The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Inside the ship, York labored as only a man with a set idea can work. The instruments were ultra-divining rods. By an intricate sonic principle, they were able to make clear the structure of inner Earth, as the X-ray reveals a skeleton. York could send down a sound wave that would reflect, hours later, from the hot core of Earth.

  York finally accumulated a sheaf of papers scrawled with condensed mathematical equations and notes. Salted throughout the manuscript were dynamical formulae involving mountain-sized masses of land, water and air. Trembling, he fingered the pages.

  “No time to make them look pretty,” he murmured to Vera. “But I have it almost completely worked out. With my seismological observations of the past year to go by the Earth as a whole has been moved into the laboratory. I have dealt with this planet as though it were a compound in a test tube, or a slide under a microscope. With these Earth dynamics, I can predict the result of any major geological phenomenon, just as the Three Eternals worked it out. Look!”

  He spread out a large flat map of the world and put his pencil tip on a spot in the Atlantic Ocean.

  “An island existed here ten years ago. The Three Eternals knew it to be the key to their aim. They exploded it. The tremendous ground waves this started touched off certain strains in Earth’s crust. Atlantis and Mu, long buried, began rising. The other lands are slowly sinking. But I can stop it!”

  York’s pencil moved to the Pacific, circling a dozen tiny atolls among the Polynesian group.

  “The key lies somewhere here,” he explained. “The antidote to their poison. The explosion of one of these islands will send out ground waves setting off related, but opposing strains. There will be a cancelation of effects. In a decade or less, Earth will quiet down with no more than a few coasts undermined. Atlantis and Mu will not rise!”

  “All humanity, now and in the future, will owe you its life!” cried Vera, happy in his success. Suddenly a deep horror flooded her eyes. “But the Three Eternals will destroy you—us—for it, Tony! What is to prevent them? Can they destroy us, Tony, or—”

  To Vera it was a strange thought that anyone or anything could destroy them. For had they not lived two thousand years?

  York nodded somberly. “They can!” He clamped his teeth together firmly. “But first we’ll finish our job, and then think of that. I still have to determine exactly which island to demolish.”

  A FEW hours later their ship hovered over Southern Pacific waters. Only a few uninhabited islands speckled the vast reaches of ocean. York carried on his subsurface probings, but finally gave a baffled grunt.

  “I’ve narrowed the field down to three of these islands,” he mused, “but I can’t seem to go any further with the data, from here. I have to be dead sure I explode the right island. If I hit the wrong one, the result might be just as catastrophic as what the Three Eternals started.”

  He thought a moment. “Vera, there’s only one way. These measurements involve the strains within Earth’s crust. I must map the strains at first hand. I must go down there, in person. Down miles and miles below the ocean, to where the greater ocean of subsea plasma fumes.” His brow wrinkled thoughtfully, as the mind behind already began shaping a machine unknown to Earthly science, “No mines or man-made submarines go down that far, of course, I’ll have an Earth-boring ship made—a mechanical mole. I’ll—”

  Vera was quick to sense something in her husband’s words.

  “You’re using too many Ts, Tony. You’re not going down without me!”

  “It’s liable to be very dangerous, Vera. World-shattering forces lie down there.” Seeing the set of her jaw, he tried a humorous tack. “Why don’t you visit your aunt for a few weeks?”

  But instead of smiling, her eyes became a little sad. She had no aunt, or relatives at all from that long-gone day of their birth. Neither had York.

  “We even have no descendants,” she murmured, for that had been the price of immortality. “No one on this Earth we can remotely call kin. Tony, don’t you see? If I stayed up here and you, going below, never came back, I’d be more lonely than the loneliest meteor in space!”

  Within another year, the precision factories of the Forty-first Century industry had turned out the parts from York’s blueprints. Time, of which they had a plethora, meant nothing to the eternal pair as they superintended the construction.

