by Philip Wylie
A tall man was shuffling into the room. He had on pajamas, much-wrinkled but clean and new. Shoes-brown, low, laced. His face was greenish-gray. His pale-gray eyes squinted. His mousy hair was mussed. One thin hand kept patting his smudge of mustache.
Peter Williams--the meter reader.
Kit made ready to grab the man and hold him again.
But the twirp was no longer batty. Seeing Kit, he stopped, smiled--or tried to--and said, in an uneven but not unpleasant voice, "Then it's all true! I didn't dream it?"
"Dream what?"
"That somebody started an atom-bomb war? That some people dragged me into a mine shaft? That they were Red Chinese, and going to torture me? Then--that they were insane. Telling me I was safe in a deep shelter. I felt sane. But believed I was a prisoner of screwballs. It's not so--is it?"
Kit said, "No." He added, "Just wake up?"
The other man shook his head, his eyes slowly taking in the immense and bare stone walls, the scattered chairs, the bridge table. "No, sir! I've been awake for some time now. Thinking about it all. When I got up and found a light switch, then a door that wasn't locked, I decided I'd gone nuts myself, for a while. I'm sorry."
Kit nodded. "Whole world's gone nuts. My name's Barlow. Kit." He held out his hand.
"Williams. Pete." The tall, thin man's eyes were on the wall again. "Limestone,"
he said. "Noticed that when I came through the corridor back there--same formation.
How long--?"
Kit gave the fellow a relieved grin. "It started just before noon, yesterday. Now, it's about 6 A.M., day after. Can you cook?"
Peter Williams gulped. "Matter of fact, yes. But why?"
"You must be hungry."
"Guess I am. But--?"
The distant tinking was again noticeable to Kit. Peter Williams did not hear it. Kit pointed. "First door down that passage, on your left-our kitchen. Freezers. Refrigerators.
Stoves. The works.
Make yourself something to eat. Others'll be getting up, in time. I gotta go on an errand-if--?"
Pete understood. He seemed, in fact, pretty sharp, now that he had recovered. "Go ahead!" Pete started toward the kitchen. "I'll be okay, now."
At Vance Farr's door Kit hesitated. From beyond it he could hear a loud and rhythmic sound. "Old boy," Kit told himself, "snores like a ram-jet." He started to knock anyway, and changed his mind. "Maybe the Brain would do as well. Pop needs his shut-eye." He proceeded down the lighted corridor to Ben's door, where he did knock lightly.
Ben had been asleep for some while. Myriads of horrible imaginings of the world above had raced through his dreaming head. And he had also puzzled, intermittently and as he briefly wakened, over Vance Farr's picture of anticipated trouble.
To Ben, even on such spotty reflection, it seemed that Farr was overly concerned about the likelihood of romantic liaisons and subsequent jealousies, even if their immuration did last for months. The people here were young, mostly. The three young women were very attractive--in three different ways. And this was an age in which all remnants of Victorianism had finally vanished.
But those in the group were intelligent, and all shared a terrible uncertainty about their common future. Certainly, Ben thought, relative trifles like lust or jealousy could not prevail here. Farr must be one of those oversexed middle-agers. The idea relieved Ben, and irritated him, also. Besides, he somewhat resented Farr's inclusion of him as one of the stable, hence elder, members of the shelter group. The whole affair had an off-key sound, a motivated seeming.
CHAPTER 8
Ben heard a faint rapping on his door some while after his broken sleep. "Yes?"
he called softly, though the stone walls between the personal rooms would drown anything but a shout.
"Kit! Got a problem!" The knocking went on, more loudly.
Ben's light snapped on. He leaped into coveralls and went, barefooted, to the door.
Opened it. Listened to Kit. His eyes widened over the information and his brows leaped at the final question. "Dunno," he said. "We should probably wake Vance. Wait up! Let's try George Hyama, first. He'll know if that tapping is a drippy drain, or a gadget, or something."
With sleepy-eyed George they rushed to the Hall. A faint scent of frying bacon pervaded it and lights threw a harsh rectangle into the passageway outside the kitchen.
Ben noticed that and Kit explained. George by then had his ear to a wall. He stepped back presently, and eyed them with an expression Ben found as unfathomable as oriental expressions were supposed to be . . . and never, he'd thought till then, really were.
