The End of the Tunnel

by Paul Capon

  “How long have you had it?” asked Boyd.

  “Not long, not long.”

  “You mean just a matter of weeks?”

  The pilot hesitated, then said, “Well, in Sutterranea we never talk in terms of days or weeks or months. Actually it’s considered bad form to try to measure time. We have no days and no nights. No seasons, either. Time does not exist for us, as you’ll soon find out.”

  Julius’ words made Boyd feel uneasy, and he glanced over his shoulder to see if the others had heard, but they were gazing down at the valley, which was slowly vanishing into the mist as the helicopter rose higher. He hadn’t liked the way the pilot had said, “. . . as you’ll soon find out.” His voice had held an undertone of menace. Just what had he meant? How would they soon find out? Within an hour or so they would be on their way home, wouldn’t they?

  Boyd began to perceive why watches were so significant in this weird country. In a timeless land the man with a watch had power and could reasonably expect to earn the resentment of any emperor or vice-emperor who happened to be in control.

  By now the great valley was little more than a bright patch of greenish light shining through the mist. To one side and some miles away was the dazzling glare of Sutterranea’s light source, so brilliant that a single glance in that direction made Tom feel that his eyes were on fire.

  “Listen, girls, don’t look over there!” he exclaimed warningly, shouting to make himself heard. “It’s like looking into a thousand suns at once.”

  The pilot glanced over his shoulder and laughed. “Yes, it is a trifle bright, isn’t it?” he called loudly. “Later I’ll provide some dark glasses and we’ll fly over there.”

  Jane glanced at Tom, who was still rubbing his eyes, and decided that this was her chance. She leaned forward and, resting her chin on the back of his seat, told him in a whisper what had happened while she and the Lady Marcia were standing by the window of the Vice-Emperor’s room.

  Tom half turned in his seat. “We must get Boyd back here to discuss this,” he murmured out of the side of his mouth. “Ask Ruth to — ”

  Just then the intercom crackled, and the pilot said, “Hold tight, chicks. The roof! We’re just about there.”

  The children looked up. At first the roof seemed to be no more than a vast, dark canopy looming through the mist, but, as the helicopter soared higher, they began to see its rugged grandeur. It was like a series of mountain ranges upside down. Great, gray peaks thrust down into the mist, and the helicopter turned and twisted among them, then soared hundreds of feet up into the deep chasms until there was nothing on either side except walls of dark rock.

  Beneath them the group could just discern the patch of lighter mist that was the valley, and beyond it the white blaze of the light source, still too bright to gaze upon.

  Boyd glanced at the pilot. ‘Doesn’t any of this rock ever break loose and fall on Sutterranea?” he asked.

  “Hardly ever. You see, there’s nothing to loosen it — no rain, no wind, no frost. What’s more, this happens to be a particularly tough and settled part of the earth’s crust. If we were in an earthquake belt, it might be a different story.”

  “What’s directly over our heads? England?”

  “No. The North Sea.”

  That was quite a thought, but before Boyd had time to ponder it an immense hanging cliff loomed ahead of them, and his heart jumped into his mouth.

  “Look out!” he gasped.

  Julius laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This is a helicopter, not a plane.”

  He flew up to the hanging cliff and hovered so close to it that the tips of the rotor blades seemed to miss the rock by inches.

  In a leisurely fashion they flew along the cliff, and, when they came to the end of it, they were met by a sight still more fantastic. Ahead was a great field of stalactites, looking for all the world like a forest of petrified redwood trees growing down from the roof.

  “What the heck?” Boyd was nonplussed.

  “Stalactites,” explained Julius. “But inert these tens of thousands of years.”

  “What do you mean — inert?”

  “They don’t grow. The limestone deposits that formed them were probably exhausted long before even the first dinosaur was born.”

  “Sort of old down here, isn’t it?”

  “As old as time,” agreed Julius.

  He did not risk flying among the stalactites, but he skirted the area long enough for the foursome to study the ugly, dirty-yellow formations in detail. Ruth remarked that they looked like half-melted candles stuck to a giant’s ceiling.

