_Power!_
A girl whose creamy body was strangely unsoiled by smoke or grime,
whose jeweled breast-plates flashed in the light of her torch while
the loose wrappings about her waist whipped against her as she ran.
And Rawson, naked but for the golden loin cloth, running beside her.
Then Smithy, and ten others in the khaki uniform of the service--it
was all that was left of the fifty who had dared the depths. And now
all of them were harried and driven like helpless animals in the
burrows and runways of that under-world.
But not entirely helpless. Colonel Culver had been right: their rifles
outranged the flame-throwers. And Rawson, looking past that first
burst of rifle fire, saw the one flame that had reached them whip
upward as its owner fell. Others of the Reds came crowding in after,
and the jets of their weapons made little areas of light as they
crashed to the floor. Then Colonel Culver took charge of the retreat.
Ahead of them and behind them was impenetrable darkness; only the
nearby walls were illumined by the torch that Loah had been forced to
turn on. And out of that darkness at any moment might come devastating
flames. Culver detailed two men as a rear guard and two others to run
ahead a few paces in advance. At intervals of a minute or two their
rifles would crack, and the echoes would be pierced by the whining
scream of ricochets, as their bullets glanced from the walls.
"We may not need them up ahead," Culver shouted to Rawson. "I don't
understand it. The place seems deserted--there were plenty of them
here before!"
"They've got something else to think of," Rawson shouted in reply. "I
killed Phee-e-al--he was their leader. But they're after us now.
They'll be running through other passages, cutting in ahead of us."
The tunnel turned and bent upward. For a full half mile they ran
straight in a stiff climb. Between gasping breaths Colonel Culver
shouted hoarsely: "Won't it ever turn? If they bring up their damned
heat-ray machines they'll get us on a straightaway like this!"
Then Smithy's voice outshouted his with a note of hope: "We're almost
there; I remember this place. There's where we mounted the
searchlight. They've ripped everything out. Up ahead, one turn to the
right, then a quarter mile, then a turn toward the crater. That runs
straight for a mile, but there's a field gun at the bottom of the
volcano. We'll be safe when we're on that last stretch."
* * * * *
Ahead of them the rifles of the two who ran in advance crashed out in
a fury of fire as a green glow appeared. But this time the flame did
not die; and Rawson, staring with hot, wide-opened eyes, saw that the
ribbon of green swept transversely across the tunnel.
He could hardly stand when he came to a stop. Beside him Loah was
swaying with weariness. The walls echoed only the hoarse, panting
breath of the men. Then they crept slowly forward, where the passage
went steadily up. Loah's light was out; she had slipped the cap on the
torch at the first sight of that green.
They stopped but ten feet short of the deadly blaze. From a narrow
rift in the left wall it streamed outward, the rock at the edges of
that crack turning to red at its touch. It beat upon the opposite
wall, where already the stone was melting to throw over them a white
glare and the glow of heat. And, like a shimmering, silken barrier,
whose touch could mean only instant death, it reached across the wide
tunnel at the height of a man's waist and moved slowly up and down.
The heaviest armor plate ever rolled could have formed no more
impenetrable a barrier.
"And we almost made it," said Smithy slowly. "Look, beyond
there--another hundred feet. There's the bend in the tunnel, a sharp
turn--and we almost got around!"
Rawson reached for Loah's light. In the wall where the flame was
striking, only a dozen steps back, he had seen another dark mouth, a
ragged crack in the rock. He sprang to the entrance; it might be there
was another way around. His first glance told the story, for he saw
the walls draw together again not a hundred feet off.
"A blind alley," he groaned.
* * * * *
One of the two who had been their advance guard snapped his rifle to
his shoulder. He was aiming at the glowing crack where the green light
was issuing.
"A ricochet," he growled. "It may go on in and mess 'em up." But there
was no whine of a glancing bullet that followed his shot; the
softened wall had cushioned the impact.
Another man sprang beside him. He was shouting at the top of his voice
while one hand reached into a bag that hung at his waist. "Get back,
everyone," he said. "If I miss...." He did not finish the sentence,
but pulled the pin from a hand grenade, then took careful aim and
threw.
