Two Thousand Miles Below
by Charles Willard Diffin · English · Gutenberg #29965 · 339,238 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Two Thousand Miles Below
Author: Charles Willard Diffin
Release date: September 12, 2009 [eBook #29965]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29965
Credits: Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWO THOUSAND MILES BELOW ***
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!"
CHAPTER II
_Gold!_
"Ten miles down, drillers!
Hell-bound, and proud of it!
Ten miles down, drillers!
Hark to what I say:
You're pokin' through the crust of hell
And braggin' too damn loud of it,
For, when you get to hell, you'll find
The devil there to pay."
From the black, night-wrapped valley, far below, the singer's voice
went silent with the slamming of a door in one of the bunkhouses. The
song was popular; some rimester in the Tonah Basin camp had written
the parody for the tormenting of the drill crews. And, high on the
mountainside, Dean Rawson hummed a few bars of the lilting air after
the singer's voice had ceased.
"Ten miles down!" he said at last to his assistant, sprawled out on
the stone beside him. "That's about right, Smithy. And maybe the rest
of the doggerel isn't so far off either. 'Pokin' through the crust of
hell'--well, there was hell popping around here once, and I am
gambling that the furnaces aren't all out."
They were on the outthrust shoulder of rock where the mountain road
hung high above the valley floor. Below, where, months before, Rawson
had rescued a man from desert death, was blackness punctured by points
of light--bunkhouse windows, the drilling-floor lights at the foot of
a big derrick, a single warning light at the derrick's top. But the
buildings and the towering steelwork of the derrick that handled the
rotary drills were dim and ghostly in the light of the stars.
"We've gone through some places I'd call plenty warm," said Smithy,
"but you--you craves it _hot_! Think we're about due?" he asked.
Rawson answered indirectly.
"One great big old he-crater!" he said. His outstretched arm swept the
whole circle of starlit mountains that enclosed the Basin. "That's
what this was once. Twenty miles across--and when it blew its head off
it must have sprayed this whole Southwest.
"Now, those craters"--he pointed contemptuously toward the three
conical peaks off to the right--"those were just blow-holes on the
side of this big one."
* * * * *
In the ragged ring of mountains, the throat of some volcanic monster
of an earlier age, the three cones towered hugely. Their tops were
plainly cupped; their ashy sloping sides swept down to the desert
floor. At their base, the gray walls of stone in the ghost town of
Little Rhyolite gleamed palely, like skeleton remains.
"I've seen steam, live steam," Rawson went on, "coming out of a
fissure in the rocks. I know there's heat and plenty of it down below.
We're about due to hit it. The boys are pulling the drill now; they
cut through into a whale of a cave down below there--"
He broke off abruptly to fix his attention on the dark valley below,
where lights were moving. One white slash of brilliance cut across the
dark ground; another, then a cluster of flood lights blazed out. They
picked the skeleton framework of the giant derrick in black relief
against the white glare of the sand. From far below; through the
quiet air, came sounds of excited shouting; the voices of men were
raised in sudden clamor.
"They've pulled the drill," said Rawson. "But why all the excitement?"
He had already turned toward their car when the crackle of six quick
shots came from below. His abrupt command was not needed; Smithy was
in the car while still the echoes were rolling off among the hills.
Their own lights flashed on to show the mountain grade waiting for
their quick descent.
* * * * *
The sandy floor of this part of the Tonah Basin was littered with the
orderly disorder of a big construction job--mountains of casing,
tubular drill rod, a foot in diameter; segmental bearings to clamp
around the rod every hundred feet and give it smooth play. Dean drove
his car swiftly along the surfaced road that was known as "Main
Street" to the entire camp.
There were men running toward the derrick--men of the day shift who
had been aroused from their sleep. Others were clustered about the
wide concrete floor where the derrick stood. Clad only in trousers and
shoes, their bodies, tanned by the desert sun, were almost black in
the glare of the big floods. They milled wildly about the derrick;
and, through all their clamor and shouting, one word was repeated
again and again:
"Gold! Gold! Gold!"
The big drill head was suspended above the floor. Dean Rawson, with
Smithy close at hand, pushed through the crowd. He was prepared to see
traces of gold in the sludge that was bailed out through the hollow
shaft--quartz, perhaps, whose richness had set the men wild before
they realized how impossible it would be to develop such a mine. But
Rawson stopped almost aghast at the glaring splendor of the golden
drill hanging naked in the blinding light.
* * * * *
Riley, foreman of the night shift, was standing beside it, a pistol in
his hand. "L'ave it be," he was commanding. "Not a hand do ye lay on
it till the boss gets here." At sight of Rawson he stepped forward.
"I shot in the air," he explained. "I knew ye were up in the hills for
a breath of coolness. I wanted to get ye here quick."
"Right," said Rawson tersely. "But, man, what have you done with the
drill? It's smeared over with gold!"
"Fair clogged wid it, sir," Riley's voice betrayed his own excitement.
"You remimber we couldn't pull it at first--the drill was jammed-like
after it bruk through at the ten-mile livil. Then it come free--and
luk at it! Luk at the damn thing! Sent down for honest work, it was,
and it comes back all dressed up in jewelry like a squaw Indian whin
there's oil struck on the reservation! Or is it gold ye were after all
the time?" he demanded.
"Gold! Gold!" a hundred voices were shouting. Dean hardly heard the
voice of the foreman, made suddenly garrulous with excitement. He
stared at the big drill head, heaped high with the precious metal. It
was jammed into the diamond-studded face of the drill; it filled every
crack and crevice, a smooth, solid mass on top of the head and against
the stem. A workman had brought a singlejack and chisel; he was prying
at a ribbon of the yellow stuff. Riley went for him, gun in hand.
"L'ave it be!" he shouted.
"But, confound it all, Dean," Smithy's voice was saying in a tone of
disgust, "I thought we were working on a power plant. Not that a gold
mine is so bad; but we can't work it--we can't go down after it at ten
miles."
"Gold mine!" Rawson echoed. "I'll say it's a gold mine--but not
because of the gold. Do you notice anything peculiar about that,
Smithy?"
His assistant replied with a quick exclamation:
"You're right, Dean! I knew there was something haywire with that.
Solid chunk--been cast around that stem--melted on. And that means--"
"Heat," said Rawson. "It means we've found what we're after. Give the
gold to the men; tell them we'll divide it evenly among them. There's
more down there, but there's something better: there's energy, power!"
He snapped out quick orders. "Get the temperature. Drop a recording
pyrometer. Let me know at once. There'll be plenty doing now!"
* * * * *
Drill rods and cables, all were made of the newest aluminum alloy. The
long tube that held the pyrometer was formed of the same metal. Smithy
sent it down to get a recording of the temperatures of that
subterranean cave into which their tools had plunged.
He adjusted the recording mechanism himself and stood beside the
twenty-inch casing that held back the loose sand from the big bore.
Then he watched ten sections of cable, each a mile in length, each
heavier than the last, as they went hissing into the earth.
From the cable control shed the voice of Riley was calling the depth.
"Fifty-two thousand." Then by hundreds until he cried:
"Fifty-two-seven. We're into the big cave! Now another hundred feet."
The cable was moving slowly. In the middle of Riley's call of
"Fifty-two-eight," a jangling bell told that the bottom of the
pyrometer carrier had touched.
"Up with it," Smithy ordered. "Make it snappy. We'll see if we've got
another cargo of gold."
There was an undeniable thrill in this reaching to a tremendous
distance underground, this groping about in a deep-hidden cave, where
molten gold was to be found. What had they tapped?--he asked himself.
He saw visions of some vast pool of hot, liquid gold. Perhaps Dean
would have to change his plans. They could rig up some kind of a
bailer; they could bring out thousands of dollars at a time.
He was watching for the first sight of the metal carrier, far more
interested in what might be clinging to it than in the record of the
pyrometer it held. He saw it emerge--then he stared in disbelief at
the stubby mass at the cable's end, where all that remained of the
long tube he had sent down was a dangling two feet of discolored
metal, warped and distorted. The lower part, a full twenty feet in
length, had been fused cleanly off.
Dean Rawson was there to watch the next attempt. Again Riley's roaring
bass rolled out the count, but this time the call stopped at
fifty-two-seven. The jangling bell told that the carrier had touched.
"Divil a bit do I understand this," Riley was calling. "We're right at
the point where we dropped through into the clear. Right at the roof
of the big cave--fifty-two-seven, it says--and no lower do we go. The
bottom of the hole is plugged!"
* * * * *
Rawson made no reply. He was scowling while he stared speculatively at
the mouth of the twenty-inch bore--a vertical tunnel that led from the
drilling floor down, down to some inner vault. "Molten gold," he was
thinking. "It melted a cylinder of the new Krieger alloy--melted it
when its melting point is way higher than that of any rock that we've
hit. And now the bore is closed...."
He was trying vainly to project his mental vision through those miles
of hard rock to see what manner of mystery this was into which he had
probed. He shook his head slowly in baffled speculation, then spoke
sharply.
"Drill it out!" he ordered. "We're into a hot spot sure enough, though
I can't just figure out the how of it. But we'll tame it, Smithy. Send
down the drill. Clean it out. Then we'll poke around down there and
get the answer to all this."
Five days were needed to send down the big drill with a new drill-head
replacing the other too fouled with gold for any use. The tubular
sections, a hundred feet in length, were hooked together and lowered
one by one. Each joint meant the coupling of the air-pipe as well.
Air, mixed with water from the outer jacket, must come foaming up
through the central core to bring the powdered rock to the surface.
Five days, then one hour of boring, and another five days to pull out
the drill before Rawson could hope for his answer. But he found it in
the severed shaft of the great drill where the head had been melted
completely off. The big stem that would have resisted all but electric
furnace heat, and been cut through like a tallow candle in the blast
of an oxy-acetylene flame.
CHAPTER III
_Red Drops_
The flat-roofed shack of yellow boards that was Dean Rawson's "office"
had a second canopy roof built above it and extending out on all sides
like a wooden umbrella. Thick pitch fried almost audibly from the fir
boards when the sun drove straight from overhead, but beneath their
shelter the heat was more bearable.
By an open window, where a hot breeze stirred sluggishly, Rawson sat
in silent contemplation of the camp. His face was as copper-colored as
an Apache's and as motionless. His eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon a
distant derrick and the blasted stub of a big drill that hung unmoving
above the concrete floor.
But the man's eyes did not consciously record the details of that
scene. He saw nothing of the derrick or of the heat waves that made
the steel seem writhingly alive; he was looking at something far more
distant, something many miles away, something vague and mysterious,
hidden miles beneath the surface of the earth.
"Heat," he said at last, as if talking in a dream. "Heat, terrific
temperatures--but I can't make it out; I can't see it!"
The younger, broad-shouldered man, whose khaki shirt, thrown open at
the neck showed a chest tanned to the black-brown of his face, stopped
his restless pacing back and forth in the hot room.
"Yes?" he asked with a touch of irritation in his tone. "There's
plenty of heat there--heat enough to melt off the shaft of that
high-temp alloy! What the devil's the use of wondering about the heat,
Dean? What gets me is this: the shaft has been plugged again. Now,
what kind of...."
* * * * *
Dean Rawson's face had not moved a muscle during the other's outburst.
His eyes were still fixed on that place that was so far away, yet
which he tried to bring close in his mind, close enough to see, to
comprehend the mystery that should be so plain.
"Lava wouldn't do it!" he said softly. "No melted stone would melt the
Krieger alloy, unless it was under pressure, which this was not.
There was no blast coming out of our shaft. Yet we dipped into that
gold; we stuck the drill right down into it. But what did we go into
the next time? What did we dip into?"
He swung quickly, violently, toward Smithy who was facing him from the
middle of the room. He aimed one finger at him as if it were a pistol,
and his words cracked out as sharply as if they came from a gun:
"That tube you sent down--that piece of casing! How was it burned?
Were there straggling ends, frozen gobs of metal? Did it look like an
old-fashioned molasses candy bar that's been melted? Did it?"
"Why, no," said Smithy. "It hadn't dripped any; it was cut off nice
and clean."
"Cut!" Rawson almost shouted the word. "You said it, Smithy. So was
the shaft of the drill. And if you ever saw a piece of this alloy
being melted you know that it's as gummy as a pot of old paint. It was
cut, Smithy! Dipping into that melted gold threw us off the track; we
were thinking of ramming the drill down into a mess of lava. But we
didn't. It was cut off by a blast of flame so much hotter than lava
that melted rock would seem cold!"
"And that helps us a lot, doesn't it," asked Smithy, scornfully, "when
the flame melts the end of the shaft shut as fast as we open it?"
Dean Rawson's lean, muscular hands took Smithy's broad shoulders and
spun the younger man around. "Cheer up," Dean told him. "We've got it
licked. Why it doesn't blow out of that shaft like hell out for noon
is more than I can see; but the heat's there! We've won!"
"But--" Smithy began. Rawson sent him spinning toward the door in a
good-natured showing of strength that his assistant had not yet
guessed.
"Soup!" he ordered. "Break out the nitroglycerine, Smithy. Get that
Swede, Hanson, on the job; he's a shooter. He knows his stuff. We'll
blow open the bottom end of our shaft so it'll never go shut!"
* * * * *
Hanson knew his stuff and did it. But he met Rawson's inquiring eyes
with a puzzled shake of his head when the open mouth of the
twenty-inch bore gave faint echo of the deep explosion and followed
after a time with only a feeble puff of air.
"Like a cannon, she should have gone," Hanson stated. "And she yoost
go _phht_!"
"It's open down below," said Rawson briefly. "This is a different kind
of a well from the kind you've been shooting."
To the waiting Riley he said: "Hook a bailer onto that cable and send
it down. See what you can tell about the hole."
Again ten miles of cable hissed smoothly down the gaping throat. Then
it slowed.
"Fifty-two-seven," said Riley, "and she's open. Seven twenty-five!
Seven fifty, and we're on bottom!"
"Up," Rawson ordered, "if there's anything left of the bailer. It's
probably melted into scrap."
But strangely it was not. It hung from the dangling cable spinning
lazily until Riley stepped in to check its motion.
There was a check valve in the bottom--a door that opened inwardly, to
take in water and fragments of rock when need arose. Riley,
disregarding the possible heat of the twirling bailer, reached for it
with bare hands. He drew them back, then held them before him--and a
hundred watching eyes saw what had been unseen before: the slow
dropping of red liquid from the bailer's end. The same drops were
falling from Riley's hands that had touched that end.
"Blood!" The word came from the foreman's throat in one horrified
gasp. It ran in a whispering echo from one to another of the watching
crew. From far across the hot sands came the rattle of a truck that
brought the first of many loads of cement and steel for Rawson's
buildings. Its driver was singing lustily:
"Hark to what I say:
You're pokin' through the crust of hell
And braggin' too damn loud of it,
For, when you get to hell, you'll find
The devil there to pay!"
But Rawson, looking dazedly into Smithy's eyes, said only: "It's
cold--the bailer's cold. There's no heat there."
CHAPTER IV
_The Light in the Crater_
"Of course it wasn't blood!" said Smithy explosively. "But try to tell
the men that. See how far you get. 'Devils!' That's been their talk
since yesterday when Riley got smeared up--and now that the bailer's
gone we can't prove a thing."
Again he was pacing restlessly back and forth in the little board
shack that was Rawson's field head-quarters. Rawson, seated by the
window, was looking at tables of comparative melting points. He
glanced up sharply.
"You haven't found it yet?" he questioned. "A forty-foot bailer! Now
that's a nice easy little thing to mislay."
Riley had followed the excited Smithy into the room; he stood silently
by the door until he caught Rawson's questioning glance.
"Forty feet or forty inches," he said, "'tis gone! 'Twas there by the
derrick last night, and this marnin'--"
"That's fine," Rawson interrupted with heavy sarcasm. "I haven't
enough down below ground to keep my mind occupied--I need a few
mysteries up top. Now do you really expect me to believe that a thing
like that bailer has been carried off?"
This time it was Smithy who interrupted. "You can just practise
believing on that, Dean," he said. "When you get so you can believe a
forty-foot bailer can vanish into thin air, then you'll be ready for
what I've got. This is what I came in to tell you: that one truckload
of steel grillage beams for the turbine footings--they were put out
where we surveyed for the first power house--dumped on the sand...."
"Well?" questioned Rawson, as Smithy paused. His look was daring
Smithy to say what he knew was coming.
"Five tons of steel beams," said Smithy softly, "gone--just like that!
Just a hollow in the sand!"
* * * * *
The big figure of the Irish foreman was still beside the door. Rawson
saw one clumsy hand make the sign of the Cross; then Riley held that
hand before him and stared at it in horror. "Divils' blood," he
whispered. "And I dipped my hands in it. Saints protect us all!"
"That will be all of that!" Dean Rawson's usually quiet voice was as
full of crackling emphasis as if it had been charged with electrical
energy. "If anyone thinks that I have gone this far, just to be scared
out by some dirty sabotage....
