Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Stories June, September,
November 1932, January 1933. Extensive research did not uncover
any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
The Table of Contents is not part of the original magazines.
Two Thousand Miles Below
_A Four-Part Novel_
By Charles Willard Diffin
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PROLOGUE
I A Man Named Smith
II Gold!
III Red Drops
IV The Light in the Crater
V The Attack
VI Into the Crater
VII The Ring
VIII The Darkness
IX A Subterranean World
X Plumb Loco
XI The White-Hot Pit
XII Dreams
XIII "N-73 Clear!"
XIV Emergency Order
XV The Lake of Fire
XVI The Metal Shell
XVII Gor
XVIII The Dance of Death
XIX The Voice of the Mountain
XX Taloned Hands
XXI Suicide?
XXII The Red-Flowering Vine
XXIII Oro and Grah
XXIV The Bargain
XXV Smithy
XXVI Power!
* * * * *
PROLOGUE
[Sidenote: Rawson learns to his cost that the life-spark of a fabled
race glows in the black heart of a dead, Western volcano.]
[Illustration: _The derrick was falling as he fired again._]
In the gray darkness the curved fangs of a saber-toothed tiger gleamed
white and ghostly. The man-figure that stood half crouched in the
mouth of the cave involuntarily shivered.
"Gwanga!" he said. "He goes, too!"
But the man did not move more than to shift a club to his right hand.
Heavy, that club, and knotted and with a head of stone tied and
wrapped with leather thongs; but Gor of the tribe of Zoran swung it
easily with one of his long arms. He paid only casual attention as the
great cat passed on into the night.
One leathery hand was raised to shield his slitted eyes; the wind from
the north struck toward the mouth of the cave, and it brought with it
cold driving rain and whirling flurries of frozen pellets that bit and
stung.
Snow! Gor had traveled far, but never had he seen a storm like this
with white cold in the air. Again a shiver that was part fear rippled
through his muscles and gripped with invisible fingers at his knotted
arms.
"The Beast of the North is angry!" he told himself.
Through the dark and storm, animals drifted past before the blasts of
cold. They were fleeing; they were full of fear--fear of something
that the dull mind of Gor could not picture. But in that mind was the
same wordless panic.
Gor, the man-animal of that pre-glacial day, stared wondering,
stupidly, into the storm with eyes like those of the wild pig. His
arms were long, almost to his knees; his hair, coarse and matted, hung
in greasy locks about his savage face. Behind his low, retreating
forehead was place for little of thought or reason. Yet Gor was a man,
and he met the threat of disaster by something better than blind,
terrified, animal flight.
A scant hundred in the tribe--men and women and little pot-bellied
brown children--Gor gathered them together in the cave far back from
the mouth.
"For many moons," he told them by words and signs, "the fear has been
upon us. There have been signs for us to see and for all the
Four-feet--for Hathor, the great, and for little Wahti in his hole in
the sand-hill. Hathor has swung his long snout above his curved tusks
and has cried his fear, and the Eaters of the Dead have circled above
him and cried _their_ cry.
"And now the Sun-god does not warm us. He has gone to hide behind the
clouds. He is afraid--afraid of the cold monster that blows white
stinging things in his breath.
"The Sun-god is gone--now, when he should be making hot summer! The
Four-feet are going. Even Gwanga, the long-toothed, puts his tail
between his legs and runs from the cold."
* * * * *
The naked bodies shivered in the chill that struck in from the
storm-wrapped world; they drew closer their coverings of fur and
hides. The light of their flickering fires played strange tricks with
their savage faces to make them still uglier and to show the dull
terror that gripped them.
"Run--we must run--run away--the breath of the beast is on us--he
follows close--run...." Through the mutterings and growls a sick child
whimpered once, then was still. Gor was speaking again:
"Run! Run away!" he mocked them. "And where shall the tribe of Zoran
go? With Gwanga, to make food for his cat belly or to be hammered to
death with the stones of the great tribes of the south?"
There was none to reply--only a despairing moan from ugly lips. Gor
waited, then answered his own question.
"No!" he shouted, and beat upon his hairy chest that was round as the
trunk of a tree. "Gor will save you--Gor, the wanderer! You named me
well: my feet have traveled far. Beyond the red-topped mountains of
the north I have gone; I have seen the tribes of the south, and I
brought you a head for proof. I have followed the sun, and I have gone
where it rises."
In the half light, coarse strands of hair waved as hideous heads were
nodded in confirmation of the boast, though many still drooped
despairingly.
"If Gor leads, where will he go?" a voice demanded.
Another growled: "Gor's feet have gone far: where have they gone where
the Beast cannot follow our scent?"