It went high--thrown there purposely; he had not dared aim it into the
flame. But it struck the crevice fairly, and they heard it rattle on
inside. The next instant brought the crack and roar of its explosion.
Like a winking signal light the green barrier vanished. Where it had
been was only blackness and the dying glow of molten rock. Then, a
hundred feet beyond, up close to the roof, the bend of the tunnel
turned red; it seemed bursting into flame. Far back of them, down the
long sloping way where they had come, shrill voices were
screaming--and still there was no green flame to account for that
tunnel end flaming red.
Rawson stood motionless. Loah, and the others beside him, seemed
likewise petrified, until the voice of Culver jarred them into action.
"The ray!" he shouted. "It's the heat ray, damn them! Quick, jump into
that cave!"
* * * * *
They had all retreated through fear of the grenade; they were opposite
the black place into which Rawson had looked. Loah was close beside
Dean; he threw her with all his strength into the black mouth of the
cave, then he was one of a crowding, stumbling mass of men who
followed after, and their going was lighted by a terrible torch of
flame.
One man had stood apart from the others, farther across the wide
corridor. His khaki-clad body flashed suddenly to incandescence, then
fell to the floor. And inside the cave, where the walls came abruptly
together to cut off any further retreat, Colonel Culver spoke softly.
"One more gone," he said. "That was Oakley. Well, he never knew what
it was that hit him--and it looks as if we'll all get the same."
Through it all, Rawson had clung to his flame-thrower; unconsciously
his hand had held fast to the bent handle of the cylindrical weapon.
Now he set it down slowly upon the floor, then straightened his aching
body laboriously.
Loah's light was still gleaming. He saw her eyes searching for his,
half in terror, half in wonderment. Strange men with strange
thundering weapons--he knew she was wondering if they still dared
hope, wondering if these warriors of Rawson's race might be able to
work further magic.
Dean put one arm tenderly about her and drew her close and his other
hand came to rest upon Smithy's shoulder.
"It's the end, dear," he told the girl softly. "It's the end of our
journey. You've been so dear and so brave. Pretty tough to lose out
when we'd almost fought clear." Then, to Smithy: "Loah came back to
save me--refused to go when she could have got away and been safe."
* * * * *
Already the air was stifling. The tunnel beyond the mouth of the cave
was hot, though only at its end, where the invisible ray struck the
rock surface squarely, was there red, glowing heat. Rawson suddenly
saw none of it. He was seeing in his mind the world up above, his own
world of great, free, sunlit spaces. Suddenly he was hungry for some
closer link, no matter how slight, to bind him to that world.
"What day is it?" he asked. "Have you kept track of time?"
Smithy looked at him wonderingly. "Yes," he said, then added: "Oh, I
see. You want to know what day this is when we die. It's the
twentieth, Dean"--he looked at the watch on his wrist--"just two
o'clock, the afternoon of the twentieth."
Within him, Rawson felt a dull resentment. He was being denied even
this last trifling solace. "You're wrong," he said sharply. "You
slipped up on your count."
"It doesn't make any real difference," Smithy said. But Rawson went
on:
"We left the inner world on the nineteenth. At noon on the twentieth
Gor was to cut loose the flame-throwers, melt a hole in the floor of
the ocean. But it didn't work. I had hoped I could wipe out the
mole-men, turn a solid stream of water down a shaft for over six
hundred miles. It would have gone through the Zone of Fire, come
flooding up into the mole-men world and spread out all over down deep
where it's hot. It would have hit the Lake of Fire--all that!"
"I don't know what you are talking about, Dean." Smithy's voice was
intentionally soothing; he knew Rawson was talking wildly. "But I know
I am right on the time. We've kept track of it every hour since--"
Rawson's talk had sounded like insanity in Smithy's ears. He would
have gone on--he didn't want to see Dean Rawson go out like that--but
now he stopped. The rock was quivering beneath his feet.
And now Rawson, with a wild wordless cry, threw himself toward the
flame-thrower on the floor. His voice rose to what was almost a
scream. "It's worked!" he shouted in a delirium of joy. "It's the end
of the brutes!"