"I see it all. I don't know how they did it, but it's all come since
the gold was found. Someone else wants it. They think they can scare
off the men, maybe take a pot-shot at me, come back here and clean up
later on, pull up gold by the pailful, I suppose--"
Riley leaped forward and banged his big fist down on the table. "Right
ye are!" he shouted, until loitering men in the open "street" outside
stared curiously. "Divils they are, but they're the kind of divils we
know how to handle. And now I'll tell ye somethin' else, sir: I know
where they are hidin'.
"There was no work for anyone last night, but I'm used to bein' up. I
couldn't sleep. I was wanderin' around, thinkin' of nothin' at all out
of the way, and I thought I saw some shadows, like it might be men,
way off on the sand. Then later over to the old ghost town, d'ye mind!
I saw a light, a queer, green sort of light. Sure, a fool I was
callin' meself at the time, but now I believe it."
* * * * *
Dean Rawson had crossed the room while the man was still speaking. He
dragged a wooden case from beneath his cot and smashed at the lid with a
wrecking bar. Then he reached inside and drew forth a blue-black .45.
He tossed the pistol to Riley. "Know how to use one of these?" he
asked. The manner in which the big Irishman snapped open the side
ejection was sufficient answer. Dean handed another gun to Smithy,
then pulled out more and laid them on his cot together with a little
pile of cartridge boxes.
"You're all right, Riley," he said. "Just keep your head. Don't let
your damned superstitions run away with you, and I wouldn't ask for a
better man to stand alongside of in a scrap."
The foreman beamed with pleasure: Rawson went on in crisp sentences:
"Take these guns. Take plenty of ammunition. Pick five or six men you
know you can depend on. Mount guard around this camp to-night. I'll
post an order saying you're in charge--and I'm telling you now to use
those guns on anything you see.
"Smithy," he said to the other man who had been quietly listening,
"you and I are going to start for town. Only Riley will know that
we're gone for the night. We'll have a little listening post of our
own up here in the hills."
But Rawson postponed their going. More material was arriving; one
casting in particular needed all the men and Rawson's supervision to
place it on the sand where an erection crew could swing it into place
at some later date. And then, when he and Smithy had driven away from
camp with the distant city as their announced destination, Rawson
still did not go directly to the mountain grade. He swung off instead
where rolling sand-hills blocked all view from the camp, and he headed
the car into a gusty wind that brought whirling clouds of dust; they
almost obscured the crumbling walls at the volcano's base.
The ghost towns that are found here and there in the forsaken
wilderness of the West are depressing to one who walks their empty
streets. Little Rhyolite was no exception. In gray, ghostly walls,
empty windows stared steadily, disconcertingly like sockets of dead
eyes in tattered, weatherbeaten skulls.
* * * * *
Dean and Smithy walked among the roofless ruins. Lizards, the color of
the cold, gray walls, slipped from sight on silent, clinging feet.
Once a sidewinder, almost invisible against the sand, looped away from
the intruders with smooth deliberation.
"No marks here," said Rawson at last. "Even an Indian can't read sign
in this ashy sand when the wind has dusted it off."
He turned his head from a whirl of fine ash where the wind, sweeping
around a wall of stone, was scouring at a sand dune's sloping side.
"Dean," said Smithy, "old Riley may have been looking for banshees
when he saw these lights. Superstitious old cuss, Riley! Maybe there
wasn't anything here. But, Dean, there's some confoundedly funny
things happening around here."
"Are you telling me?" Rawson asked grimly. "But we want to remember
one thing," he added: "We've punched a hole in the ground, and we've
got into a place that is hot enough to melt Krieger alloy one minute
and is stone cold the next. That's disturbing enough, but we don't
want to get that mixed up with what's happening up top. There's dirty
work going on--"
He stopped. His eyes, that had never ceased to search for some mark of
special meaning, had come to rest upon an object half hidden in the
sand. He stooped and picked it up.
"Now what the devil is this?" Smithy began. But Rawson was staring at
the smooth lava block that was in his hand. It was tapered; it was
pierced through with a straight, smooth hole, and its base was round
and ringed as if it had been held in a clamp.
"That," he said at last, "was brought in from outside. Outside,
Smithy--get that."
* * * * *
Dean Rawson's face was wreathed in a sudden smile of pure pleasure. "No, I
don't know what the darn thing is," he admitted. "And I don't care. But I
know that someone, or some bunch of someones--outsiders--are trying to
horn in. I might even go so far as to say that I suspect the power
monopoly gentlemen. I think they have started in on us, plan to run off
our men, interfere in every way and drive me out of the field with the
boring a failure. Smithy, I begin to think I'm going to enjoy this job!"
Again the hot wind, only beginning to cool with the setting of the
sun, swept around the building where they stood and tore at the hill
of sand. "Come on," said Rawson. "It's getting dark. We'll get up to
our lookout--"
"Hold on!" called Smithy sharply.
Rawson turned. Smithy was rubbing his eyes when the whirl of
wind-borne sand had passed; he was staring at the sand dunes.
"I'm seeing things, I guess," he said. "I thought for a minute there
was a hole there, and the sand was slipping. I'm getting as bad as
Riley."
The two went back through the gathering shadows to their waiting car.
And Smithy's involuntary shiver told Rawson that he was not the only
one to feel a sense of relief at the sound of the exhaust as their car
took them away from the dead bones of a dead city in a barren,
trackless waste.
* * * * *
The shoulder of rock, where the mountain road swung out, gave a
comprehensive view of camp and desert and the encircling mountains.
Above in a vault of black was the dazzling array of stars as the
desert lands know them; so low they were, the ragged, broken tops of
the three ancient craters seemed touching the warm velvet of the sky
on which the stars were hung. Beyond their smooth slopes a spreading
glow gave promise of the rising moon.
Rawson headed the car downgrade in readiness for a quick return; he
ran it close to the inner wall of rock out of which the road had been
carved, then seated himself on the outer rim without thought of the
thousand-foot sheer drop beneath his dangling legs. With a glass he
was sweeping the foreground where the scattered lights of the camp
were like vagrant reflections of the stars thrown back to them from
the dead sea of sand.
"Riley's on the job," he told Smithy when he passed over the glass
later on. "And I've got my pocket portable." He took the little radio
receiver from his pocket as he spoke. "Riley will signal me from my
office if he sees anything."
The moon had cleared the mountains; its flood of light poured across
their rugged heights and filled the bowl of Tonah Basin as some master
of a great theatrical switchboard might have flooded a dark stage with
magic illumination, half concealing, transforming whatever things it
touched.
All the hard brilliance of sunlit sands was gone. The rolling dunes
were softly mellow; the more distant mountains were dream-peaks. Half
real, they seemed, and half imagined in a veil of haze. Even the
buildings, the scattered piles of material, the gaunt skeleton of the
derrick--their stark blackness of outline and clear-cut shadow were
gone; the whole land was drenched in the mystery and magic of a desert
moon.
* * * * *
Rawson and the man beside him were silent. Even a mind perplexed by
unanswerable problems must pause before the witchery of nature's
softer moods.
"If Riley were here," said Smithy softly at last, "he wouldn't be
seeing any devils. Fairies, pixies, the 'little people'--he'd be
seeing them dancing."
Rawson shot his companion a sidelong, appraising glance. He had never
penetrated before to this sub-stratum of Smithy's nature. He had
never, in fact, felt that he knew much about Smithy, whose past was
still the one topic that was never mentioned. He saw his thick mop of
black hair and the profile of his face as Smithy stared fixedly down
toward the sleeping camp. It was a matter of a minute or so before he
knew that the head was outlined against an aura of red light.
Smithy was seated at his right. Off beyond him the three extinct
craters made a dark background where the moonlight had not yet reached
to their inner slopes. Smithy's head was directly in line with the
largest crater's irregularly broken top; and about it was the faintest
tinge of red.
For a moment the light flamed close; it seemed to be hovering about
the head of the silent, seated man. Then Rawson moved, looked past,
and found a true perspective for the phenomenon. One rugged cleft in
the rim of the crater's cup made a peephole for seeing within. It was
plainly red--the light came from inside the age-old throat.
* * * * *
"It's alive!" Rawson whispered in quick consternation. Almost he
expected to see billowing clouds of smoke, the fearful pyrotechnics of
volcanic eruption.
He sensed more than saw that Smithy had not turned his head. "Look!"
he was shouting by now. "Wake up, Smithy! Good Lord!"
He stopped, open-mouthed. The red glow had meant volcanic fires; to
have it change abruptly to a green radiance was disconcerting.
Green--pale green. Only through the gap, like a space where a tooth
was missing in the giant jaw, could Dean Rawson see the changed light.
Only from this one point could the view be had--there would be nothing
visible from the camp below. And as quickly as it had come all
thought of volcanic fires left him; he knew with quick certainty that
this was something that concerned him, that threatened, and that was
linked up with the other threatening, mysterious happenings of the
recent nights and days.
Still Smithy had not turned. Rawson felt one quick flash of annoyance
at his helper's dullness--or indifference; then he knew that Smithy's
dark-haired head was reached forward, that he was bending at a
precarious angle to stare below him into the valley. Then:
"They're there!" said Smithy in a hushed voice, as if someone or
something on that desert floor far below might hear and take alarm.
"Look, Dean. Where's your glass? What are they?"
* * * * *
His cautious whispering was unnecessary. Below them a thin line of
light pierced the darkness; another; then three more in quick
succession before the sharp crack of pistol fire came to the men a
thousand feet above. Rawson had snatched up his binoculars.
"To the left," Smithy was directing. "Off there, by the big casting.
Great Scott! what's that light?"
Rawson got it in the glass--a single flash of green that cut the
blackness with an almost audible hiss. It was gone in an instant while
a man's voice screamed once in fear and agony, one scream that broke
like brittle steel in the same instant that it began.
Dean found the big casting in the circle of his glass. There were
black figures moving near it; they were indistinct. He changed the
focus--they were gone before he could get their images sharp.
But the casting! Plainly he saw its great bulk that many men had
worked to ease down to the sand. It was outlined clearly now until its
edge became a blur, until the sand rolled in upon it, and its black
mass became a circle that shrank and shrank and vanished utterly at
the last.
"It's gone!" Rawson shouted. "It sank into the sand! I saw it...."
He was running for the car. A clamor of voices was coming from below;
the sound died under the thunder of the car's exhaust as Rawson gave
it the gun and sent the big machine leaping toward the waiting curves.
CHAPTER V
_The Attack_
Every light of the camp was on as Rawson and his assistant approached.
A shallow depression in the sand marked the place where the big
casting had been. Beyond it a hundred feet was a black swarm of men
that parted as the car drew near. They had been gathered about a
figure upon the sand.
Dean sensed something peculiar about that figure as the big car
ploughed to a stop. He leaped out and ran forward.
He knew it was Riley there on the ground, knew it while still he was a
score of feet away. Only when he was close, however, did he realize
that the body ended in two stubs of legs; only when he leaned above
him did he know that the Irish foreman's big frame had been cut in two
as if by a knife.
The severed legs lay a short distance beyond the body; they had fallen
side by side in horrible awkwardness, their stumps of flesh protruding
from charred clothing--and suddenly, shockingly, Rawson knew that the
flesh of body and legs had been seared. The knife had been hot--its
blade had been forged of flame!
He heard Smithy cursing softly, unconsciously, at his side.
"The green light," Smithy was saying in horrified understanding. "But
who did it? How did they do it? Where did they go?"
"Quiet!" ordered Rawson sharply. He dropped to his knees beside the
mutilated body. Riley's eyes had opened in a sudden movement of
consciousness.
* * * * *
The voice that came from his lips was a ghastly whisper at first, but
in that stricken thing that had been the body of Riley, foreman of the
night drilling crew, some reservoir of strength must still have
remained untapped.
He drew upon it now. His voice roared again as it had done so many
times before through the Tonah Basin camp. It reached to every
listening ear where crowding men stood hushed and motionless; and the
overtone of terror that altered its customary timber was apparent to
all.
"Devils!" said Riley. "Devils, straight out o' hell!... I saw 'em--I
saw 'em plain!... I shot--as if hot lead could harm the imps of
Satan....
"Oh, sir,"--his eyes had found those of Dean Rawson who was leaning
above--"for the love of hivin, Mister Rawson, do ye be quittin'
drillin'. The place is damned. L'ave it, sir; go away...."
His eyes closed. But he started up once more; he raised his head from
the sand with one final convulsive movement, and his voice was high
and shrill.
"The fire! The fire of hell! He's turnin' it on me! God help...."
But Riley, before his failing mind could recall again that torturing
jet of flame, must have slipped away into a darkness as softly
enveloping as the velvet shadow world behind the low-hung stars.
Rawson's hand that felt for a moment above the heart, confirmed the
message of the closed eyes and the head that fell inertly back.
He came slowly to his feet.
"Keep the floods on!" he ordered. "Take command of the armed guard,
Smithy; keep the whole camp patrolled."
Then to the men:
"Boys, Riley was wrong. He believed what he said, all right, but Smith
and I know better. Don't worry about devils. These're just some dirty,
skulking dogs who got away with murder this time but who won't do it
again. We know where they're hiding. I'm checking up on them right
now. After that you'll all get a chance to square accounts for poor
old Riley!"
* * * * *
"But the casting!" Smithy protested when he and Rawson were alone.
"You can't explain that disappearance so easy, Dean."
"No, I can't explain that," Rawson's words came slowly. "They've got
something that we don't understand as yet--but I'm going to know the
answer, and I'm going to find out to-night!"
He was seated behind the wheel of his old car.
"I'm as good a desert man as there is in this crowd," he told Smith.
"And it's my fight, you know. I'm going alone. But there'll be no
fighting this trip; I'll just be scouting around."
He leaned from the car to grip Smithy's shoulder with a hand firm and
steady.
"You didn't see the crater when the show was on. You think that I'm
crazy to believe it, but up in that crater is where I'll find the
answer to a lot of questions. Lord knows what that answer will be.
I've quit trying to guess. I'm just going up there to find out."
He was gone, the rear wheels of the car throwing a spray of sand as he
started heedless of Smithy's protests against the plan. Rawson was in
no mood to argue. He must climb the mountain while it was night; under
the sun he would never reach the top alive. He would go alone and
unseen.
He swung wide of the deserted town at the mountain's base. The
spectral walls of Little Rhyolite still showed their empty windows
that stared like dead eyes, and the man guided his car without lights
along a hidden stretch of hard, salt-crusted desert. He felt certain
that other eyes were watching.
* * * * *
He began his climb at a point five miles away. The slopes that seemed
smooth and hard from a distance became, at closer range, a place of
wind-heaped, sandy ash, carved and scoured into fantastic forms. But
its very roughness offered protection, and Rawson fought the dragging
sand, and the gray, choking ash that dried his throat and cut it like
emery, without fear of being observed.
He fought against time, too. Above Little Rhyolite, whatever
mysterious men were making the ascent would find the going easy. There
were windswept areas, long fields of pumice; a man could make good
time there. Rawson had none of these to aid him. He cast anxious
glances toward the eastern sky as he struggled on, till he saw gray
light change to rose and gold--but he stood in the titanic cleft in
the crater's rim as the first straight rays of the sun struck across.
The volcano's top had been stripped clean by the winds of countless
years. Rocks, black, brown, even blood-red, were naked to the pitiless
glare of the sun. Their colors were mingled in a weird fantasy of
twisted lines that told of the inferno of heat in which they had been
formed.
They towered high above the head of Dean Rawson as he stood, panting
and trembling with exhaustion. The cleft before him had become
enormous: it was a canyon, half filled with pumice and coarse ash.
* * * * *
Rawson stood for long minutes in quiet listening. At the canyon's end
would lie the crater, and in that crater he would find.... But there
was no slightest picture in his mind of what he might see. He knew
only that he himself must remain unseen. He went forward cautiously.
Rocky walls; a floor of sand where his feet left no mark. He was
watching ahead and above him. His gun was ready in his hand; he did
not propose to be ambushed. He moved with never a sound.
The silence persisted; no living thing other than himself lent any
flicker of motion to the scene. Not even a lizard could hope for
existence amid these dead and barren heights. He was alone--the
certainty of it had driven deeply into his mind before the canyon end
was reached. And, desert man though he was and accustomed to traveling
the waste places of the earth, Rawson learned a new meaning and depth
of solitude.
Here was no voiceless companionship of trees or brush or cactus; no
little living things scuttled across the rocks--he was alone, the only
speck of life in a place where life seemed forbidden.
So sure of this was he that he stepped boldly from the canyon's end.
He knew before he looked that he would see only more of the same
desolation. And his mind was filled equally with anger and
disappointment.
* * * * *
Something was opposing him! Something had come into their camp--had
killed old Riley. And he, Rawson, had been so sure he would find
traces here that would allow him to give that opposing force a
name....
He stared out from the rocky cleft into a sun-blasted pit. Already
the rising sun was pouring its energy ever the jagged rim of bleak
rocks and down into the vast throat, choked and filled with ash.
It sloped gently from all sides, the gray-brown powder that had been
coughed from within the earth. It made a floor where Rawson could have
walked with safety. But he did not go on.