"Down!" said Gor with unconscious dramatic effect, and he pointed at
the rocky floor of the cave. "I have gone where even the Beast of the
North cannot go. The caves back of this you have seen, but only Gor
has seen the hole--the hole where a strong man can climb down; a hole
too small for the great beast to get through. Gor has gone down to
find more caves below and more caves below them.
"Far down is a place where it is always warm. There is water in lakes
and streams. Gor has caught fish in that water, and they were good.
There are growing things like the round earth-plants that come in the
night, and they, too, were good.
"Will you follow Gor?" he demanded. "And when the Beast is gone and
the Sun-god comes back we will return--"
* * * * *
The blast that found its way inside the cave furnished its own answer;
the echoing, "We follow! We follow!" spoken through chattering teeth
was not needed. The women of the tribe shivered more from the cold
than from fear as they gathered together their belongings, their furs
and hides and crude stone implements; and the shambling man-shape,
called Gor, led them to the hole down which a strong man might climb,
led them down and still down....
But, as to the rest--Gor's promise of safe return to the light of day
and that outer world where the Sun-god shone--how was Gor to know that
a mighty glacier would lock the whole land in ice for endless years,
and, retreating, leave their upper caves filled and buried under a
valley heaped with granite rocks?
Even had the way been open to the land above, Gor himself could never
have known when that ice-sheet left. For when that day came and once
more the Sun-god drew steamy spirals from the drenched and thawing
ground, Gor, deep down in the earth, had been dead for countless
years. Only the remote descendants of that earlier tribe now lived in
their subterranean home, though even with them there were some who
spoke at times of those legends of another world which their ancestors
had left.
And through the long centuries, while evolution worked its slow
changes, they knew nothing of the vanishing ice, of the sun and the
gushing waters, the grass and forests that came to cover the earth.
Nor did their descendants, exploring interminable caves, learning to
tame the internal fires, always evolving, always growing, have any
remote conception of a people who sailed strange seas to find new
lands and live and multiply and build up a country of sky-reaching
cities and peaceful farmlands, of sunlit valleys and hills.
But always there were adventurous souls who made their way deeper and
deeper into the earth; and among them in every generation was one
named Gor who was taught the tribal legends and who led the
adventurers on. But legends have a trick of changing, and instead of
searching upward, it was through the deeper strata that they made
their slow way in their search for a mystic god and the land of their
fathers' fathers....
CHAPTER I
_A Man Named Smith_
Heat! Heat of a white-hot sun only two hours old. Heat of blazing
sands where shimmering, gassy waves made the sparse sagebrush seem
about to burst into flames. Heat of a wind that might have come out of
the fire-box of a Mogul on an upgrade pull.
A highway twisted among black masses of outcropping lava rock or
tightened into a straightaway for miles across the desert that swept
up to the mountain's base. The asphalt surface of the pavement was
almost liquid; it clung stickily to the tires of a big car, letting go
with a continuous, ripping sound.
Behind the wheel of the weatherbeaten, sunburned car, Dean Rawson
squinted his eyes against the glare. His lean, tanned face was almost
as brown as his hair. The sun had done its work there; it had set
crinkly lines about the man's eyes of darker brown. But the deeper
lines in that young face had been etched by responsibility; they made
the man seem older than his twenty-three years, until the steady eyes,
flashing into quick amusement, gave them the lie.
And now Rawson's lips twisted into a little grin at his own
discomfort--but he knew the desert driver's trick.
"A hundred plus in the shade," he reasoned silently. "That's hot any
way you take it. But taking it in the face at forty-five an hour is
too much like looking into a Bessemer converter!"
He closed the windows of his old coupe to within an inch of the top,
then opened the windshield a scant half inch. The blast that had been
drawing the moisture from his body became a gently circulating current
of hot air.
He had gone only another ten miles after these preparations for fast
driving, when he eased the big weatherbeaten car to a stop.
* * * * *
On his right, reaching up to the cool heights under a cloudless blue
sky, the gray peaks of the Sierras gave promise of relief from the
furnace breath of the desert floor. There were even valleys of snow
glistening whitely where the mountains held them high. A watcher, had
there been one to observe in the empty land, might have understood
another traveler's pausing to admire the serene majesty of those
heights--but he would have wondered could he have seen Rawson's eyes
turned in longing away from the mountains while he stared across the
forbidding sands.
There were other mountains, lavender and gray, in the distance. And
nearer by, a matter of twenty or thirty elusive miles through the
dancing waves of hot air, were other barren slopes. Across the rolling
sand-hills wheel marks, faint and wind-blown, led straight from the
highway toward the parched peaks.
"Tonah Basin!" Rawson was thinking. "It's there inside these hills.
It's hotter than this is by twenty degrees right this minute--but I
wish I could see it. I'd like to have one more look before I face that
hard-boiled bunch in the city!"
