Uneasily, Wilcox and Murgatroyd turned to face a group of people hurrying toward them across the intervening area of the fenced enclosure. One was a trusted workman, left to guard the gate. But the others—there were four men and a girl—had been able to overrule the guard’s refusal to admit them.
Of the four men, three were burly, massive specimens with the scars of many combats marking their coarse features. The fourth was slender and bent, maybe fifty. His head was entirely bald, his cheeks had withered lines in them, and his squinted piggish eyes held a look of secretive, hungry searching.
Murgatroyd and Wilcox had no trouble recognizing this uninvited guest, who clearly was the master mind of the intruding group. All the world knew Lyman Kerwin, whose colossal fortune had thrust dominance-seeking tentacles into most of the key industries of America. Path of Progress, Rod’s and Perry’s outfit, had tangled with him once. They’d taken newsreel pictures of the collapse of one of the gigantic but poorly constructed power and irrigation dams which he had built in one of the western states. Hundreds of people had been killed, and thousands had been rendered homeless by a disaster traceable to materials and workmanship far less costly than specified. Only Kerwin’s money, fixing a corrupt court, had enabled him to escape the consequences of criminal misrepresentation.
Seeing Kerwin, and the inquiring speculative glances he cast about the enclosure, Doctor Murgatroyd’s pointed red face suddenly darkened with fury, chagrin, and something like a nameless, nervous panic.
“Thunder of Jupiter!” he whispered hoarsely. “That polecat would have to barge in now—now, of all times! We might have known it, Perry! But you just wait till I sail into him! The dirty—”
Perry silenced the old scientist with a poke in the ribs. “You keep still,” he ordered. “Just make believe you’re bossing the drill crew.”
* * *
The young man advanced slowly a few steps toward the intruders. He didn’t grin or scowl. He just kept his face straight, ready to meet Kerwin in whatever manner the latter might ask for by his actions or words. Perry did notice the girl in the party, though—briefly. She was walking beside Kerwin. Chestnut curls peeped from beneath an odd little hat. There was a sprinkling of freckles across her tanned, earnest face. Perry knew her slightly. She was Lyssa Arthurs, better known as Troubles, reporter for a paper in the neighboring town of Brenton. Cute, plucky kid, but she seemed a little self-conscious now. And evidently she had strange tastes in company. Perry dismissed her presence with a curt nod that could hardly have been called a greeting.
When he spoke, Kerwin didn’t allow a lot of room for doubt as to his attitude, in spite of the veiled terms he used.
“Hello, Wilcox!” he hailed volubly in a rich voice that was in sharp contrast with his cadaverous appearance. “I thought I’d call, since you and the Professor are always doing such interesting things. What’s up? Boring for oil or something?”
Perry kept silent, waiting for Kerwin to talk a little more.
“You might as well answer my question, Wilcox,” the financier urged. “I’ll find out anyway, you know.”
“Maybe they’re diggin’ a road down to China, Chief,” one of Kerwin’s bodyguards offered with dry and slightly sinister humor. “Or a nice, deep hole to bury themselves in.”
Before Perry could speak there was an interruption. The sound of the drill nearby, busy in the dusk, changed abruptly. There was a grating, hollow noise from far underground. Then the whine of machinery racing without resistance. Out of the pipe which ejected the muck and chipped stone and metal shreds brought up from the drilling, there came a gurgling puff, as of air trapped in a subterranean cavern, and under slightly higher pressure than that of the surface, being suddenly released from confinement.
Workmen leaped to throw out the clutch of the big diesel. Old Rod Murgatroyd began to swear excitedly, for it was clear what had happened. The drill had broken through the metal at last. It had reached a hollow space down there. A room, a chamber, perhaps, which the shell of lead alloy was meant to protect.
Perry Wilcox felt his pulses racing wildly. The presence of Kerwin could not spoil his sense of victory. In the evening air around him there was suddenly a faint, musty odor, like that of an old cellar, but with a distinctive quality all its own.
