answer back over his shoulder.
"Me?--I'm going to fix the wiring on those disintegrators in your
friend Quade's borer. Then I'm starting down after him." He stopped
and turned before he closed the door. "And if I don't get back--well,
it's just too bad for you!"
* * * * *
And so, a little later, once more the hushed desert night was cleft by
a furious bellow of sound. It came, this time, from a narrow cañon.
The steep sides threw the roar back and back again, and the echoes
swelled to an earth-shaking blast of sound. The oblong hut from which
it came rocked and almost fell; then, as the noise began to lessen,
teetered on its foundations and half-slipped into the ragged hole that
had been bored inside.
The descent was a nightmare that Holmes would never forget. Quade's
machine was much cruder and less efficient than the sphere David
Guinness had designed. Its protecting insulation proved quite
inadequate, and the heat rapidly grew terrific as the borer dug down.
Phil became faint, stifled, and his body oozed streams of sweat. And
the descent was also bumpy and uneven; often he was forced to leave
the controls and work on the mechanism of the disintegrators when they
faltered and threatened to stop. But in spite of everything the needle
on the depth gauge gradually swung over to three thousand, and four,
and five....
After the first mile Holmes improvised a way to change the air more
rapidly, and it grew a little cooler. He watched the story the depth
gauge told with narrowed eyes, and, as it reached three miles,
inspected his rifle. At three and a half miles he stopped the borer,
thinking to try to hear the noise made by the other, but so paralyzed
were his ear-drums from the terrific thunder beneath, it seemed hardly
any quieter when it ceased.
His plans were vague; they would have to be made according to the
conditions he found. There was a coil of rope in the tube-like
interior of the borer, and he hoped to find a cavern or cleft in the
earth for lateral exploring. He would stop at a depth of four
miles--where he should be very near the path of the professor's
sphere.
But Phil never saw the needle on the gauge rise to four miles. At
three and three quarters came sudden catastrophe.
He knew only that there was an awful moment of utter helplessness,
when the borer swooped wildly downwards, and the floor was snatched
sickeningly from under him. He was thrown violently against the
instrument panel; then up toward the pointed top; and at the same
instant came a rending crash that drove his senses from him....
CHAPTER III
"_You Haven't the Guts_"
"Just as I thought," said James Quade in the silence that fell when
the last echoes had died away, and the splinters of steel and rock had
settled. "You see, Professor, this earth-borer belongs to me. Yes, I
built one too. But I couldn't, unfortunately, get it working
properly--that is, in time to get down here first. After all, I'm not
a scientist, and remembered little enough of your borer's plans....
It's probably young Holmes who's dropped in on us. Shall we see?"
David Guinness and his daughter were speechless with dread. Quade had
trained the searchlight on the borer, and by turning their heads they
could see it plainly. It was all too clear that the machine was a
total wreck. It had pitched over onto one side, its shell cracked and
mangled irreparably. Grotesque pieces of crumpled metal lay all around
it. Its slanting course had tumbled it within fifteen yards of the
sphere.
In silence the old man and the girl watched Quade walk deliberately
over to it, his automatic steady in his right hand. He wrenched at the
long, narrow door, but it was so badly bent that for a while he could
not get it open. At last it swung out, however, and Quade peered
inside.
After a moment he reached in and drew out a rifle. He took it over to
a nearby rock, smashed the gun's breech, then flung it, useless,
aside. Returning to the borer, he again peered in.
Sue was about to scream from the torturous suspense when he at last
straightened up and looked around at the white-faced girl and her
father.
"Mr. Holmes is tougher than I'd thought possible," he said, with a
thin smile; "he's still alive." And, as Sue gasped with relief, he
added: "Would you like to see him?"
* * * * *
He dragged the young man's unconscious body roughly out on the floor.
There were several bad bruises on his face and head, but otherwise he
was apparently uninjured. As Quade stood over him, playing idly with
the automatic, he stirred, and blinked, and at last, with an effort,
got up on one elbow and looked straight at the thin lips and narrowed
eyes of the man standing above. He shook his head, trying to
comprehend, then muttered hazily:
"You--you're--Quade?"
Quade did not have time to answer, for Sue Guinness cried out:
"Phil! Are you all right?"
Phil stared stupidly around, caught sight of the two who lay bound on
the floor, and staggered to his feet. "Sue!" he cried, relief and
understanding flooding his voice. He started towards her.
"Stand where you are!" Quade snapped harshly, and the automatic in his
hand came up. Holmes peered at it and stopped, but his blood-streaked
face settled into tight lines, and his body tensed.
"You'd better," continued Quade. "Now tell me what happened to Juan."
Phil forced himself to be calm. "Your pal, the greaser?" he said
cuttingly. "He's lying on a bunk in your shack. He shot himself,
playing with a gun."
Quade chose not to notice the way Phil said this, but a little of the
suave self-confidence was gone from his face as he said: "Well, in
that case I'll have to hurry back to the surface to attend to him. But
don't be alarmed," he added, more brightly. "I'll be back for you all
in an hour or so."
At this, David Guinness struggled frantically with his bonds and
yelled:
"Don't believe him, Phil! He's going to leave us here, to starve and
die! He told us so just before you came down!"
* * * * *
Quade's face twitched perceptibly. His eyes were nervous.
"Is that true, Quade?" Holmes asked. There was a steely note in his
voice.
"Why--no, of course not," the other said hastily, uncertain whether to
lie or not. "Of course I didn't!"
Phil Holmes looked square into his eyes. He bluffed.
"You couldn't desert us, Quade. You haven't the guts. You haven't the
guts."
His face and eyes burned with the contempt that was in his words. It
cut Quade to the raw. But he could not avoid Phil's eyes. He stared at
them for a full moment, trembling slightly. Slowly, by inches, he
started to back toward the sphere; then suddenly he ran for it with
all his might, Holmes after him. Quade got to it first, and inside, as
he yanked in the searchlight and slammed and locked the door, he
yelled:
"You'll see, you damned pup! You'll see!" And there was the smothered
sound of half-maniacal laughter....
Phil threw all his weight against the metal door, but it was hopeless
and he knew it. He had gathered himself for another rush when he heard
Guinness yell:
"Back, Phil--back! He'll turn on the side disintegrators!"
Mad with rage as the young man was, he at once saw the danger and
leaped away--only to almost fall over the professor's prone body. With
hurrying, trembling fingers he untied the pair's bonds, and they
struggled to their feet, cramped and stiff. Then it was Phil who
warned them.
"Back as far as you can! Hurry!" He grabbed Sue's hand and plunged
toward the uncertain protection of a huge rock far in the rear. At
once he made them lie flat on the ground.
* * * * *
As yet the sphere had not stirred nor emitted a whisper of sound,
though they knew the man inside was conning the controls in a fever of
haste to leave the cavern. But they hadn't long to wait. There came a
sputter, a starting cough from the rocket tubes beneath the sphere.
Quickly they warmed into life, and the dully glimmering ball rocked in
the hole it lay in. Then a cataract of noise unleashed itself; a
devastating thunder roared through the echoing cavern as the rockets
burst into full force. A wave of brilliant orange-red splashed out
from under the sphere, licked back up its sides, and seemed literally
to shove the great ball up towards the hole in the ceiling.
Its ascent was very slow. As it gained height it looked--save for its
speed--like a fantastic meteor flaming through the night, for the
orange plumage that streamed from beneath lit the ball with dazzling
color. A glowing sphere, it staggered midway between floor and
ceiling, creeping jerkily upwards.
"He's not going to hit the hole!" shouted Guinness.
The borer had not risen in a perfectly straight line; it jarred
against the rim of the hole, and wavered uncertainly. Every second the
roar of its rockets, swollen by echoes, rose in a savage crescendo;
the faces of the three who watched were painted orange in the glow.
The sphere was blind. The man inside could judge his course only by
the feel. As the three who were deserted watched, hoping ardently that
Quade would not be able to find the opening, the left side-rockets
spouted lances of fire, and they knew he had discovered the way to
maneuver the borer laterally. The new flames welded with the exhaust
of the main tubes into a great fan-shaped tail, so brilliant and shot
through with other colors that their eyes could not stand the sight,
except in winks. The borer jerked to the right, but still it could not
find the hole. Then the flames lessened for a moment, and the borer
sank down, to rise again a moment later. Its ascent was so labored
that Phil shouted to Professor Guinness:
"Why so slow?"
And the inventor told him that which he had not seen for the
intolerable light.
"Only half his rockets are on!"
* * * * *
This time the sphere was correctly aimed, however, and it roared
straight into the hole. Immediately the fierce sound of the exhaust
was muffled, and in a few seconds only the fiery plumage, shooting
down from the ceiling, showed where the machine was. Then this
disappeared, and the noise alone was left.
Phil leaped forward, intending to stare up, but Guinness's yell halted
him.
"Not yet! He might still use the disintegrators!"
For many minutes they waited, till the muffled exhaust had died to a
drone. There was a puzzled expression on the professor's face as the
three at last walked over and dared peer up into the hole. Far above,
the splash of orange lit the walls of the tunnel.
"That's funny!" the old man muttered. "He's only using half the
rockets--about ten. I thought he'd turn them all on when he got into
the hole, but he didn't. Either they were damaged in the fall, or
Quade doesn't see fit to use them."
