_Into the Crater_
Smithy's agonized face was above him when he came back to life. "God!"
Smithy was breathing. "I thought you were gone, Dean! I thought you
were dead!"
As it had been with Riley, there was one thought uppermost in Rawson's
bewildered mind: "The fire!" he choked. "He's swinging it...."
Then, after a time: "The derrick--it's falling! I went down with
it!... I hit--"
"I'll say you did," said the relieved Smithy. "The derrick smashed
across the bunkhouse, snapped you off, sent you skidding down the side
of a sand dune. It darned near scoured the clothes off you at that."
Slowly Rawson began to feel the return flow of life through his body;
the shock had jarred every nerve to insensibility. Slowly he
remembered and comprehended what had happened.
He was in his little office; he recognized his surroundings now. The
windows were open. Outside the sun was shining. He realized at last
the utter silence of that outer world.
He tried to raise himself from the cot, but fell back as his
surroundings began to spin. "The camp!" he gasped weakly. "The men--I
don't hear them."
"Gone!" Smith told him, while his eyes narrowed at some recollection
and his hand came up unconsciously to a bruise of his cheek. "They
beat it--went last night after the derrick fell. I tried to stop them.
The fools were crazy with fear--devils, hell, all that kind of stuff.
It all wound up in a fight--I couldn't hold 'em.
"You've got to get better kind of fast," he told Rawson. "We've got to
get out of here ourselves--that flame-throwing stuff is too strong for
me to take."
Rawson suddenly remembered the vague figure that had directed that
flame. "Did I get him?" he demanded eagerly.
"You got him, yes, but then a whole swarm of things boiled up out of
nowhere and carried him off! We weren't any of us close enough to
see. The men said they were devils; I'm not sure they were wrong,
either. Dean, old man, we're up against something rotten. We've got to
get fixed for a fight; we can't handle this by ourselves."
* * * * *
Rawson was silent. He spoke slowly at last:
"You mean we've got to quit--quit without knowing what we're up
against. Can you imagine what they'll say to me back in town? Scared
out, licked by something I've never even seen!"
"Scared?" Smithy inquired. "You couldn't find a better word for it if
you hunted through the whole dictionary. Scared? Why, say, I'm so damn
scared I'm shaking yet, and the only thing that will cure me of it is
to look at those devils along the top of a machine gun! We'll go catch
us some equipment and a few service men--"
"You're a good guy, Smithy," Rawson reached out and gripped one brown
hand. "And we'll do as you say; but first I've got to get a line on
things. I'm becoming as irrational as the men. I'm imagining all sort
of crazy things."
"You don't have to imagine them." Smithy's voice was strained; it
showed the tension under which he was laboring. "Men or beasts--God
knows what they are!--but when they come up from nowhere--"
"Out of the sand," Rawson explained.
Smithy stared at him. "Out of the sand," he repeated. "Then, when they
cut a man in two, melt steel as if it were butter, pull a few tons of
metal down out of sight as easy as we would sink it in the ocean,
flash their lights over in the ghost town, up on top of a volcano--"
"Stop!" shouted Rawson unexpectedly. Some sudden gleam of
understanding had flashed through his mind. He dragged himself to his
feet and staggered to the doorway where he clung until the nausea of a
whirling world had passed. "The dust! The dust!" he gasped.
Smithy put a hand on his shoulder. Plainly he thought Rawson out of
his mind. "Easy, old-timer," he cautioned. "We'll get out of here. I
hate to make you walk in the shape you're in, but the dirty cowards
ran off with the trucks. They even took your car; there isn't a thing
here on wheels."
But Rawson did not hear. He was staring off across the sand, and he
was muttering bitter words.
"Fool! Oh, you utter fool!" he said. "The dust--the dust." Then he let
the roughly tender hands of Smithy guide him back to the cot where he
fell into a troubled sleep.
* * * * *
The comparative coolness of dusk was tempering the feverish midday
heat when Rawson awoke. And, strangely, his troubles and all his
conflicting plans had been simplified by the magic of sleep. His
course was entirely plain. He was going to the crater again.