Perry saw the workmen step back from the machinery, as if they didn’t know quite what to do or say. And he could tell, too, that the sudden cessation of movement, and that noisome smell, indescribably suggestive of a time that was dead for incredible eons, had had its effect on Lyman Kerwin. Kerwin’s lips dangled loosely, and his eyes had lost a lot of their squint. His face was sweaty, and paler than usual.
“You asked what was up, Kerwin,” Perry growled at last. “Well, so far we’ve tried to keep our work here dark so we could get the first investigations completed without interference. But I guess there’s no use to stall. You said you’d find out anyway, and you’re right—whatever good that’ll do you. I think everybody’ll get the story in a few days, or even hours. I suppose somebody tipped you off about what we were doing—somebody who lives around here.” Perry grinned crookedly at the girl, Lyssa Arthurs, as he made this half accusation.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he went on. “You saw what just happened, Kerwin. We’ve evidently reached something with the drill. I don’t know what—yet. But it’s terribly old, Kerwin. And get this—there’s metal down there—a perfectly balanced alloy as old as the Carboniferous fossils! Yes, it’s pretty big, Kerwin! And liable to be—dangerous! Why, hell, even that cellar stench that came up from down there might actually be poisonous! It might contain microscopic spores that, in contact with human lungs, could grow and kill. Spores from the past, Kerwin. Sealed up and kept alive through the ages. Of course it’s a thin possibility, but who can say? Do you still want to hang around, Kerwin?”
The latter’s retreat was just a trifle too quick for good poise, and the sudden fury of his expression wasn’t good form either.
“Rot, Wilcox!” he half stammered and half roared as he backed away. “You’re talking rot!”
Perry could almost feel sorry for him at that moment. Full of hypochondriac fear, inspired by nothing but the slenderest of chances, Kerwin was trying to mask his cowardice by a show of scorn.
But Perry could feel sorrier for Lyssa Arthurs. Troubles, she was called. And she looked regular, all right… But why was she hanging around with Kerwin?
Now Kerwin made a nervous, jerking sign to his henchmen.
“Come on, boys,” he said. “We might as well leave these fools to their silly grubbing.”
Even the three pug-uglies looked a bit sheepish at the hasty departure their boss led them into.
* * *
Workmen were grinning and chuckling as Perry turned about, and old Rod Murgatroyd’s red face was alight with amusement and satisfaction.
“You sure told that ninny where to dump himself, pal,” he complimented, his blue eyes seeming to twinkle even in the dusk.
Perry’s answering smile was brief. He glanced toward the fence, from beyond which came the sounds of Kerwin’s car speeding away along the concrete road.
“Only,” Murgatroyd added, sobering, “I don’t think we’re through with our playmate yet, Perry. You’ve got him doubly sore at us now, for making him ridiculous. And he’s not so scared that he won’t do his damnedest to get even—if nothing else. And—glory but it would be tough to have him mixing in with something really colossal, wouldn’t it? What we’ve got here could be good for all humanity—it could be neutral, or it could be bad. We don’t know. But good or bad, depend on Kerwin to make it the latter, if he gets the chance!”
Perry shrugged ruefully. “Yeah,” he said. “That means we’ve got to work quick, Rod. One of us has got to go down there into the bore on a cable—find out just what we’re up against in that quarter. Then there’ll still be time to see if we can get digging options on the surrounding country—if it turns out to be advisable. Kerwin can’t ver
y well beat us to that, anyway. Now who’ll it be that goes down there first?”
Perry Wilcox drew a nickel from his pocket. He flipped it dexterously into the air, caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand.
“Buffalo!” old Rod called.
Perry raised his palm to reveal a shiny Indian head. “I win,” he remarked, grinning.
Chapter II Mystery Below Ground
Lights were snapped on in the gathering darkness. Long lengths of drill-shaft were pulled out of the boring, whose dark maw hid the unknown.
Perry put on a coverall garment of rubberized silk. Over his face he fitted an oxygen mask, and to his shoulders he attached several oxygen bottles. The air below, after so many countless ages of stagnation, would probably be unbreathable. And though Perry had meant merely to unnerve Kerwin when he had mentioned the possibility of some kind of contamination, one could not quite be sure. It was best to have one’s body encased in a sealed garment.