"Half of them are enough," said Phil bitterly, and put his arm around
the quiet girl standing next to him. Together, a silent little group,
they watched the spot of orange die to a pin-point; watched it waver,
twinkle, ever growing smaller.... And then it was gone.
Gone! Back to the surface of the earth, to the normal world of
reality. Only four miles above them--a small enough distance on the
surface itself--and yet it might have been a million miles, so utterly
were they barred from it....
* * * * *
The same thought was in their minds, though none of them dared express
it. They were thinking of the serene desert, and the cool wind, and
the buttes and the high hills, placid in the moonlight. Of the hushed
rise of the dawn, the first flush of the sun that was so achingly
lovely on the desert. The sun they would never see again, buried in a
lifeless world of gloom four miles within.... And buried alive--and
not alive for long....
But that way lay madness. Phil Holmes drove the horrible thoughts from
his brain and forced a smile to his face.
"Well, that's that!" he said in a voice meant to be cheerful.
The dim cavern echoed his words mockingly. With the earth-borer
gone--the man-made machine that had dared break a solitude undisturbed
since the earth first cooled--the great cavern seemed to return to its
awful original mood. The three dwarfed humans became wholly conscious
of it. They felt it almost a living thing, stretching vastly around
them, tightening its unheard spell on them. Its smell, of mouldy earth
and rocks down which water slowly dripped, filled their nostrils and
somehow added to their fear.
As they looked about, their eyes became accustomed to the dim, eery,
phosphorescent illumination. They saw little worm-like creatures now
and again appear from tiny holes between stalagmites in the jagged
floor; and, as Phil wondered in his mind how long it would be before
they would be reduced to using them for food, a strange mole-sized
animal scraped from the darkness and pecked at one of them. As it
slithered away, a writhing shape in its mouth, Holmes muttered
bitterly: "A competitor!" Vague, flitting forms haunted the gloom
among the stalactites of the distorted ceiling--hints of the things
that lived in the terrible silence of this nether world. Here Time had
paused, and life had halted in primate form.
A little moan came from Sue Guinness's pale lips. She plucked at her
arm; a sickly white worm, only an inch long, had fallen on it from the
ceiling. "Oh!" she gasped. "Oh!"
Phil drew her closer to him, and walked with her over to Quade's
wrecked borer. "Let's see what we've got here," he suggested
cheerfully.
The machine was over on its side, the metal mangled and crushed beyond
repair. Nevertheless, he squeezed into it. "Stand back!" he warned.
"I'm going to try its rockets!" There was a click of broken machinery,
and that was all. "Rockets gone," Phil muttered.
He pulled another lever over. There was a sputter from within the
borer, then a furious roar that sent great echoes beating through the
cavern. A cloud of dust reared up before the bottom of the machine,
whipped madly for a moment, and sank as the bellow of sound died down.
Sue saw that a rocky rise in the floor directly in front of the
disintegrators had been planed off levelly.
Phil scrambled out. "The disintegrators work," he said, "but a lot of
good they do us. The borer's hopelessly cracked." He shrugged his
shoulders, and with a discouraged gesture cast to the ground a coil of
rope he had found inside.
Then suddenly he swung around. "Professor!" he called to the old
figure standing bowed beneath the hole in the ceiling. "There's a
draft blowing from somewhere! Do you feel it?"
Guinness felt with his hands a moment and nodded slowly. "Yes," he
said.
"It's coming from this way!" Sue said excitedly, pointing into the
darkness on one side of the cavern. "And it goes up the hole we made
in the ceiling!"
Phil turned eagerly to the old inventor. "It must come from
somewhere," he said, "and that somewhere may take us toward the
surface. Let's follow it!"
"We might as well," the other agreed wearily. His was the tone of a
man who has only a certain time to live.
But Phil was more eager. "While there's life, there's hope," he said
cheerfully. "Come on, Sue, Professor!" And he led the way forward
toward the dim, distorted rock shapes in the distance.
* * * * *
The roof and sides of the cavern angled down into a rough, tunnel-like
opening, from which the draft swept. It was a heavy air, weighted with
the smell of moist earth and lifeless water and a nameless, flat,
stale gas. They slowly made their way through the impeding
stalagmites, surrounded by a dark blur of shadows, the ghostly
phosphorescent light illuminating well only the few rods around them.
Utter silence brooded over the tunnel.
Phil paused when they had gone about seventy-five feet. "I left that
rope behind," he said, "and we may need it. I'll return and get it,
and you both wait right here." With the words he turned and went back
into the shadows.
He went as fast as he could, not liking to leave the other two alone.
But when he had retrieved the rope and tied it to his waist, he
permitted himself a last look up as he passed under the hole in the
ceiling--and what he saw there tensed every muscle in his body, and
made his heart beat like mad. Again there was a tiny spot of orange in
the blackness above!
"Professor!" he yelled excitedly. "Sue! Come here! The sphere's
coming back!"
There was no doubt about it. The pin-point of light was growing each
second, with the flame of the descending exhausts. Guinness and his
daughter ran from the tunnel, and, guided by Phil's excited
ejaculations, hurried to his side. Their eyes confirmed what his had
seen. The earth-borer was coming down!
"But," Guinness said bewilderedly, "those rockets were enough to lift
him!"
This was a mystery. Even though ten rockets were on--ten tiny spots of
orange flame--the sphere came down swiftly. The same force which some
time before had lifted it slowly up was now insufficient. The roar of
the tubes rose rapidly. "Get back!" Phil ordered, remembering the
danger, and they all retreated to the mouth of the tunnel, ready to
peep cautiously around the edge. Holmes' jaws were locked tight with
grim resolution. Quade was coming back! he told himself exultantly.
This time he must not go up alone! This time--!
But his half-formed resolutions were idle. He could not know what
frightful thing was bringing Quade down--what frightful experience was
in store for them all....
CHAPTER IV
_Spawn of the Cavern_
In a crescendo of noise that stunned their ears, the earth-borer came
down. Tongues of fire flared from the hole, speared to the ground and
were deflected upward, cradling the metal ball in a wave of flame.
Through this fiery curtain the machine slowly lowered to the floor,
where a shower of sparks spattered out, blinding the eyes of the
watchers with their brilliance. For a full minute the orange-glowing
sphere lay there, quivering from the vibration; then the exhausts died
and the wave of flame wavered and sank into nothingness. While their
ear-drums continued the thunder, the three stared at the borer, not
daring to approach, yet striving to solve the mystery of why it had
sunk despite the up-thrust of ten rocket tubes.
As their eyes again became accustomed to the familiar phosphorescent
illumination, pallid and cold after the fierce orange flame, they saw
why--and their eyes went wide with surprise and horror.
A strange mass was covering the top of the earth-borer--something that
looked like a heap of viscid, whitish jelly. It was sprawled
shapelessly over the round upper part of the metal sphere, a
half-transparent, loathsome stuff, several feet thick in places.
And Phil Holmes, striving to understand what it could be, saw an awful
thing. "It's moving!" he whispered, unconsciously drawing Sue closer.
"There's--there's life in it!"
Lazy quiverings were running through the mound of jelly, pulsings that
gave evidence of its low organism. They saw little ripples of even
beat run over it, and under them steady, sluggish convulsions that
told of life; that showed, perhaps, that the thing was hungry and
preparing to move its body in quest of food.
It was alive, unquestionably. The borer lay still, but this thing
moved internally, of itself. It was life in its lowest, most primate
form. The mass was mind, stomach, muscle and body all in one, stark
and raw before their startled eyes.
"Oh, God!" Phil whispered through the long pause. "It can't be
real!..."
"Protoplasm--a monster amoeba," David Guinness's curiously cracked
voice said. "Just as it exists on the surface, only microscopically.
Primate life...."
* * * * *
The lock of the earth-borer clicked. Phil gasped. "Quade is coming
out!" he said. A little cry of horror came from Sue. And the metal
door opened.
James Quade stepped through, automatic in hand. He was fresh from the
light inside, and he could not see well. He was quite unconscious of
what was oozing down on him from above, of the flabby heap that was
carefully stretching down for him. He peered into the gloom, looking
for the three he had deserted, and all the time an arm from the mass
above crept nearer. Sue Guinness's nerves suddenly gave, and she
shrieked; but Quade's ears were deaf from the borer's thunder, and he
did not hear her.
It was when he lifted one foot back into the sphere--probably to get
out the searchlight--that he felt the thing's presence. He looked
up--and a strange sound came from him. For seconds he apparently could
not move, stark fear rooting him to the ground, the gun limp in his
hand.
Then a surge ran through the mound of flesh, and the arm, a pseudopod,
reached more rapidly for him.
It stung Quade into action. He leaped back, brought up his automatic,
and fired at the thing once; then three times more. He, and each one
of the others, saw four bullets thud into the heap of pallid matter
and heard them clang on the metal of the sphere beneath. They had gone
right through its flesh--but they showed no slightest effect!
Quade was evidently unwilling to leave the sphere. Jerking his arm up
he brought his trigger finger back again. A burst of three more shots
barked through the cavern, echoing and re-echoing. The man screamed an
inarticulate oath as he saw how useless his bullets were, and hurled
the empty gun at the monster--which was down on the floor now, and
bunching its sluggish body together.
The automatic went right into it. They could all see it there, in the
middle of the amorphous body, while the creature stopped, as if
determining whether or not it was food. Quade screwed his courage
together in the pause, and tried to dodge past to the door of the
sphere; but the monster was alert: another pseudopod sprang out from
its shapeless flesh, sending him back on his heels.