"What's there?" Smithy demanded. "What do you think that you'll find?"
"I don't know," was the reply.
"Then why--what the devil's the idea?"
"It's my job. They put it up to me, Erickson and his crowd. I've got
to go."
And nothing Smithy could say seemed able to reach Rawson and swerve
him from his single idea.
"You'll be safe on the road," Rawson told him, while he filled a
canteen with water in preparation for his own trip. "You can get to
the highway by morning."
Smithy did not trouble to reply. Was Rawson out of his mind? He could
not be sure. Certainly he had got an awful bump, but there were no
bones broken. However, it might be that he was still dazed--a crack on
the head might have done it.
But there was no use in further argument, he admitted to himself. Dean
was going to the crater again--there was no stopping him--but he was
not going alone; Smithy could see to that.
* * * * *
Again Rawson took the more difficult ascent. They went first to the
ghost town: the slope above Little Rhyolite would save weary miles.
But, once there, they knew that the route was not a place where they
would care to be in the night. The realization came when Smithy,
walking where they had been the day before, passing the sand dune
where the wind had been scouring, seized Rawson's arm.
"I thought so," he said softly. "I thought I saw something there the
other day, but the sand fell in and hid it. I didn't know the
old-timers went in for subways in Little Rhyolite."
And Rawson looked as did Smithy, in wondering amazement, at the
roughly round opening in the sand, a tunnel mouth, driven through the
shifting sands--a tunnel, if Rawson was any judge, lined with brown
glistening glass.
Understanding came quickly.
"The jet of flame!" he exclaimed half under his breath. "They melted
their way through; the sand turned to glass; they held it some way for
an instant while it hardened." He walked cautiously toward the dark
entrance and peered inside.
Darkness but for the nearer glinting reflections from walls that had
once been molten and dripping. The tunnel dipped down at a slight
angle, then straightened off horizontally. Rawson could have stood
upright in it with easily another two feet of headroom to spare.
"And that," said Smithy, "is how the dirty rats got over to the camp.
Like moles in their runway. No wonder they could pop up from nowhere.
But, Dean, old man, I'm thinkin' we're up against something we haven't
dared speak of to each other. Don't tell me that it's just men we've
got to meet--"
"Wait," Rawson begged in a hushed whisper. "Wait till we know. That's
why I didn't dare go out without something definite to report. We'll
go up--but not here. We'll get a line on this up top."
* * * * *
He led the way from the crumbling walls and skirted the mountain's
base to the place where he had climbed before. And, with the help of a
supporting arm at times, he found himself again in the great cleft in
the rocks.
Darkness now made the passageway a place of somber shadows. The broad
cupped crater lay beyond in silent waiting; the vast sand-filled pit
seemed, under the starlight, to have been only that instant cooled.
The twisted rocks that formed the rim had been caught in the very
instant of their tortures and frozen to deep silence and eternal
death: the black masses of tufa, protruding from the packed ashy sand
might have been buried by the smothering mass but a moment before. It
was a place of death, a place where nothing moved--until again the
breeze that whirled gustily over the saw-tooth crags snatched at the
sand in that lowest pit and drew it up in a spiral of dust.
The word was on Rawson's lips. "Dust--dust in the crater. Fool! I said
I could read sign; I thought I was a desert man."
"Dust? And why shouldn't there be dust? How do you usually have your
volcanoes arranged, old man?"
"Fine dust!" Rawson interrupted in the same whisper. He was glancing
sharply about him as if in fear of being overheard. "See, the wind is
blowing it. Coarse sand and pumice--that's to be expected; but light
dust in a place that the winds have been sweeping for the last million
years! I don't have them arranged that way, Smithy--not unless the
sand has been recently disturbed!"