"Somebody," the Japanese youth stated. "Up, maybe, in the long side passage." A different light shone in his brown stare, and vanished. "This is a passage I am not supposed to know even exists."
"Where to?" Ben asked sharply.
"We better get Mr. Farr," George answered.
It took a minute to stop his snoring, arouse Farr to complete sensibility, and get him into the Hall. He, in turn, listened to the "tinking" wall. Kit, also listening, said,
"Sounds fainter than it was."
Farr had grown white; his hands shook. He looked numbly from Kit to George to Ben. He said, in a semi-whisper and as if to himself, "I suppose it's possible!" He seemed, as they waited, to be weighing very desperate alternatives. At last he spoke. "When we started cutting the main shaft to this place, we ran into another, old, horizontal tunnel, running north. Entered, we found later, from a hidden, vertical hole cut into the floor of the wine cellar. The tunnel, which we explored immediately, led clear under the summit of Sachem's Watch. It was pretty old—decades--and full of dust, cobwebs, fallen rubble.
It emerged at a place across the gravel road that then led through to our estate. There's a big ledge, at one point, where a very cleverly concealed door led out into daylight."
Ben asked, "The slaves?"
Farr shook his head. "It was more recent. But I realized, almost at once, what it meant." His eyes met the scientist's with evanescent amusement. "I told you my old man was a strict conservative. So was Mother. Dad, though, had loved travel--been everywhere, for pleasure as much as because of the business. His lifelong hobby was wines. He'd spend days--and whole nights--in his wine cellars. Even had a room in them furnished, so he could read, sleep, eat snacks, keep accounts, work. Mother beefed about that 'wasted time' to her dying day. On finding the tunnel I realized that Dad--probably even before I was born, when the old house, not Uxmal, stood above us--had cut the tunnel so, when he felt like it, he could get out. I mean, away from home. On what errands, I couldn't say. But I can guess."
He looked at their faces. They did not smile. Just waited.
When Farr continued, he spoke unevenly, but more rapidly. "I--well, a time came when I felt I, too, might want some private--well--call it, sanctuary. We were mining galleries down here then, and Valerie's house was just blueprints. So I reconditioned the tunnel. When I sold off half our land to the developers of Candlewood Manor Apartments, I blocked the remote exit of the tunnel. Made another, after those big buildings were completed. In time I contrived a secret connection with one of the apartment houses." His voice dropped almost to a whisper and, though another man might have blushed, Vance Farr remained pale. "Well, frankly, only one person in the buildings--I believe--ever knew about that entry. Her name is Angelica Rosa and she has lived in a Candlewood cooperative--the one the tunnel reaches--since we moved into Uxmal. It is possible--!" He pondered. "We've got to try!"
Ben asked, "Where does the thing end, this side? Wine cellars, still?"
Farr shook his head. "It was easier to reach it by the elevator shaft. The tunnel ends up where I said there was a passage around the middle psi door."
All four went together.
It took them half an hour, in the furnace heat, to loosen toggles that held the first of three small steel portals. The second responded readily to its motorized controls and opened like a bank vault. The third had to be cut free with oxyacetyle
ne torches operated in turns by the heat-blanched, frantic men. When at last a chunk of steel large enough to admit a man fell, red-hot, into the darkness beyond, a great blast of superheated air poured upon them. They raced for the elevator and sent it downward at full speed to keep from being baked alive.
But even as the jagged metal had crushed in, they had heard a far-off sound of pounding, clearer, now, than the rock-carried tinking audible below. On the way down Farr gasped, "Have to hose it."
Ben said, swiftly, "And fill it with superheated steam? That tunnel's like a volcano throat!"
"Somebody"--George muttered when they reached the Hall, carrying into it a wave of heated air--"is trying to bust through at the far end. You hear the sound? No signals now, though. Guess they heard us!"
"How long is it?" Kit asked.
"Thousand yards--give or take fifty." Vance wiped sweat and grime from his naked chest.
Ben spoke. "What's at the far end?"