The feeler had all but touched Quade, and with the closeness of his
escape, the remnants of his courage gave. He yelled, and turned and
ran.
* * * * *
He ran straight for the three who watched from the tunnel mouth, and
the mound of shapeless jelly came fast on his trail. It came in
surging rolls, like thick fluid oozing forward; it would have been
hard to measure its size, for each moment it changed. The only
impression the four humans had was that of a wave of half-transparent
matter that one instant was a sticky ball of viscid flesh and the next
a rapidly advancing crescent whose horns reached far out on each flank
to cut off retreat.
By instinct Phil jerked Sue around and yelled at the professor to run,
for the old man seemed to be frozen into an attitude of fearful
interest. Bullets would not stop the thing--could anything? Holmes
wondered. He could visualize all too easily the death they would meet
if that shapeless, naked protoplasmic mass overtook and flowed over
them....
But he wasted no time with such thoughts. They ran, all three, into
the dark tunnel.
Quade caught up with them quickly. Personal enmity was suspended
before this common peril. They could not run at full speed, for a
multitude of obstacles hindered them. Tortuous ridges of rock lay
directly across their path, formations that had been whipped in some
mad, eon-old convulsion and then, through the ages, remained frozen
into their present distortion; black pits gaped suddenly before them;
half-seen stalagmites, whose crystalline edges were razor-sharp, tore
through to their flesh. Haste was perilous where every moment they
might stumble into an unseen cleft and go pitching into awful depths
below. They were staking everything on the draft that blew steadily
in their faces; Phil told himself desperately that it must lead to
some opening--it must!
But what if the opening were a vertical, impassable tunnel? He would
not think of that....
Old David Guinness tired fast, and was already lagging in the rear
when Quade gasped hoarsely:
"Hurry! It's close behind!"
* * * * *
Surging rapidly at a constant distance behind them, it came on. It was
as fast as they were, and evidently untiring. It was in its own
element; obstacles meant nothing to it. It oozed over the jagged
ridges that took the humans precious moments to scramble past, and the
speed of its weird progress seemed to increase as theirs faltered. It
was a heartless mass driven inexorably by primal instinct towards the
food that lay ahead. The dim phosphorescent illumination tinged its
flabby tissues a weird white.
The passage they stumbled through narrowed. Long irregular spears of
stalactites hung from the unseen ceiling; others, the drippings of
ages, pronged up from the floor, shredding their clothes as they
jarred into them. One moment they were clambering up-hill, slipping on
the damp rock; the next they were sliding down into unprobed darkness,
reckless of where they would land. They were aware only that the
water-odorous draft was still in their faces, and the hungry mound of
flesh behind....
"I can't last much longer!" old Guinness's winded voice gasped. "Best
leave me behind. I--I might delay it!"
For answer, Phil went back, grabbed him by the arm and dragged his
tired body forward. He was snatching a glance behind to see how close
the monster was, when Sue's frightened voice reached him from ahead.
"There's a wall here, Phil--and no way through!"
And then Holmes came to it. It barred the passage, and was apparently
unbroken. Yet the draft still came!
"Search for where the draft enters!" he yelled. "You take that side!"
And he started feeling over the clammy, uneven surface, searching
frantically for a cleft. It seemed to be hopeless. Quade stood staring
back into the gloom, his eyes looking for what he knew was surging
towards them. His face had gone sickly white, he was trembling as if
with fever, and he sucked in air with long, racking gasps.
"Here! I have it!" cried the girl suddenly at her end of the wall. The
other three ran over, and saw, just above her head, a narrow rift in
the rock, barely wide enough to squirm through. "Into it!" Phil
ordered tersely. He grasped her, raised her high, and she wormed
through. Quade scrambled to get in next, but Holmes shoved him aside
and boosted the old man through. Then he helped the other.
A second after he had swung himself up, a wave of whitish matter
rolled up below, hungry pseudopods reaching for the food it knew was
near. It began to trickle up the wall....
* * * * *
The crack was narrow and jagged; utterly black. Phil could hear Quade
frantically worming himself ahead, and he wondered achingly if it
would lead anywhere. Then a faint, clear voice from ahead rang out:
"It's opening up!"
Sue's voice! Phil breathed more easily. The next moment Quade
scrambled through; dim light came; and they were in another vast,
ghostly-lit cavern.
The crack came out on its floor-level; Guinness was resting near, and
his daughter had her hands on a large boulder of rock. "Let's shove it
against the hole!" she suggested to Phil. "It might stop it!"
"Good, Sue, good!" he exclaimed, and at once all four of them strained
at the chunk, putting forth every bit of strength they had. The
boulder stirred, rolled over, and thudded neatly in front of the
crack, almost completely sealing it. There was only a cleft of five
inches on one side.
But their expression of relief died in their throats. A tiny trickle
of white appeared through the niche. The amorphous monster was
compressing itself to a single stream, thin enough to squeeze through
even that narrow space.
They could not block it. They had nothing to attack it with. There was
nothing to do but run.... And hope for a chance to double back....
As nearly as they could make out, this second cavern was as large as
the first. They could dimly see the fantastic shapes of hundreds of
stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Clumps of stalagmites made the
floor a maze which they threaded painfully. The strong steady draft
guided them like a radio beacon, leading them to their only faint hope
of escape and life. Guinness, very tired, staggered along
mechanically, a heavy weight on Phil's supporting arm; James Quade ran
here and there in frantic spurts of speed. Sue was silent, but the
hopelessness in her eyes tortured Phil like a wound. His shirt had
long since been ripped to shreds; his face, bruised in the first place
by the borer he had crashed in, now was scratched and bloody from
contact with rough stalagmites.
* * * * *
Then, without warning, they suddenly found among the rough walls on
the far side of the cavern, the birthplace of the draft. It lay at the
edge of the floor--a dark hole, very wide. Black, sinister and clammy
from the draft that poured from it, it pierced vertically down into
the very bowels of the earth. It was impassable.
James Quade crumpled at the brink; "It's the end!" he moaned. "We
can't go farther! It's the end of the draft!"
The hole blocked their forward path completely. They could not go
ahead.... In seconds, it seemed, the slithering that told of the
monster's approach sounded from behind. Sue's eyes were already fixed
on the awful, surging mass when a voice off to one side yelled:
"Here! Quick!"
It was Phil Holmes. He had been scouting through the gloom, and had
found something.
The other three ran to him. "There's another draft going through
here," he explained rapidly, pointing to an angled crevice in the
rocky wall. "There's a good chance it goes to the cavern where the
sphere and the hole to the surface are. Anyway, we've got to take it.
I'd better go first, after this--and you, Quade, last. I trust you
less than the monster behind."
He turned and edged into the crack, and the others followed as he had
ordered. Quickly the passageway broadened, and they found the going
much easier than it had been before. For perhaps ten minutes they
scrambled along, with the draft always on their backs and the blessed,
though faint, fire of hope kindling again. In all that time they did
not see their pursuer once, and the hope that they had lost it brought
a measure of much needed optimism to drive their tired bodies onward.
They found but few time-wasting obstacles. If only the tunnel would
continue right into the original cavern! If only their path would stay
clear and unhindered!
But it did not. The sound of Phil's footsteps ahead stopped, and when
Sue and her father came up they saw why.
"A river!" Phil said.
* * * * *
They were standing on a narrow ledge that overhung an underground
river. A fetid smell of age-old, lifeless water rose from it. Dimly,
at least fifty feet across, they could see the other side, shrouded in
vague shadows. The inky stream beneath did not seem to move at all,
but remained smooth and hard and thick-looking.
They could not go around it. The ledge was only a few feet wide, and
blocked at each side.
"Got to cross!" Phil said tersely.
Quade, sickly-faced, stared down. "There--there might be other things
in that water!" he gasped. "Monsters!"
"Sure," agreed Phil contemptuously. "You'd better stay here." He
turned to the others. "I'll see how deep it is," he said, and without
the faintest hesitation dove flatly in.
Oily ripples washed back, and they saw his head poke through,
sputtering. "Not deep," he said. "Chest-high. Come on."
He reached for Sue, helped her down, and did the same for her father.
Holding each by the hand, Sue's head barely above the water, he
started across. They had not gone more than twenty feet when they
heard Quade, left on the bank, give a hoarse yell of fear and dive
into the water. Their dread pursuer had caught up with them.
And it followed--on the water! Phil had hoped it would not be able to
cross, but once more the thing's astounding adaptability dashed his
hopes. Without hesitation, the whitish jelly sprawled out over the
water, rolling after them with ghastly, snake-like ripples, its pallid
body standing out gruesomely against the black, odorous tide.
Quade came up thrashing madly, some feet to the side of the other
three. He was swimming--and swimming with such strength that he
quickly left them behind. He would be across before they; and that
meant there was a good chance that the earth-borer would go up again
with only one passenger....
Phil fought against the water, pulling Sue and her father forward as
best he could. From behind came the rippling sound of their shapeless
pursuer. "Ten feet more--" Holmes began--then abruptly stopped.
There had been a swish, a ripple upstream. And as their heads turned
they saw the water part and a black head, long, evil, glistening,
pointing coldly down to where they were struggling towards the shore.
Phil Holmes felt his strength ooze out. He heard Professor Guinness
gasp:
"A water-snake!"