"Damn it!" he said with sudden savagery. "What a fool I was to think
of finding anyone here. Who would ever pick out a spot like this for a
base of operations?"
He stared angrily at the floor of ash, at the black, outcropping
masses of tufa. He was angry with himself, angry and baffled and tired
from his climb. Far down in the vast, shallow pit blazing sunlight
glinted from massive blocks whose sides were mirror-smooth. A whirl of
wind eddied there for a moment and lifted the dust into a vertical
gray column--the only sign of motion in the whole desolate scene.
Rawson turned and tramped back toward the long hot descent to the
floor of the Basin.
* * * * *
He tried to maintain an air of confidence before the men. He kept them
busy placing and stacking materials; to all appearances the work would
go on despite the mysterious happenings of the night.
Dean even prepared to resume drilling operations. He sent down another
bailer on the end of the ten-mile cable, but he left it there; he did
not care to raise it and risk more inexplicable results with the
consequent destruction of the men's morale.
"Too late to do any more," he said to Smithy that afternoon. "We'll
drop all work--let the men get a good night's sleep. I'll take guard
duty to-night, and you can run the job to-morrow."
There were men of the drilling crew standing near, though Rawson was
handling the hoisting drums himself. A ratchet release lever hooked
its end under a ring on Rawson's hand and pinched the flesh. Dean made
this an excuse for waiting a moment while the drillers walked away.
"Ought not to wear it, I suppose," he said, and dabbed at a spot of
blood under the gold band. "But it's an old cameo--it belonged to my
Dad."
He was showing the ring to Smithy as the men passed from hearing.
"Don't want to be seen talking," he explained tersely. "Mustn't let
the men know we are on edge--they're about ready to bolt. But you be
ready for a call. Have your men armed. I am looking for more trouble
to-night."
The two were laughing loudly as they followed the men toward the
building where the cook was banging on an iron tire that served as a
bell.
* * * * *
Some three hours later Rawson was not smiling as he climbed the steel
ladder of the great derrick; he was grimly intent upon the job at
hand.
All thought of his drilling operations had gone from him. He was not
anxious about the project. This was merely an interruption; the work
would go on later. But right now there was an enemy to be met and a
mystery to be solved.
A rifle slung from his shoulder bumped against him satisfyingly as he
climbed. A man was on duty at a master switch--he would flood the camp
with light at the rifle's first crack.
Dean seated himself at the top of the derrick. The cylinder of a huge
floodlight was beside him. Beyond was the massive sheave block; the
cables ran dizzily down to the concrete drilling floor so far below.
And on every side the quiet camp spread out dark and silent in the
night. Dean surveyed it all with satisfaction. Nothing would get by
him now.
But his further reflections were not so satisfying.
"Who did it? How? Where did they go?" He was echoing Smithy's
questions and finding no ready answers. And that flame-thrower that
had cut down old Riley--how was that worked? Its one green flash had
been almost instantaneous.
He was puzzling over such futile questioning when he saw the first
sign of attack.
* * * * *
At the foot of the derrick was the hoisting shed. Except for that,
there was clear sand for a radius of fifty feet around the derrick's
base. Dean was staring suspiciously at that open space almost directly
underneath.
Moving sand! He hardly knew what he had seen at first. Then the sand
at one point bulged upward unmistakably.
For one instant Dean's thoughts shot off at a tangent. It was like the
work of a huge gopher--he had seen the little animals break through
like that. Then the sand parted, and something, indistinct, blurred,
dark against the yellow background, broke from cover.
Rawson swung the rifle's muzzle over and down. Below him the vague
shadow had moved. Dean caught the blurred mass beyond his sights, then
swung the weapon aside. Who was it? He would have a look first.
The thin crack of his rifle ripped the silence of the sleeping camp.
Dean had aimed to one side and he regretted it in the instant of
firing. For, in the same second, there had come from the moving shadow
the gleam of starlight reflected upward from polished metal.
* * * * *
Dean swung the rifle back. He fired quickly a second time. Beside him
the big light hissed into action and the whole camp sprang to sudden,
blazing light. And through the quick brilliance, more dazzling even
than the white glare itself, was one blinding line of green flame.
Dean saw it as it began. It came from the dim shadow that had sprung
suddenly into sharp outline as the big lights came on. He saw the
figure. He sensed that it was a man, though he knew vaguely that the
figure was grotesque and hideous in some manner he had no time to
discern.
The thin line of green flame ripped straight out, swinging in a quick,
sweeping trajectory, slashing through the steelwork of the great
derrick itself!
Dean knew he was lost in the blinding instant while that fiery jet was
sweeping in a fan-shaped sector of vivid green. A knife of flame! It
had destroyed a man: it was now cutting down a framework of steel as
well!
The derrick was falling as he fired again. There came a crushing jar
downward as the metal melted and failed, and the wild outward swing in
the beginning of the toppling fall. In the mind of Dean Rawson was but
one thought: the sights--and a something blurred beyond--a trigger to
be pressed.
He was still firing when the shriek of torn steel went to thundering
silence, and even the lights of Tonah Basin Camp were swallowed up in
the whirling night....
CHAPTER VI
_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....
CHAPTER VII
_The Ring_
[Illustration: _One of them pointed at the shaft Rawson had drilled._]
[Sidenote: Town after town is fired by the emerging Red Ones as Rawson
lies helpless, a prisoner, far down in their home within the earth.]
"Smithy," Rawson had called him when he found the youngster fighting
gamely with death in the heat of Tonah Basin. And Gordon Smith was the
name on the company records. Yet he remained always "Smithy" to
Rawson, and the name, which Rawson never ceased to believe was
assumed, became a mark of the affection which can spring up between
man and man.
And now Smithy stood like a rigid carven statue in the midst of a
barren sandy waste in the vast cup of a towering volcano top--sand
that was in reality coarse pumice and ash. This was a place of death,
a place where raging fires had left nothing for plant or animal life.
And, over all, the desert stars shone down coldly and added to the
desolation with their own pale light.
Smithy had seen Rawson pull himself to the top of the great
square-edged rock. Sensing that danger of some sort was threatening,
he had started to run to the aid of the struggling man. Then came
Rawson's cry.
"Back!" he shouted. "Get back, Smithy! I'm coming--"
But he did not come; and Smithy, halted by the command, was frozen to
sudden, panic-stricken immobility by that which followed.
He saw the leaping things, like grotesque yellow giants. They came
from the sand; then red ones leaped up from the open throat that had
suddenly formed. They held flame throwers, the red ones; and the green
lines of fire melted the rock from beneath Rawson's feet. All in the
one second's time, it was done, and Rawson's body, his arms wide
flung, was hurtling downward into the waiting throat and the
threatening red glow from within. Then the carriers of the flame
throwers vanished again into the pit, and there was left only a huddle
of giant figures that tore at the loose sand and ash with their hands.
They threw the material in a continuous stream; the air was full of
cascading sand. To Smithy they were suddenly inhuman--they were almost
animals; men like moles. And they and their companions had captured
Dean Rawson--sent him to his death. Slowly the watching man raised
himself from the crouched position that had kept him hidden.
They were through with their work, these great yellow-skinned naked
men--or mole-men. Six of them--Smithy counted them slowly before he
took aim--and two were armed with flame-throwers.
Smithy rested his arm across the little hummock of gritty ash that
had sheltered him and sent six flashes of flame through the night
toward the cluster of bodies.
* * * * *
He made no attempt to aim at each individual--the shapes were too
shadowy for that. And he had no knowledge of what other weapons they
might have. One thing was sure: he must take no chances on facing the
red ones single-handed. He rammed his empty pistol back into its
holster as he turned and ran--ran with every ounce of energy he
possessed to drive his flying feet across the crater floor, out
through the cleft in the rocks and down the steep mountainside.
He was stunned by the suddenness of the catastrophe that had overtaken
them. The horror of Dean Rawson's going; the fearful reality of those
"devils from hell" that old Riley had seen--it was all too staggering,
too numbing, for easy acceptance. Time was required for the truth to
sink in; and through the balance of the night Smithy had plenty of
time to think.
He dared not go back to the camp where ripping flashes of green light
told him the enemy was at work. And then, even had it been possible to
creep up on them in the darkness, that one chance vanished as the
desert about the camp sprang into view. One after another the
buildings burst into flame, and Smithy was thankful for the
concealment of the vast, empty desert.
* * * * *
The embers were still glowing when he dared go near. This enemy, it
seemed, worked only at night, and Smithy waited only for the sun to
show above distant purple ranges. It had been their enemy once, that
fiercely hot sun; they had fought against the heat--but never had the
sun wrought such destruction as this.
Smithy looked from haggard, hopeless eyes upon the wreckage of
Rawson's camp. For the men who had worked there, this had meant only a
job; to Smithy it had been a fight against the desert which had
defeated him once. But to Rawson it meant the fruit of years of
effort, the goal of his dreams brought almost within his reach.
Smithy looked at the smoldering heaps of gray where an idle wind
puffed playfully at fluffy ash or fanned a bed of coals to flame.
Twisted steel of the wrecked derrick was still further distorted; the
enemy had ripped it to pieces with his stabbing flames. Even the
unused materials, the steel and cement that had been neatly stacked
for future use--the flames had been turned on it all.
And Smithy, though his voice broke almost boyishly from his repressed
emotion, spoke aloud in solemn promise:
"It's too late to help you, Dean. I'll go back to town, report to the
men who were back of you, and then.... They're going to pay, Dean!
Whoever--whatever--they are, they're going to pay!"
He turned away toward the mountains and the ribbon of road that wound
off toward the canyon. Then, at some recollection, he swung back.
"The cable's still down--he would have wanted it left all shipshape,"
he whispered.
Where the derrick had stood was the mouth of the twenty-inch casing.
The cable that ran from it was entangled with the wreckage of the
derrick, but it had not been cut. Smithy set doggedly to work.
* * * * *
A little gin-pole and light tackle allowed him to erect a heavier
tripod of steel beams; it hoisted the big sheave block into place, and
gave Smithy's two hands the strength of twenty to rig a temporary
hoist. The juice was still on the main feed line, and the hoisting
motors hummed at his touch. The ten miles of cable wound slowly onto
the drums.
"It's nonsense, I suppose," he told himself silently. But something
drove him to do this last thing--to leave it all as Rawson would have
had it.
The long bailer came out at last; there was just room to hoist it
clear and let it drop back upon the drilling floor. A glint of gold
flashed in the sunlight as Smithy let the long metal tube down, and he
broke into voluble cursing at sight of the bit of metal that was
caught near the bailer's top.
The gold had started it all! That first finding of the gold on the big
drill had begun it.... He crossed swiftly to the gleaming thing that
seemed somehow to symbolize his loss.
He stooped to reach for it, intending to throw it as far as he could.
Instead he stood in an awkward stooping attitude--stood so while the
long uncounted minutes passed....
His eyes that stared and stared in disbelief seemed suddenly to have
turned traitor. They were telling him that they saw a ring--a
cameo--jammed solidly into the shackle at the bailer's end. And that
ring, when last he had seen it, had been on Dean Rawson's hand! Dean
had caught it; he had hooked it over a lever in this very place--and
now, from ten miles down inside the solid earth, it had returned. It
meant--it meant....
But the stocky, broad-shouldered youngster known as Smithy dared not
think what it meant. Nor had he time to follow the thought; he was too
busily engaged in running at suicidal speed across the hot sand toward
barren mountains where a ribbon of road showed through quivering air.
CHAPTER VIII
_The Darkness_
Darkness; and red fires that seemed whirling about him as his body
twisted in air. To Dean Rawson, plunging down into the volcano's maw,
each second was an eternity, for, in each single instant, he was
expecting crashing death.
Then he knew that long arms were wrapped about him, holding him,
supporting him, checking his downward plunge ... and at last the
glassy walls, where each bulbous irregularity shone red with reflected
light, moved slowly past. And, after more eons of time, a rocky floor
rose slowly to meet him.
His body crashed gently; he was sprawled face downward on stone that
was smooth and cold. The restraining arms no longer touched him.
He lay motionless for some time, his mind as stunned and
uncomprehending as if he had truly crashed to death upon that rocky
floor. Then, at last, he forced his reluctant nerves and muscles to
turn his body till he lay face upward.
Darkness wrapped him as if it were the soft swathing of some black
cocoon. The world about him was at first a place of utter night-time
blackness; and then, far above him, there shone a single star ...
until that feeble candle-gleam, too, was snuffed out.
A hand was gripping his shoulder; it seemed urging him to arise. He
felt each separate finger--long, slender, like bands of steel. The
nail at each finger-end was more nearly a claw, the whole hand a thin,
clutching thing like the foot of some giant ape. And, even as he
shrank involuntarily from that touch, Rawson wondered how the creature
could reach out and grip him so surely in the dark. But he came to
his feet in response to that urging hand.
The night was suddenly sibilant with eery, whistling voices. They came
from all sides at once; they threw themselves back and forth in
endless echoes. To Rawson it was only a confused medley of conflicting
sounds in which no one voice was clear. But the creature that held him
must have understood, for he heard him reply in a sharp, piercing
tone, half whistle, half shriek.
* * * * *
What had happened? Where was he? What was this thing that pushed him,
stumbling, along through the dark? With all his tumultuous questioning
he knew only one thing definitely: that it would be of no use to
struggle. He was as helpless as any trapped animal.
He was inside the earth, of course; he had fallen he had no least idea
how far; and, in some strange manner, this long-armed thing had
supported him and eased him gently down. But what it meant or what lay
ahead were matters too obscure for him to try to see clearly.
He held his hands protectingly before him while the talons gripping
into his shoulder hurried him along. He stumbled awkwardly as his foot
struck an obstruction. He would have fallen but for the grip that held
him erect.
For that creature, whatever it was, the darkness held no uncertainty.
He moved swiftly. His shrill shriek and the jerk of his arm both gave
evidence of his astonishment that his captive should walk so
blunderingly.
Then it seemed that he must have comprehended Rawson's blindness. A
green line of light passed close behind Dean's head. It was
cold--there was no radiant warmth--but, when it struck the face of a
wall of stone some twenty feet away, the solid rock turned instantly
to a mass of glowing yellow-red.
The cold green ray swung back and forth, leaving a path of radiant
rock behind it wherever it touched. And the rock was hot! Once the
green light held more than an instant in one place, and the rock
softened at its touch, then splashed and trickled down to make a fiery
pool.
* * * * *
Abruptly Rawson was able to see his surroundings. Also, he knew the
source of the red glow that had seemed like volcanic fires. There had
been others like his captor; they had been down below, and had played
their flames upon the rocks deep in the volcano. It was thus that they
made light.
With equal suddenness, and with terrible clearness, Dean found the
answer to one of his questions. He wrenched himself about to stare
behind him at the creature that held him in its grip. And, for the
first time, the wild experience became something more than an
unbelievable nightmare; in that one horrifying instant he knew it was
true.
Only a few minutes before, he had been walking across the cindery sand
of the crater top, walking under the stars and the dark desert
sky--Dean Rawson, mining engineer, in a sane, believable world. And
now...!
He squinted his eyes in the dim light to see more plainly the beastly
figure, more horrible for being so nearly human. He had seen them
briefly up above; the closer view of this one specimen of a strange
race was no more pleasing. For now he saw clearly the cruelty in the
face. It was there unmistakably, even though the face itself, under
less threatening circumstances, might have been a ludicrous caricature
of a man's.
Red and nearly naked, the creature stood upright, straps of metal
about its body. It was about Rawson's height; its round, staring eyes
were about level with his own, and each eye was centered in a circular
disk of whitish skin. The light went dim for a moment, and Dean,
staring in his turn, saw those other huge eyes enlarge, the white
covering of each drawing back like an expanding iris.
Some vague understanding came to him of the beast's ability to see in
the dark. They used these red-hot stones for illumination, but this
thing had seemed to see clearly even when the stones had ceased to
glow. And again, though indistinctly, Dean knew that those eyes might
be sensitive to infra-red radiations--they might see plainly by the
dark light that continued to flood these rocky chambers, though, to
him, the rocks had gone lightless and black.
* * * * *
Even as the quick thoughts flashed through his mind, he was thinking
other thoughts, recording other observations.
The rest of the face was red like the body; the head was sharply
pointed, and crowned with a mass of thin, clinging locks of hair. The
mouth, a round, lipless orifice, contracted or dilated at will; from
it came whistling words.
Out of the darkness, giant things were leaping. They clutched at
Rawson, while the first captor released his hold and drew back.
Taller, these newcomers were, bigger, and different.
In the red light from the hot rocks Dean saw their faces, in which
were owl eyes like those of the first one, but yellow, expressionless
and stupid. Their great bodies were yellow: their outstretched hands
were webbed.
For one instant, as Rawson's hand touched his pistol in its holster,
a surge of fighting rage swept through him. His whole being was in a
spasm of revolt against all this series of happenings that had trapped
him; he wanted to lash out regardless of consequences. Then cooler
judgment came to his aid.
