He gave the machine maximum power, hurtled through the nearly airless spaces to the east, right out across the Atlantic, hidden under its boiling scum of storm clouds, guiding the course entirely by the map’s directional pointer. Half way across the ocean a squadron of globes hove out of the distance—the rescue fliers returning from the African excursion. Briefly they flashed a signal of greeting, then continued on their way.
One hour, two hours, three hours—and the three thousand mile trip over the Atlantic began to near its end.
Terry drive down into the murk, staring anxiously at the pointer, then through the rain-smeared windows. The wind here was not so strong, nor the deluge as severe. None the less the old North African aspect of blazing sunshine had gone—the whole landscape lay under scudding storm clouds as the globe dropped below them and swept at decreased speed over the vast wastes of the Northern Sahara.
Terry snapped on the radio. In a few moments he was speaking to Conway and following his directions. In half an hour his lone stratosphere globe loomed up in the distance, seemingly unusually small by comparison with the massive dome standing in the background against the stormy sky.
“What the Sam Hill is it?” breathed Dawlish in amazement, squinting between the raindrops on the window. “Looks like the dome of a buried city, or something.”
The lofty Munro shook his head. “Not very likely. No city has been unearthed in the Sahara in all its existence.”
“Soon find out anyhow,” Terry remarked, bringing the vessel to a standstill.
He scrambled into his oilskins, opened the lock and walked across to where Conway was standing by his own globe. Munro followed up in the wet, sloppy sand, his, pale eyes narrowed with interest under his dripping hat brim. Dawlish, carrying the well-covered equipment, regarded the towering metal dome in some disgust.
“Meteor, I’d say,” he growled. “Been buried under the sand all this time.”
“Did you ever see a meteor with rivets on it?” asked Conway significantly, then seeing the looks of amazement he went on, “I investigated further after radioing you. Just under the sand, at the base of the dome, is a complete line of rivets. This top dome is just the end of a huge metal ship of some sort. Maybe even—even a spaceship …” He wound up as though he wasn’t at all sure of himself.
“Certainly nobody could ever have transported a thing like this into the Sahara,” Munro commented, moving toward it. “It must have dropped from the skies, if anywhere.”
He studied the metal of the thing closely for a time, finally shrugged his narrow shoulders. “No idea what it is—neither steel nor iron.”
“What’ll you have, chief?” Dawlish asked briefly. “Flame gun?”
Munro nodded abstractedly, rubbed his pointed chin.
“If the total length of the ship—granting this is part of one—can be judged from this, it must go a tremendous distance under the sand. O.K., Dawlish, get busy.”
Dawlish uncovered the gleaming tube of the flame gun and pressed the contact switch. Instantly the internal motor sent a withering line of fire against the metal, set it glowing to white heat in a moment. The men watched through half closed eyes, Dawlish himself staring through the gun’s blue shield.
Far swifter than the old fashioned oxyacetylene welder, it carved a large circle out of the metal within twenty minutes, destroying the atoms thereof and converting them into energy. Finally a powerful kick sent the piece of metal tumbling inwards, wherein it clanged noisily and seemed to fall for a tremendous distance.
The men glanced at each other uneasily for a moment.
“Hollow all right,” Munro commented. “Hope we didn’t break anything.”
Turning suddenly he leaned through the gap and flashed his torch around. He withdrew with a puzzled face.
“Looks like some sort of a shaft,” he said. “Or the hollow inside of a long cylinder. Take care in coming through the opening, else you’ll drop Heaven knows how far. There’s a small ledge just below the gap we’ve made, part of the join in the metal where the rivets are fitted. Wide enough to stand on, with care. Follow me.”
He went inside the opening and vanished presently from sight. Terry followed him up, found he was indeed standing on a narrow ledge, some interior binding ring of the perpendicular ship.
Cautiously he tugged out his own torch and flashed the beam below. At perhaps two hundred feet depth, where the light hardly reached, it was reflected back to him with a faint glitter.
“Glass?” he asked Munro—but the lanky scientist had found a metal ladder in the wall and was already clambering down it, his torch waving erratically. Half way down the abyss he stooped and shouted, his voice echoing weirdly.
“Say, there’s a manhole lock right here. Must be about a. hundred feet below desert level …” Silence for a moment, then, “It must be locked on the outside; no sign of a clamp or screw here—only a sort of automatic device.”
He continued the downward climb again, Terry now following suit. Immediately above him, treading warily, were Dawlish and Conway.
Terry stopped at last as he alighted on a curved wall of transparency that was clearly glass. For a long time he and the others flashed their torches round, studying the massive gyroscopical bearings in which the entire internal glass globe was supported, so designed that it swung upright no matter how the outer case twisted and turned.