* * * * *
Its head was reared above the surface, gliding down on them silently,
leaving a wedge of long, sluggish ripples behind. When thirty feet
away the glistening head dipped under, and a great half-circle of
leg-thick body arched out. It was like an oily stream of curved cable;
then it ended in a pointed tail--and the creature was entirely under
water....
With desperate strength Phil hauled the girl to the bank and, standing
in several feet of water, pushed her up. Then he whirled and yanked
old Guinness past him up into the hands of his daughter. With them
safe, and Sue reaching out her hand for him, he began to scramble up
himself.
But he was too late. There was a swish in the water behind him, and
toothless, hard-gummed jaws clamped tight over one leg and drew him
back and under. And with the touch of the creature's mouth a stiff
shock jolted him; his body went numb; his arms flopped limply down. He
was paralyzed.
Sue Guinness cried out. Her father stared helplessly at the spot where
his young partner had disappeared with so little commotion.
"It was an eel," he muttered dully. "Some kind of electric eel...."
Phil dimly realized the same thing. A moment later his face broke the
surface, but he could not cry out; he could not move his little
finger. Only his involuntary muscles kept working--his heart and his
lungs. He found he could control his breathing a little.... And then
he was wondering why he was remaining motionless on the surface.
Gradually he came to understand.
He had not felt it, but the eel had let go its hold on his leg, and
had disappeared. But only for a moment. Suddenly, from somewhere near,
its gleaming body writhed crazily, and a terrific twist of its tail
hit Phil a glancing blow on the chest. He was swept under, and the
water around him became a maelstrom. When next he bobbed to the
tumultuous surface, he managed to get a much-needed breath of
air--and in the swirling currents glimpsed the long, snake-like head
of the eel go shooting by, with thin trickles of stuff that looked
like white jelly clinging to it.
That explained what was happening. The eel had been challenged by the
ameboid monster, and they were fighting for possession of him--the
common prey.
* * * * *
The water became an inferno of whipping and lashing movements, of
whitish fibers and spearing thrusts of a glistening black electric
body. Unquestionably the eel was using its numbing electric shock on
its foe. Time and time again Phil felt the amoeba grasp him,
searingly, only to be wrenched free by the force of the currents the
combat stirred up. Once he thudded into the bottom of the river, and
his lungs seemed about to burst before he was again shot to the top
and managed to get a breath. At last the water quieted somewhat, and
Phil, at the surface, saw the eel bury its head in a now apathetic
mound of flesh.
It tore a portion loose with savage jaws, a portion that still writhed
after it was separated from the parent mass; and then the victor
glided swiftly downstream, and disappeared under the surface....
Holmes floated helplessly on the inky water. He could see the amoeba
plainly; it was still partly paralyzed, for it was very still. But
then a faint tremor ran through it; a wave ran over its surface--and
it moved slowly towards him once again.
Desperately Phil tried to retreat. The will was there, but the body
would not work. Save for a feeble flutter of his hands and feet, he
could not move. He could not even turn around to bid Sue and David
Guinness good-by--with his eyes....
Then a fresh, loved voice sounded just behind him, and he felt
something tighten around his waist.
"It's all right, dear!" the voice called. "Hang on; we'll get you
out!"
Sue had come in after him! She had grasped the rope tied to his belt,
and she and her father were pulling him back to the bank!
He wanted to tell her to go back--the amoeba was only feet away--but
he could only manage a little croak. And then he was safe up on the
ledge at the other side of the river.
* * * * *
A surge of strength filled his limbs, and he knew the shock was
rapidly wearing off. But it was also wearing off of the monster in the
water. Its speed increased; the ripplings of its amorphous
body-substance became quicker, more excited. It came on steadily.
While it came, the girl and her father worked desperately over Phil,
massaging his body and pulling him further up the bank. It had all but
reached the bank when Holmes gasped:
"I think I can walk now. Where--where did Quade go to?"
Guinness gestured over to the right, up a dim winding passage through
the rocks.
"Then we must follow--fast!" Phil said, staggering to his feet. "He
may get to the sphere first; he'll go up by himself even yet! I'm all
right!"
Despite his words, he could not run, and could only command an awkward
walk. Sue lifted one of his arms around her shoulder, and her father
took the other, and without a backward glance they labored ahead. But
Phil's strength quickly returned, and they raised the pace until they
had broken once more into a stumbling run.
How far ahead James Quade was, they did not know, but obviously they
could follow where he had gone. Once again the draft was strong on
their backs. They felt sure they were on the last stretch, headed for
the earth-borer. But, unless they could overtake Quade, he would be
there first. They had no illusions about what that would mean....
CHAPTER V
_A Death More Hideous_
Quade was there first.
When they burst out of a narrow crevice, not far from the
funnel-shaped opening they had originally entered, they saw him
standing beside the open door of the sphere as if waiting. The
searchlight inside was still on, and in its shaft of light they could
see that he was smiling thinly, once more his old, confident self. It
would only take him a second to jump in, slam the door and lock it. He
could afford a last gesture....
The three stopped short. They saw something he did not.
"So!" he observed in his familiar, mocking voice. He paused, seeing
that they did not come on. He had plenty of time.
He said something else, but the two men and the girl did not hear what
it was. As if by a magnet their eyes were held by what was hanging
above him, clinging to the lip of the hole the sphere had made in the
ceiling.
It was an amoeba, another of those single-celled, protoplasmic mounds
of flesh. It had evidently come down through the hole; and now it was
stretching, rubber-like, lower and lower, a living, reaching
stalactite of whitish hunger.
Quade was all unconscious of it. His final words reached Phil's
consciousness.
"... And this time, of course, I will keep the top disintegrators on.
No other monster will then be able to weigh me down!"
He shrugged his shoulders and turned to the door. And that movement
was the signal that brought his doom. Without a sound, the poised mass
above dropped.
James Quade never knew what hit him. The heap of whitish jelly fell
squarely. There was a brief moment of frantic lashing, of tortured
struggles--then only tiny ripples running through the monster as it
fed.
Sue Guinness turned her head. But the two men for some reason could
not take their eyes away....
* * * * *
It was the girl's voice that jerked them back to reality. "The other!"
she gasped. "It's coming, behind!"
They had completely forgotten the mass in the tunnel. Turning, they
saw that it was only fifteen feet away and approaching fast, and
instinctively they ran out into the cavern, skirting the sphere
widely. When they came to Quade's wrecked borer Phil, who had snatched
a glance behind, dragged them down behind it. For he had seen their
pursuer abandon the chase and go to share in the meal of its fellow.
"We'd best not get too far away," he whispered. "When they leave the
front of the borer, maybe we can make a dash for it."
For minutes that went like hours the young man watched, waiting for
the creatures to be done, hoping that they would go away. Fortunately
the sphere lay between, and he was not forced to see too much. Only
one portion of one of the monsters was visible, lapping out from
behind the machine....
At last his body tensed, and he gripped Sue and her father's arm in
quick warning. The things were leaving the sphere. Or, rather, only
one was. For Phil saw that they had agglutenated--merged into
oneness--and now the monster that remained was the sum of the sizes of
the original two. And more....
They all watched. And they all saw the amoeba stop, hesitate for a
moment--and come straight for the wrecked borer behind which they were
hidden.
"Damn!" Phil whispered hoarsely. "It's still hungry--and it's after
us!"
David Guinness sighed wearily. "It's heavy and sluggish, now," he
said, "so maybe if we run again.... Though I don't know how I can last
any longer...."
Holmes did not answer. His eyes were narrowed; he was casting about
desperately for a plan. He hardly felt Sue's light touch on his arm as
she whispered:
"In case, Phil--in case.... This must be good-by...."
But the young man turned to her with gleaming eyes. "Good-by,
nothing!" he cried. "We've still got a card to play!"
* * * * *
She stared at him, wondering if he had cracked from the strain of what
he had passed through. But his next words assured her he had not. "Go
back, Sue," he said levelly. "Go far back. We'll win through this
yet."
She hesitated, then obeyed. She crept back from the wrecked borer,
back into the dim rear, eyes on Phil and the sluggish mass that moved
inexorably towards him. When she had gone fifteen or twenty yards she
paused, and watched the two men anxiously.
Phil was talking swiftly to Professor Guinness. His voice was low and
level, and though she could not hear the words she could catch the
tone of assurance that ran through them. She saw her father nod his
head, and he seemed to make the gesture with vigor. "I will," she
heard him say; and he slapped Phil on the back, adding: "But for God's
sake, be careful!"
And with these words the old man wormed inside Quade's wrecked borer
and was gone from the girl's sight.
She wanted desperately to run forward and learn what Phil intended to
do, but she restrained herself and obeyed his order. She waited, and
watched; and saw the young man stand up, look at the slowly advancing
monster--and deliberately walk right into its path!
Sue could not move from her fright. In a daze she saw Phil advance
cautiously towards the amoeba and pause when within five feet of it.
The thing stopped; remained absolutely motionless. She saw him take
another short step forward. This time a pseudopod emerged, and reached
slowly out for him. Phil avoided it easily, but by so narrow a margin
that the girl's heart stopped beating. Then she saw him step back;
and, snail-like, the creature followed, pausing twice, as if wary and
suspicious. Slowly Phil Holmes drew it after him.