  “Some giant,” commented Jane. “If those are candles, he must be as big as the Empire State Building!”

  “That’s the sort of giant I mean,” Ruth said.

  The helicopter was drifting down into the mist once more.

  “So much for the roof,” said Julius. “Now I’ll show you the part of Sutterranea we call the Dark Lands. It’s a mining area.”

  “What sort of mines?” asked Boyd.

  “Gold. Silver. Copper. Most metals, in fact. And diamonds. We have oil, too, millions and millions of gallons of it, but we’ve little use for it. We have a few oil burning engines, but very few.”

  “You could all be millionaires!”

  Julius laughed. “We all are,” he said. “All of us Cornelians, that’s to say.”

  “Cornelians?” Boyd repeated inquiringly.

  “We people of the valley,” Julius explained. “There are about five hundred sixty of us, and we’re all descended from Cornelius the First, the founder of Sutterranea. Our present Emperor is Cornelius the Fifty-third, and his son, the Vice-Emperor, will be Cornelius the Fifty-fourth.”

  “Are they all called Cornelius?”

  “Definitely, and not only the Emperors. I’m a Cornelius, and so are all the other people of the valley. However, when we visit your world, we drop the last part of the name and call ourselves Cornel.”

  “Well, what about the others?”

  “What others? What others?” Julius repeated himself, a habit of his that Boyd had noticed earlier.

  “The soldiers and the peasants.”

  “Oh. Those. I don’t know much about them.”

  Land was appearing through the mist again. It was an ugly, harshly rolling surface, so black that Boyd felt he might be looking down on heaps of coal dust, and through it flowed a broad, sluggish river. Julius took the helicopter down until it was hovering only about ten feet above the grim surface.

  “Where does that river go?” asked Boyd.

  “Nobody knows. It has its source in our great lake which you crossed this morning, flows down through Sutterranea, watering it, and eventually disappears into a tunnel some miles to the south. What becomes of it after that is anybody’s guess, but it probably is absorbed by porous rock and perhaps finally emerges as steam from volcanoes such as Vesuvius, Etna and Stromboli.”

  Beneath them rolled mile after mile of black landscape. The hills became harsher and more rugged, and here and there Boyd began to see pit-head winding gear and little groups of derricks with sordid colonies of tin shacks squatting near by. He saw workmen, thin, elderly, worn-out creatures with straggly beards, their once voluminous trousers hanging in tatters. Every mile or so there was a blockhouse with soldiers in black uniforms drilling outside it.

  Altogether it was a terrible area and did nothing to improve Boyd’s spirits. He was thinking how easy it would be for these people to keep the four of them against their will. There could be no escape. . . .

  As if reading his thoughts, Julius remarked that there was only one way into Sutterranea. “By the railroad,” he said. “And soon you’ll see the frontier post from the air. Sutterranea is really one vast cavern, and all around us the roof eventually dips to meet the floor.”

  “Doesn’t anyone in the world outside know about Sutterranea?”

  “No one other than Cornelians who may be living outside,” said Julius, “and they
, of course, are all sworn to secrecy. No one other than a Cornelian — except for a very few servants — ever leaves Sutterranea, but we get permission to go out from time to time, sometimes staying at the Emperor’s country house, Ridgefield Manor, and sometimes at his London house in Belgrave Square. A few of us attend schools and universities in England and France and even in America. This is something that has been going on for centuries. I went to Charterhouse and Queen’s College, Cambridge, and then I served three years in the R.A.F., although that is quite exceptional. All down the ages we have known of the outside world while the outside world has never known of us, and that has been our greatest strength and our impenetrable defense.”

  “I get it,” muttered Boyd, and now he realized that he and the others might never, never leave Sutterranea. In fact, he told himself that they would be lucky to escape with their lives.

