"You, Manuel," Talbot said roughly. "Don't be a fool. If anything
should happen to me--well, I've lived my life; but you're only a kid."
Manuel's face set stubbornly. "An experienced mining man you need, is
it not? In case there should be difficulties. And I am experienced.
Besides, señores," he said simply, "my wife and child are somewhere in
those mountains ... above Oracle...."
Talbot gripped his hand in quick sympathy. "All right, Manuel; come if
you like."
A moonless sky hung above them as they swung over the dark and
jungle-engulfed deserted city of Tucson, a sky blazing with the clarity
of desert stars, and to the south and west shot through with the beams
of great searchlights. Flying at a lofty altitude to avoid contact with
drifting globes or betrayal of their coming with no lights showing
aboard their craft save those carefully screened and focused on the
instrument board, it was hard to realize that the fate of America,
perhaps of the world, hung on the efforts of two puny individuals.
Everything seemed unreal, ghost-like, and suddenly the strangeness of
it all came over Talbot and he felt afraid. The noiseless engine made
scarcely a sound; the distant rumble of gunfire sounded like low and
muttering thunder. They had come by way of Tucson so as to pick up a
ten-gallon tube of concentrated explosive gas at the military camp in
the Tucson mountains.
"This gas," the general had assured them, "has been secretly developed
by the chemical branch of the War Department and is more powerful than
TNT or nitro-glycerin. It is odorless, harmless to breathe and exploded
by a wireless-radio device."
He had showed them how to manipulate the radio device, and explained
that in the metal tube was a tiny chamber from which gas could not
escape, and a receiving-detonating cap. "If you can introduce the tube
into the underground galleries where you suspect the enemy's
headquarters to be, allow the contents to escape for ten minutes, and a
mile distant you can blow the mine and all in it to destruction. And
you needn't be afraid of anything escaping alive," he had added grimly.
Talbot thought of his words as the dark and silent world slid by. He
glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Eleven-fifteen. The
moon rose at eleven-twenty-four. He studied the map. High over Mount
Lemmon the craft soared. He touched the army pilot's arm. "All right,"
he said, "throttle her down." Their speed decreased. "Lower."
Swiftly they sank, until the dark bulk of hills and trees lay blackly
beneath; so near as to seem within the touch of a hand. Though he
strained his ears, no alien sound came wafting upward. "Keep circling
here," he directed the pilot. "The moon'll be up in a minute and then
we can be sure of where we are." The pilot nodded. He was a phlegmatic
young man. Not once during the trip had he uttered a word.
The east glowed as if with red fire. Many a time before had Talbot
watched the moon rise, but never under stranger circumstances. Now the
night was illuminated with mellow glory. "Hit the nail on the head," he
whispered. "Do you see that spot over there? To the left, yes. Can you
land us there?"
Without a word the pilot swung for the clearance. It was a close thing,
requiring delicate maneuvering, and only an auto-gyroscope could have
made it without crashing. Hurriedly Manuel and Talbot unloaded their
gear.
"All right," said Talbot to the pilot. "No need to wait for us. If we
are successful, we'll send out the wireless signal agreed on, and if we
aren't...." He shrugged his shoulders. "But tell the General to be sure
and allow us the time stipulated on before undertaking another attack."
Standing there on the bleak hillside, watching the auto-gyroscope run
ahead for a few yards and then take the air, Talbot experienced a
feeling of desolation. Now he and Manuel were alone, cut off from their
own kind by barriers of impregnable jungle. And yet on that lonely
hillside there were no signs of an enemy. For a moment he wondered if
he weren't asleep, dreaming; if he wouldn't soon awake to find that all
this was nothing but a nightmare.
But Manuel gathering up the tools aroused him from such thoughts. Not
without difficulty were the necessary things conveyed to the abandoned
mine back of the old Wiley claim. Their course lay along the bottom of
a dry creek, over a ridge, and so to the shaft half-way down the side
of a hill. A second trip had to be made to bring the gas tube.
It was two o'clock in the morning when Manuel stood at the foot of the
four-hundred-foot hole and signaled up that the air was good. Talbot
lowered the tools to him, and the gas container, and lastly went down
himself. As already stated, Talbot had explored the underground
workings of the mine not eighteen months before. Picking out the main
tunnel and keeping a close watch for rattlers with electric torches,
the two men went cautiously ahead. In places earth had fallen and had
to be cleared away, but the formation for the most part was a soft rock
and shale. They went slowly, for fear of starting slides.
