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."
* * *
e 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....
* * *
nd 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
hrough 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.
* * *
awson 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.
* * *
bout 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.
* * *
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
hrough 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."
* * *
mithy 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."
* * *
uerilla 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 the enemy makes his first crack. There's a devil of a storm in the mountains along the route we would usually take. I'm afraid I'll have to swing off south." He was grinning openly as he turned back to his desk.
Colonel Culver smiled back. "Attaboy!" he said.
But Smithy's forehead was still wrinkled in scowling lines as he walked forward to an adjoining room. "Underground," he was thinking. "We've got to carry the fight to them; got to lick 'em so they'll stay licked. But Rawson—good old Dean—we're too late to help him. And the lives of all the devils left in hell can't pay for that."
* * *
mithy had been dozing. The shrill whistle of a high-pitched siren brought him fully awake in an instant. Culver, too, sprang alertly to his feet. Both men knew the signal was the call to quarters.
They had spread blankets on the floor of the fire-control room. Culver immediately folded his into a compact bundle, and Smithy followed suit, as he said: "That's right; we don't want any feather beds flying around here in case of a mix-up."
Even Culver's simple act of stowing the blankets back in their little compartment thrilled him with what it portended. His nerves were suddenly aquiver with anticipation. A real fight! A determined effort! No telling what these big dreadnoughts could do. Two hundred, big and little, Captain Farrell had said. If they could catch the enemy out in the open, show him up in a
blaze of enormous flares....
Captain Farrell was calling them. A section of the floor had been raised up mysteriously to form a platform beneath the shallow dome of the conning tower. Farrell was there, headphones clamped to his ears, one hand on the little switchboard at the base of the glass dome that kept him in touch with every station on the ship. Beside him was the fire-control officer similarly equipped, though his headphone was connected only with the gun crews.
* * *
he enemy's out!" said Captain Farrell. "And not just where they were expected—they're raising fourteen kinds of hell. The ships have been ordered in. I'm hooked up with the radio room now. They're less than a hundred miles ahead. Of course we won't mix in on it, but I thought it best to have my men standing by."
He pressed a little lever on his switchboard and spoke into the mouthpiece of his head-set. "Pilot room? Our two passengers, Colonel Culver and Mr. Smith, are coming forward. Let them see whatever they can of the show."
He gave the two a quick smile and a nod and waved them forward with the binoculars in his free hand. "It will be 'lights out' after you get there. We'll be flying dark except for wing and tail lights up on top. The enemy's movements are uncertain; perhaps he can see us anyway, but we won't advertise ourselves to him."
The ship's bow was a blunt, rounded nose of glass, cut by cross bars of aluminum alloy. That deeper central portion of the big flying wing was carried ten feet forward; it was but one of many details that Smithy had looked at with interest when he had seen the ship waiting for them on the field.
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