He looked at his watch and shook his head. "Not a chance," he
admitted. "I'm due up in Erickson's office in five hours. I wonder if
I've got a chance with them...."
* * * * *
Five hours of driving, and Rawson walked into the office of Erickson,
Incorporated, with a steady step. Another hour, and his tanned face
had gone a trifle pale; his lips were set grimly in a straight line
that would not relax under the verdict he felt certain he was about to
hear.
For an hour he had faced the steely-eyed man across the long table in
the Directors Room--faced him and replied to questions from this man
and the half-dozen others seated there. Skeptical questions, tricky
questions; and now the man was speaking:
"Rawson, six months ago you laid your Tonah Basin plans before
us--plans to get power from the center of the Earth, to utilize that
energy, and to control the power situation in this whole Southwest.
It looked like a wild gamble then, but we investigated. It still looks
like a gamble."
"Yes," said Rawson, "it is a gamble. Did I ever call it anything
else?"
"The Ehrmann oscillator," the man continued imperturbably, "invented
in 1940, two years ago, solves the wireless transmission problem, but
the success of your plan depends upon your own invention--upon your
straight-line drills that you say will not wander off at a tangent
when they get down a few miles. And more than that, it depends upon
you.
"Even that does not damn the scheme; but, Rawson, there's only one
factor we gamble on. No wild plans, no matter how many hundreds of
millions they promise: no machines, no matter what they are designed
to do, get a dollar of our backing. It's men we back with our money!"
Rawson's face was set to show no emotion, but within his mind were
insistent, clamoring thoughts:
"Why can't he say it and get it over with? I've lost--what a
hard-boiled bunch they are!--but he doesn't need to drag out the
agony." But--but what was the man saying?
"Men, Rawson!" the emotionless voice continued. "And we've checked up
on you from the time you took your nourishment out of a bottle; it's
you we're backing. That's why we have organized the little company of
Thermal Explorations, Limited. That's why we've put a million of hard
coin into it. That's why we've put you in charge of operations."
He was extending a hand that Dean Rawson had to reach for blindly.
"I'd drill through to hell," Dean said and fought to keep his voice
steady, "with backing like that!"
He allowed his emotion to express itself in a shaky laugh. "Perhaps I
will at that," he added: "I'll certainly be heading in the right
direction."
* * * * *
Under another day's sun the hot asphalt was again taking the print of
the tires of Rawson's old car. But this time, when he came to the
almost obliterated marks that led through the sand toward distant
mountains, he stopped, partially deflated the tires to give them a
grip on the sand, and swung off.
"A fool, kid trick," he admitted to himself, "but I want to see the
place. I'll see plenty of it before I'm through, but right now I've
got to have a look; then I'll buckle down to work.
"Thermal Explorations, Limited!" The name rang triumphantly in his
mind. "A million things to do--men, crews for the drills, derricks....
We'll have to truck in over this road; I'll lay a plank road over the
sand. And water--we'll have to haul that, too, until we can sink a
well. We'll find water under there somewhere. I've got to see the
place...."
The black sides of the mountains were nearer: every outcropping rock
was plainly volcanic, and great sweeping slopes were beds of ash and
pumice; the wheel marks, where they showed at all, wound off and into
a canyon hidden in the tremendous hills that thrust themselves
abruptly from the desert floor.
The mountains themselves towered hugely at closer range, but the road
that Rawson followed climbed through them without traversing the
highest slopes. It was scarcely more than a trail, barely wide enough
for the car at times, but boulder-filled gullies showed where the
hands of men had worked to build it.
* * * * *
He came at last into the open where a shoulder of rock bent the road
outward above a sea of sand far below. And now the mountains showed
their circular arrangement--a great ring, twenty miles across. At one
side were three conical peaks, unmistakable craters, whose scarred
sides were smothered under ash and sand that had rained down from
their shattered tops in ages past. Yet, so hot they were, so clear-cut
the irregularly rimmed cups at their tops, that they seemed to have
pushed themselves up through the earth in that very instant. At their
bases were signs of human habitation--broken walls, scattered stone
buildings whose empty windows gaped blackly. This was all that
remained of New Rhyolite.
Rawson looked at the "ghost town" which had never failed to interest
him, but he gave no thought now to the hardy prospectors who had built
it or to the vein of gold that had failed them. His searching eyes
came back to the fiery pit, the Tonah Basin, a vast cauldron of sand
and ash--great sweeps of yellow and gray and darker brown into which
the sun was pouring its rays with burning-glass fierceness.
But to Rawson, there was more than the eye could see. He was picturing
a great powerhouse, steel derricks, capped pipes that led off to
whirring turbines, generators, strings of cables stretching out on
steel supports into the distance, a wireless transmitter--and all of
this the result of his own vision, of the stream he would bring from
deep in the earth!