  CHAPTER 10

  The helicopter flew on, and gradually the hideous Dark Lands became flatter and flatter, and their color changed from black to brown to brick-red. Tom recognized the desert they had crossed that morning in the train. The thin mist still hung over everything, but to his right he could make out the frontier post and to his left the evil-looking crags that bordered the great lake.

  He leaned back in his seat and caught Ruth’s attention. “There’s something urgent I want to discuss with Boyd,” he whispered. “Tell him it’s your turn to sit beside the pilot.”

  “All right.”

  The helicopter rocked a little as she moved, and Julius glanced back. “Don’t rampage about, chicks,” he warned. “These things aren’t meant for gymnastics.”

  “I want to change places with Boyd. He’s been in front all the time.”

  “All right, but make it quick.”

  Boyd was glad of the chance to talk to the others, and, as soon as he sat down, Tom asked Jane to tell him of her conversation with the Lady Marcia. Boyd listened quietly, and, when his sister had finished, he nodded thoughtfully.

  “That goes along with what I’ve been thinking,” he murmured. “Tom, this little helicopter trip is no joy ride, but a way of showing us there’s no point in trying to escape.”

  “At least we know that Marcia’s on our side,” said Tom, “and that should count for something.”

  “Yes, but even so, they’ll never let us go. They don’t dare. However much we swore we’d never breathe a word, they’d never believe they could trust us. They’ve got oil here, millions of gallons of it, as well as lots of other valuable things, and I guess they don’t want Britain or anyone walking in and saying that Sutterranea belongs to them. No, sir. We’re here, and here we’ll have to stay.”

  “What do you think they’ll do with us?” asked Jane.

  “I think that depends on how well we behave,” Boyd replied.

  All the time they were talking the helicopter was flying toward the light source. Now Ruth came to them carrying a small, leather case.

  “Dark glasses,” she explained. “Julius is going to fly us right over the light source.”

  “Should be interesting,” remarked Boyd, accepting a pair of glasses. They were almost like goggles, with wide rims and heavy sidepieces.

  Tom took a pair of the glasses and made his way forward to the copilot’s seat.

  “Hello, there,” said Julius. “Another change of partners, eh?”

  “Yes. I want to get a really good look at the light source,” Tom said.

  “So you shall,” promised Julius, and Tom was left to wonder whether he had simply imagined it, or whether there was menace in the pilot’s voice.

  Tom put the glasses on and looked directly toward the light source. Even at that distance and through the dark glasses, it was strong enough to make him squint. Now it appeared as a reddish-orange flood of brilliance, shining up from the rocky landscape to be reflected onto Sutterranea by the permanent ceiling of mist.

  The atmosphere was turbulent and the helicopter bucked and rocked alarmingly. Rising currents of warm air tugged and wrenched at its rotor, and Julius struggled to keep it on an even keel.

  “I’ll have to take her up,” he muttered after a particularly rough half minute. “We’re too close to the ground for comfort.”

  The helicopter rose rapidly, leveling out at about two thousand feet, and Tom could see the rim of a crater in the foreground, a crater that must have been more than a hundred miles across. Then he realized that the light source was really a gigantic, raw wound on Sutterranea’s surface, a yawning pit open all the way down to the molten magma that forever heaves and surges beneath the mantle of the earth. In fact, the earth’s core, or a small part of it, was to Sutterranea what the sun was to the rest of the world — the giver of light and heat and even of life itself. . . .

  As the helicopter approached the crater, the air grew calmer while the temperature rose rapidly until Tom could feel sweat prickling under his clothes and streaming down his face. He looked down and saw the rim of the crater pass beneath them, and in the next moment the helicopter dropped like a stone into that enormous pipe with the thin mists, fiery in the reflected glare, streaming past it like flames.

  “A mile down,” yelled Julius, “and we shall be below the mist. Then you’ll be able to see the lava itself!”

  “Fine!” gasped Tom, but in his heart he knew he would far, far rather be on his way home. He glanced back at the others and managed a grin, which he rather suspected was sickly. The two girls clung to each other and gazed at the crater’s glassy walls. Boyd, kneeling on his seat, was peering down into the mist. If he was scared, he certainly did not show it.