When he had completed his preparations, there was even a small toolkit at his hip. Attached to an elbow there was a powerful electric lamp, fitted with a long cord by means of which it could draw power from the generator here on the surface. And there was a small phone incorporated into his headgear. With the phone, like a subsea diver, he could maintain communication with Rod and the rest of the crew here above ground. And of course he had his motion picture camera—strapped across his chest.
With a stout steel cable fastened under his armpits, Perry clambered over the edge of the boring, and was lowered below. The trip down—nearly three hundred feet—was uneventful. The stillness in the narrow shaft, scarcely wider than his shoulders, deepened with the depth of his descent. There was only the scraping of his kit against the rough walls, and the sleepy trickle of seepage water.
He reached the punctured metal barrier at last, and passed through it. Two feet thick, the shell was. A moment later his feet touched a solid floor, wet with the water that had dribbled down through the opening.
“I’m here, Rod,” Perry called into the phone. “At the bottom.”
It was a moment before the older man answered, and in this interval Perry heard disquieting sounds from the phones over his ears—sounds from the surface, which seemed so infinitely far away to him now. Automobile motors racing. Voices in much larger numbers than those of the small drill crew. And to Perry Wilcox came a conviction of pending trouble.
Then Murgatroyd spoke: “We’ve got company up here, Perry,” he said, a note of anxiety in his tone. “A lot of curious people from Brenton. Sightseers rushing to a fire, so to speak. Kerwin couldn’t think of anything dirtier to do to gum up the works for us, so he spread the news around that something was up out here. Naturally I’ve got a whole crowd on my hands. We’re trying to keep ’em outside the fence. Of course they ought to be harmless enough, really; but damn it, I wish they’d go someplace else! What do you see down there?”
Perry had his electric lamp blazing at full now. On his chest, his camera, driven by a little spring motor, was turning. And he was staring about him intently, to grasp the character of his surroundings. He began to talk—to describe what he saw and felt.
* * *
“I’m in a passage, Rod,” he said. “It slants down. Its alloy walls are all bent and crumpled. It must have been the movement of the ground through the ages that did that. Gosh, Rod, but you can feel the length of eternity here! It’s written in these tunnel walls, Rod. The way they’re bent and rebent. I can understand now why they were made of something tough and pliable, like this lead alloy. It’s twisted everywhere, but unbroken. They—whoever built this place—must have known pretty well what they were doing—whatever their purpose was…”
Perry advanced slowly down the slope of the tunnel, cautiously drawing his descent cable and his telephone and electric cords after him.
He reached a room of heroic dimensions, walled with the same grey alloy as the tunnel. The Stygian gloom that obscured it parted before the intense white path of his lamp.
There were tall metal boxes, like packing cases for heavy machinery, arranged in rows on the buckled and humped pavement of the chamber—metal boxes, each with a closed and perhaps hermetically sealed door. And near the farther wall was a machine—an engine or something—that displayed a gigantic, dusty flywheel. The walls, at a head-high level, were covered with something crystalline, like glass; though where it had bent it had bent like metal—not shattering as a brittle substance would have done. Behind those crystal panes were compartments, housing queer, complicated devices. They looked a little like astronomical or surveying instruments, Perry thought. Were they perhaps instruments for the navigation of interplanetary or interstellar space?
Seeing charts traced on the walls above the compartments that protected this array of apparatus—charts dotted with winking, diamond-bright bits of glass, which must represent scattered suns of the void—he was half sure that his guess was right. The charts were marked with countless interlocking lines and circles, which might be the geometric equivalent of latitude and longitude, applied not to the navigation of the ocean, but to the limitless, three-dimensional reaches of the cosmos.