To Sue, who did not know what was his plan, it seemed a deliberate
invitation to death. She forgot about her father, lying inside the
mangled borer, waiting. She did not see that Phil was leading the
monster directly in front of it....
* * * * *
It was a grotesque, silent pursuit. The creature appeared to be
unalert; its movements were sloth-like; yet the girl knew that if Phil
once ventured an inch too close, or slipped, or tried to dodge past it
to the sphere, its torpidness would vanish and it would have him. His
maneuvering had to be delicate, judged to a matter of inches. Tense
with the suspense, the strain of the slow-paced seconds, she
watched--and yet hardly dared to watch, fearful of the awful thing she
might see.
It was a fantastic game of tag her lover was playing, with death the
penalty for tardiness. The slow, enticing movements were repeated
again and again, Phil advancing very close, and stepping back in the
nick of time. Always he barely avoided the clutching white arms that
were extended, and little by little he decoyed the thing onward....
Then came the end. As Holmes was almost in front of the wrecked
machine, Sue saw him glance quickly aside--and, as if waiting for that
moment when he would be off guard, the monster whipped forward in a
great, reaching surge.
Sue's ragged nerves cracked: she shrieked. They had him! She started
forward, then halted abruptly. With a tremendous leap, Phil Holmes had
wrenched free and flung himself backwards. She heard his yell:
"Now!"
* * * * *
There was a sputter from the bottom of the outstretched borer; then,
like the crack of a whip, came a bellow of awful sound.
A thick cloud of dust reared up, and the ear-numbing thunder rolled
through the cavern in great pulsing echoes. And then Sue Guinness
understood what the young man had been about.
The disintegrators of James Quade's borer had sent a broad beam of
annihilation into the monster. His own machine had destroyed his
destroyer--and given his intended victims their only chance to escape
from the dread fate he had schemed for them.
Sue could see no trace of the creature in its pyre of slow-swirling
dust. Caught squarely, its annihilation had been utter. And then,
through the thunder that still echoed in her ear-drums, she heard a
joyful voice.
"We got 'em!"
Through the dusty haze Phil appeared at her side. He flung his arms up
exultantly, swept her off the ground, hugged her close.
"We got 'em!" he cried again. "We're free--free to go up!"
Professor David Guinness crawled from the borer. His face, for the
first time since the descent, wore a broad smile. Phil ran over to
him, slapped him on the back; and the older man said:
"You did it beautifully, Phil." He turned to Sue. "He had to decoy
them right in front of the disintegrators. It was--well, it was
magnificent!"
"All credit to Sue: she was my inspiration!" Phil said, laughing. "But
now," he added, "let's see if we can fix those dead rocket-tubes. I
have a patient up above--and, anyway, I'm not over-fond of this
place!"
* * * * *
The three had won through. They had blasted four miles down from the
surface of the earth. The brain of an elderly scientist, the
quick-witted courage of a young engineer, had achieved the seemingly
impossible--and against obstacles that could not have been predicted.
Death had attended that achievement, as death often does accompany
great forward steps; James Quade had gone to a death more hideous than
that he devised for the others. But, in spite of the justice of it, a
moment of silence fell on the three survivors as they came to the spot
where his fate at last had caught up to him.
But it was only a moment. It was relieved by Professor Guinness's
picking up the chunk of radium ore his former partner had hewn from
the cavern's wall. He held it up for all to see, and smiled.
"Here it is," he said simply.
Then he led the way into his earth-borer, and the little door closed
quietly and firmly into place.
For a few minutes slight tappings came from within, as if a wrench or
a screwdriver were being used. Then the tappings stopped, and all was
silence.
A choke, a starting cough, came from beneath the sphere. A torrent of
rushing sound burst out, and spears of orange flame spurted from the
bottom and splashed up its sides, bathing it in fierce, brilliant
light. It stirred. Then, slowly and smoothly, the great ball of metal
raised up.
It hit the edge of the hole in the ceiling, and hung there,
hesitating. Side-rockets flared, and the sphere angled over. Then it
slid, roaring, through the hole.
Swiftly the spots of orange from its rocket-tube exhausts died to
pin-points. There were now almost twenty of them. And soon these
pin-points wavered, and vanished utterly.
Then there was only blackness in the hole that went up to the surface.
Blackness in the hole, calm night on the desert above--and silence, as
if the cavern were brooding on the puny figures and strange machines
that had for the first time dared invade its solitude, in the realms
four miles within the earth....
The Lake of Light
_By Jack Williamson_
[Illustration: _The monster emanated power, sinister, malevolent
power._]
[Sidenote: In the frozen wastes at the bottom of the world two
explorers find a strange pool of white fire--and have a strange
adventure.]
The roar of the motor rang loud in the frosty air above a desert of
ice. The sky above us was a deep purple-blue; the red sun hung like a
crimson eye low in the north. Three thousand feet below, through a
hazy blue mist of wind-whipped, frozen vapor, was the rugged
wilderness of black ice-peaks and blizzard-carved hummocks of snow--a
grim, undulating waste, black and yellow, splotched with crystal
white. The icy wind howled dismally through the struts. We were flying
above the weird ice-mountains of the Enderby quadrant of Antarctica.
That was a perilous flight, across the blizzard-whipped bottom of the
world. In all the years of polar exploration by air, since Byrd's
memorable flights, this area had never been crossed. The intrepid
Britisher, Major Meriden, with the daring American aviatrix whom the
world had known as Mildred Cross before she married him, had flown
into it nineteen years before--and like many others they had never
returned.
Faintly, above the purring drone of the motor, I heard Ray Summers'
shout. I drew my gaze from the desolate plateau of ice below and
leaned forward. His lean, fur-hooded face was turned back toward me. A
mittened hand was pointing, and thin lips moved in words that I did
not hear above the roar of the engine and the scream of the wind.
I turned and looked out to the right, past the shimmering silver disk
of the propeller. Under the blue haze of ice-crystals in the air, the
ice lay away in a vast undulating plain of black and yellow, broken
with splotches of prismatic whiteness, lying away in frozen desolation
to the rim of the cold violet sky. Rising against that sky I saw a
curious thing.
It was a mountain of fire!
Beyond the desert of ice, a great conical peak pointed straight into
the amethystine gloom of the polar heavens. It was brilliantly white,
a finger of milky fire, a sharp cone of pure light. It shone with
white radiance. It was brighter, far brighter, than is the sacred cone
of Fujiyama in the vivid day of Japan.
* * * * *
For many minutes I stared in wonder at it. Far away it was; it looked
very small. It was like a little heap of light poured from the hand of
a fire-god. What it might be, I could not imagine. At first sight, I
imagined it might be a volcano with streams of incandescent lava
flowing down the side. I knew that this continent of mystery boasted
Mt. Erebus and other active craters. But there was none of the smoke
or lurid yellow flame which accompanies volcanic eruptions.
I was still watching it, and wondering, when the catastrophe took
place--the catastrophe which hurled us into a mad extravaganza of
amazing adventure.
Our little two-place amphibian was flying smoothly, through air
unusually good for this continent of storms. The twelve cylinders of
the motor had been firing regularly since we took off from Byrd's old
station at Little America fifteen hours before. We had crossed the
pole in safety. It looked as if we might succeed in this attempt to
penetrate the last white spot on the map. Then it Happened.
A sudden crack of snapping metal rang out sharp as a pistol report. A
bright blade of metal flashed past the wing-struts, to fall in a
flashing arc. The motor broke abruptly into a mad, deep-voiced roar.
Terrific vibration shook the ship, until I feared that it would go to
pieces.
Ray Summers, with his usual quick efficiency, cut the throttle.
Quickly the motor slowed to idling speed; the vibration stopped. A
last cough of the engine, and there was no sound save the shrill
screaming of the wind in the gloomy twilight of this unknown land
beyond the pole.
"What in the devil!" I exclaimed.
"The prop! See!" Ray pointed ahead.
I looked, and the dreadful truth flashed upon me. The steel propeller
was gone, or half of it at least. One blade was broken off at a jagged
line just above the hub.
* * * * *
"The propeller! What made it break? I've never heard--"
"Search me!" Ray grinned. "The important thing is that it did. It was
all-metal, of course, tested and guaranteed. The guarantee isn't worth
much here. A flaw in the forging, perhaps, that escaped detection.
And this low temperature. Makes metal as brittle as glass. And the
thing may have been crystallized by the vibration."
The plane was coming down in a shallow glide. I looked out at the grim
expanse of black ice-crags and glistening snow below us, and it was
far from a comforting prospect. But I had a huge amount of confidence
in Ray Summers. I have known him since the day he appeared, from his
father's great Arizona ranch, to be a freshman in the School of Mines
at El Paso, where I was then an instructor in geology. We have knocked
about queer corners of the world together for a good many years. But
he is still but a great boy, with the bluff, simple manners of the
West.
"Do you think we can land?" I asked.
"Looks like we've got to," he said, grimly.
"And what after that?"
"How should I know? We have the sledge, tent, furs. Food, and fuel for
the primus to last a week. There's the rifle, but it must be a
thousand miles to anything to shoot. We can do our best."
"We should have had an extra prop."
"Of course. But it was so many pounds, when every pound counted. And
who knew the thing would break?"
"We'll never get out on a week's provisions."
"Not a shot! Too bad to disappoint Captain Harper." Ray grinned wanly.
