The Earth-Tube

by Gawain Edwards

  The five planes, with their convoy, sailed around the edges of the metal shield, observing what they could of conditions below them. Little was to be seen which had not already been described. Dr. Scott calculated that the metal covering was resting upon supports which perched it at least half, and perhaps three-quarters of a mile in the air. Beneath it there would be room to house an army of men, in addition to the necessary gear for “landing” the inter-hemispheric car and launching it upon the return journey.

  “It is likely,” Dr. Scott observed, “that the Asians have more than one of these cars. From the frequency with which the trips are made, I believe they have at least three; one at either end being loaded while a third is in the tube. The regularity of the earth-tremors caused by these flying monsters makes it fairly evident that there are no long delays at either end, such as would certainly be occasioned if it were necessary to unload and reload the one car each time between journeys. But with a loaded car waiting at either end, the schedule of about two hours per trip could be kept up indefinitely and with express-like regularity.”

  The fliers, remembering the fate of the plane which had flown into the air blast on the day before, stayed well away from the center of the shield. From the behavior of the clouds it was evident that there was a tremendous stream of air rising there again, and in addition there was a curious rumbling which could be heard even above the drone of the airplane motors and the whistle of wind. It had the full-throated sound of a noise issuing from an immensely deep well, but it was also an unmistakably metallic clatter. a series o-f long, sliding, ringing sounds.

  Dr. Scott listened to them closely, trying to catch the timing and the rhythm as the noise rapidly increased. Touching the sleeve of the Secretary, he called his attention also to the thunder roaring upward from the earth beneath the dome.

  “If you will listen,” he remarked, “you’ll hear the earth-car coming with its load. It can’t be far away. It may arrive at any minute now!”

  The scientists and technicians were visibly excited at this announcement. The planes were slowed and ordered to circle as near the center of the mushroom as was safe. The power was partly shut down, so that the rumble, now increased to the thunder of a Niagara, could be heard plainly.

  The wind whistled up from the opening at a fearful rate, and all around the edge of the metallic shield there were curious puffs and eddies of steam. So great was the tumult that the earth appeared to be trembling. The sea at the edges of the island was broken into a choppy, foaming mass, thundering against the rocks with peculiar fury.

  Louder and louder came the noise, rising to an overwhelming crescendo. Suddenly a great jet of steam appeared in the middle of the island. There was a loud clang, like the sound of many metal partitions jangling against one another. A long, metallic nose appeared in the opening in the shield and rose upward for perhaps a hundred feet, its gleaming surface lustrous with heat and polished surfaces. The red eye of the sun, bursting for a moment from the fetters of clouds, flashed upon it once and became muffled again. The metal nose dropped back a little way, inclined to one side, and disappeared in a violent blast of steam, which seemed in an instant to overwhelm the whole island, blotting it from sight.

  Dr. Scott, when he saw the menacing billow of vapor rising underneath, was suddenly electrified.

  “Full power ahead, and climb, climb!” he screamed into the control room. The engineers had seen the danger also. The motors roared, and the propellers, hurled abruptly into top speed, tore at the air, pulling the huge plane after them.

  The other official planes, when they saw the scalding steam, also started away to escape. The five machines, like startled birds, darted swiftly upward as the white demon engulfed the world beneath with a tremendous whistling noise.

  But several of the lighter planes found themselves unable to get away. The rolling cloud caught and smothered them. The condensing vapor as it rose turned into jets of scalding rain, which stopped the tardy motors and cooked the luckless pilots in their seats.

  King and the Secretary stared with horror at the phenomenon. Thousands of tons of water, converted into steam, had been thrown into the air at them. It was like a nightmare, the race for safety from the menacing cloud. Every ounce of power in the motors was thrown on. The sturdy frames of the planes groaned and shuddered, strained to the utmost.

  At an altitude of three miles the cloud was still coming viciously upward toward them, but the alarmed pilots saw with relief that it was coming more slowly than at first and that they had gained enough distance to permit them to pull off sidewise and defeat the steam. The plane which carried the scientists zoomed eastward with a sudden turn. The white arms of the demon momentarily obscured the windows and the cabin. The occupants thought for a minute that the game was up, and then, abruptly, the blue sky appeared overhead. They were saved.

  Underneath the still skyward-reaching cloud behind them there was a terrific downpour of warm rain, so heavy as almost to preclude flying into it. The few small planes which had managed to escape the scalding cloud circled away off and finally turned for home to report this new manifestation and to refuel. The five official ships, which were sturdy and fully equipped for many more hours of continuous flying, headed bravely into the downpour and circled back toward the island again. On the sea, when they came close, they perceived the wreckage of several unlucky planes, but there was no sign of life about any of them.

  “I take it you are convinced now that we have a powerful and ingenious people to deal with,” said Dr. Scott to the Secretary, who was visibly shaken by the ordeal through which they had just passed.

  “Yes,” was the reply, “but there are many things that want explaining, it seems to me. Why, for instance, all that outburst of steam? Did it mean that they were taking that unique means of destroying us?”