  The helicopter was now so far into the crater that even the nearest wall was hidden behind the mist. Julius said the mist was pumice dust, but he admitted that no one knew exactly what it was or why it hung so permanently in the Sutterranean atmosphere. Those who did not subscribe to the pumice dust theory maintained that the mist was composed of microscopic metallic particles held in suspension by magnetic fields.

  Like a fly in the funnel of the Queen Elizabeth — that’s how Tom felt, and he was relieved when Julius checked the helicopter’s fall. The mist grew thinner, ceased altogether, and they were drifting in the very heart of the glare. In spite of the dark glasses Tom’s eyes burned and stung, and the light, stronger than any he could have imagined, was beating upon him from all directions, reflecting down from the clouds of mist above, glancing off the olivine walls and blazing up from the magma itself.

  “If we should crash,” yelled Julius cheerfully, “no one would ever know what became of us!”

  “How far down is the magna?” asked Tom.

  “Perhaps hundreds of miles. Its depth has never been measured, but someday I’m going to experiment with radar to see if I can get an echo from it.”

  He tilted the machine so that Tom could gaze directly down, but there was nothing except the orange flood of light, pervasive as air and almost as tangible as water. The heat was not quite so intense as Tom had thought it would be, but, even so, he could feel his skin drying and reddening by the second.

  “Seen enough?” asked Julius.

  “I think so,” Tom said, and succeeded in forming his dry and cracking lips into a smile. “Thank you very much.”

  The helicopter chugged upward, climbing into the mist once more, soaring up and up until at last the rim of the crater appeared.

  Over the intercom Julius said, “Chicks, better keep those glasses on until I give you the word.”

  Tom glanced back to see that the others were evidently as relieved to be quitting the crater as he was. They were lolling on the seats, mopping their faces. Even Ruth was silent and pensive.

  The helicopter floated over the crater’s rim and surged forward, but Julius did not have the foursome remove their dark glasses until they were beyond the belt of turbulent air. Then in the distance they could dimly make out the valley with its gardens, lakes, white buildings and restful green lawns.

  “The Vice-Emperor wants to see you aga
in,” said the young man in the toga, “but first I imagine you would like to bathe and have something to eat. Perhaps also you would care to change your clothes for something more in keeping with Sutterranea.”

  “Well, more than anything we want to get home,” said Tom. “Why can’t we go right away?”

  “That is a matter you must discuss with His Imperial Majesty.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Ruth, “but what about our people? Mummy and Daddy must be beside themselves with worry.”

  The young man, whose name was Titus, did not reply. He was sitting behind an immense marble-topped table in what was presumably his office. Now he lifted the telephone.

  “Would you care for some Sutterranean clothes?” he asked.

  The children exchanged doubtful glances, and Boyd asked, “Well, just what do you mean?”

  “Boys of your age wear tunics and kilts, and girls favor a modification of the palla.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a toga,” said Boyd.

  “Out of the question!” Titus snorted. “Togas are worn only by trueborn Cornelians and then only on ceremonial occasions.”

  “Well, what’s your ceremonial occasion?” asked Ruth.

  “As equerry to His Imperial Majesty,” said Titus stuffily, “all occasions are ceremonial for me. Come, now. What’s it to be?”

  “I guess I’ll go along with what I have — jeans and T-shirt,” said Boyd, and the others agreed to do the same.

  “As you wish,” Titus muttered and spoke into the telephone.

  In a few seconds two servants appeared, a man and a woman, dressed much as were all the working people of Sutterranea in white blouses and full trousers, but their clothes were elaborately embroidered as befitted imperial functionaries.

  Titus spoke briefly to them in dialect. The man motioned to the boys to follow him, and the woman took charge of the girls.

  “I suppose we’re going to visit a Roman bath,” murmured Boyd as they followed the servant. “This’ll be something to tell them back in the States.”