"He ought to have the _Albatross_ around there by this time, waiting
for us." The _Albatross_ was the ship which had left us at Little
America a few months before, to steam around and pick us up at our
destination beyond Enderby Land. "We're in the same boat with Major
Meriden and his wife--and all those others. Lost without a trace."
"You've read Scott's diary--that he wrote after he visited the pole in
1912--the one they found with the bodies?"
"Yes. Not altogether cheerful. But we won't be trying to get out. No
use of that." He looked at me suddenly, grinning again. "Say, Jim, why
not try for that shining mountain we saw? It looks queer enough to be
interesting. We ought to make it in a week."
"I'm with you," I said.
* * * * *
I did not speak again, for the jagged ice-peaks were coming rather
near. I held my breath as the little plane veered around a slender
black spire and dropped toward a tiny scrap of smooth snow among the
ice-hummocks. I might have spared my anxiety. Under Ray's consumately
skilful piloting, the skids struck the snow with hardly a shock. We
glided swiftly over the ice and came to rest just short of a yawning
crevasse.
"Suppose," said Ray, "that we spend the first night in the plane. We
are tired already. We can keep warm here, and sleep. We've plenty of
ice to melt for water. Then we're off for the shining mountain."
I agreed: Ray Summers is usually right. We got out the sledge, packed
it, took our bearings, and made all preparations for a start to the
luminous mountain, which was about a hundred miles away. The
thermometer stood at twenty below, but we were comfortable enough in
our furs as we ate a scanty supper and went to sleep in the cabin of
the plane.
We started promptly the next morning, after draining the last of the
hot chocolate from our vacuum bottles, which we left behind. We had a
light but powerful sporting rifle, with telescopic sights, and several
hundred rounds of ammunition. Ray put them in the pack, though I
insisted that we would never need them, unless a quick way out of our
predicament.
"No, Jim," he said. "We take 'em along. We don't know what we're going
to find at the shining mountain."
The air was bitterly cold as we set out: it was twenty-five below and
a sharp wind was blowing. Only our toiling at the sledge kept us warm.
We covered eighteen miles that day, and made a good camp in the lee
of a bare stone ridge.
That night there was a slight fall of snow. When we went on it was
nearly thirty-five degrees below zero. The layer of fresh snow
concealed irregularities in the ice, making our pulling very hard.
After an exhausting day we had made hardly fifteen miles.
* * * * *
On the following day the sky was covered with gray clouds, and a
bitterly cold wind blew. We should have remained in the tent, but the
shortage of food made it imperative that we keep moving. We felt
immensely better after a reckless, generous fill of hot pemmican stew;
but the next morning my feet were so painful from frost-bite that I
could hardly get on my fur boots.
Walking was very painful to me that day, but we made a good distance,
having come to smoother ice. Ray was very kind in caring for me. I
became discouraged about going on at all: it was very painful, and I
knew there was no hope of getting out. I tried to get some of our
morphine tablets, but Ray had them, and refused to be convinced that
he ought to go on without me.
On the next march we came in sight of the luminous mountain, which
cheered me considerably. It was a curious thing, indeed. A
straight-sided cone of light it was, rather steeper than the average
volcano. Its point was sharp, its sides smooth as if cut with a
mammoth plane. And it shone with a pure white light, with a steady and
unchanging milky radiance. It rose out of the black and dull yellow of
the ice wilderness like a white finger of hope.
The next morning it was a little warmer. Ray had been caring for my
feet very attentively, but it took me nearly two hours to get on my
footgear. Again I tried to get him to leave me, but he refused.
We arrived at the base of the shining mountain in three more marches.
On the last night the fuel for the primus was all gone, having been
used up during the very cold weather, and we were unable to melt water
to drink. We munched the last of our pemmican dry.
* * * * *
A few minutes after we had started on the last morning, Ray stopped
suddenly.
"Look at that!" he cried.
I saw what he had seen--the wreck of an airplane, the wings crumpled
up and blackened with fire. We limped up to it.
"A Harley biplane!" Ray exclaimed. "That is Major Meriden's ship! And
look at that wing! It looks like it's been in an electric furnace!"
I examined the metal wing; saw that it had been blackened with heat.
The metal was fused and twisted.
"I've seen a good many wrecks, Jim. I've seen planes that burned as
they fell. But nothing like that. The fuselage and engines were not
even afire. Jim, something struck out from that shining mountain and
brought them down!"
"Are they--" I began.
Ray was poking about in the snow in the cockpits.
"No. Not here. Probably would have been better for them if they had
been killed in the plane. Quick and merciful."
He examined the engines and propellers.
"No. Seems to be nothing wrong. Something struck them down!"
Soon we went on.
The shining mountain rose before us like a great cone of fire. It must
have been three thousand feet high, and about that in diameter at the
bottom. Its walls were as smooth and straight as though turned from
milky rock crystal in a gigantic lathe. It shone with a steady,
brilliantly white radiance.
"That's no natural hill!" Ray grunted beside me as we limped on.
We were less than a mile from the foot of the cone of fire. Soon we
observed another remarkable thing about it. It seemed that a straight
band of silvery metal rose from the snow about its foot.
"Has it a wall around it?" I exclaimed.
"Evidently," said Ray. "Looks as if it's built on a round metal
platform. But by whom? When? Why?"
* * * * *
We approached the curious wall. It was of a white metal, apparently
aluminum, or a silvery alloy of that metal. In places it was
twenty-five feet high, but more usually the snow and ice was banked
high against it. The smooth white wall of the gleaming mountain stood
several hundred yards back from the wall.
"Let's have a look over it." Ray suggested. "We can get up on that
hummock, against it. You know, this place must have been built by
men!"
We clambered up over the ice, as he suggested, until our heads came
above the top of the wall.
"A lake of fire!" cried Ray.
Indeed, a lake of liquid fire lay before us. The white aluminum wall
was hardly a foot thick. It formed a great circular tank, nearly a
mile across, with the cone of white fire rising in the center. And the
tank was filled, to within a foot of the top, with shimmeringly
brilliant white fluid, bright and luminous as the cone--liquid light!
Ray dipped a hand into it. The hand came up with fingers of fire,
radiant, gleaming, with shining drops falling from them. With a
spasmodic effort, he flung off the luminous drops, rubbed his hand on
his garments, and got it back into its fur mitten.
"Gee, it's cold!" he muttered. "Freeze the horns off a brass
billy-goat!"
"Cold light!" I exclaimed. "What wouldn't a bottle of that stuff be
worth to a chemist back in the States!"
"That cone must be a factory to make the stuff." Ray suggested,
hugging his hand. "They might pump the liquid up to the top, and then
let it trickle down over the sides: that would explain why the cone is
so bright. The stuff might absorb sunlight, like barium sulphide. And
there could be chemical action with the air, under the actinic rays."
"Well, if somebody's making cold light, where does he use it?"
"I'd like to find out, and strike him for a hot meal," Ray said,
grinning. "It's too cold to live on top of the ground around here.
They must run it down in a cave."
"Then let's find the hole."
"You know it's possible we won't be welcome. This mountain of light
may be connected with the vanishing of all the aviators. We'd better
take along the rifle."
* * * * *
We set off around just outside the white metal wall. The snow and ice
was irregularly banked against it, but the wall itself was smooth and
unbroken. We had limped along for some two miles, or more than halfway
around the amazing lake of light. I had begun to doubt that we would
find anything.
Then we came to a square metal tower, ten feet on a side, that rose
just outside the silvery wall, to a level with its top. The ice was
low here; the tower rose twenty feet above its unequal surface. We
found metal flanges riveted to its side, like the steps of a ladder.
They were most inconveniently placed, nearly four feet apart; but we
were able to climb them, and to look down the shaft.
It was a straight-sided pit, evidently some hundreds of feet deep. We
could see a tiny square of light at the bottom, very far away. The
flanges ran down the side forming the rungs of a ladder that gave
access to whatever lay at the bottom.
Without hesitation, Ray climbed over the side and started down. I
followed him, feeling a great relief in getting out of the freezing
wind. Ray had the rifle and ammunition strapped to his back, along
with a few other articles; and I had a small pack. We had abandoned
the sledge, with the useless stove and the most of our instruments.
Our food was all gone.
The metal flanges were fully four feet apart, and it was not easy to
scramble down from one to another; certainly not easy for one who was
cold, hungry, thirsty, worn out with a week of exhausting marches, and
suffering the torture of frozen feet.
"You know, this thing was not built by men," Ray observed.
"Not built by men? What do you mean?"
"Men would have put the steps closer together. Jim, I'm afraid we are
up against something--well--that we aren't used to."
"If men didn't build this, what did?" I was astounded.
"Search me! This continent has been cut off from the rest of the world
for geologic ages. Such life as has been found here is not common to
the rest of the earth. It is not impossible that some form of life,
isolated here, has developed intelligence and acquired the power to
erect that cone of light--and to burn the wing off a metal airplane."
My thoughts whirled madly as we clambered down the shaft.
* * * * *
It must have taken us an hour to reach the bottom. I did not count the
steps, but it must have been at least a thousand feet. The air grew
rapidly warmer as we descended. We both took off most of our heavy fur
garments, and left them hanging on the rungs.
I was rather nervous. I felt the nearness of an intelligent, hostile
power. I had a great fear that the owners of those steps would use
them to find us, and then crush us ruthlessly as they had brought down
Meriden's plane.
The little square of white light below grew larger. Finally I saw Ray
swing off and stand on his feet in a flood of white radiance below me.