  The mechanical mole took shape as a segmented cylinder of fused, transparent diamond—York’s secret—buttressed with steel of colossal strength. Its front end held the fanwise jets of York’s gamma-sonic force, for converting solid matter to impalpable dust. The technicians who assembled the machine understood little of what they made, further than that it could possibly plow through anything short of neutronium.

  The completed vehicle was shipped to one of the Polynesian Islands, via barge dragged by the world’s largest freight ship, and here York dismissed all attendants. Alone with Vera, he drew a breath.

  “I’ve been wondering all this time if the Three Eternals would find out and interfere in some way,” he confided, “despite the secrecy with which it was done.”

  Vera shuddered, as she always did at mention of the Three.

  “They’re like three vultures, waiting, waiting—”

  York waved a hand. “Take a last look at the Sun, dear. We may not see it again for weeks!”

  Then he led the way into the craft, sealing its pneumatic hatch. An hour later, after carefully checking the supplies of tanked air, food, water, and his many instruments, he started the motor.

  THE titanic energies of gravity warped into his coils, spraying disintegrative forces from the under nose jets. The nose of the ship dived into the pit formed and like a great worm, it bored downward, roaring powerfully. In seconds, the segmented tail of the ship had vanished beneath the surface. When it had penetrated through top soil and loose ground, it struck bed-rock and there the rate of boring settled to an average of eight hundred feet an hour.

  Swirls of black soot shot back from the rock-easing nose, so that they saw little of their course into Earth’s skin. It was a bumpy ride, and vibration shook them so violently that they clamped their teeth tight to keep them from rattling like castanets. Each hour York stopped the ship and let their aching bodies recuperate somewhat.

  Down and down the mechanical mole drilled, meeting no material obstacle that its blasting-rays could not whiff to unresistant dust. Once their rate slowed by half, as they went through a hard-grained granitic stratum, packed densely by the crushing weight overhead.

  York did not fear collapse of the tunnel about them. The braced diamond-walls of the ship would have survived the weight of Mount Everest, balanced on its tip, on each square inch of surface.

  A week later, York stopped the ship when his gravity instruments read twenty-five miles below Earth’s sea level. For three days he and Vera rested their bruised bodies and jangled nerves.

  “Well,” said York then, “here we are, twenty-five miles down, deeper than man has ever been before within the Earth he lives upon like”—he thought of an appropriate metaphor—“like bacteria swarming about a marble.”

  With Vera’s skilled help, York made tests of temperature, pressure, density of the solid rock about them, with instruments that extended out of walled pockets in the hull. Most important of all, he measured the strain imposed by the mighty masses of rock above, and the pressing hot core of Earth below. The figures represented leashed forces whose unbinding would have buckled Earth’s crust like a toasted apple skin.

  “They are ordinarily in balance, these brute forces,” said York. “The Three Eternals have unsettled them to the extent of raising two continents and lowering the rest. We have to restore the balance.”

  A week later, he again started the motor and drilled downward.

  “My answer doesn’t lie here,” he decided. “We’ll have to penetrate almost fifty miles down, right through the crust to the barysphere. It is semi-fluid and hot. We’ll have to be very careful.”

 
; Vera knew without saying that they were risking their lives. But so they had many times before, out in space. They were calm in the thought that if they went, they would go together. York was glad now that Vera had insisted on coming along.

  AT a depth under Earth of forty-five miles, York again halted. Strangely, the temperature was not much greater here than it had been at twenty-five miles. In fact, not much more than man’s deepest mines.

  “Earth’s skin is a good conductor of heat,” York explained for his own satisfaction. “And brings most of it directly to the surface, which accounts for volcanic action, hot springs, and the non-freezing of the sunless ocean bottoms.”

  Slowly he dictated a mass of measurement data to Vera, using his instruments. Hourly, he became more excited. Finally, a day later, he was jubilant.