Other figures, with faces red and ugly, expressive of nameless evil,
were gathered beside the one who still played the jet of cold fire
upon the walls. Like him they were naked save for a cloth at the waist
and the metal straps encircling their bodies. They, too, had
flame-throwers--he saw the long metal jets and their lava tips. Yet
the temptation to fire into that group as fast as he could pull
trigger was strong upon him.
Instead he allowed these other giant things to grip him with their
webbed hands and lead him away.
* * * * *
The wavering light had shown many passages through the rock. Glazed,
all of them. Either they had been blown through molten rock which had
then solidified to give the glassy surfaces, or else--and this seemed
more likely--the flame-throwers had done it. Rawson, scanning the
labyrinth for some recognizable strata, had a quick vision of these
caverns being cut out and enlarged, and of their walls melted just as
they were being melted now--melted and hardened again innumerable
times by succeeding generations of red and yellow-skinned men.
Yes, they were men. He admitted this while he walked unresistingly
between two of the giants. Another went before them and lighted the
way with the green ray of a flame-thrower on the melting rock. These
were men--men of a different sort. Evolution, working strange changes
underground, had made them half beasts, diggers in the dark, mole-men!
They were passing through a long tunnel that went steadily down.
Cross passages loomed blackly; ahead of them the leader was throwing
his flame upon the walls of a great vault.
Rawson had ceased to take note of their movements. What use to
remember? He could never escape, never retrace his steps.
He tried to whip up a faint flicker of hope at thought of Smithy.
Smithy had seen him go, had seen the red mole-men, of course. And he
had got away--he must have got away! He would go for help....
But, at that, he groaned inwardly. Smithy would go for help, and then
what? He would be laughed out of any sheriff's office; he would be
locked up as insane if he persisted. Why should he persist--for that
matter, why should he go at all? Smithy would not believe for a single
minute that Rawson was still alive.
* * * * *
His thoughts ended. Webbed hands, wrapped tightly about his arms, were
thrusting him forward into a great room. The green flame had been
snapped off. One last hot circle on the high wall showed only a dull
red. But before it faded, Dean saw dimly the outlines of a tremendous
cavern. He saw also that these walls were unglazed, raw; they had
never been melted.
Below the rough and shattered sides heaps of fragments were piled
about the room.
Fleetingly he saw the shadowed details; then darkness swallowed even
that little he had seen. Clanging metal told of a closing door; a line
of red outlined it for an instant to show where it was welded fast. He
was a prisoner in a cell whose walls were the living rock.
For a long time he stood motionless, while the heavy darkness pressed
heavily in upon his swimming senses; he sank slowly to the floor at
last. He was numbed, and his mind was as blank as the black
nothingness that spread before his staring eyes. In a condition almost
of coma, he had no measure or count of the hours that passed.
Then a fever of impatience possessed him; his thoughts, springing
suddenly to life, were too wildly improbable for any sane mind, were
driving him mad. He forced himself to move cautiously.
* * * * *
On the floor he had seen burnished gold, shining dully as he entered.
There had been a thick vein of yellow in the rock. The floor, at that
place, was rough beneath his feet, as if the hot metal had been
spilled.
His hands groped before him as he remembered the heaps of rock
fragments. Then his feet found one of them stumblingly, and he turned
and moved to one side. He remembered having seen a dim shape off there
that had made a straight slanting line. His searching hands
encountered the object and kept him from walking into it.
The feeling of helplessness that drove him was only being increased by
his blind and blundering movements. He told himself that he must wait.
Silently he stood where he had come to a stop, hands resting on the
object that barred his way--until suddenly, stiflingly, his breath
caught in his throat. Some emotion, almost too great to be borne, was
suffocating him.
Slowly he moved his hands. Inch by inch he felt his way around the
smooth cylinder, so hard, so coldly metallic. Then, with a rush, he
let his hands follow up the slanting thing, up to a rounded top, to a
heavy ring and a shackle that was on the end of a cable, thin and
taut. And, while his hands explored it feverishly, the metal moved!
* * * * *
He clung to the smooth roundness as it slipped through his hands. It
was the bailer, part of his own equipment. That slender cable reached
up, straight up to the world he knew. And Smithy was there--Smithy was
hoisting it!
He clung to the cylinder desperately. The bore, at this depth, had
been reduced to eight inches; the bailer fitted it loosely. And Rawson
cursed frantically the narrow space that would let this inanimate
object return but would hold him back, while he wrapped his arms about
the cold surface of the metal messenger from another world.
It lifted clear, then settled back. This time it dropped noisily to
the floor. And suddenly Dean was tearing at the ring on one of the
swollen fingers of his left hand.
It came free at last; it was in his hand as the cable tightened again.
Swiftly, surely, he worked in the darkness to jam the ring through the
shackle at the bailer's top. Then the bailer lifted, clanged loudly as
it entered the shattered bore in the rocks above, and scraped noisily
at the sides. The sound rose to a rasping shriek that went fainter and
still fainter till it dwindled into silence.
But Dean Rawson, standing motionless in the darkness of that buried
vault, dared once more to let himself think and _feel_ as he stared
blindly upward.
Up there Smithy was waiting. Smithy would know. And with Smithy
fighting from the outside and he, Rawson, putting up a scrap below....
He smiled almost happily as his hand rested upon his gun.
Hopeless? Of course it was hopeless. No use of really kidding
himself--he didn't have the chance of a pink-eyed rabbit.
But he was still smiling toward that dark roof overhead as the
outlines of a metal door grew cherry red. They were coming for him!
He was ready to meet whatever lay ahead....
CHAPTER IX
_A Subterranean World_
The metal plate that had sealed him in this tomb fell open with a
crash. Beyond it the passageway was alive with crowding red figures.
Above their heads the nozzles of a score of flame-throwers spat jets
of green fire. Rawson drew back in sudden uncontrollable horror as
they came crowding into the room.
The familiar feel of the bailer's cold metal had given him a momentary
sense of oneness with his own world. Now this inrush of hideous,
demoniac figures beneath the flare of green flames was like a fevered
vision of the infernal regions come suddenly to actuality.
Rawson retreated to the shattered, rocky wall and prepared for one
last fight, until he realized that the evil black eyes in their
ghastly circles of white skin were fixed upon him more in curiosity
than in active hatred.
They formed a semicircle about him--a wall of red bodies, whose
pointed heads were craned forward, while an excited chatter in their
broken, whistling speech filled the room with shrill clamor. Then one
of them pointed above toward the open shaft that Rawson had drilled,
the shaft up which the bailer had gone. And again their voices rose in
weird discord, while their long arms waved, and red, lean-fingered
hands pointed.
Only a moment of this, then one of them gave an order. Two of the red
figures came toward Rawson where he was waiting. They were unarmed.
They motioned that he was to go with them. And Dean, with a helpless
shrug of his shoulders, allowed them, one on each side, to take him
by the arms and hurry him through the open door. Two others went
ahead, the green jets of flame from their weapons lighting the
passage.
The system of communicating tunnels seemed at first only the vents and
blow-holes from some previous volcanic activity. And yet, at times
they gave place to more regular arrangement that plainly was
artificial. The air in them was pure, though odorous with a pungent
tang which Dean could not identify. Through some of the passages it
blew gently with uncomfortable warmth.
The guard of wild red figures hurried him along through a vast world
of caverns and winding passages which seemed one great mine. The
richness of it was amazing. Dean Rawson was a man, a human being,
facing death in some form which he could not yet know, and, so fast
had his wild experiences crowded in upon him, he seemed numbed to all
normal emotions; yet through it all the mind of the engineer was at
work, and Dean's eyes were flashing from side to side, trying to see
and understand the ever-changing panorama of a subterranean world.
* * * * *
Mole-men, both red and yellow, were everywhere. But it was apparent at
a glance that the yellow giants were a race of toilers--slaves, driven
by the reds.
Their great bodies glowed orange-colored with the reflected heat of
the blasts of flame used to melt the metals from their ores. Gold and
silver, other metals that Rawson could not distinguish in the half
light--the glow of the molten stuff came from every distant cave that
the passages opened up.
The sheer marvel of it overwhelmed him. His own danger, even the death
that waited for him, were forgotten.
A world within a world--and who knew how far it extended? Mole-men, by
scores and hundreds, the denizens of a great subterranean world, of
which his own world had been in ignorance. Here was civilization of a
sort, and now the barriers that had separated this world from the
world above had been broken down; the two were united. Suddenly there
came to Rawson's mind a flashing comprehension of a menace wild and
terrible that had come with the breaking of those barriers.
They were passing through a wider hall when the whistling chatter of
Dean's escort ceased. They were looking to one side where a cloud of
smoke had rolled from a slope beyond. One of the red figures
staggered, choking, from the cloud. Two yellow mole-men followed
closely after.
The red mole-man was unarmed; each yellow one had a flame-thrower that
was now so familiar a sight to Dean. His own escort was silent; they
had halted, watching those others expectantly.
* * * * *
In the silence of that rocky room the single red one whistled an
order. One of the two yellow men placed his weapon on the floor.
Another shrill order followed, and the remaining worker, without a
moment's hesitation, turned the green blast of his own projector upon
his comrade.
It was done in a second--a second in which the giant's shriek ended in
a flash of flame for which his own flesh was the fuel. A wisp of
drifting smoke, and that was all. And the red creatures who had Rawson
in their charge, after a moment of silence, filled the room with
shrill-voiced pandemonium, while they shrieked their approval of the
spectacle.
But Dean Rawson's lips were forming half-whispered words, so intently
was he thinking the thoughts. "The damned red beast! That poor devil's
flame hit some sulphur, I suppose--burned it to SO_2--then he got
his!"
But, even while he searched his mind for words to describe the evil of
this red race, he was realizing another fact. These yellow giants,
countless thousands of them, perhaps, were held in subjection by their
red masters. They would do as they were told. Dimly, vaguely, through
his horrified mind, came the picture of a horde of red and yellow
beasts turned loose upon the world above.
There were fears now which filled Dean Rawson, shook him with horrors
as yet only half comprehended. But the fears were not for himself, one
solitary man in the grip of these red beasts--he was fearing for all
mankind.
* * * * *
His guard was hurrying him on, but now Dean hardly saw the scenes of
feverish activity through which they passed. Another thought had come
to him.
That shaft, the hole which he himself had drilled--what damage had it
done? It was he who had broken down the barriers. His drill had told
these beasts that there was other life above. It had guided them. They
had realized that they were near to some other place where men worked
and drove tunnels through the rocks. They had followed up these
forgotten passages that led to the old craters, had ascended inside
the volcano, made their way through the top and emerged into another
world--a clean and sunlit world.
Now Rawson's eyes found with new understanding the activity about him.
The mining operations had been left behind. Here were branching
passages, great cavelike rooms--a world within a world, in all truth.
Throughout it, demoniac figures were hurrying, driving thousands of
giant yellow slaves where the light shone sparkling from innumerable
heaps of metal weapons--flame-throwers and others, the nature of which
Rawson could not determine. And everywhere was the shouting and hurry
as of a nation in the throes of war.
His speculations ended abruptly. They were approaching a room, a vast
open place. High on the farther wall was a recess in the rock in which
tongues of flame licked hungrily upward. The heat of the fires struck
down in a ceaseless hot blast. Close to the fires, unmindful of the
heat, a barbaric figure assumed grotesque and horrible postures, while
its voice rose in echoing shrillness.
Below were crowding red ones who prostrated themselves on the rocky
floor.
"Fire worshipers!" The explanatory thought flashed through Dean
Rawson's mind. "Here was one of their holy places, a place of
sacrifice, perhaps, and he was being taken there, helpless, a
captive!"
CHAPTER X
_Plumb Loco_
The sheriff of Cocos County was reacting exactly as Rawson had
anticipated. Smithy stood before him, a disheveled Smithy, grimy of
face and hands. He had made his way to the highway and caught a ride
to the nearest town, and now that he had found Jack Downer, sheriff,
that gentleman leaned back in his old chair behind the battered desk
and regarded the younger man with amused tolerance.
"Now, that's right interesting, what you say," he admitted. "Tonah
Basin, and the old crater, and red devils settin' fire to everything.
I've heard some wild ones since this Prohibition went into effect and
some of the boys started makin' their own, but yours sure beats 'em
all. Guess likely I'll have to take a run up Tonah way and see what
kind of cactus liquor they're makin'."
"Meaning I'm drunk or a liar." Smithy's voice was hot with sudden
anger, but the sheriff regarded him imperturbably.
"Well, I'd let you off on one count, son. You do look sort of sober."
Smithy disregarded the plain implication and fought down the anger
that possessed him.
"May I use your phone, Mr. Downer?" he asked.
He called the office of Erickson and his associates in Los Angeles and
told, as well as he could for the constant interruptions from his
listener, the story of what had occurred. And Mr. Erickson at the
other end of the line, although he used different words, gave somewhat
the same reply as had the sheriff.
"I refuse to listen to any more such wild talk," he said. "If our
property has been destroyed, as you say, there will be an accounting,
you may be sure of that. And now, Mr. Smith, get this straight, you
tell Rawson, wherever he is hiding, to come and see me at once."
"But I tell you he has been captured," said Smithy desperately. "He's
gone."
"I rather think we will find him," was the reply. "He had better come
of his own accord. His connection with us will be severed and all
drilling operations in Tonah Basin will be discontinued, but Mr.
Rawson will find that his responsibility is not so easily evaded."
The sheriff could not have failed to realize the unsatisfactory nature
of the conversation; he must have wondered at the satisfied grin that
spread across Smithy's tired face.
"Do you mean you're through?" he demanded. "You're abandoning Rawson's
work?"
"Exactly," was Mr. Erickson's crisp response.
* * * * *
Smithy, as the telephone clicked in his ear, turned again to the
sheriff. "That unties my hands," he said cryptically. "One more call,
if you please."
Then to the operator: "Get me the offices of the Mountain Power and
Lighting Corporation in San Francisco. I will talk with the
president."
The sheriff of Cocos County chuckled audibly. "You'll talk to the
president's sixteenth assistant secretary, son," he told Smithy. "And
I take back what I said before--now I know you're plumb loco. By the
way, son, it costs money for telephone calls like that. I hope you
ain't, by any chance, overlookin'--"
But Smithy was speaking into the telephone unmindful of the sheriff's
remarks.
"Is Mr. Smith in his office?" he was inquiring. "Yes, President
Smith.... Would you connect me with him at once, please? This is
Gordon Smith talking."
"Hello, Dad," he said a moment later. "Yes, that's right. It's the
prodigal himself. Now, listen, Dad, here's something important. Can
you meet me in Sacramento and arrange for us to see the Governor--get
his private, confidential ear? I'll beat it for Los Angeles--charter
the fastest plane they've got...."
There was more to the conversation, much more, although Smithy
refrained from giving details over the phone. An operator was breaking
in on the conversation as he was about to hang up.
"Emergency call," the young woman's voice was saying. "We must have
the line at once."
* * * * *
Smithy handed the telephone to the sheriff. "Someone's anxious to talk
to you," he said. He searched his pockets hurriedly, found a
ten-dollar bill which he laid on the sheriff's desk. "That will cover
it," he said with a new note in his voice. "Perhaps you're not just
the man for this job, sheriff. It's going to be a whole lot too hot
for you to handle."
He had turned quickly toward the door, but something in the sheriff's
excited voice checked him. "Burned? Wiped out, you say?"
Halfway across the room Smithy could hear another hoarse voice in the
telephone. The sheriff repeated the words. "Red devils! They wasn't
Injuns? The whole town of Seven Palms destroyed!"
"I thought," said Smithy softly to himself, "that we'd have to go down
_there_ to find _them_, and instead they're out looking for us. Yes, I
think this will be decidedly too hot for you to handle, sheriff." He
turned and bolted out the door.
* * * * *
An attentive audience was awaiting Gordon Smith on his arrival in
Sacramento. Smithy's father was not one to be kept waiting even by the
Governor of the state. Also, Smithy was coming from the Tonah Basin
region, and the news of the destruction of the desert town of Seven
Palms had preceded him. Even the swift planes of the Coastal Service
could not match the speed of the radio news.
There were only two men in the room when Smithy entered. One of them,
tall, heavily built, as square-shouldered as Smithy, came forward and
put his two hands on the young man's shoulders. Their greetings were
brief.
"Well, son?" asked the older man, and packed a world of questioning
into the interrogation.
"O. K., Dad," said Smithy simply.
His father nodded silently and turned to the other man. "Governor, my
son, Gordon. He got tired of being known as the 'Old Man's
son'--started out on his own--not looking for adventure exactly, but I
judge he has found it. He's got something to tell us."
And again Smithy told his wild, unbelievable tale. But it was not so
incredible now, for, even while Smithy was talking, the Governor was
glancing at the report on his desk which told of the destruction of
the little town of Seven Palms.