"False door--steel this side, brick the far side--to match the cellar wall. It's in a sub-cellar below a trunk room, off a furnace room. If it's Angelica, and if she's trying to smash through, that means the motorized gear isn't working. Be a job, but a person with a sledge and muscles could batter through--given time."
"We gotta try," Kit said fiercely. "Suppose, though, it's a whole lot of people that got through what's happened there, and that your girl friend"--he did not notice the term he had used--"told 'em about this place?"
"Possible," Farr admitted. "In which case--!"
None of the others--stripped like Farr, as sweat-drenched and grime-smeared--
said a word. Pete Williams then joined the group and was told the main facts.
Farr realized it was up to him to deal with Kit's question. He drew a shaky breath.
"In other words, if, by some wild luck, a mob is still alive out there, we can't let them in because our own chances depend on keeping the group down to fifteen, or sixteen, maximum."
"That means," George said quietly, "up to six more or so we could take 'em--"
"--providing, always, we can get to them. And get them back."
"I say," George went on calmly, "we try. If there's a crowd, we take the youngest five or six. Assuming we can figure a way. If there's too many people--well--somebody can be all set at this end. We've got machine guns enough for a small army."
Ben felt his body tremble. Pete murmured, "God!" Kit said, "Somebody's got to see how far they can make it down that shaft." He turned to Farr. "Got any flameproof gear?"
The tycoon nodded. "Of course. For fires, down here. Gear for exploration outside, too. We've got an assortment of things. Asbestos suits. Radiation-resistant suits.
Combinations, with interior oxygen supply. But before a man got a quarter of the way down that hell--!"
"I'll take a shot," Kit said.
Thirty minutes later Kit, in a cumbersome, Martian-like costume, tottered back toward a narrow landing on the stairway that bypassed the middle psi doors. The four men had been waiting there in air that was tolerable because it then came in a gush through a thick hose attached by George to distant pumps. They saw the figure vaguely as it neared, flashlight still gripped by a massively-gloved hand. Kit staggered and, as he reached the others, collapsed. Ben and George dragged him out of the tunnel. Took off the quartz face plate. Kit was panting mightily and managed, as the air hose hit his face, to say a few words. "They got their end open, I guess. Heard 'em. Yelling. One word.
'Help!' maybe. But no man'll ever make it that far."
Ben had been thinking. He turned to George. "You produce Dry Ice here, for storage lockers, right? Got any dollies? Trucks?"
"Yeah. To move stuff. Electric."
"Okay." He helped remove Kit's finger-searing cover of asbestos and synthetic fiber and went on: "Then we'll load a truck with Dry Ice. Build a sheet-asbestos face for it. That way it'll fill the place with vapor, but also more or less bathe a guy, running behind it, with cold CO2, Give him a chance."
They carried Kit to the steel floor of the elevator and went down with him.
Farr said to Ben as they re-emerged, "That's nuts! Dry Ice'd steam away before a man had run five hundred yards behind it. His sides and back would still probably be roasted by hot air sucked in behind him."
Kit, his naked body red, his face and arms burned badly, looked up from the floor where Farr was already salving the worst of his agonizing scalds. "Don't even go in there, Ben! It's hot as the center of hell!"
"I'm a half-miler," Ben said. It wasn't true.
What was true was that Ben had perceived himself at last faced with a kind of challenge about which he had always wondered: a test of physical courage that relied, not on scientific skill for protection, but on plain guts. The test from which no fellow scientist or Navy Chief or anyone would save you if you flunked. And he knew that, panicky as he felt, queasy of belly and shaky of muscle, he was going to try. He had hitherto often speculated on how he would react to such peril as other men held to be the supreme test.
The peril of combat, of death by means unknown or not possible to anticipate. Grimly, he now thought he would soon have the answer.
When George Hyama said, "Better I do it," Ben merely shook his head. "I'll get into another asbestos job, and you get me all the Dry Ice you can load in crates on a truck. I'll tie a rope--no, it'd burn through--some kind of wire around my waist. If I flop, I'll flop on the truck and you can haul me back."
"Frozen solid on your belly side?" Farr asked. "Okay. We'll put some kind of insulation over the Dry Ice. Steel wool, say."