  “I have it now, Vera!” he cried. “The subplasma stresses have a node, a point of concentration, right here! It runs as a straight line up to the island next to the one we bored down into. When we destroy that island, counter waves in the crust will cancel those started by the Three Eternals and then—”

  “Tony!” It was a sharp cry from Vera. “Tony, I feel strange! I feel as though someone were near us—telepathy—”

  “Nonsense!” snapped York, slightly annoyed. “Who could be forty-five miles under the surface?” He started. “Except the Three—”

  “Eternal Three!” came the distinct telepathic message, mockingly.

  And at that moment, one entire side of the tunnel in which their ship rested dissolved away. A craft lay revealed beyond. It was segmented, like theirs, but larger and with a hull of some dear, greenish material through which were plainly visible the three leadenly-calm, almost unhuman features of the three dwellers of Mount Olympus!

  CHAPTER VI

  Buried Alive!

  YORK felt the alarmed pumping of Vera’s heart, her body pressed against his, and his own pulse raced. Fool, that he hadn’t thought of bringing down a weapon with him! But even that, he reflected with sagging spirit, would not have helped, against the impregnable Three.

  “Anton York,” came the telepathic voice, heavy with threat from the other Earth-boring ship, “you have signed your own death warrant. We have been picking up your conscious thoughts, with certain long-range psychic instruments, ever since you left us, at Mount Olympus. We detected that you were trying to upset our plans. We did not think you would succeed in finding the necessary data. But when you dived underneath the Earth, we followed in the mechanical mole ship we used for our measurements twelve years ago. As a scientist you are seemingly a little more adept than we thought.”

  The Eternals paused as though to give the ironic compliment full play.

  “So adept that we must now destroy you. There cannot be two masters of Earth!”

  “I do not wish to master Earth!” remonstrated York. “Only save it!” He tried pleading. “Think once, what you are doing—murdering ten billion people! Even if you live to the end of eternity, your conscience could never be free of that stigma!”

  “You are an idealist, Anton York,” responded the implacable trio. “We are realists. The present race and civilization do not deserve continuance. They are cluttered with traditions, superstitions, periodic setbacks of their own devising. Scarcely three centuries ago, there was again a world-wide ‘depression,’ accompanied by needless famine, rioting and maladjustment of affairs. Civilization fell back as it has so many times.”

  “But it climbs steadily!” reminded York.

  “When we have raised Atlantis and Mu,” the voice went on, ignoring his remark, “we will people them with a new race, set in a super-civilization, like a precious stone glittering in a setting of purest gold.”

  “And in ten years there will be bickering, struggle for power, and anarchy,” predicted York quickly. “You are the idealists, so divorced from your former life that you do not realize the fundamental rule of life—experience! Your new civilization, started at the topmost stage, would collapse into the hollow sands of its non-existent foundations.”

  For the first time, a trace of anger came from the Eternals, as though their pride had been pricked by this calm, searching analysis.

  “Cease, fool! You are to die. But one thing we wish to learn from you before you go—the secret of your gamma-sonic weapon. Though it did not destroy us, and though we have equal forces, we wish to add it to our knowledge. Speak!”

  York’s silence was stinging.

  “Very well’,” resumed the Eternals’ spokesman. “We will get it anyway. In advance, knowing your nature, we’ve planned how. You will be left to die, in this cavern, without your ship. Without a single implement with which to dig—or commit suicide. You will go insane, before death by asphyxiation. In that condition, your mind will automatically throw off all its thoughts, willed and unwilled. Back in our laboratory at Mount Olympus, an instrument is set to pick up the mental record, and at our leisure we will extract from it the gamma-sonic data. Thus you will die and serve us at the same time.”

  THERE was no fiendish note in the quiet exposition of their hideous plan. It was a cold, passionless scheme, in which human feeling meant nothing. York doubted that they knew the meaning of love, anger, hate, mercy, or any emotion. Twenty thousand years of living had drained them dry of all but crystallized intellect.