  “Hardly,” replied the scientist. “I am quite sure, in fact, that they do not even know we are here, unless by accident they have sighted us. The steam came from the interior of the earth, following the car, whose nose we saw as they were landing her.

  “Don’t you see. to overcome gravity, friction, and the pressure of the air, and also, no doubt, to hasten the passage of the car, they have turned their tube into a huge steam engine! They have heat enough. free heat. in the center of the earth. They have water enough, in the oceans. Consequently, after the car has gone a certain distance they perhaps seal the tube at some point and turn the water in. The resulting steam blows the car out the other end like a piston in a steam engine. It is only necessary to reverse the process to send the same car, or another, back again.”

  “And the tremendous clattering we heard?”

  “A projectile, traveling as fast as this one does, need only touch the side walls with the slightest whisk from time to time to produce what would seem like a constant noise like that, echoed up out of the depths of so long a well. The car is nearly the same diameter as the tube, but enough smaller, probably, so as not too greatly to increase the friction and air resistance. I have no doubt that it is equipped with rollers or other friction reducing bearings along the sides, in anticipation of just such striking in the tube.”

  “But why need it touch the side walls at all?” asked the Secretary. “If these fellows are the perfect engineers you say, why couldn’t they launch it straight into the tunnel and let it pass through without striking?”

  “That is simply explained,” replied Dr. Scott. “Such a car will, of necessity, touch upon one side or the other of the earth-tube throughout the journey, with the exception of a brief interval at the center. This is due to the rotation of the earth, which at the surface, at the equator, moves eastward at the rate of about one thousand miles an hour.

  “This speed is correspondingly less toward the poles, which do not move at all, of course. Therefore it must be somewhat more than six hundred miles an hour at the mouth of the earth-tube. As the car approaches the center of the earth the influence of rotation becomes proportionally less, and the
pressure against the side of the tube decreases with it.

  “Crossing the center, the car encounters the earth moving in the opposite direction, and must adjust itself to this new condition, sliding against the wall of the tube under constantly increasing pressure until the mouth is reached.”

  The planes were over the island again. The rain was still falling heavily, but the air was clearer because the clouds of vapor had largely blown away. They could see the general outlines of the entire island. It was evident that already another car had been launched downward through the tube. Above the center of the shield, where the jet of upward-rushing air had formerly been, there was now a tremendous sucking, and a funnel of cloud and water was being carried directly down into the hole from the heavy layers of mist above. It looked like a slender thread being pulled from a tangled skein and wound upon an unseen bobbin underneath the earth.

  “When the projectile has reached a certain point,” Dr. Scott commented, “they will probably seal the tube and turn the water in. Until then, it might as well be filling up with air, which also expands rapidly under the action of heat.”

  The Secretary smiled mysteriously.

  “Well,” he said, “this is all very amusing, and I have no doubt your Asians are an ingenious race, but I don’t know any reason why we should permit this invasion’ to go any farther. In fact, I believe I’ll put an end to it right now.”

  Dr. Scott glanced at him questioningly. King had a sudden premonition. But it was too late. The Secretary had given a signal, which was flashed to the other planes almost at the same instant.

  “What are you doing?” demanded King. Dr. Angell, without answering, waved his hand toward the four other planes of the investigating party. They had drawn off a little and were circling low over the metal shield, near the edge.

  Suddenly there was a series of terrific flashes, accompanied by a continuous roar that shook the air and caused the official plane to vibrate like a cork caught upon turbulent water. A tiny wisp of smoke cleared away from the gleaming surface beneath the circling fliers, but no change was visible there.

  With great agitation the Secretary stared at the shield beneath the planes through his field glasses, turning them this way and that. The four bombers had dropped enough high explosives upon the shining dome to sink a fleet of battleships, but there was not even a mark or discoloration upon the metal where the bombs had struck.

  “Well,” growled Dr. Scott with great exasperation, “I suppose it was your plan to have them bomb that shield.”

  The Secretary answered in a shaky voice. For the first time he appeared to be realizing the seriousness of the invasion from the other side of the world.

  “I ordered them to drop the explosive,” he admitted nervously, “but it is clear, the bombs did nothing.”

  “Nothing to the shield, you mean,” corrected the scientist. “But they undoubtedly warned the Asians that we have spotted them and tried to blow them out. If you had not tried this foolish trick we might have worked out some wiser means of attack and caught them unaware.

  “But from now on they’ll be prepared. You’ve declared war on them, and they’ll soon give you war a-plenty. You can count on that!”

  III

  The Asians made their first attack on Montevideo. In a perfectly matter-of-fact way they finished their causeway, as Dr. Scott had prophesied, by passing material along it, underneath an armored covering of metal which reached out into the ocean to the earth-tube cap and joined it. They extended it to the nearest point on the coast of Uruguay,6 and repelled every attempt to interrupt their work with such blasts of steam and rock that shipping in that region was almost paralyzed. Steamers plying between Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and other southern ports and the north were forced to make a wide circuit around the island, coming into the bay from the southward.