With much fast labor they put that scheme into effect. The door was wracked open. At the head of the stairs where the melted-steel-hot tunnel opened up, with pumped air pressing back its temperatures, Ben, in the fire-fighter's suit, aimed the contraption he'd suggested at the blackness ahead. The Dry Ice had already started to fill the small narrow landing with steam. Ben said, before Farr screwed on the face plate of the suit, "If I make it, I'll yank the wire three times. Any series of yanks--or any single, weak yank--
will mean, pull me back. If I find anybody I--! Anyone here know Morse?"
"Me," George said.
"Sure!" Ben smiled feebly. "I guess I can remember it well enough. I'll use it, on the line, to give further data." Then he went.
They stood amid the hosed-in air, peering down the tunnel. Carbon-dioxide
"steam" now swirled upward, toward heavy baffles in this bypass, so they could see Ben's light for a while and hear the wheels of his impromptu conveyance as they clattered on the smooth floor of the tunnel. Vapor erupted from the great, white lumps of Dry Ice loaded on the cart under a mat of steel wool. Erupted and enfolded him. Aluminum wire was paid out in shining loops as the scientist moved away, going as fast as his clumsy clothing, his power-driven cart, and the light wire permitted.
In the hole--a foot higher than his head, level, and perfectly smooth-Ben faintly felt icy touches of the vaporized CO2 He also felt, in other, random places, fingers of superheated air. He flinched from both extremes and tried, against his will at times, to run, so as to keep his flesh clear of places in his suit that grew unendurably hot and then, occasionally, almost as balefully cold. He was gasping. His lungs seemed to be burning.
He knew he was getting a rich mixture of oxygen from his helmet but even so he felt he'd soon have to stop.
This was like certain nightmare moments he'd experienced in underwater demolition training, when the instructor had ordered some "simulated" accident that obliged the deep-down swimmer to hold his breath till his head seemed about to explode and his vision grew crimson, while, meticulously, he went through, one by one, the intricate procedures that, if he could hold out, would finally restore air to his lungs.
This was worse, however. Because then, a Navy Chief would grab a man who passed out cold.
He'd gone the distance, surely, he told himself; but vapor obscured the view through a thick glass window in the shield set up on the truc
k-front.
He was in torment. It would feel like this if you were burned at the stake, he thought, panically! The Dry Ice was about spent. His light wobbled on the endless stone path as he ran on, on, on. Then, appallingly, the improvised vehicle hit some irregularity in the floor, bucked, and he lost his flashlight. It hit the stone, smashed, went out. Ben shut his eyes in sheer horror. Stopped. Felt the added heat caused by stopping. Realized he would never be hauled that long way back, alive. Realized he would begin to be deeply burned in many places, and, soon, from head to foot--in a matter of ten or fifteen seconds. Opened his eyes. Felt his heart leap.
Straight ahead through the last cool wisps and not far away, light glowed dully.
His brilliant flashlight had prevented him from seeing it sooner. He raced forward again.
He could make out, in twenty strides, an irregular, large hole at the tunnel end, its broken edges framing a feeble gleam. He stopped the cart there, leaped it, and dove through the hole, barely catching his balance beyond it.
The place was large and shapeless--a cave. A ladder led to an evidently closed trap door overhead and a lantern hung from a rung. On the floor, apparently insensible, lay a man, a woman, and two children. With feverish but awkward effort he unscrewed the face plate. Pulled off a great glove. Felt, with his bared hand, the intense hotness of this vast chamber. Touched the motionless figures. Their hearts beat. Threadily.
Now he looked swiftly up at the irregular roof. It seemed to have buckled downward in places. A few broken stalactites had fallen from it. Next he grasped at the radiation counter tied to his asbestos suit. He could, he knew, already have received, in this cavern, a lethal dose of radiation. He carried the gadget to the wan light. Stared with unbelief at its dial: nine roentgens. Then guessed that the ten-story? twelve? fifteen?, anyhow, the entire apartment house might lie, as protective rubble, above this spot.
The air could barely be breathed. He put his face plate on again. He reefed in the aluminum line till it came tight enough so he could signal his success. Then, knowing George held the far end, he began a series of short and longer yanks to represent dots and dashes. He could not be sure he remembered the correct dot-dash symbol for every letter.