* * * * *
Then, in words which the others could not comprehend but which somehow
fired them with his own emotion: "Gor has cut it loose! Water,
millions of tons of it! The Zone of Fire--steam!..." He threw himself
flat on the floor as close to the hot mouth of the cave as he dared
go, and the green flame of his weapon ripped outward and up as he
aimed it.
From the passage, where it sloped downward toward the source of the
heat ray, the sound of shrill, whistling voices had swelled louder.
The whole tunnel now glowed green from the flames of an advancing
horde. They were bringing their ray projector with them, Rawson knew,
not that its beam was visible, but the white, dazzling glow from the
end wall where the tunnel turned was still there.
"Shoot above me!" Rawson shouted. "Don't stick your guns out into that
ray, but aim as straight down the tunnel as you can. Keep 'em busy.
Keep 'em from coming too close."
Above his head he heard the beginning of rifle fire as the men crowded
close to aim at the opposite wall at as flat an angle as they could.
The air grew shrill with the sound of ricochets as the bullets
glanced, but still the enemy came on, as their screeching voices told.
His own weapon was aimed up above. The roof of the tunnel was rough
and broken. He directed the flame against the top of a great black
granite block. In one place it was fractured. If he could cut it off
above, make it fall to the steeply slanting floor.... He worked the
full force of the blast methodically along the line he had chosen.
* * * * *
The air of the tunnel had been blowing gently, but now it came in
sharp gusts that whipped in through the mouth of the cave, while it
brought an unending growl and roar like distant gunfire from deep
within the earth. The breeze had swelled to a steady blast when the
rock crashed down.
"But that's no use," Culver had shouted, when the deafening sound of
its fall had ceased. "They'll melt it in a second with their ray."
Even as he spoke the great mass of granite softened and rolled
downward as the enemy shot their ray on its lower side. The heat of it
struck blastingly into the entrance to their retreat, yet still Rawson
kept on, sawing doggedly with the weapon of flame at other great
blocks above.
Now that distant thunder grew hugely in volume, and again the rocks
trembled beneath them. The wind in the tunnel grew suddenly to a wild
blast. It brought to them from a thousand other passages, the shrill,
demoniac shrieking of air that was torn and ripped on projecting
ledges of rock. Mingled with it was the sound of voices that screamed
in terror, and the echo of feet running in mad flight down the tunnel.
The mass of stone, that had been melting under the invisible ray,
cooled to red, then to black. Outside, the tunnel, now a place of
roaring winds, was lighted only by the single flame of Dean's weapon.
"They've gone!" Culver shouted. "The ray's off. Get outside! Now we'll
run for it!" And, with the others, Rawson sprang to his feet and
leaped out into the tunnel which was no longer a place of death.
* * * * *
He heard the sound of their hurrying feet and a voice that cried:
"Look out for the turn--the rock's hot," but he did not look after
them. He was standing squarely, bracing himself in the blast of air,
still directing the flame upon a block that hung stubbornly and would
not let go.
He knew that Loah alone stood near. He heard other feet; someone was
returning. Then Smithy was upon him, almost jarring him from his
careful pose. Smithy was shouting.
"Come back, Dean!" he cried. "Are you crazy? Don't you know they'll be
after us again?"
Rawson sprang as the big rock let go. It, too, crashed deafeningly
upon the floor and rolled sluggishly downward beside the high hummock
of glass that the first rock had become. They bulked hugely in the
passage. They were eight or ten feet high, reaching across from one
wall to the other.
Above them was still a space of four feet; Rawson estimated it
carefully while he looked at the ceiling above. Then he shook off
Smithy's hand that was dragging at him and returned to the attack; for
now, above the top of the barricade he had built, white ribbons of
vapor were streaming. He had to shout to his utmost to make Smith hear
above the shrill shriek of the blast.
"Steam!" he screamed into Smithy's ear. "Live steam! We could never
make it--before we got to the top we'd be cooked to a pulp. I've got
to block it, got to seal it off." A whole section of the ceiling tore
loose as he spoke, and the wind raised its voice like the scream of a
wounded animal--or the cry of an overwhelmed and stricken people--as
it tore through the space that remained.