  The War Department’s first move was to mount heavy coast defense artillery at the point where the causeway was expected to strike land, and to keep up a ceaseless bombardment. Their shots only added debris to the mountains of rock which the Asians, by their own devices, were hurling there. Whenever a shell struck the overhead covering of the finished causeway it bounded off like a pea or exploded harmlessly. The work of building the land connection was neither slowed nor deflected by the artillery. The Asians did not even do the War Department the honor to return the gunfire. The work of finishing the link between the island and the shore was carried on as impersonally as if, indeed, the entire phenomenon was of volcanic and natural origin, despite the evidences of guiding intelligence manifest in the nature of the construction.

  Many newspapers, at first alarmed and impressed by the pronouncements of Dr. Scott and the corroborating evidence given by the Secretary, were misled by the attitude of the invaders and soon began to laugh at the whole affair. They published long interviews with established scientists, proving that no such thing as a tube through the earth was possible. Anthropologists declared that even if it were, the strange Asians who had conquered the East were incapable of such a feat of engineering.

  “The most charitable estimate of these men places them somewhere between the African native and the early American Indian,” one was quoted as saying. “That they overwhelmed the Japanese and Chinese need hardly be taken into account. They did it by sheer force of numbers, not by intelligence or new mechanical appliances. Dr. Scott, it is to be feared, read too closely the more erratic newspaper accounts of the time. He allowed his scientific imagination to run away with him.”

  The newspapers made fun of the Secretary of War also, and that was something the Secretary could not stand. Hardly more than a week after the exploring flight to South America he came to Dr. Scott’s laboratory and explained that he no longer cared to be quoted as certifying to the theory of the earth-tube.

  “You saw it yourself,” exclaimed Dr. Scott, tartly.

  “I thought I saw it,” was the reply, “but since I have had an opportunity to think it over, I have become convinced that what we saw was only some new and unusual volcanic disturbance. You will agree with me, I am sure, that neither of us or any one in the party saw any of the Asians you have referred to. If the island and the shield were the work of men, how does it come that we did not see a single man about the place?”

  Dr. Scott expressed his impatience at this reasoning by ignoring the question, to ask a more pointed one.

  “Then you intend to abandon your effort to find some way of combating these people?”

  “Well,” answered the Secretary hesitantly, “I’ll leave the artillery there for a while.”

  “But nothing else?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Secretary, you have already delayed for three weeks on this matter though the proof was in your hands. Three weeks ago we might have found them unable to protect themselves. Now they are strongly entrenched. Give them another week and they will be in Montevideo. What will you say to that?”

  “Nonsense,” said the Secretary. He took his hat and walked, unaccompanied, to the door.

  “Two weeks from now the papers will be calling you worse things than they are to-day,” was the scientist’s parting shot, “and it will be for better reason, too.”

  The prediction proved accurate. Amid a constant downpour of warmish rain the coast defense gunners peppered away at the approaching causeway, under orders to stop its advance at any cost. It was like trying to stop a railroad train with spitballs. One morning through the mist they saw that the head of the land-link was half a mile from the shore, and the commander of the artillery company radioed frantically to the South American capital at Rio de Janeiro for re-enforcements and infantry.

  Two hours later, when the first of the heavily loaded infantry transports appeared overhead, they saw through the rain that the artillery camp, the guns and ammunition, and the men who had sent too late for aid had been covered with a mountainside of earth. The causeway was complete. Already the overhead protective structure had been brought within a few rods of the sh
ore, and before the planes had landed and the soldiers had disembarked, the defenses of the Asians were complete.

  The causeway was nearly a quarter of a mile in width at water level, and the enclosed and armored passageway along its top was more than adequate to cover the movements of armies, machines and whole races of peoples. A long metal box, it stretched from the mouth of the earth-tunnel to the mainland, protected above, below and on all sides by seamless and indestructible plates. While the army of the defense was being hastily formed on the shore, the Asians finished the last of the walls and threw up a sort of circular building at the end, made of the same metallic substance as that which formed the island shield and the walls of the causeway.

  Not a single man in the land forces was able to see how the building and armoring of the last of the causeway was done. The defenders did, however, catch glimpses of many men, working in regimented groups, bringing the sections into place. Hastily planted artillery fired a few shots of shrapnel into the breach, and the workers fell on all sides as the shells burst. But fresh hundreds were hurried into their places. Without hesitation the sections were rolled into their places and sealed by men who were apparently slaves and more afraid of the long whips of their overseers than the death-dealing shot of the Americans. The Asians, conquerors of two great races, had, it was clear, learned to make those conquered races useful.

  By the time the flame-throwers were ready, the guns all in place, and the infantrymen aligned ready for a rush upon the enemy, it was too late. Only a blank and rounded wall faced them on the shore, and shelling it was wasted effort. Batteries of red-ray guns were mounted on concrete bases around the fortress by nightfall, and all through the hours of the dark they poured their burning energy on the metal before them. The flickering surfaces merely mocked the rays which had previously destroyed battleships and burned stone buildings to the ground. By morning the defense troops were ready to admit that they had been balked. They sat down glumly around the armored garrison to await the next move.