The air was warm, moist, laden with a subtle unfamiliar fragrance that
suggested growing things. Then I stood beside Ray.
We stood on the bare stone floor of a huge cavern. It must have been
of volcanic origin. The walls glistened with the sparkling smoothness
of volcanic glass. It was a huge space. The black roof was a hundred
feet high, or more; the cave was some hundreds of feet wide. And it
sloped away from us into dim distance as though leading into huger
cavities below.
The light that shone upon us came from an amazing thing--a fall of
liquid fire. From the roof plunged a sheer torrent of white
brilliantly luminous fluid, falling a hundred feet into a shimmering
pool of moon-flame. Shining opalescent mists swirled about it, and the
ceaseless roar of it filled the cave with sound. It seemed that a
stream of the phosphorescent stuff ran off down the cave from the
pool, to light the lower caverns.
"Very clever!" said Ray. "They make the stuff up there at the cone and
run it in here to see by."
"This warm air feels mighty good," I remarked, pulling off another
garment.
Ray sniffed the air. "A curious odor. Smells like something growing.
Where anything is growing there ought to be something to eat. Let's
see what we can find."
Only black obsidian covered the floor about us. Cautiously we skirted
the overflowing pool of white fire, and followed down the stream of it
that flowed toward the inner cavern. We had gone but a few hundred
yards when suddenly Ray stopped me with a hand on my arm.
"Lie flat!" he hissed. "Quick!"
He dived behind a huge mass of fire-born granite. I flung myself down
beside him.
"Something is coming up the trail by the shining river. And it isn't a
man! It's between us and the light; we should be able to see it."
* * * * *
Soon I heard a curious scraping sound, and a little tinkle of metal. I
caught a whiff of a powerful odor--a strange, fishy odor--so strong
that it almost knocked me down.
The thing that made the scraping and the tinkle and the smell came
into view. The sight of it sickened me with horror.
It was far larger than a man; its body was heavy as a horse's, but
nearer the ground. In form it suggested a huge crab, though it was not
very much like any crustacean I had ever seen. It was mostly red in
color, and covered with a huge scarlet shell. It had five pairs of
limbs. The two forward pairs had pinchers, seemingly used as hands; it
scraped along on the other three pairs. Yard-long antennae, slender
and luminously green, wavered above a grotesque head. The many facets
of compound eyes stood on the end of foot-long stalks.
The amazing crab-thing wore a metal harness. Bands of silvery aluminum
were fastened about its shell, with little cases of white metal
dangling to them. In one of its uplifted claws it carried what seemed
to be an aluminum bar, two feet long and an inch thick.
It scraped lumberingly past, between us and the racing stream of white
fire. It passed less than a dozen feet from us. The curious fishy
smell of it was overpowering, disgusting.
Sweat of horror chilled my limbs. The monster emanated power,
sinister, malevolent power, power intelligent, alien and hostile to
man.
I trembled with the fear that it would see us, but it scrambled
grotesquely on. When it was twenty yards past, Ray picked up a block
of black lava that lay beneath his hand and hurled it silently and
swiftly. It crashed splinteringly on the rocks far beyond the
creature, on the other side of the stream of light.
In fascination I watched the monster as it paused as if astonished.
The glittering compound eyes twisted about on their stalks, and the
long shining green tentacles wavered questioningly. Then the knobbed
limbs snapped the white metal tube to a level position. A metallic
click came from it.
And a ray of red light, vivid and intense, burst from the tube. It
flashed across the river of fire. With a dull, thudding burst it
struck the rocks where the stone had fallen. It must have been a ray
of concentrated heat. Rocks beneath it flashed into sudden
incandescence, splintered and cracked, flowed in molten streams.
* * * * *
In a moment the intensely brilliant ruby ray flashed off. The rocks in
the circle where it had struck faded to a dull red and then to
blackness, still cracking and crumbling.
To my intense relief, the monstrous crab lumbered on.
"That," Ray whispered, "is what got Major Meriden's airplane wing."
When we could hear its scraping progress no longer, we climbed up from
behind our boulder and continued cautiously down the cavern, beside
the rushing luminous river. In half a mile we came to a bend. Rounding
it, we gazed upon a remarkable sight.
We looked into a huge cavity in the heart of the earth. A vast
underground plain lay before us, with the black lava of the roof
arching above it. It must have been miles across, though we had no way
to measure it, and it stretched down into dim hazy distance. Its level
was hundreds of feet below us.
At our feet the glistening river of fire plunged down again in a
magnificent flaming fall. Below, its luminous liquid was spread out in
rivers and lakes and canals, over all the vast plain. The channels ran
through an amazing jungle. It was a forest of fungus, of mushroom
things with great fleshy stalks and spreading circular tops. But they
were not the sickly white and yellow of ordinary mushrooms, but were
of brilliant colors, bright green, flaming scarlet, gold and
purple-blue. Huge brilliant yellow stalks, fringed with crimson and
black, lifted mauve tops thirty feet or more. It was a veritable
forest of flame-bright fungus.
In the center of this weirdly forested subterranean plain was a great
lake, filled, not with the flaming liquid, but with dark crystal
water. And on the bottom of that lake, clearly visible from the
elevation upon which we stood, was a city!
* * * * *
A city below the water! The buildings were upright cylinders in groups
of two or three, of dozens, even of hundreds. For miles, the bottom of
the great lake was covered with them. They were all of crystal,
azure-blue, brilliant as cylinders turned from immense sapphires. They
were vividly visible beneath the transparent water. Not one of them
broke the surface.
Through the clear black water we saw moving hundreds, thousands of the
giant crabs. The crawled over the hard, pebbled bottom of the lake, or
swam between the crystal cylinders of the city. They were huge as the
one we had seen, with red shells, great ominous looking stalked eyes,
luminous green tentacular antennae and knobbed claws on forelimbs.
"Looks as if we've run on something to write home about," Ray muttered
in amazement.
"A whole city of them! A whole world! No wonder they could build that
cone-mountain for a lighting plant!"
"When they got to knocking down airplanes with that heat-ray," he
speculated, "they were probably surprised to find that other animals
had developed intelligence."
"Do you suppose those mushroom things are good to eat?"
"We can try and see--if the crabs don't get us first with a heat-ray.
I'm hungry enough to try anything!"
Again we cautiously advanced. The river of light fell over a sheer
precipice, but we found a metal ladder spiked to the rock, with rungs
as inconveniently far apart as those in the shaft. It was five hundred
feet, I suppose, to the bottom; it took us many minutes to descend.
At last we stepped off in a little rocky clearing. The forest of
brilliant mushrooms rose about us, great fleshy stalks of gold and
graceful fringes of black and scarlet about them, with flattened heads
of purple.
We started eagerly across toward the fungoid forest. I had visions of
tearing off great pieces of soft, golden flesh and filling my aching
stomach with it.
We were stopped by a sharp, poignantly eager human cry.
A human being, a girl, darted from among the mushroom stalks and ran
across to us. Sobbing out great incoherent cries, she dropped at Ray's
feet, wrapped her arms about his knees and clung to him, while her
slender body was wracked with sobbing cries.
* * * * *
My first impression was that she was very beautiful--and that
impression I was never called upon to revise. About her lithe young
body she had the merest scrap of some curious green fabric--ample in
the warm air of the great cavern. Luxuriant brown hair fell loose
about her white shoulders. She was not quite twenty years old, I
supposed; her body was superbly formed, with the graceful curves and
the free, smooth movements of a wild thing.
Ray stood motionless for a moment, thunder-struck as I was, while the
sobbing girl clung to his knees. Then the astonishment on his face
gave place to pity.
"Poor kid!" he murmured.
He bent, took her tenderly by the shoulder, helped her to her feet.
Her beauty burst upon us like a great light. Smoothly white, her skin
was, perfect. Wide blue eyes, now appealing, even piteous, looked
from beneath a wealth of golden brown hair. White teeth, straight and
even, flashed behind the natural crimson of her lips.
She stood staring at Ray, in a sort of enchantment of wonder. An eager
light of incredible joy flamed in her amazing eyes; red lips were
parted in an unconscious smile of joy. She looked like the troubled
princess in the fairy tale, when the prince of her dreams appeared in
the flesh.
"God, but you're beautiful!" Ray's words slipped out as if he were
hardly conscious of them. He flushed quickly, stepped back a little.
The girl's lips opened. She voiced a curious cry. It was deep toned,
pealing with a wonderful timbre. A happy burst of sound, like a baby
makes. But strong, ringing, musically golden. And pathetically eager,
pitifully glad, so that it brought tears to my eyes, cynical old man
that I am.
I saw Ray wipe his eyes.
"Can you talk?" Ray put the question in a clear, deliberate voice,
with great kindness ringing in it.
"Talk?" The chiming, golden voice was slow, uncertain. "Talk? Yes. I
talked--with mother. But for long--I have had no need to talk."
"Where is your mother?" Ray's voice was gentle.
"She is gone. She was here when I was little." The clear, silvery
voice was more certain now. "Once, when I was almost as big as
she--she was still. She was cold. She did not move when I called her.
The Things took her away. She was dead. She told me that sometime she
would be dead."
* * * * *
Bright tears came in the wide blue eyes, trickled down over the
perfect face. A pathetic catch was in the deliberate, halting voice. I
turned away, and Ray put a handkerchief to his face.