  A few minutes later, York and Vera stood alone in the cavern that had been formed by the two mechanical moles. Their ship was gone, disintegrated before their eyes by a cold beam which caused matter to fall into rotting grains. York and Vera had previously been carried out of the ship, under the Eternals’ paralysis ray. Then the Three had released one tank of oxygen into the space, lest they die too soon. Finally, their ship had left, spraying a heat ray behind it that fused its own trail, as the Eternals had fused off the tunnel made by York’s ship.

  “This is our end, Tony!” whispered Vera, huddling close to him. “Dying like trapped rats, forty-five miles under Earth’s surface, in a sealed pocket of rock. But we’ll fool them, Tony, in one thing. We won’t go insane. We’ll talk over our life—two thousand years of it. It’s been glorious. We’ll die in peace!”

  York kissed her tenderly for her bravery and they talked. They renewed stirring memories of their sojourn in space, and of their last two visitations to Earth. But within an hour their voices faltered and their nerves shrieked.

  They could see each other by weird radioactive glow from the surrounding rock. It was more hellish than darkness would have been. Aching silence greeted every pause in their speech. The excessive warmth began to torture their bodies, unrelieved by a breath of current in the confined air.

  They were buried alive! That corrosive thought ate into their enforced resignation.

  Vera began to babble aimlessly, her eyes wild. York fought back the darkening cloud of madness. Was there no escape? They had no slightest tool, implement, or material object other than their clothing and their bodies.

  No escape! They had not even a spoon with which to start digging, useles’s as that would have been with forty-five, miles of stone to penetrate. York had the inane thought for a moment that they had fingernails, something to scratch with—madness!

  “One thing I have,” he remembered, without the slightest surge of hope. “The brainwave instrument within my left ear, with which I commanded the councilors. The Three Eternals missed it, or disdained it. But what good is it? I can command minds with it, but stone is mindless.”

  And soon they, too, would be as mindless as their prisoning walls.

  “I can hear your thoughts,” Vera mumbled, laughing hysterically. “You won’t give up, Tony, but how foolish. You’re trying to think a way out—think a way out—think a way out—”

  Her voice began to repeat like a cracked phonograph record, as her mind teetered.

  “Think a way out!” echoed York, his mind clicking. Suddenly he grabbed Vera, shaking her violently. “Vera, maybe that’s it! My brain-wave concentrator projects telekinetic forces. With
it, I made other minds cause their bodies to act, move. Perhaps, without the relay minds between, I can use telekinesis to make movement—even of stone!”

  “Move stone?” Vera said sepulchrally, in a moment of calm. “But that would take energy, much more than to cause mobile human machines to move, as with the councilors. Energy, lots of it, to move tons of stone over which are tons more—” Her voice broke. “Tony, why do we even think of it? False hopes are just added torture.”

  “Energy,” mumbled York defeatedly. “More energy, than our bodies contain, if we could use even that.”

  HE ground the thought of telekinesis out of his mind and joined in Vera’s resignation.

  “Die in peace—we must,” Vera murmured, straining against another attack of hysteria.

  “It’s a little ironic, isn’t it?” mused York. “Two thousand years of science at my fingertips, gathered in thirty lifetimes of thought and research. And yet, without tools, I’m as helpless as any single-lived man would be, in this same dilemma. A thousand years ago, in a great ship, I moved planets. Today, stripped of implements, I’m no better than a worm.”

  Something probed into his mind. He had felt it many times before in the past two years, without realizing it had been the Three Eternals, spying out his thoughts.

  “Still sane?” came the cold, blunt psychic voice of one of the Eternals, rather faintly. “You have remarkable fortitude, Anton York. But you will succumb, even as we might, be it admitted. We are halfway to the surface. When we reach it, you will be babbling, spilling your mind into our recorders.” The voice clicked off.

  Vera shrieked. She had heard too. “Don’t, Vera!” soothed York. “Don’t you see? They did that to drive us to insanity more quickly. Let’s remember our resolve—to die in peace.”

  “If we only could!” she moaned. “But it’s such torture. And my skin, itching—that radioactive emanation—”

  York felt it too, a bothersome tingling on his skin, to add to their discomfort. It was caused by radium in the rock.