"I can't tell you what it means," Smithy concluded. He paused before
venturing a prediction which was to prove remarkably accurate. "But I
saw them--I saw them come up out of the earth, and I'm betting there
are plenty more where they came from. And now that they've found their
way out, we've got a scrap on our hands. And don't think they're not
fighters, either. They're armed--those flame-throwers are nothing we
can laugh off, and what else they've got, we don't know."
He leaned forward earnestly across the Governor's desk. "But that's
your job," he said. "Mine is to find Dean Rawson. He's alive, or he
was. He sent up his ring as proof of it. I've got to find him--I've
got to go down in that pit and I want your help."
CHAPTER XI
_The White-Hot Pit_
How far his guard of wild, red man-things had taken him Dean Rawson
could not know. Many miles, it must have been. And he knew that the
air had grown steadily more stiflingly hot. But the heat of those long
tunneled passages was like a cool breeze compared with the blasting
breath of the room into which he was plunged.
It seared his eyeballs; it struck down from the tongues of flame that
played in red fury in the recess high up on the farther wall. And the
vast room, the fires, the hundreds of kneeling figures, all blurred
and swam dizzily before him.
The hot air that he breathed seemed crisping his lungs. Vaguely, for
the stupefying, brain-numbing heat, he wondered at the figure he saw
dimly in its grotesque posturing close to the flames. And the hundreds
of others--how could they live? How could he himself go on living in
this inferno?
They had been chanting in unison, the kneeling red ones. Dean heard
the regular beat of their repeated words change to an uproar of
shrill, whistling voices. But he could neither see nor hear plainly
for the unbearable, suffocating heat.
The clamor was deafening, confusing; it echoed tremendously in the
rocky room and mingled with the steady, continuous roar of the flames.
The mass of bodies that surged about him made only a blurring
impression; he tried to make himself see clearly. He must fight--fight
to the last! Only this thought persisted. He was striking out blindly
when he knew that his red guard had cleared a way through the mob and
was dragging him forward.
He knew when they reached the farther wall. Somewhere above him was
the deep-cut niche in which the fires roared. And then, when again he
could see from his tortured eyes, he found directly ahead another
doorway in the solid rock. Beyond it all was black; it gave promise of
coolness, of relief from the stifling air of the room. Red hands were
thrusting him through.
The burst of water, icy cold, that descended upon him from above
shocked him from the stupor that claimed his senses. He was drenched
in an instant, strangling and gasping for breath. But he could think!
And, as the lean hands seized him again and hurried him forward, he
almost dared to hope.
* * * * *
To his eyes the passageway was a place of utter darkness, but the red
ones, their great owl eyes opened wide, hurried him on. His stumbling
feet encountered a flight of steps. With the red guard he climbed a
winding stair where the tunnel twisted upward.
That icy deluge had set every nerve aquiver with new life. He hardly
dared ask himself what might lie ahead. Yet he had been saved from
that mob; it might be his life would be spared, that in some way he
could learn to communicate with these people, learn more of this
subterranean world--which must be of tremendous extent. Without any
sure knowledge of their plans, he still was certain in his own mind
that they intended to swarm out upon the upper world. He might even be
able to show them the folly of that.
A thousand thoughts were flashing through his mind when the tunnel
ended. Beyond a square-cut opening the air was aglow with red. An
ominous thunder was in his ears. Then a score of hands lifted him
bodily and threw him out upon a rocky floor that burned his hands as
he fell.
Heat, blistering, unbearable, beat upon him. He was wrapped in
quick-rising clouds of steam from his wet clothes.
The platform ended. Far below was a sea of red faces, grotesque and
horrible, where each held two ghastly white disks, and at the center
of each disk a mere pinpoint eye.
He saw it all in the instant of his falling--the inhuman, shrieking
mob, the blast of hot flame not forty feet away at the back of the
rocky niche, and, between himself and the flame, a giant figure that
leaped exultantly, while its body, that appeared carved from metallic
copper, reflected the red fires until it seemed itself aflame.
* * * * *
Dean knew in the fraction of a second while he scrambled to his feet,
that the great room had gone silent. The roaring of the flames ceased;
even the clamor of shrill voices was stilled. He had thrown one arm
across his face to shield his eyes; the heat still poured upon him
like liquid fire. But his instant decision to throw himself out and
down into the waiting mob was checked by the sudden stillness.
To open his eyes wide meant impossible torture, yet he forced himself
to peer through slitted lids beneath the shelter of his arm.
The flame was gone. Where it had been was a wall of shimmering red
rock above a gaping throat in the floor, whose rim was quivering white
with heat. Here the blast from some volcanic depth had come.
Then he saw it, saw the great coppery figure leaping upon him--and saw
more plainly than all this the end that had been prepared for him.
Fire worshipers! Demons of an under world paying tribute to their god.
And he, Dean Rawson, was to be a living sacrifice, cast headlong to
that waiting, white-hot throat!
The coppery giant was upon him in the instant of his realization.
Somehow in that moment Dean Rawson's wracked body passed beyond all
pain. With the inhuman, maniacal strength of a man driven beyond all
reason and restraint he tore himself half free from those encircling
arms and drove blow after blow into the hideous face above him.
Only his left arm was free. That, too, was clamped tightly against his
body an instant later.
* * * * *
The giant had been between him and the glowing rocks. Now he felt
himself whirled in air, and again the blast of heat struck upon him.
He was being rushed backward; and there flashed through his mind, as
plainly as if he could actually see it, the scintillant whiteness of
that hungry throat.
He tried to lock his legs about the big body to prevent that final
heave and throw that would end a ghastly ceremony. The rocks were
close, their radiant heat wrapped about him like a living flame.
Abruptly his strength was gone--the fight was over--he had lost! His
heart sent the blood pounding and thundering to his brain; his lungs
seemed on fire.
* * * * *
The high priest of the red ones had his priestly duty to perform--the
sacrifice must be offered. But even the high priest, it would seem,
must have been not above personal resentment. Sacrilege had been
done--a fist had smashed again and again into the holy one's face.
This it must have been that made him pause, that brought one big hand
up in a grip of animal rage about Dean's throat.
Only a moment--a matter of seconds--while he vented his fury upon this
white-skinned man who had dared to oppose him. Dean felt the hand
close about his throat. So limp he was, so drained of strength, he
made no effort to tear it loose. He was _dead_--what mattered a few
seconds more or less of life? And then a thrill shot through him as he
knew his right hand was free.
That hand made fumbling work of drawing a gun from its smoking,
leather holster. He could hardly control the numbed, blistered
fingers, yet somehow he crooked one about the trigger; and dimly, as
from some great distance, he heard the roar of the forty-five....
Then, from some deep recess within him, he summoned one last ounce of
strength that threw him clear of the falling body.
Instinctively he had heaved himself away from the fiery rocks; the
same effort had sent his big coppery antagonist staggering, stumbling,
backward. And Dean, sprawled on the stone floor, whose heat where he
lay was just short of redness, heard one long, despairing shriek as
the giant figure wavered, hung in air for a moment in black outline
against the fierce red of a rocky wall above a white-hot pit, then
toppled, pitched forward, and vanished.
Sick and giddy, he forced himself to draw his body up on hands and
knees. Then he straightened, came to his feet, and staggered forward.
* * * * *
Below him was pandemonium. The sea of faces wavered and blurred before
his eyes. From a distant archway other figures were coming. He saw the
gleam of metal, heard the wild blare of trumpets, and knew that the
hundreds of red ones below him were standing stiffly, both hands
raised upright in salute as another barbaric figure entered. The air
was clamorous with a shrill repeated call. "Phee-e-al!" the red ones
shrieked. "Phee-e-al!"
But Rawson did not wait to see more. Behind him, the flames that had
been fed with human flesh--if indeed these red ones were human--roared
again into life. He had returned the pistol to its holster when first
he came to his feet; his weak hands had seemed unable to hold it. And
now his two hands were thrust outward before him as he staggered
blindly toward the tunnel mouth.
It was where he had emerged upon the platform. His reaching hands
found the side entrance where the stairs led down to the main hall.
In the darkness he made his way past. Stumbling weakly he pushed on
down the long tunnel whose floor slanted gently away.
Ahead of him was a light. The comparative coolness of these rocks had
served to revive him somewhat. He had no hope of escape, yet the light
seemed comforting, somehow.
He stopped. His stinging eyes were wide open. He stared incredulously
at the glowing spot on a distant wall, where a flame must have
touched, and at the figure beneath it.
The figure of a woman! A young woman, tall, slender, fair-haired,
whose skin was white, a creamy white, whiter than snow.
A woman? It was a mere girl, slender and beautiful, her graceful young
body poised as if, in quick flight, she had been caught and held for a
moment of stillness.
What was she doing here? His exhausted brain could not comprehend what
it meant. He had seen women of the Mole-men tribe mingling with the
men. Like them their heads were pointed, their faces grotesque and
hideous. Rawson gave an inarticulate cry of amazement and staggered
forward.
Between him and the distant figure a crowd of Reds swarmed in. They
came from a connecting passage. Above their heads the lava tips of
flame-throwers were spitting jets of green fire. Every face was turned
toward him at his cry.
Beyond them the white figure vanished. Dean, leaning weakly against
the wall, told himself dully that it had been a phantom, a product of
his own despairing brain and his own weakness. Then that weakness
overcame him; and the red Mole-men, their white and hideous eyes, the
threatening jets of green flame, all vanished in the quick darkness
that swept over him....
CHAPTER XII
_Dreams_
The black curtain of unconsciousness which descended so quickly upon
Rawson was not easily thrown off. For hours, days or weeks--he never
knew how long he lay in the citadel of the Reds--it was to wrap him
around.
Nor was his waking a matter of a moment. Many and varied were the
impressions which came to him in times of semiconsciousness, and which
of them were realities and which dreams, he could not tell.
He was being tortured with knives, lances tipped with pain that
dragged him up from the black depths in which he lay. Dimly he
realized that his clothes were being stripped from him and that the
piercing knives were none the less real for being only the touch of
hands and rough cloth upon his blistered body. Then from head to foot
he was coated with a substance cool and moist. The pain died to a mere
throbbing and again he felt himself sinking back into unconsciousness.
There were other visions, many others, some of them plain and
distinct, some blurred and terrifying to his fevered brain trying
vainly to bring order and reason into what was utterly chaotic.
Once a bedlam of shrieking voices roused him. He tried to open his
eyes, whose lids were too heavy for his strength. And by that he knew
he was dreaming. Yet from under those lowered lids he seemed to see a
wild medley of red warriors, their faces blotched and ghastly in the
green light of their weapons. They were carrying a charred body which
they threw heavily upon the floor beside him as if to compare the two.
He saw the face which the flames had not touched, the face of Jack
Downer--Downer, the sheriff of Cocos County. His sandy hair had been
scorched to the scalp.
Dreams ... and the steady beat of metal-shod feet of marching men. He
saw them passing some distance away. The repeated _thud-thud_ of metal
on stone echoed maddeningly through his brain for hours.... Dreams,
all of them.
And once there came to him a vision which beyond all doubt was unreal.
* * * * *
Silence had surrounded him. For what seemed hours not one of the red
mole-men had come near. And then, in the silence, he heard whisperings
and the sound of stealthy feet; and, for a moment, the same white
figure that had met him in his flight stood where he could see.
Only the merest trace of dim light relieved the utter darkness of the
room. The girl's figure was ghostly, unreal. Yet he saw the dull
sparkle of jeweled breast-plates against her creamy white skin. Loose
folds of cloth were gathered about her waist; her golden hair was
drawn back except for vagrant curls that only accentuated the perfect
oval of her face.
There were others with her, dim shapes of men; how many Rawson could
not tell. They looked down at him, whispering softly, excitedly,
amongst themselves; but their words were like nothing he had ever
heard.
For an instant Dean felt his stupefied mind coming almost to
wakefulness. Phantom figures, ghostly and unreal--but the faces were
human, and the eyes looked down upon him pityingly. He tried to rouse
himself, tried to call out, then settled limply back, for the girl was
speaking--or he was catching her thoughts. It seemed almost that he
heard her whispered words:
"They take him to _Gevarro_, to the Lake of Fire which never dies!
Gor told me--he overheard their plans. But, by the Mountain I
swear...." Then footsteps echoed in a far-off passage, and the white
ones vanished like drifting smoke.
Dreams, all of them. Yet the time came when Dean knew that he was
awake--knew too that further experiences awaited him in this demoniac
land.
* * * * *
Again red guards came. The wicked breath of their weapons filled the
great room where Rawson had been with green, flickering light. Dean,
dragged to his feet, was unable to stand. One of the giant yellow
workers came forward at a whistled order and held him erect. Another
brought a bowl carved from rock crystal and filled with a liquid
golden-green with reflected light. He put it to Rawson's lips and with
the first touch Dean knew that he must have been filled with a burning
thirst beyond anything he had ever known. He gulped greedily at the
liquid, drained the bowl to the last drop, then marveled at the
thrilling fire of strength that flowed through him.
"Wine," he thought, "wine of the gods--or devils." He came to himself
with a start. He knew that he was naked and that his body was encased
in a coating of stiff gray plaster. It was this that prevented his
arms and legs from flexing.
Another order and the giant worker picked him up in his arms and
carried him where the others led to a distant room. A stream trickled
through a cut in the rocky floor. At the center of the room was a
pool. Unable to resist, Dean felt the giant arms toss him out and
down.
The water was warm. At its first touch the hard plaster melted like
snow. Sputtering and choking for breath, Rawson came to the surface.
He found he could move freely, then reaching hands hauled him out
upon the floor, and through all his dread he found time to marvel at
his own firm muscles and the healthy white of his skin that had been
seared and blistered.
He obeyed when the red guards pointed and motioned him into a dark
passageway. He tried to keep up with them as they hurried him on.
Evidently his pace was too slow, for again the big worker picked him
up, swung him into the air and seated him firmly on one broad
shoulder, and, with red guards ahead and behind them, hurried on.
To find himself a child in the hands of this big yellow man was
disconcerting. To be calmly lugged off was almost humiliating. No one
who was not a good sport could have grinned as Rawson did at his own
predicament.
"Not exactly a triumphal procession," he told himself, then his lips
set grimly. "They've got my gun," he thought, "and now, whatever
comes, all I can do is stand and take it. Still, they've saved my
life. But what for?"
* * * * *
Always the way led downward, and Rawson, perched on his strange,
half-human steed, let his gaze follow up every branching tunnel and
widespread cave. Not all of these were as dark as the broad
thoroughfare they followed. In some, strange lights glowed, and Rawson
saw weird, towering plant growths that yellow workers were harvesting.
Life, life, everywhere, and seemingly this underground world was
endless.
Troops of red warriors passed them, upward bound. The dancing flames
of their weapons, where occasional ones were in action, glowed from
afar. They bobbed and waved like green fireflies as the Mole-men came
on at a half-run.
"And this means trouble up top," he thought. "There's going to be hell
to pay up there."
But workers, fighters, everyone they met stood aside to let the red
guard pass. Again Rawson heard the strange word or call that had come
to him in the temple of fire. One of the guides would give a whistling
call that ended in the same strange shrill cry of "Phee-e-al," and
instantly the way was cleared.
A wild journey, incredible, unreal. Rawson, as he met the countless
staring white eyes of the creatures they passed, found his thoughts
wandering. He had had wild dreams. Surely this was only another in
that succession of phantom pictures. Then, seeing the cold, implacable
hatred in those staring eyes, he would be brought back with sickening
abruptness to a full knowledge of his own hopeless situation.
"Gevarro, the lake of fire which never dies"--what was it the white
ones had said? But no, that certainly was a dream like that other in
which he had seemed to see the charred body of a man, the sheriff who
had called to see him at his camp in Tonah Basin.
Dreams--reality--his brain was confused with the wild kaleidoscope of
unbelievable pictures.
* * * * *
He was suddenly aware that through it all he had been mentally
tabulating their route, remembering the outstanding features when
there was light enough to see. He knew that unconsciously his mind had
been thinking of escape. Wilder than all the other visions, he had
been picturing himself retracing his route, alone, free. He did not
know that he had laughed aloud, harshly, hopelessly, until he saw the
curious eyes of his red guard upon him.
"Yes," he told himself in silent bitterness, "I could find my way
back, if...."
The guard had swung off from the great tunnel which must have been one
of the main thoroughfares of the Mole-men's world. They crowded
through a narrower passage and again Rawson found himself in one of
the great, high-ceilinged caves like the others he had seen. But
unlike the others this was brightly lighted.
Massive limestone formation. His eyes squinted against the glare and
caught the character of the rock before he was able to distinguish
details, and in the black limestone big disks of gray mineral had been
set. Jets of flame played upon them and turned them to blazing,
brilliant white.
The big yellow Mole-man who had carried him dropped him roughly to the
floor and backed away. About him the red guard was grouped. Rawson
caught a glimpse of hundreds of other thronging figures. The crowd
about him separated. A space was cleared between him and the farther
end of the room, a lane lined on either side by solid masses of savage
Reds. And beyond them, more barbaric than any figure in the
foreground, was another group.