"What is your name? Who are you?" Ray spoke kindly.
"I am Mildred. Mildred Meriden."
"Meriden!" Ray turned to me. "I bet this is a daughter of the major
and his wife!"
"Father was the major," the girl said slowly. "He and mother came in a
machine that flew, from a far land. The Things burned the machine with
the red fire. They came here and the Things kept them. They made
mother sing over the water. They killed father. I never saw him."
"I know," Ray, said gently. "We came from the same land. We saw your
father's machine above."
"You came from outside! And you are going back? Oh, take me with you!
Take me!" Piteous pleading was in her voice. "It is so--lonely since
the Things took Mother away. Mother told me that sometime men would
come, and take me away to see the people and the outside that she told
me of. Oh, please take me!"
"Don't worry! You go along whenever we leave--if we can get out."
"Oh, I am so glad! You are very good!"
Impulsively, she threw her arms around Ray's neck. Gently, he
disengaged himself, flushing a little. I noticed, however, that he did
not seem particularly displeased.
"But can we get out?"
"Mother and I tried. We could never get out. The Things watch. They
make me come to the water to sing, when the great bell rings."
"Are these things goods to eat?" I motioned to the brilliant fungal
forest. I had begun to fear that Ray would never get to this very
important topic.
Blue eyes regarded me. "Eat? Oh, you are hungry! Come! I have food."
* * * * *
Like a child, she grasped Ray's hand, pulled him toward the mushroom
jungle. I followed, and we slipped in between the brilliantly golden,
fleshy stalks. They rose to the tangle of bright feathery fringes
above, huge and substantial as the trunks of trees.
In a few minutes we came to a wide, shallow canal, metal-walled,
through which a slow current of the opalescent, luminous liquid was
flowing. We crossed this on a narrow metal foot-bridge, and went on
through the brilliant forest.
Suddenly we emerged into a little clearing, with the black waters of
the great lake visible beyond it, across a quarter-mile of rocky
beach. In the middle of the open space, rose three straight cylinders
of azure crystal, side by side. Each must have been twenty feet in
diameter, and forty high. They shone with a clear blue light, like the
cylindrical buildings we had seen in the strange city of the
crab-creatures below the great lake.
Mildred Meriden, the strangely beautiful girl who had known no other
world than this amazing cavern empire where giant crabs reigned,
beckoned us with unconscious queenly grace to enter the arched door in
the blue sapphire wall of her remarkable abode of clustered cylinders.
The crystal of the walls seemed luminous, the lofty cylinders were
filled with a liquid, azure radiance. The high round room we entered
was strangely furnished. There was a silken couch, a bathing pool of
blue crystal filled with sparkling water, a curious chest of drawers
made of bright aluminum with a mirror of polished crystal, its top
bearing odd combs and other articles. The furnishings must have been
done by the giant crabs, under human direction.
Mildred led us quickly across the room, through an arched opening into
another. A round aluminum table stood in the center of the room, with
two curious metal chairs beside it. Odd metal cabinets stood about the
shining blue walls. The girl made us sit down, and put dishes before
us.
She gave us each a bowl of thick, sweetish soup, darkly red; placed
before us a dish piled high with little circular cakes, crisp and
brown, which had a tantalizing fragrance; poured for each of us a
transparent crystal goblet full of clear amber drink.
We fell to with enthusiasm and abandon.
"The Things made this place for father," the girl told us, as she
watched us eat, attentively replenishing the red soup in the great
blue crystal bowl, or the little cakes, or the fragrant amber drink.
"They would give him anything he wanted. But he tried to go away with
mother, and they killed him."
"We must get out of here," Ray declared when at last we had done. "We
must get together a lot of food, and enough clothing for all of us. We
ought to be able to make it to the edge of the ice-pack. We've got to
give these crab-things the slip; we ought to get off before they know
we're here--unless they already do."
Mildred was eagerly attentive: she was so unused to human speech that
it took the best of her efforts to understand us, though it seems that
her mother had given her quite a wide education. She promised that
there would be no difficulty about the food.
"Mother taught me how to fix food," she said. "She always said that
sometime men would come, with weapons of fire and great noise that
would tear and kill the Things. I have food ready, in bags--more than
we can carry. I have, too, the furs that mother and father wore."
She ran into another room and returned with a great pile of fur
garments, which we examined and found to be in good condition.
"Now is the time," Ray said. "I'd like to know more about the big
crabs, but there'll be a chance for that, later. Mildred is the
important thing, now. We must get her out. Then we can tell the world
about this place and come back with a bigger expedition."
"You think we can reach the coast?"
"I think so. It might be hard on Mildred. But we will have food; we
can probably find fuel for the stove in Meriden's plane, if the tanks
were well sealed. And Captain Harper should have a relief party landed
and sent to meet us. We should have only three or four hundred miles
to go alone."
"Three or four hundred miles, over country like we've been crossing in
the last week, with a girl! Ray, we'd never make it!"
"It's the only chance."
I said nothing more. I knew that I could stand no such march on my
frozen feet, but I resolved to say nothing about it. I would help them
as far as I could, and then walk out of camp some night. Men have done
just that.
Mildred brought out sacks of the little cakes, and of a red powder
that seemed to be the dried and ground flesh of a crimson mushroom. We
made a pack for each of us, as heavy as we could carry.
* * * * *
Just before we were ready to start Ray took off my footgear and
treated my feet from his medicine kit. I had feared gangrene, but he
assured me that there was no danger if they were well cared for.
Walking was still exquisitely painful to me as we slipped out through
the arched door and into the fungoid forest beyond the three blue
cylinders.
As rapidly and silently as possible we hastened through the brilliant
fungous forest, across the river of opalescent liquid, to the foot of
the fall of fire. A weird and splendid sight was that sheer arc of
shimmering white flame, roaring into a pool of opal light, and
surrounded with a mist of moon-flame.
We reached the foot of the metal ladder spiked to the rocks beside the
fall and started up immediately. The going was not easy. The packs of
food, heavy enough when we were on level ground, were difficult indeed
to lift when one was scrambling up over rungs four feet apart.
Ray climbed ahead, with a piece of rope fastened from his waist to
Mildred's, so that he could help her if she slipped. I was below the
girl. We were halfway up the rock when suddenly a glare of red light
shone upon me, casting my shadow sharply on the cliff. I looked up
and saw the broad, intensely red beam of a heat-ray like that we had
seen the giant crab use.
The ray came, evidently, from the shore of the great lake with its
submerged city of blue cylinders. It fell upon the face of the cliff
just above us. Quickly the ladder was heated to cherry red. The face
of the rock grew incandescent, cracked. Hot sparks rained down upon
us.
Slowly the ray moved down, toward us.
"Guess we'd better call it off," said Ray. "They have the advantage
right now. Better get to climbing down, Jim. This ladder is going to
be burning my hands pretty soon."
* * * * *
I climbed down. Mildred and Ray scrambled down behind me.
The ray followed us, keeping the metal at a cherry red just above
Ray's hands.
I looked down and saw a dozen of the giant crabs lumbering up out of
the fungoid jungle from the direction of the great lake. Hideous
things they were, with staring, stalked eyes, shining green antennae,
polished red shells, claw-armed limbs. Like the one that had passed us
in the upper cavern, they wore glistening white metal accoutrements.
We clambered down, with the red ray following.
I dropped to the ground among them, wet with the sweat of horror. I
reeled in nausea from the intolerable odor of the crab-things; it was
indescribable, overpowering.
Curious rasping stridulations came from them, sounds which seemed to
serve as means of communication, and which Mildred evidently
understood.
"They say that you will not be harmed, but that you must not go out,"
she called down.
I was seized by the pincher-like claws, held writhing in an
unbreakable grasp, while the glittering eyes twisted about, looked at
me, and the shining green tentacles wavered questioningly over me. My
stomach revolted at the horrible odor.
The crabs tore off my pack, even my clothing. Ray was similarly
treated as soon as he reached the ground. Though they took Mildred's
pack, they treated her with a curious respect.
In a few minutes they released us. They had taken the packs, the rifle
and ammunition, our medicine kit and the few instruments we had
brought with us down the shaft, even our clothing. They turned us
loose stark naked. Ray's face and neck went beet-red when he saw
Mildred standing by him.
The rasping sound came from one of them again.
"It says you may stay with me," Mildred said. "They will not harm you
unless you try again to get away. If you do, you die--as father did.
They will keep what they took from you."
* * * * *
Several of the creatures went scraping off, carrying the articles they
had taken from us either in their claws or in the metal cases they
wore. Several waited, staring at us with the stalked compound eyes,
and waving the green antennae as if they were organs of some special
sense.
Two of the creatures waited at the foot of the metal ladder, holding
the long slender white tubes of the heat-ray in their claws.
"They say we can go now," Mildred said.
She led the way toward the edge of the brilliant jungle. She seemed to
be without false modesty, for I saw her glancing with evident
admiration at Ray's lithe and powerful white-skinned figure. We
followed her into the giant mushrooms, glad to escape the overpowering
stench of the crabs.
In a few minutes we arrived again at the strange building of the three
blue cylinders. Mildred, noticing our discomfort, produced for each of
us a piece of white silken fabric with which we draped ourselves.
She had noticed my difficulty in walking on bare feet. She had me
bathe them, then dressed them with a soothing yellow oil, and bandaged
them skilfully.