Then, abruptly, the pictures faded. Far below him on the yellow,
sun-blasted floor, a fleck of shadow had moved. It appeared suddenly
from the sand, moved erratically, staggeringly, for a hundred feet,
then vanished as if something had blotted it out--and Dean Rawson
knew that it was the shadow of a man.
* * * * *
The road widened beyond the turn. He had intended to swing around; he
had wanted only to take a clear picture of the place with him. But now
the big car's gears wailed as he took the downgrade in second, and the
brakes, jammed on at the sharp curves, added their voice to the chorus
of haste.
"Confounded desert rats!" Rawson was saying under his breath. "They'll
chance anything--but imagine crossing country like that! And he hasn't
a burro--he's got only the water he can carry in a canteen!"
But even the canteen was empty, he found, when he stopped the car in a
whirl of loose sand beside a prone figure whose khaki clothes were
almost indistinguishable against the desert soil.
Before Rawson could get his own lanky six feet of wiry length from the
car, the man had struggled to his feet. Again the little blot of
shadow began its wavering, uncertain, forward movement.
He was a little shorter than Rawson, a little heavier of build, and
younger by a year or two, although his flushed face and a two days'
stubble of black beard might have been misleading. Rawson caught the
staggering man and half carried him to the shadow of the car, the only
shelter in that whole vast cauldron of the sun.
From a mouth where a swollen tongue protruded thickly came an agonized
sound that was a cry for, "Water--water!" Rawson gave it to him as
rapidly as he dared, until he allowed the man to drink from the desert
bag at the last. And his keen eyes were taking in all the significant
details as he worked.
The khaki clothes earned a nod of silent approval. The compact roll
that had been slung from the younger man's shoulders, even the broad
shoulders themselves, and the square jaw, unshaved and grimy, got
Rawson's inaudible, "O. K.!" But the face was more burned than tanned.
* * * * *
He introduced himself when the stranger was able to stand. "I'm
Rawson, Dean Rawson, mining engineer when I'm working at it," he
explained. "I'm bound north. I'll take you out of this. You can travel
with me as far as you please."
The dark-haired youngster was plainly youthful now, as he stood erect.
His voice was recovering what must have been its usual hearty ring.
"I'm not trying to say 'thank you,'" he said, as he took Rawson's
hand. "I was sure sunk--going down for the last time--taps--all that
sort of thing! You pulled me out--the good old helping hand. Can't
thank a fellow for that--just return the favor or pass it on to
someone else. And, by the way--you won't believe it--but my name is
Smith."
Rawson smiled good-naturedly. "No," he agreed, "I don't believe it.
But it's a good, handy name. All right, Smithy, jump in! Here, let me
give you a lift; you're still woozy."
Rawson found his passenger uncommunicative. Not but what Smithy talked
freely of everything but himself, but it was of himself that Rawson
wanted to know.
"Drop me at the first town," said Smithy. "You're going north: I'm
south-bound--looking for a job down in Los. I won't take any more
short cuts; I was two days on this last one. I'll stick to the road."
They were through the mountains that ringed in the fiery pit of Tonah
Basin. Smooth sand lay ahead; only the shallow marks that his own
tires had ploughed needed to be followed. Dean Rawson turned and
looked with fair appraisal at the man he had saved.
"Drifter?" he asked himself silently. "Road bum? He doesn't look the
part; there's something about him...."
Aloud he inquired: "What's your line? What do you know?"
And the young man answered frankly: "Not a thing!"
* * * * *
Dean sensed failure, inefficiency. He resented it in this youngster
who had fought so gamely with death. His voice was harsh with a
curious sense of his own disappointment as he asked:
"Found the going too hard for you up north, did you? Well, it won't be
any easier--" But Smithy had interrupted with a weak movement of his
hand.
"Not too hard," he said laconically; "too damn soft! I don't know what
I'm looking for--pretty dumb: got a lot to learn!--but it'll be a job
that needs to take a good licking!"
"'Too damn soft!'" Dean was thinking. "And he tackled the desert
alone!" There was a lot here he did not understand. But the look in
the eyes of Smithy that met his own searching gaze and returned it
squarely if a bit whimsically--that was something he _could_
understand. Dean Rawson was a judge of men. The sudden impulse that
moved him was founded upon certainty.
"You've found that job," he said. "The desert almost got you a little
while ago--now it's due to take that licking you were talking about.
I'm going to teach it to lie down and roll over and jump through
hoops. Fact is, my job is to get it into harness and put it to work.
I'll be working right out there in the Basin where I found you. It
will be only about two degrees cooler than hell. If that sounds good
to you, Smithy, stick around."
He warmed oddly to the look in the younger man's deep-set, dark eyes,
as Smithy replied:
"Try to put me out, Rawson--just try to put me out!"