* * * * *
Across the full width of the room a low wall was raised three or four
feet from the floor. It was capped with rude carvings. The whole mass
gleamed dully golden in the bright light. Beyond the wall in
semicircular formation, resembling a grouping of bronze statues, were
men like the one with whom Rawson had fought. Priests, tenders of the
fires. He knew in an instant that here were more of the red one's holy
men. They stood erect, unmoving. At their center was another seated
man-shape that might have been cast from solid gold.
His naked body was yellow and glittering, contrasting strongly with
the black metal straps like those the warriors wore. On his head a
round, sharply-pointed cap was ablaze with precious stones.
Rawson took it all in in one quick glance. He knew that those copper
bodies were not encased in metal, for the flesh of the one he had
fought with had sunk under his blows. Their skin was coated with a
preparation, heat resistant without a doubt, and the golden one must
have been treated in somewhat the same way.
His thoughts flashed quickly over this. It was the face of that seated
figure that riveted his attention, a white face, milk-white, so white
it seemed almost chalky!
* * * * *
For one breathless second Rawson was filled with a wordless hope.
Those white ones of his dream had looked upon him with kindly eyes.
They were human--men of another race, but men. Then beneath the chalky
whiteness of the face he found the hideous features of the red
Mole-men, and knew that the white color of the face was as false as
that of the golden body.
But he was their leader. He was someone of importance. Rawson had
started forward impetuously when he saw the figure rise. At the first
motion the hands of every red one in the room were flung in air. They
stood stiffly at salute. Even the priests' coppery arms flashed
upward. And "Phee-e-al!" a thousand shrill voices were shouting.
"Phee-e-al! Phee-e-al!"
Rawson stopped, then walked slowly forward, one defenseless, naked man
of the upper world, between two living walls formed by men of a hidden
race.
"Phee-e-al," he was thinking. "He's the one I saw coming into their
temple back there. They got out of our way when they knew we were
coming to see him. He's the big boss here, all right."
He did not pause in his steady, forward progress until his hands were
resting upon the golden barrier. Strange thoughts were racing through
his mind. Phee-e-al, he was facing Phee-e-al, king of a kingdom ten
miles or more beneath the surface of the earth, a place of devils more
real and terrible than any that mythology had dared depict. And he,
Dean Rawson, a man, just one of the millions like him up there in a
sane, civilized world, was down here, standing at a barrier of gold
before a tribunal that knew nothing of justice or mercy.
* * * * *
Thoughts of communicating with them had mingled with other half-formed
plans in his racing mind. Sign language--he had talked with the
Indians; he might be able to get some ideas across. He met the other's
fierce scrutiny fearlessly, then, waiting for him to make the first
advance, let his gaze dart about at closer range. He could not
restrain a start of surprise at sight of his own clothing, his pocket
radio receiver and his pistol spread out on a metal stand.
They had been curious about them. Rawson took that as a good sign.
Perhaps he had been mistaken in his interpretation of what he had
seen. For himself, he could have no real hope, but it might be that
the outpouring of these demons into his own world was a threat that
lay only in his own imagination.
His eyes came back to meet that gaze which had never left him. The
eyes were mere dots of jet in a white and repulsive face. The rounded
mouth opened to emit a shrill whistled order.
In the utter silence of the great room one of the copper-skinned
priests moved swiftly toward the rear. There were chests there,
massive metal things afire with the brilliance of inlaid jewels. The
priest flung one of them open with a resounding clang.
The room had been warm, and the chill which abruptly froze Rawson's
muscles to hard rigidity came from within himself. Dreams! He had
thought them dreams, those marching thousands, and the others who
returned. He had dared to hope he might avert an invasion by this
inhuman horde.
And now he knew his worst imaginings were far short of the truth. He
saw clearly his own fate. For the priest returning was holding an
object aloft, a horrible thing, a naked body, scorched and charred.
And above it a head lopped awkwardly. The hair was sandy; half of it
had been burned to the scalp in a withering flame. Below, staring from
sightless eyes, was the face of the man who had once been sheriff of
Cocos County.
CHAPTER XIII
"_N-73 Clear!_"
"You fly, of course?" demanded Governor Drake.
Smithy nodded. "Unlimited license--all levels."
They had spent the night in the executive mansion, and now the
Governor had burst precipitately into the room where Smithy and his
father had just finished dressing. The two had been deep in an earnest
conversation which the Governor's entrance had interrupted.
"I am drafting you for service," said the Governor. "I want you to go
out to Field Number Three. A fast scout plane--National Guard
equipment--will be ready for you--"
He broke off and stared doubtfully at a paper in his hand, a
radiophone message, Smithy judged. "I'm in a devil of a fix," the
Governor exclaimed, after a pause. Then:
"I don't doubt your sincerity," he told Smithy. "Never saw you till
yesterday, but your father's 'O.K.' goes a hundred per cent with me.
Old 'J. G.' and I have been through a lot of scraps together." His
frowning eyes relaxed for a moment to exchange twinkling glances with
the older man.
"No, it isn't that," he added, "but...." Again he stared at the flimsy
piece of paper.
"What's on your mind, Bill?" asked Smith senior. "That stuff the boy
told us was pretty wild"--he laid one hand affectionately upon
Smithy's shoulder--"but he's a poor liar, Gordon is, and, knowing his
weakness, he usually sticks to the truth. And there's no record of
insanity in the family, you know. If there's something sticking in
your crop, Bill, cough it up."
And the Honorable William B. Drake obeyed. "Listen to this," he
commanded, and read from the paper in his hand:
"'Replying to your inquiry about the doings at Seven Palms.
Some Indians did that job. No help needed. I can handle
this. Posse organized and we are leaving right now.--Signed,
Jack Downer, Sheriff, Cocos County.'"
"That sounds authentic," said Smithy drily. "I've met the sheriff."
"Now, if it _was_ Indians that got tanked up and came down off the
reservation, burned Seven Palms and cleaned up your camp--" began
Governor Drake.
"It wasn't!" Smithy interrupted hotly. "I told you--" He felt his
father's hand gripping firmly at his shoulder.
"Steady," said Smith, senior. "Let him talk, son."
"There's an election three months from now, J. G.," said the
Governor, "and you know they're riding me hard. Let me make one false
move--just one--anything that the opposition can use for a campaign of
ridicule, and my goose is cooked to a turn."
* * * * *
Gordon Smith shook off his father's restraining hand and took one
quick forward step. His face, even through the tan of the desert sun,
was unnaturally pale.
"Election be dammed!" he exploded. "Dean Rawson has been captured by
those red devils--he's down there, the whitest white man I ever met!
I've been to the sheriff; now I've come to you! Do you mean to tell me
there isn't any power in this state to back me up when--"
He stopped. There was a tremble in his voice he could not control.
"Good boy," said Governor Drake softly. "Now I know it's the truth.
Yes, you'll be backed up, plenty, but for the present it will be
strictly unofficial. Now pull in your horns and listen.
"You know the lay of the land. I want your help. Go out to Field
Three; there'll be a man there waiting for you. Don't call him
'Colonel'--he's also strictly unofficial to-day. The sheriff and his
posse will be there at Seven Palms inside an hour; I want you to be
there, too, about five thousand feet up.
"Tell Colonel Culver--I mean Mr. Culver--your story; tell him
everything you know. He'll be in charge of operations if we have to
send in troops; he'll give you that private and unofficial backing I
spoke of if we don't.
"Now get down there; keep your eye on the sheriff's crowd and see
everything that happens!"
But Smithy's parting remark was to his father; it was a continuation
of the subject they had been discussing before.
"You can buy at your own price," he said. "They've got rights to the
whole basin. But they've quit; I'm not treating them to a
double-cross."
And he added as he went out of the room: "Buy it for me if you don't
want it yourself."
* * * * *
It was a two-place, open-cockpit plane that Smithy found had been set
aside for him. Dual control--the stick in the forward cockpit carried
the firing grip that controlled the slim blue machine guns firing
through the propeller. Behind the rear cockpit a strange, unwieldy,
double-ended weapon was recessed and streamlined into the fuselage.
The scout seemed quite able to protect itself in an emergency.
Beside the plane a tall, slender man in civilian attire was waiting.
He stuck out his hand, while the gray eyes in his lean, tanned face
scanned Smithy swiftly.
"I'm Culver. Understand I'm to be your passenger to-day. How about
it--can you fly the ship? Seven hundred and fifty DeGrosse
motor--retractable landing gear, of course. She hits four-fifty at top
speed--snappy--quick on the trigger."
Smithy shook his head dubiously. "Four-fifty--I'm not accustomed to
that. But you can take the stick, Mr. Culver, if I get in a hurry and
jump out and run on ahead. You see I'm used to my own ship, an
_Assegai_--special job--does five hundred when I'm pressed for time."
The lean face of Mr. Culver creased into a smile. "You qualify," he
said. "But keep your hands off the dead mule."
At an inquiring glance he pointed to the heavy, half-hidden weapon
that Smithy had noticed. "Can't kick," he explained, "--hence 'dead
mule.' It's the new Rickert recoilless; throws little shells the size
of your thumb--but they raise hell when they hit."
"Sounds interesting." Smithy climbed into the rear cockpit and
strapped himself in. "Show me how it works, then I won't do it."
* * * * *
A pistol grip moved under Culver's reaching hand and the strange
weapon sprang from concealment like something alive. The pistol grip
moved sideways, and the gun swung out and down, its muzzle almost
touching the ground. Smithy was suddenly aware that a crystal above
his instrument board was reflecting that same bit of sun-baked earth.
A dot of black hung stationary at the crystal's center.
"That's your target." Culver's voice held all the pride of a child
with a new toy, but he released the grip, and the ungainly gun swung
smoothly back to its hiding place.
He settled himself in the forward cockpit. "You will find a helmet
there," he said. "It's phone-equipped; you can tell me all about that
wild nightmare of yours while we jog along."
The white beam from the despatcher's tower had been on them while they
talked. Other planes were waiting on the field. Smithy smiled as he
settled the helmet over his head. "For a strictly unofficial flight,"
he thought, "we're getting darned good service."
He taxied past a hangar where uniformed men pointedly paid them no
attention. He swung the ship to the line as Airboard regulations
required.
"N-73" was painted on the monoplane's low wings that seemed scraping
the ground. "N-73 Clear!" the despatcher's voice radioed into Smithy's
ears. Then the seven-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower DeGrosse let loose
its voice as Smithy gunned her down the field.
* * * * *
Whatever doubts Colonel Culver may have had of Smithy's ability were
dissipated as they made their way cautiously through the free-flying
area under five thousand. Everywhere were mail planes, express and
passenger ships taking off for the transcontinental day run, and
private planes scattering to the smaller landing areas among the
flashing lights of the flat-topped business blocks. Among them Smithy
threaded his way toward the green-lighted transfer zone, where he
spiraled upward.
At ten thousand he was on his course. He set the gyro-control which
would fly the ship more surely than any human hands, and the air-speed
indicator crept up to the four hundred and fifty miles an hour that
Culver had promised. Not till then did he give the man in the forward
cockpit the details of his "nightmare."
He had not finished answering the other's incredulous questions when
he throttled down to slow cruising speed and nosed the ship toward a
distant expanse of sage-blurred sand.
Outside the restricted metropolitan area he had already dropped out of
the chill wind that struck them at ten thousand. Behind them and off
to the right was the gray rampart of the Sierra. Ahead a rough circle
of darker hills enclosed the great bowl he had learned to know as
Tonah Basin.
* * * * *
Some feeling of unreality in his own experiences must have crept into
his mind; unconsciously he had been questioning his own sanity. Now,
at sight of the sandy waste where he and Rawson had labored, with the
dark slopes of desolate craters looming ahead and a blot of burned
wreckage directly below to mark the site of their camp, the horrible
reality of it gripped him again.
He could not speak at first. The air of the five-thousand level was
not uncomfortably warm, but Smithy was feeling again the baking heat
of that desert land; again he was with Rawson in the volcanic crater;
Dean was calling to him, warning him....
A sharp question from Culver was repeated twice before Smithy could
reply.
He side-slipped in above the crater's ragged rim, heedless of
down-drafts--the power of the DeGrosse motor would pull them out of
anything in a ten-thousand-foot vertical climb if need arose. Smithy
was pointing toward a confusion of shining black rock.
"Over there," he told Culver. Then he was shouting into the telephone
transmitter. "It's open," he said. "That's where Dean went down--and
there they are! Look, man, there--there!"
CHAPTER XIV
_Emergency Order_
The throat of the old volcano was a pit of blackness in the midst of
gray ash and the red-yellow of cinders. Beside it were other flecks of
color: red, moving bodies; metal, that twinkled brightly under the
desert sun--and in an instant they were gone. Nor did Smithy, throwing
the thundering plane close over that place, know how near he had
passed to sudden, invisible death. Rugged pinnacles of rock were
ahead. The plane under Smithy's hands vaulted over them and roared on
above the desert.
"Did you see them?" Smithy was shouting.
The man in the forward cockpit turned to face his pilot. "I am
apologizing, Smith, for all the things I have been thinking and
haven't said. We've got a job on our hands. Now let's find that fool
sheriff who thinks he's hunting for drunken Indians. We must warn
him."
Smithy wondered at the wisps of blue smoke still rising from the ruins
of Seven Palms as he drove in above it. It seemed years since he had
left the Basin, yet the wreckage of this little town, only five miles
outside, still smoldered.
Colonel Culver was shouting to him. "East," he said. "Swing east.
There's fighting over there." Then, in his usual cool tone: "I'll take
the ship, Smith. Give then a burst or two from up here--perhaps the
sheriff can use a little help."
Across the yellow sand ran a desert road. Ten miles away black smoke
clouds were lifting. Smithy knew there had been a little settlement
there. A dozen houses, perhaps, and a gasoline station. At half that
distance the clear sunlight showed moving objects on the sand:
automobiles, smaller dots that were running them. They came suddenly
to sharp visibility as the plane drew near. Tiny bursts of white meant
rifle fire.
They were a thousand feet up and close when Smithy saw the first car
vanish in flame. Others followed swiftly. Men were falling. A dozen of
them had made up the sheriff's posse, and now, like the cars, they,
too, burst into flame and either vanished utterly or, like living
torches, were cast down upon the sand.
Still no sign of the enemy, more than the ripping stab of green fire
from a sand dune at one side. They were over and past before Smithy,
looking back, saw the red ones leap out into view.
* * * * *
Culver must have seen them in the same instant. He throttled down to a
safe banking speed. Opened full, the DeGrosse would have whipped them
around in a turn that would have meant instant death. From five miles
distant they shot in on a long slant. Smithy's hands were off the
stick. It was Culver's ship now.
He saw the man peering through his sights, then the roar of the motor
held other, sharper sounds. Thin flames were stabbing through the
propeller disk, and he knew that the bow guns were sending messengers
on ahead where red figures waited on the sand.
Their trajectory flattened. Culver half rolled the ship as they sped
overhead. "He wants a look at them," Smithy was thinking. Then a blast
of heat struck him full in the face.
It was Smithy's hand on the stick that righted the ship; only the
instant response of the big DeGrosse motor tore them up and away from
the sands that were reaching for those wings.
His face was seared, but the pain of it was forgotten in the knowledge
that their drunken, twisting flight had whipped out the fire licking
back from the forward cockpit. He saw Culver's head, fallen awkwardly
to one side. The helmet in one part was charred to a crisp.
He leveled off. He was thinking: "Another man gone! Can't I ever fight
back? If I only had a gun!" Then he knew he was looking at the pistol
grip, where Colonel Culver's brown hand had brought an awkward weapon
to life. His lips twisted to a whimsical smile, though his eyes still
held the same cold fury, as he whispered: "And I don't even know that
the damn thing's loaded--but I'm going to find out!"
* * * * *
They were clustered on the sands below him as he roared overhead. He
was flying at two thousand, the throttle open full. Beside the ship a
gun swung its long barrel downward. It sputtered almost
soundlessly--but where it passed, the sand rose up in spouting
fountains.
But his wild speed made the gunfire almost useless. The shell-bursts
were spaced too far apart; they straddled the blot of figures.
He came back at five thousand feet, slowly--until the ship lurched,
and he saw the right wing tip vanish in a shower of molten metal. He
threw the ship over and away from the invisible beam; the plane
writhed and twisted across the last half mile of sky. He was over them
when he pulled into a tight spiral, then he swung the pistol grip that
controlled the gun until the dot in the crystal was merged with the
target of clustering red forms. The gun sputtered.
Below the plane, the quiet desert heaved its smooth surface
convulsively into the air. Even above the roar of the motor Smithy
heard the terrific thunder of that one long explosion.
Above the rim of the forward cockpit Culver's head rolled uneasily;
his voice, thick and uncertain, came back through the phone; and
later--only a matter of minutes later, though fifty miles away--Smithy
set the plane down on a level expanse of sand and tore frantically at
his belt. Colonel Culver was weakly raising his head.
* * * * *
"What hit us?" he demanded when Smithy got to him. "Did I crash?" He
looked about him with dazed eyes from which he never would have seen
again, but for the protection of his goggles.