* * * * *
He moved soundlessly across the sand. There was no chance for
concealment; the surface was too smooth for that. Yet he wished, as he
moved onward down the long, gentle slope, that he had been able to
keep under cover. In all the wide bowl of the great crater top was
nothing but dead ashes of fires gone long centuries before, coarse,
igneous rock--nothing to set the little nerves of one's spine to
tingling. Rawson tried to tell himself he was alone. Even the gun in
his hand seemed an absurd precaution. Yet he knew, with a certainty
that went beyond mere seeing, that invisible eyes were upon him.
The blocks were massive when he drew near to them. They were buried in
the sand, their sides like mirrors, their edges true and straight.
"Crystals," Rawson tried to tell himself, but he knew they were not.
Gun in hand, he moved among the great rocks. Open sand lay beyond,
running off at a steeper pitch to make a throat--a smaller pit in the
great pit of the crater itself. Rawson noted it, then forgot it as he
stooped for something that lay half hidden, its protruding end shining
under the light of the stars, as he had seen it gleam before at the
derrick's base.
He snatched up the metal tube, noting the lava tip, and that it was
like the one Smithy had found in the ghost town. The tube, clearly,
was part of some other mechanism, and Rawson realized with startling
suddenness that he was holding in his hand the jet of a
flame-thrower--the same one, perhaps, that had almost sent him to his
death.
The thought, while he was still thinking it, was blotted from his
mind. He was thrown suddenly to the sandy earth; the sand was slipping
swiftly from beneath his feet; he was scrambling on all fours, clawing
wildly for some anchorage that would keep him from being swept away.
* * * * *
He touched a corner of shining stone, drew himself to it, reached its
slanting side, then scrambled frenziedly to the top and threw himself
about to face the place of slipping sands. But where the sand had
been, his wildly glaring eyes found only a black hole--a vertical
bore, like the ancient throat of the volcano; and this, like the
tunnel in the sand, was lined with smooth and glistening glass.
It was black at first, a yawning, ominous maw, till the polished sides
caught a reflection from below and blazed red with the glare of hidden
fires.
No time was needed for Dean's quick searching eyes to grasp the
meaning of the change. Whatever had menaced the camp had set this
trap. He swung sharply to leap from the block, but stopped at the
sight of Smith's chunky figure coming slowly across the sand.
"Back!" he shouted. His voice was almost a scream, shrill and
crackling with excitement. "Get back, Smithy! I'm coming!"
* * * * *
He would have leaped. Below the block the sand bulged upward as a
yellow animal-thing came clawing up into the night. Dimly he saw
it--saw this one and the others that must have been hidden in the
sand. They were between him and Smithy! A blaze of red came from
behind him--there must be others there! He snatched his gun from its
holster as he turned.
Flames were hissing into the darkness, five or six of them in lines of
hot crimson fire. They changed to green as he watched, and the livid
light spread out in ghastly illumination over the creatures that
directed them.
He saw them now--saw them in one age-long instant while he stood in
horror on the black shining rock. He saw their heads, red-skinned,
pointed, their staring eyes as large as saucers--owl-eyes. They were
naked, and their bodies, that would have been almost crimson in the
light of day, were blotched and ghastly in the green light. And each
one held in long clawlike hands a thing of shining metal--a lava tip
like the one he had found projected and ended in the hissing line of
green.
A flame slashed downward. For one sickening second he waited to feel
the heat of it, though it was many feet away; in his mind he cringed
involuntarily from the ripping knife-cut of the fiery blade that would
blast the life from him; then he knew that the flame had passed--it
was tearing at the rock beneath his feet. And the cold stone turned to
liquid fire at that touch.
It leaped in a splashing fountain to the sand. The blaze turned the
whole pit to flame. On even the farthest rugged crag of the crater's
rim the red light glowed. Before Rawson could raise his own weapon the
blast had torn the rock from beneath his feet. The great mass tipped,
rolled. Rawson's arms were flung wide in an effort to save himself.
Then below him was the black throat with its walls of glass: he was
plunging headlong into it, turning as he fell--and somewhere, far down
in that throat, was the red glow of waiting fires. He saw it again and
again as he fell....