This much Perry Wilcox was able to note, before his eager inspection was interrupted. In the heavy stillness there was a rustling whisper, which penetrated easily the thin, rubberized fabric of his hoodlike mask. The sound swiftly built itself up into a regular, soft rhythm. Perry spoke a few warning words about this development into his phone, and described briefly the room he was in. Meanwhile he stared ahead, ready in every taut nerve and muscle to leap out of danger, yet eager to see what it was that caused the disturbance.
His lamp beam focused on the engine near the opposite wall. Its flywheel was turning, maybe after half a billion years of motionless waiting in this sealed vault. But why? How?
Perry bounced back a step, icy fingers of dread tickling his flesh. “On your marks up there, Rod,” he said tensely into his phone. “I can’t tell what kind of a show it is I’ve started; but you may have to yank me up in a hurry!”
* * *
The engine was whizzing now, ancient dust spraying from its fly wheel. For a few seconds there were no more developments, except that Perry noticed the decorative frieze around the high, shadowy ceiling. Human faces carved in the metal. They smiled down on the young man mysteriously.
Then there was a soft clank in the far distance, muffled apparently by the turn of many passages, and echoed back and forth by crumpled, vaulted ceilings and walls. The sound might have been that of a door opening, or the rattling of chains. Perry was beginning to feel very much like beating a hasty retreat; but he waited a trifle longer.
There came, then, a ponderous, soft thudding, growing nearer. It wasn’t till the impression of the sound clicked into a groove in his mind, establishing itself as identical with the regular thud-thud of great, running, elastic-shod feet, entirely inhuman in their note, that he concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.
He had farther to return than he realized. And his electric and telephone cords, his hoist cable, hampered him.
“Draw in the slack of my rig,” he shouted into his phone. “And for Pete’s sake, if you love me, set the hoist winch going when I tell you!”
He got beneath the bore that penetrated the tunnel roof okay. But the thudding was catching up on him fast. “Up!” he yelled. “Quick!”
It seemed a century before he felt the reassuring tug of the cable under his arms. He had a chance to look back once into the Stygian darkness that concealed a reawakening and incredible ancientness. There a little red light wavered and hurtled nearer.
Perry’s feet left the metal pavement. He heard a hiss, like escaping steam, just as he was drawn up into the narrow bore. Something clanked and scraped beneath him, like claws raking at his retreat. And the hissing continued.
He thought he could relax then, a little. But as he was pulled farther up the bore he felt heat burning through his rubberized silk cov
erall. It was just a harmless warmth at first, but it increased to a burning sensation about his legs. It made him dizzy and sick, and clouded his brain.
He heard Rod Murgatroyd yelling at him through the phone: “What’s the matter, Perry? What’s up?” And behind the voice of his friend there was the murmur of many other voices. The sightseers from Brenton. They didn’t have any business being there; but if anything happened—if they got hurt—it was his and Rod’s fault. Even though Kerwin, or someone under Kerwin’s orders, had tipped them off for mere malice.
“Back!” Perry yelled. “Order everybody back! When you pull me up, Rod, don’t touch me without gloves! And breathe cautiously. Gas, I think. Some kind of corrosive gas.…”
* * *
The rest, for a while, was like a bad dream to Wilcox. He became aware of stars overhead, and of wind. He was up in the open air once more. Nearby, Herkett, one of the drill crew, was swearing at the inquisitive onlookers, trying to send them on their way. Some were retreating. Others, held by a kind of fascination, still crowded forward against the fence, and met Herkett’s blasphemous pleas with boos, or ignored them with a kind of self-conscious indifference.
Perry was sick with that intense, burning pain in his right leg. To keep his senses was a struggle. He heard noises from within the Earth—like ragged drumbeats that made the ground shake. Something unknown, crescendoing on to a preplanned purpose. Hands touched him—Rod’s hands, covered with thick gloves. Car headlights flared all around in the night, mingling confusingly with the chaos of voices. Perry’s rubber-silk outer garment was crumbling away from him like rotten rags. It had been eaten by a virulently active gaseous chemical, all right. Like combustion, the activity had evolved heat. He was still alive only because he was wearing an oxygen mask.
Ten (Stories) to The Stars Page 5