"Fire," said Smithy tersely. "They did it, the devils, and it wasn't a
flame-thrower, either. There wasn't a flash of their cursed green
light. It just flicked us for a second. You got the worst of it. Your
half roll saved us. That thing, whatever it was, would have ripped our
left wing off in a second."
He was looking at the forward cockpit where the metal fuselage was
melted. The leather cushioning around the edge was black and charred.
Culver's helmet had protected him, but half of his face was seared as
if it had been struck by a white flame.
"But we got some of them: they know we can hit back...." Smithy began,
but knew he was speaking to deaf ears. Again his passenger had lapsed
into unconsciousness.
Quickly he disconnected their own radio receiver and threw on the
emergency radio siren. Ahead of them for a hundred miles an invisible
beam was carrying the discordant blast. Then, with throttle open full,
regardless of levels and of air traffic that tore frenziedly from his
path, he drove straight for the home field.
* * * * *
In the office of the Governor, the radio newscaster was announcing
last-minute items of interest. The Governor switched off the
instrument as Smithy entered, supporting the tall figure of Colonel
Culver, whose face and head were swathed in bandages. Culver had
insisted upon accompanying him for the rendering of their report,
though Smithy had to do the talking for both of them.
He outlined their experience in brief sentences. "And now," he was
saying grimly, "you can go as far as you please, Governor. You've got
a man's sized fight on your hands. We don't know how many there are of
them. We don't know how fast they'll spread out, but--"
A shrill wail interrupted him. From the newscasting instrument came a
flash of red that filled the room. The crystal, the emergency call,
installed on all radios within the past year and never yet used, was
clamoring for the country's attention.
Governor Drake sprang to switch it on, and tried to explain to Smithy
as he did so. "It's out of my hands now," he said. "Washington has--"
Then the radio came on with a voice which shouted:
"Emergency order. All aircraft take notice. Mole-men"--Smithy started
at the sound of the word; it was the name he had given them
himself--"Mole-men are invading Western states. A new race. They have
come from within the earth. In Arizona, three ships of the
Transcontinental Day Line, Southern Division, have been destroyed with
the loss of all passengers and crew. Shattered in air.
"It is war, war with an unknown race. Goldfield, Nevada, is in ruins.
Heavy loss of life. Federal Government taking control. Air-Control
Board orders traffic to avoid following areas...."
There followed a list of locations, while still the red crystal blazed
its warning across the land and to all aircraft in the skies. Southern
California, Arizona, Nevada--Southern Transcontinental Routes closed;
all except military aircraft grounded in restricted areas.
* * * * *
Smithy's excitement had left him. In his mind he was looking far off,
deep under the surface of the world. "They've been there," he said
quietly, "thousands of years. A new race--and they've just now learned
of this other world outside. Three ships downed! They picked them off
in the air just as they tried to do with us. I knew we had a fight on
our hands."
His voice died to silence in the room where now the new announcer was
giving a list of the dead--a room where men were speechless before an
emergency no man could have foreseen. But Smithy's eyes, gazing far
off, saw nothing of that room. Again he was seated on an outthrust
point of rock, Dean Rawson beside him, and from the black depths
beneath a man's voice was rising clearly, mockingly it seemed, in
song:
"You're pokin' through the crust of hell
And braggin' too damn loud of it,
For, when you get to hell, you'll find
The devil there to pay!"
"The devil is there to pay," Smithy repeated softly. He leaned across
and placed one hand on Colonel Culver's knee. "With your assistance,
Colonel, I'd like to go down there and find him. You and I, we know
the way--we'll organize an expedition. Maybe we can settle that debt."
CHAPTER XV
_The Lake of Fire_
Before a barrier of gold, waist-high, Dean Rawson stood tense and
rigid. Behind him the great cave-room swarmed with warriors, leaders,
doubtless, of the unholy hordes. But beyond the barrier were the real
leaders of the Mole-men tribes--Phee-e-al, ruler in chief, and his
clustering guard of high priests. In the flooding light from the wall,
their eyes were circles of dead-white skin. A black speck glinted
wickedly in the center of each.
Phee-e-al was speaking. His artificially whitened face grimaced
hideously; the shrill whistling voice made no comprehensible sound.
But in some manner Rawson gathered a dim realization of what his
gestures meant.
Phee-e-al pointed at the captive; and one lean hand, with talons more
suggestive of a bird of prey than of a human hand, pointed downward.
"Gevarro," he said. The word was repeated many times in the course of
his whistling talk.
"Gevarro"--what did it mean? Then Rawson remembered. It was the word
he had heard in his dreams, the name of the lake of fire.
The voices of the priests rose in a shrill chorus of protests, and
even Phee-e-al stood silent. They crowded about their ruler, and
Rawson knew they were demanding him for themselves. Then the one who
still held a human body in his arms sprang forward and his long talons
worked unspeakable mutilation upon the body and face.
Rawson averted his eyes from the ghastly spectacle. For, swiftly, he
was seeing something more horrifying than this desecration of a dead
body; he was seeing himself, still living, tortured and torn by those
same beastly hands. The dead face of Sheriff Downer was staring at him
from red, eyeless sockets as with one leap Rawson threw himself over
the golden wall. Ten leaping strides away was his gun. In that instant
of realization, he knew why his life had been spared.
In the room of fire he had destroyed their priest. They had saved him
for further torture.
* * * * *
To get his hands on the gun, to die fighting--the thought was an
unspoken prayer in his mind. Behind him the room echoed with demoniac
shrieks. Before him was the metal stand. His outstretched hands fell
just short of the blue .45 as he crashed to the floor. The copper ones
were upon him.
Half stunned by the fall, he hardly knew when they dragged him to his
feet. He was facing the golden figure of Phee-e-al, but now the
ruler's indecision had vanished. He was exercising his full authority
and even Rawson's throbbing brain comprehended the doom that was being
pronounced.
"Gevarro!" he was shrieking. "Gevarro!"
Beside him a priest swept the metal table clear. Rawson's clothing,
the gun, the radio receiver, all were snatched up and hurled into one
of the massive chests. Phee-e-al was still shouting shrill commands.
An instant later Rawson was lifted in air, rushed to the barrier and
thrown bodily from the sacred premises he had invaded. Then the hands
of the red guard closed about him before he could struggle to his
feet. A shining object swung down above his head. It was the last he
knew.
* * * * *
His dreams were of falling. Always when he half roused to
consciousness he was aware of that smooth, even descent, and he knew
it had continued for hours.
Once he saw black walls slipping smoothly past, upward, always upward.
Gropingly he tried to marshal his facts into some understandable
sequence. He was falling, falling toward the center of the earth, and
this that he saw was not rock, or any metal such as he knew.
"It's all different," he told himself dully, "new kind of matter. Rock
would flow; this stands the pressure." But he knew the air pressure
had built up tremendously. The blood was pounding in his ears. He
wanted to sleep.
It was the heat that awakened him. The air was stifling him,
suffocating. He was struggling to move his heavy body, fighting
against this nightmare of heat when he opened his eyes and knew that
he was in a place of light. First to be seen were walls, no longer
black, no longer even with the characteristics of rock, or even metal.
Here, as Rawson had sensed, was new material to form the core of a
world. It would have been red in an ordinary light. It was transformed
to orange, strangely terrifying in the blazing flood of yellow
brilliance that came from the tunnel's end.
Rawson's brain was not working clearly. An unendurable weight seemed
pressing upon him--the air pressure, he thought, to which he had not
yet become accustomed. And the air, itself, hot--hot!
A breeze blew steadily past toward that place of yellow horror at the
tunnel's end. Yellow, that reflected light; but its source was a
searing, dazzling white in the one brief instant when Rawson dared
turn his eyes.
Hands held him erect, red, gripping hands. One, whose body seemed
molten copper in that fierce glare, approached. His hand described a
circle over Rawson's bare chest. Straight lines radiated out from the
circle, lines of stabbing pain for the helpless man. He had seen the
same emblem in the temple of fire, again in the big room where
Phee-e-al had stood.
* * * * *
The living sacrifice was prepared. Burned into his bare flesh was the
emblem of their legendary sun-god. The priests, their bodies coated
with a flashing coppery film that must somehow be heat-resistant, had
him in their grasp.
The red warriors had fallen back. Then Phee-e-al appeared; he joined
the march of death of which Dean Rawson formed the head. Voices were
chanting--somewhere a trumpet blared. Then Rawson, moving like one in
a dream, knew the priests were guiding him toward that waiting,
incredible heat.
The tunnel's end was near. About him was an inferno where heat and hot
colors blended. The whole world seemed aflame, but beyond the tunnel's
end was a seething pit upon which no human eyes could look and live.
One glimpse only of the unbearable whiteness beneath which was the
lake of fire, then the chains of his stupor broke and Dean Rawson
struggled frenziedly in the grip of two copper giants.
They had been chanting a shrill monotonous refrain. They ceased now as
they fought to throw the man out past that last ten paces where even
they dared not go.
Rawson was beyond conscious thought. Eyes closed against the
unendurable heat, he fought blindly, desperately, then knew his last
strength was going from him. Still struggling he opened his eyes; some
thought of meeting death face to face compelled him.
* * * * *
A hideous coppery face glared close into his own. Miraculously it
vanished, disappeared in a cloud of white. Then the blazing walls were
gone--there was nothing in all the world but rushing clouds of
whiteness, shrieking winds, the roar of an explosion--and cold, so
biting that it burned like heat.
Vaguely he wondered at the hands that still clutched at him. Dimly he
sensed other bodies close to his, other hands that tore him free where
he lay, still struggling with the priests, upon the floor. A narrow
opening was in the wall, a blur of darkness in the billowing white
clouds. They were dragging him into it, those others who held him, and
they were white--white as the vapor that whirled about him.
Ahead, the girl of his former dreams was guiding him, her hand cool
and soft in his. Others helped him; he ran stumblingly where they led
down a steep and narrow way.
The White Ones! In a vision they had reached out to him before. Was
this, too, a dream? Was it only the delirium of death? That burst of
cold--had it truly been liquid fires, wrapping him around?
Dean Rawson could not be sure. He knew only that his fate lay wholly
in the hands of these White Ones--and that hideous eyes in the coppery
face of a priest had glared at them as they fled.
CHAPTER XVI
_The Metal Shell_
[Illustration: _She was motioning for him to follow._]
[Sidenote: The Voice of the Mountain heralds Rawson's Messianic coming
to the White Ones in their hour of need.]
Dean Rawson had passed through a nerve-racking experience. It was not
a question of courage--Rawson had plenty of that--but there are times
when a man's nervous system is shocked almost to insensibility by
sheer horror. Not at once did he realize what was happening.
Perhaps it was the sound of pursuit that jarred him out of the fog
clouding all his thoughts and perceptions. It was like the sound of
fighting animals--cat-beasts--whose snarls had risen to screaming,
squalling shrieks of rage. It was sheer beastliness, the din that
echoed through that narrow passage.
Ahead of him the girl was running. She held a light in her hand. Soft
wrappings of cloth hung loosely from her waist; like her golden hair,
it was flung backward in the strong draft of air against which they
were struggling. She was outlined clearly before the red, rock-like
masses where her light was falling; she was running swiftly,
gracefully, like a wild, woodland nymph.
Two men, their milk-white bodies naked but for the thick folds of
their loin cloths, were beside Rawson, helping him along. Two others
followed. And, by their haste and their odd whispered words of alarm,
he knew that pursuit had not been expected; they must have thought to
get away unobserved.
Rawson felt his strength returning. He shook himself free from those
who tried to aid him. He was amazed at how easily he ran: his weight
was a mere nothing; his efforts were expended in driving his body
against the blast of wind. The air seemed dense, thick; he had almost
the feeling of forcing himself through water.
Ahead of him the girl darted abruptly through a narrow crack in the
wall. Rawson followed--and then began a wild race through a network of
connecting passages, a vast labyrinth of caves, more like fractures in
this strange red substance which Rawson could think of only as rock,
for lack of a more accurate name, until at last there was no sound
except that of their own hurrying feet.
* * * * *
They stopped and stood panting in one of the wider passages. He heard
nothing but the endless rush of the wind. For the first time Rawson
became aware of his own almost naked condition.
The mole-men had prepared him for the sacrifice. They had decked him
with a loin cloth of woven gold. It felt cold to the touch, and Rawson
did not doubt its being made of fine threads of the precious metal.
About his neck hung a gold chain with a heavy object suspended; he
tore it off, and found again a representation of a golden sun. The
copper priests had arrayed him to meet their fire-god, and again
Rawson wondered at the emblem they employed.
"What in the name of the starlit heavens," he demanded silently of
himself, "could this buried race know of the sun?"
The others were watching him. In the glow of that strange light held
by the girl he saw them smiling. They were congratulating one another
with odd, soft-syllabled words. And Rawson, ignorant of their tongue,
was mute, when his whole soul cried out to thank them.
He gripped the hands of the men. They were as tall as himself, their
gaze level with his own. Their faces were human, friendly; their eyes
sparkled and smiled into his. Then he turned to the girl.
She had seen the method of greeting this stranger employed. She
extended her hand--a white hand, slim, soft, cool. And Rawson, choking
with emotion, knowing that here was the one who had first seen him and
who had returned to save him, a stranger, bent low above that hand,
held in his own so rough and burned, and pressed his lips to the
slender fingers in a quick caress.
When he raised his head she was looking at him oddly; her eyes were
deep, serious and unsmiling. He wondered if, blunderingly, he had
offended her. He could not know; he did not know their customs.
Again the slim girlish figure turned; her jeweled breast-plates
flashed as she led the others on where always the way led upward and
the wind pressed against them unceasingly.
* * * * *
The White Ones wore sandals that seemed woven of glass. Rawson's bare
feet were bruised and sore, for those narrower clefts had been paved
only with broken fragments of the red walls. He moved less easily now.
The heavy, beating air tired him; the lightness of his body made it
all the more difficult to fight the steady wind. Still he followed the
white figure of the girl where her light was flashing on endless walls
of red.
In his ears a new sound was registering. Above the rush of the air,
that now was soft and warm, a new note had risen to a hollow,
unremitting roar. He knew that for some time he had been hearing it
faintly. It grew louder, one long, steady, unchanging note, as they
advanced. It was a deafening reverberation that seemed shaking the
whole earth when they came at last to an open room.
It beat upon him thunderously. As deep as the deepest tone of a mighty
organ, like a thousand gigantic organs welded in one, it roared and
shook him through and through with its single note.
Exhausted by his wild flight, surrounded by this maelstrom of sound,
he sank to the floor and let his laboring lungs have their way. But
his eyes were searching the big room.
* * * * *
The great cave was too regularly formed to have had a natural origin.
The light that the girl had carried gave only feeble illumination in
so great a space that had so evidently been hollowed out of the solid
red matter.
The light flashed here and there as the girl and her companions moved
away. They were circling the room. Rawson saw the irregular outlines
of entrances to many dark passages like the one through which they had
come. The red rock-mass seemingly had been riven and torn, and
apparently in front of each opening the white figures fought against
the rush of outgoing air. Rawson felt the same current sweeping and
whirling gustily about him.
Now his companions were across the room, and between him and them in
the center of the floor he saw the mouth of a black well, a pit some
twenty or more feet across. Directly above, where the red rock stuff
formed a domed ceiling, he found a counterpart of the pit
below--another great bore or open shaft, roughly circular. Apparently
it went straight on up and was a continuation of that lower pit.
"This room was cut out," Rawson was thinking, "by the white people or
the mole-men--Lord knows who, or when, or why. Cut out around this big
shaft...."
His thoughts trailed off. Even thinking seemed impossible under the
battering of the roaring noise that pounded about him. Then another
thought pierced through the bedlam. He had found the source of the
uproar.
* * * * *
That upper shaft, the hole that went on up, must be plugged. There was
no outlet that way, and this air that drove endlessly upward from the
room must be coming from the lower shaft. It was striking up into that
upper cavity.
An organ pipe, truly. But whence came the unending blast of air to
keep that gigantic instrument in operation? Rawson dropped to his
knees and crept slowly across the floor toward the pit. He must test
his theory--see if that was where the air was driving in.
Just short of the brink he stopped. The girl had called--a cry of
alarm. She was running swiftly toward him, circling the pit. And
Rawson, as she tugged at him, trying to draw him back, knew that she
had mistaken his motive. She had thought he was going to cast himself
down.
He did not need to go farther. He was close to the edge. And now, even
above that roaring sound he heard the rush of the column of air. He
seated himself on the stone floor and smiled up at the girl
reassuringly. Her eyes that had been dark with fear changed swiftly to
a look so sweetly, beautifully tender that Dean Rawson found himself
thrilled and shaken by an emotion that set his nerves to quivering
even more than did the sonorous vibration from above.
Her companions had joined her. Dean saw her eyes regarding them
steadily. Then, as if reaching some sudden final conclusion in her
own mind, she dropped swiftly to her knees beside him, raised one of
his hands in hers and pressed her soft lips against it.