At a spot taking an abrupt turn--and it was here that the newer tunnel
had broken through into the older gallery of the Wiley claim--Manuel
caught swiftly at Talbot's arm. "What is that?" To straining ears came
the unmistakable throb of machinery. They snapped off their torches and
crouched in Stygian darkness. Not a ray of light was to be seen. Talbot
knew that in following the ore stratum, the Wiley gallery took several
twists. Laboriously he and Manuel advanced with the gas tube. It was
stiflingly close. He counted the turns, one, two, three. Now the roar
of machinery was a steady reverberation that shook the tunnel. He
whispered to Manuel:
"Go back and wait for me at the mouth of the shaft. Only one of us must
risk taking the gas tube any nearer the enemy. Here, take my watch. It
is now two-forty-five. If I don't rejoin you by four o'clock touch off
the explosive."
Manuel started to protest. "Do as I say," commanded Talbot. "The fate
of the world is at stake. Give me an hour; but no longer--remember!"
Left alone in the clammy darkness Talbot wiped the sweat from his face.
Grabbing one end of the rope sling in which the tube was fastened, he
pulled it ahead. There was a certain amount of unavoidable noise; rock
rattled, earth fell; but he reasoned shrewdly enough that the roar of
the machinery would drown this. Beyond a crevice created by a cave-in
he saw an intense light play weirdly. He squirmed through the crevice
and pulled the tube after him.
His mind reconstructed the mine ahead. He recollected that when the
lead of this mine had petered out, the owners had begun to sink the
shaft deeper into the earth before abandoning the mine. This meant that
the foot of the shaft, with the addition of an encroaching twenty feet
of the southern gallery, was deeper by some several yards than the
floor of the tunnel in which he stood. Here was the logical place to
set the gas tube, nose pointed ahead.
With trembling fingers he loosened the screwed-in nose of the tube with
a wrench. A slight hiss told of the deadly gas's escape. It would
inevitably flow towards the shaft, drawn by the slight suction of
machinery, following the easiest direction of expansion. Now Talbot's
work was done, and if he had immediately retreated all would have been
well, but the weird light fascinated him. Here he was, one man in the
bowels of earth pitting his strength, his ingenuity against something
incredible, unbelievable. Beings from an atomic universe, from a world
buried within the atom; beings attacking his own earth with uncanny
methods of destruction. Oh, it was impossible, absurd, but he must look
at them, he must see.
Scarcely daring to breathe, he squirmed, he crawled, and suddenly he
saw. He was looking down into an underground crypt flooded with
brilliant light. That crypt had been altered out of all recognition,
its greater expanse of roof supported with massive pillars, the light
screened away from the shaft. But it was not all this which riveted his
staring eyes. No--it was the machines; strange, twisted things,
glowing, pulsing, and--in the light of his knowledge--menacing and
sinister.
Talbot gasped. Almost at once he observed the birds, twelve of them,
two standing in front of what appeared to be a great square of polished
crystal, wearing metal caps and goggles, heads cocked forward intently.
The others also perched in front of odd machines like graven images.
That was the uncanny thing about the birds: they appeared to be doing
nothing. Only the occasional jerk of a head, the filming of a hard
golden eye, gave them a semblance of life. But, none the less, there
could be no mistaking the fact that they were the guiding, the
directing geniuses back of all the pulsing, throbbing mechanisms.
Half mesmerized by the sight, forgetful of time and place, Talbot
leaned forward in awe. There was a great funnel, a shallow cabinet, and
out of the cabinet poured an intense reddish beam, and out of the
beam....
It was a minute before he understood, and then comprehension came to
him. Those dark spots shooting from the cabinet, no larger than peas,
were the mysterious drifting globes whose scattered seed was fast
covering miles of Arizonian soil with impenetrable jungle. From a
universe in a piece of matter no larger than a pin-head, from a
sub-atomic world, the weapons of an alien intelligence were ruthlessly
being hurled against man, to conquer, to destroy him.
And now it was made plain to him why the drifting globes had seemed to
materialize out of thin air. Being infinitesimally small parts of an
atom, these globes were released from the cabinet and soon assumed the
size of peas; they were guided across the crypt, up the old Wiley
shaft, and high in the air, somewhere in space, enlarged to immense
proportions. How? Talbot could not guess. By some manipulation of
science and machinery beyond that of earth.
Engrossed, he moved an inch forward, craned his head, and in that
moment it happened. Beneath his weight a section of earth and rock
crumbled, cracked, slid forward, and he plunged headlong to the floor
below, striking his skull with stunning force!
He came to himself, staring up into the dour-looking face of a tall
man. He recollected pitching forward among the birds and the machines.
But the birds and the machines had disappeared and he was lying in an
odd room without windows but lit with a soft radiance. Bewildered, he
sat up.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
The man's beard looked straggly, untrimmed.
"My name," he said, "is Reubens--Professor Reubens."