* * * * *
It whipped the molten drops as they fell and made of them a deadly
rain. Rawson, staring through the clouds of hot steam that now wrapped
him about, called to Smithy to take Loah to safety, and kept the flame
where it should be--until at length the last aperture was closed, the
last gap in the wall filled in. And even after that Rawson kept the
flame still playing above that wall till he had melted rock and more
rock that flowed down to make the barrier a single heavy, solid mass.
Steam was coming now from the narrow cleft where the green light had
flashed out to bar their way. But that was simple, and he sealed the
gap shut with his flame.
He was gasping. The radiant heat from that molten mass had been
torture that his naked body could never have borne but for the
desperate necessity that drove him.
Smithy and Loah were again beside him. "Now," he choked, "we can go,
but if there are any cross passages I'll have to block them too."
"There aren't," said Smithy, and added: "I thought you were crazy.
You've saved us all, Dean; we never could have made it to the top.
That steam was getting hot--hot as if it had come right out of hell."
"It did," said Rawson. Then the flame-thrower fell from his nerveless
hand. He was swaying; his knees were trembling with weakness when
Smithy and Loah, on either side, took his burned arms tenderly and
helped him on where the others had gone.
Colonel Culver and a rescue party met them halfway. The Colonel had
seen his men safely to the bottom of the volcanic pit. Others had run
from their station beside a field gun to meet them; then Culver had
called for volunteers and had gone back. And now there were plenty of
willing arms to help.
* * * * *
The big lift, with its platforms of metal plates, awaited them at the
tunnel's end. There was room on it now for all who were left; there
was no crowding of men's bodies as there had been on the downward
passage. Rawson was stretched on the floor-plates, whose touch was
cool to his tortured body. Loah was seated that his head might rest
in her lap on that absurd little fragment of skirt. She bent above
him, whispering brokenly: "Dean-San--my dear--my own Dean-San! We
live, Dean-San. I can scarcely believe it, but I know that we live,
for I still have you."
But Dean was able to stand when that journey was done. First, though,
there were men who placed him carefully on a stretcher and carried
him, when he commanded, to the crater's outer rim. On the ashy floor
of the crater a big transport was waiting with idling motors, but Dean
would not let them put him inside. He wanted to look out across the
world, to see it in reality as he had seen it in his own mind when all
hope was gone. He wanted to look out once more across Tonah Basin and
let his eyes rest upon country he had known.
Loah and Smithy walked beside him, as the first-aid men carried him
toward that distant rim. The rocks there were cleft--it was the place
where he first had seen the inside of the crater's cup. There he had
them put him down; and, with the help of Loah and Smithy, he got
slowly to his feet. While they lifted him, he wondered at the sound in
this desert world where no sound should be. A terrific rushing, an
endless roar--and then his eyes found the clouds of steam.
* * * * *
Below him was the Basin, the tangled wreckage of his camp. And there,
where the derrick had stood, was a tall plume of white. It did not
begin close to the ground--superheated steam, until it cools and
condenses to water vapor, is invisible--but a hundred feet above the
sand. And, from there on up, two thousand feet sheer into the air, was
a straight shaft of vapor, rolling up for another thousand feet into
billowing clouds that the afternoon sun turned to glorious white.
"Power!" gasped Rawson. "Power--and it will be like that
indefinitely!" Then he laughed weakly. "I had to go down there to do
it, to make Erickson richer, but it was worth it. In there the ocean
will slowly subside. Gor and his people will find their lost lands;
the column of water in the shaft will hold the back-pressure of steam.
And here, I have Loah, and that's all--but that's enough!"
He put one arm, still with the bandages of the first-aid men, about
the girl. "I hope you'll be happy, dear," he said softly, and turned
back. But Smithy barred the way.
"That isn't all," said Smithy jubilantly. "You see, Dean, Erickson
fired you--Erickson thought you had run out on him. Instead of backing
you up, he quit. So I bought them all out. Whatever is there,
Dean--and it's worth more millions than I dare to think about--you own
half of! Now get back on that stretcher. Just because you've saved all
our necks up here on top of the earth, you mustn't think you can keep
an Army ship waiting all day!"
(_The End._)
End of Project Gutenberg's Two Thousand Miles Below, by Charles Willard Diffin