And Dean, even had he known their language, could not in that moment
have spoken. There had been something in the look of her eyes and the
soft touch of her lips that of themselves went far beyond words.
"You darling," he was whispering softly to himself as the girl sprang
to her feet and walked swiftly away, the others following.
"An angel, no less--down in this damned place!"
* * * * *
He wondered, as he watched the flickering light far across the room,
what destination they could be bound for. Surely no one so radiantly
beautiful could inhabit a world of endless dungeons like that where
the mole-men lived. But if not that, then what? Where would their next
journey take them? And in what direction would they go?
Again Rawson's thoughts were submerged beneath his own weariness. This
air that beat about him had seemed cool after the terrific heat that
drove in off the Lake of Fire. Now he realized that the air itself was
hot. His one spurt of strength and energy had been expended.
He watched the men disappear into one of the passages, but he roused
himself when they returned. They were clinging to a strange device, a
metal cylinder that floated in air above their heads like a dirigible
on end. It was about eight feet in diameter and some fourteen feet in
height; both upper and lower ends were rounded. A cage of parallel
bars enclosed it from end to end; like springs of steel they extended
from top to bottom where they curved in and were attached to the
rounded ends.
* * * * *
Rawson sat up quickly and stared in startled amazement at the thing
glinting like polished aluminum in the light. And his engineer's mind
responded as much to that smooth finish and the evident workmanship
that had entered into the making of this thing as it did to the object
itself.
The girl placed her light on the floor. She, too, reached up and
gripped a bar of the protecting cage to which the others were holding.
With her added weight and strength they drew it down almost to the
floor. Rawson knew by their efforts that they were dealing with
something actually buoyant, a metal balloon. One of the men, still
putting his weight on the bars, reached in and opened a door in the
smooth shell. He stepped inside, and a moment later the big shell
dropped to the floor and, still vertical, stood on the lower rounded
end of the protecting cage, rocking gently as the hot whirling wind
hit it.
They were communicating among themselves by signs. Rawson saw them
motioning. Speech was useless in that roaring, pandemonium-filled
room.
She was motioning for him to follow. One of the men circled that
central pit, came beside Rawson and helped him to his feet, steadying
him as they crossed the room. The girl had entered the big metal
shell. Dean saw the glow of her torch shining through the open doorway
and through two other windows of crystal glass.
The big room had grown dimmer. The high ceiling was lost in murky
shadows. All the room was dark save where that light struck upon walls
and floor to make them glow blood-red. The waiting lighted shell
seemed a haven of refuge. To get inside, close the door, lock out some
of this unendurable, battering sound--it was all Rawson asked, all he
could think.
The door closed. He was within the shell, standing on a smooth metal
floor. The others were beside him. Dully he wondered what wild
adventure was ahead.
* * * * *
He had expected--he hardly knew what. But there should have been
machinery of some sort. If this weird balloon thing was actually to
carry them, there must be some mechanism, some propelling power. And
instead he saw nothing but the shining walls of the circular room and
at the exact center, reaching from floor to ceiling, a six-inch metal
post that thickened to a boxlike form on a level with his eyes. There
was a plate on the side of that box, a cover, and clamps that held it
in place, and on an adjoining side two little levers, one near the top
of the box, the other near the bottom.
His one all-inclusive glance showed him bull's-eye windows in the
ceiling. There were more of them in the floor. One curved bar,
circling the room, was mounted on brackets against the wall. They were
telling him by signs that he was to put his hands on it and hang on.
One of the men was beside that central post. He too gripped at a
projecting hand-hold. His other hand was on the lower lever.
Rawson knew his disappointment was unreasonable, but his weary mind
was tired of mysteries. Some understandable bit of machinery would
have been reassuring. And then in his next thought he asked himself
what difference did it make. If this childish balloon thing were
really capable of carrying them somewhere, what of it? It could only
mean more of this hideous inner world that grew more unbearably
fantastic with each new experience.
His life had been saved. True, but for what end? The girl's eyes were
upon him, reading the expression on his face. She smiled
encouragingly. Then Rawson's hands tightened upon the metal bar. The
man who stood by the central post had moved one lever the merest
trifle. Rawson felt the floor lifting beneath him. Then the shell,
like a bubble of metal, pitched and tossed as the powerful air
currents caught it.
* * * * *
His own lightness saved him from injury. He gripped the bar and held
himself free of the wall. The round top of their strange craft grated
against the domed roof. Then again the ship steadied and seemed
motionless, and Rawson knew they had slipped up into the still air of
that upper shaft.
For one wild instant, filled with impossible hope, Rawson saw this as
a means of ascent to his own world. Then reason tore those wild hopes
to shreds.
"It's closed up above," he thought. "It must be. That's why it sounded
that way. That's why the air drove off through those side passages."
The next instant held no time for thought. Rawson's whole attention
was concentrated upon the bar to which he clung. For, quicker than
thought, the metal shell, the little cylindrical world in which he and
these others were, fell swiftly beneath them.
His body twisted in mid-air. He knew the others were being thrown in
the same manner. Then, what an instant before had been the ceiling was
now a floor beneath his feet, pressing up against him and giving him
weight--and by the whistling rush of the air that tore past their
shell he knew they had fallen with marvelous swiftness straight down
through the throat of that lower shaft.
And now what had been down was up. The ceiling of this strange room
was now their floor, but Rawson was not deceived. "Acceleration," he
said. "It's crowding us. The shell tends to fall faster than we do.
It's like an elevator traveling downward at a swifter rate than a free
falling body."
* * * * *
He had glimpsed the glassy-side of that well into which he knew they
had been flung. He knew that the shrieks that filled the room time and
again were caused by the touching of their shell's guiding and
protecting bars against one glassy wall. Those sounds came always from
the same side and Rawson found momentary satisfaction in his own
understanding of the phenomenon.
"We're falling free," he argued within his own mind, "falling toward
the center of the earth. And a falling body wouldn't follow a vertical
course. It would tend to hug against one wall." And by that he knew
something of their speed. The necessity for it was apparent a moment
later.
Above his head the bull's-eyes pointing forward in the direction of
their flight were faintly red. Swiftly they changed to crimson. Rawson
was standing beside a window in the wall of their craft. That, too,
grew quickly to an area of dazzling brightness. Slowly the heat struck
in. The air in the little room was stifling. He saw the girl turn her
head and give a sharp order.
The man by the central post responded with another slight movement of
the lever. Beneath Rawson's feet the floor pressed upward in a surge
of speed that bent his knees and bore him downward. Under his hands
the rod to which he clung was hot. The shining walls were dimly
glowing. They were being hurled through the very heart of hell....
* * * * *
And then it was past. The crimson horror beyond those windows grew
dull and then black. In the blunt nose of their craft a tiny crevice
must have opened. The one who drove that projectile in its shrieking
flight had touched another control that Rawson had not before seen.
And with a piercing shriek a thin jet of cold air drove down into the
hot room.
No wine could have been one-half so potent. That thin jet filled the
room with buffeting whirlwinds that grew quickly cold.
Then their speed was checked. Abruptly Rawson was weightless, his body
hanging in air, moved only as he moved his hand upon the bar. Only a
few feet away was the body of the girl floating weightless like
himself. The others were shouting loud words of satisfaction, but her
face was turned toward Rawson, her eyes were smiling into his; while,
outside the little shell that fell in meteor flight, were only
shrieking winds and the blackness into which they plunged.
CHAPTER XVII
_Gor_
Through an ordinary experience, Dean Rawson, like any other man, would
have kept unconscious measurement of the passing time. An hour, no
matter how crowded, would still have been an hour that his mind could
measure and grasp. But now he had no least idea of the hours or
minutes that had marked their flight. Each lagging second was an age
in passing. Even the flashing thoughts that drove swiftly through his
mind seemed slow and laborious. Painstakingly he marshaled his few
facts.
"They know what they're about, that's one thing dead sure. They're
onto their job, and they've got something here that beats anything
we've ever had." He mentally nailed that one fact down and passed on
to the next. "And that's the bow end of our ship, up there." He looked
above him at a dented place in the ceiling, the ceiling that had been
the floor of the room when first he stepped into it. "There isn't any
up or down any more. I've been flipped back and forth every time we
slowed down or accelerated until I don't know where I'm at, but I saw
that dented plate in the floor when I got in and we started falling in
that direction. But whether we're falling toward the center of the
earth still or whether we passed the center back there at that hot
spot and now this crazy, senseless shell is flying on and up, perhaps
these people know--I don't!"
Then fact No. 3. "They live somewhere inside here. They're taking me
there, of course. It must mean there's a race of them--and they don't
like the mole-men. They know the way back, too, and if they'll help
me.... Perhaps the fighting's not over yet!"
Through more endless, age-long seconds there passed through Rawson's
mind entrancing visions. An army of men like these White Ones, himself
at their head. They were armed with strange weapons; they were
invading the mole-men's world....
The girl was reaching toward him. She laid one hand upon his, then
pointed overhead.
* * * * *
Rawson looked quickly above. The glowing bull's-eyes startled him,
then he knew it was white-light he was seeing, not the red threat of
glowing rock. Their speed had been steadily cut down as the air
pressure lessened. "They're decompressing," he thought. "They're
working slowly into the lesser pressure."
The passing air no longer shrieked insanely. Above its soft rushing
sound he heard the girl's voice; it was clear, vibrant with happiness.
Her hand closed convulsively over his; her eyes beneath their long
lashes smiled unspoken words of welcome, of comradeship, and of
something more.
Within their room her light, which at close range seemed only a
slender bar of metal with a brilliantly glowing end, had been clamped
in a bracket against the wall. The illumination had seemed brilliant,
now suddenly it was pale and dim.
Through the bull's-eyes above, a brighter light was shining, clear and
golden, like the light of the sun on a brilliant and cloudless day.
And to Rawson, who felt that he had spent a lifetime in the gloomy
dungeons of that inner world, that flooding brilliance was more than
mere light. It was the promise of release, the very essence of hope.
His eyes clung to these little round windows; then the larger glass
beside him blazed forth with the bright sunlight of an open world that
was unbearable to one who had lived so long in darkness.
He held tightly to that slim hand that remained so confidingly within
his own.
"It isn't true," Rawson was telling himself frantically. "It can't be
true. It must be a delusion, another dream."
He gripped the girl's hand in what must have been a painful clasp. He
told himself that she at least was real. Her lovely face was before
him when at last he could bear to open his eyes.
* * * * *
About him were the others. The cylinder rested firmly upon a surface
of pale-rose quartz. Inside the shell he saw the floor where he had
stood, and with that he added one more fact to the few he had gotten
together. There was no dent in the floor. The shell's position was
reversed. What had been up was now down. Rawson knew he was standing
firmly, with what seemed his normal earth weight, upon a smooth
surface of rock; he knew that he was standing head down as compared
with his position at the beginning of their flight--as compared, too,
with the way he had stood in the mole-men's world and in his own world
up above.
"I've passed the center of the world." The words were ringing in his
brain. And then reason shot in a quick denial. "You're as heavy as you
were on earth," he told himself. "You'd have to go through and on to
the other side, the opposite surface of the world, before your weight
would come back like that!"
"What could it mean?" he was demanding as his eyes came back from the
machine and swept around over a gorgeous, glittering panorama of
crystal mountains, rose and white. Fields of strange plants, vividly
green; a whole world that rioted madly in a luxury of color. Before
him the girl stood smiling. Every line of her quivering figure spoke
eloquently of her joy in seeing this world through Rawson's eyes.
* * * * *
A man was approaching, a man like the others, yet whose oval face
strangely resembled that of the girl. She led Rawson toward him, then
Rawson, stopping, jerked backward in uncontrollable amazement, for the
tall man drawing near had spoken. His lips were open, moving, and from
them came sounds which to Rawson were absolutely unbelievable:
"Stranger," said the newcomer, "in the name of the Holy Mountain, and
in the Mountain's language and words, I bid you welcome."
And Rawson, too stunned for coherent thought, could only stammer in
what was half a shout: "But you're speaking my language. You're
talking the way we talk on earth. Am I crazy? Stark, raving crazy?"
But even the sound of the man's voice could not have prepared him for
what followed. There was amazement written on the face of the man. And
the girl who stood beside him--her eyes that had been smiling were
wide and staring in utter fear. Then she and the man and the other
white figures nearby dropped suddenly to kneel humbly before him.
Their faces were hidden from him, covered by their hands as they bent
their heads low. He heard the man's voice:
"He speaks with the tongue of the Mountain! He comes from the Land of
the Sun, from Lah-o-tah, at the top of the world! And I, Gor, am
permitted to hear his voice!"
CHAPTER XVIII
_The Dance of Death_
Through an airplane's thick windows of shatter-proof glass, so tough
and resilient that a machine-gun bullet would only make a temporary
dent, the midday sun flashed brightly as the big ship rolled. Along
each side of the small room, high up under the curve of the cabin
roof, windows were ranged. Others like them were in the floor. And,
above, the same glass made a transparent dome from which an observer
could see on all sides.
Outside was the thunderous roar of ten giant motors, but inside the
cabin--the fire-control room of a dreadnought of the air--that blast
of sound became more a reverberation and a trembling than actual
noise.
Certainly the sound of motors and of slashing propellers, as the
battle plane roared up into the sky, did not prevent free
conversation among the three men in the room. Yet there was neither
laughter nor idle talk.
At a built-in desk, before a battery of instruments, sat Farrell, the
captain of the ship. Farther aft, in solidly anchored chairs, Colonel
Culver and Smithy were seated. Occasionally the captain spoke into a
transmitter, cutting in by phone on different stations about the ship.
"Check up on that right-wing gun, Sergeant--number two of the top
wing-battery. Recoil mechanism is reported stiff.... Tell Chicago,
Lieutenant, we will want one thousand gallons in the air--gas only--no
oil needed.... Gun room? Have the gun crews get some sleep. They'll
have to stand by later on...."
Colonel Culver spoke musingly. "Guerilla warfare, the hardest kind to
meet."
* * * * *
Smithy nodded absently. He rose and stared from one of the side
windows that was just level with his eyes. He could see nothing but
the broad expanse of wing, a sheet of smooth gray metal. Along its
leading edge was a row of shimmering disks where great propellers
whirled. From the top of the wing a two-inch Rickert recoilless thrust
forth its snout; it rose in air till the whole weapon was visible,
then settled again and buried itself inside the wing.
They were testing a gun. Smithy knew that inside that wing section
were other guns, and men, and smoothly running motors. The whole ship
was only a giant flying wing of which their own central section was
merely a thickening.
He looked down through a bull's-eye in the floor. The city they had
just left was beneath them. Washington, the nation's capital; the
golden dome of the Capitol Building was slipping swiftly astern. Only
then did he make a belated reply to Culver's statement.
"Well," he said shortly, "they'll have to meet it their own way. We
told them all we knew. And a lot of good that did--not!"
"Five days!" said Culver. "It seems more like five years since the
devils first came out. Nobody knows where they will hit next. But
they're working north--and there's no trouble in telling where they've
been."
Smithy's voice was hot in reply, hot with the intense anger of a
young, aggressive man when confronted by the ponderous motion of a big
organization getting slowly under way.
"If only we'd gone down underground," he exclaimed; "carried the fight
to them! They live there--there must be a whole world underground. We
could have carried in power lines, lighting the place as we went
along. We could have fought 'em with gas. We'd have paid for it, sure
we would, but we'd have given them enough hell to think of down below
so they wouldn't raise so much of it up above.
"But no! We had to fight according to the textbooks. And those red
devils don't fight that way; they never learned the rules."
* * * * *
"Guerilla warfare," Colonel Culver repeated. "There are certain
difficulties about fighting enemies you can't see."
"They're clever," Smithy admitted. "We taught them their lesson down
there in the desert--they've never been seen in daylight since. Out at
night--and their invisible heat-rays setting fire to a city a mile
away, then mopping up with their green flame-throwers if anyone's
left. They pick our planes out of the sky even when they're flying
without lights. Darkness means nothing to them! It was murder to send
troops in against them, troops wiped out to a man! Artillery--that's
no good either when we don't know how many of the devils there are, or
where they are. There's no profit in shelling the place when the
brutes have gone back underground."
Colonel Culver shot a warning glance from Smithy to the seated
officer. "About a hundred square miles of the finest fruit country on
earth laid waste," he admitted gravely; then sought to turn Smithy
from his rebellious mood:
"What's underground, I wonder? Must be a world of caves. Or perhaps
these mole-men can follow up a mere crack or a fault line and open it
out with their flame-throwers to make a tunnel they can go through."
The plane's captain had caught Culver's glance. "Speak your piece," he
said pleasantly. "Don't stop on my account. There's a lot to what Mr.
Smith says--but you don't know all that's going on."
He had been half turned. Now he swung about in his little swivel
chair, whose base was riveted solidly to the floor and whose safety
belt ends dangled as he turned.
"My orders are to deliver you two gentlemen at San Francisco. But
there's a show scheduled for to-night down south of there--two hundred
planes, big and little, scouts, cruisers, battle planes. They're going
to swarm in over when
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