“Look down there …” murmured Munro, and his beam passed through the glass under his feet to train on a neat and orderly control room, a mass of machinery grouped at one end and connected to a switchboard, before which stood two metal chairs.
“It’s a space ship all right,” he went on pensively. “I wonder if it is possible for —” He stopped abruptly as Terry’s torch beam flashed idly down. Suddenly he gasped out, “Say, what’s that? A little more to the left—There!”
Silent, utterly dumbfounded, the quartet stared down. To the left of their position, lying on the floor of the globe, was a motionless figure—the figure of a girl, bare arms outflung, her slender form draped in the briefest of garments, her feet encased in dainty sandals. Black hair lay draped around her shapely head.
“A woman!” Munro looked up in blank amazement—then recovering himself he hit the glass forcibly below him with his heavy boot. It made not the least impression. Irritated he swung to Dawlish.
“Flame gun, man—quick! The glass is as tough as the metal. Come on.”
“O.K.,” Dawlish grunted. “But I don’t see a few minutes longer will make much difference to the dame. She must have been here since the Sahara was born, anyway.” He angled the gun and released the switch.
The glass was by no means easy to break even under the blasting power of the flame gun, but it did finally fuse and begin to splinter, melted queerly and dropped huge globules of boiling substance below. Air sighed into the hole.
During the operation Terry glanced further along the dome—beheld the piece of metal they had smashed out of the ship’s wall. The glass had not even cracked under the impact.
“Right!” breathed Munro suddenly, and slid through the gap in the glass, dropped the twelve feet to the floor below—likewise glass. One by one the others followed him, stood at some little distance in the stuffy, circular chamber, gazing at the motionless girl.
“What do we do now?” asked Dawlish uneasily. “I’m all for getting out of here. It’s giving me the jitters.”
Nobody spoke. Terry went slowly forward, torch firmly clamped in his hand—But long before he reached the sprawling girl he stopped in frozen wonderment, the circle of the beam playing on her outflung right hand. On the second finger was a ring, its stone blazing with sullen fires! He’d know that ring anywhere. Elsa Dallaway had been placed in the mausoleum with it on her hand …!
Mistaking Terry’s motionlessness for uncertainty, Munro strode forward, gently caught the girl under the shoulders and turned her over so that her face fell in the area of light. Immediately he dropped her, even his scientific calmne
ss shattered.
“My God!” he whispered hoarsely. “My God …”
“It’s—it’s Elsa!” Terry screamed suddenly, twisting round from staring at that dead white face and closed eyes. “Oh, Heaven, it’s Elsa! I can’t stand this place, Munro; I’m getting —”
“Take it easy, Terry!” Conway came up grimly from the shadows, seized Terry’s arm in a grip of iron. “Don’t go off half cocked!” he snapped. “This can’t be Elsa; all reason’s against it. She’s in the mausoleum. Relax, I tell you!”
Quivering with emotion, Terry made a terrific effort to master himself. He turned back dumbly to the still, beautiful figure on the floor, let his torch rays play on the face.
The girl resembled Elsa to the last detail, looking just as she had in her tomb. The only difference lay in the clothing. Gingerly he touched the slender bare arm—then he recoiled with a sudden gulp of horror as the girl shivered momentarily, trembled, then collapsed into a mass of dust which swirled in the wet wind blowing down through the two holes from the exterior.
A tinkling noise, and the ring fell from where the hand had been to lie in blazing solemnity.
Stunned, the four men stared fixedly at the spot from which the girl had utterly disappeared.
IV – The Meaning of the Jewel
At last Dawlish spoke.
“Chief, we’re seeing things!” he cried dismally. “Please let’s get out of here!”
“Four perfectly sane men can’t see things,” Munro retorted, his pale eyes contracted in thought. “Use your brains, man! This space machine has been sealed under the desert sands for Lord knows how long. No air has been able to get inside this double shell. That girl probably died in the first instance from suffocation, after which she just lay where she’d fallen for thousands of years. She couldn’t decay visibly because of lack of air—but the instant air surged in normalcy reasserted itself. Long extinction passed suddenly to its normal state and she just collapsed to dust, her clothes going with her. Other things will start to deteriorate rapidly as well, but of course machinery is tougher than flesh and blood and fabric.”
He bent down and picked up the ring, turned it over musingly under the torch beam.
“At least that’s Elsa’s ring!” Terry whispered, staring.at it. “I’d know it anywhere.”
Munro laughed shortly. “Then your powers of observance are mighty poor. I had occasion many times to see Miss Dallaway’s ring at close quarters before she died—and it differed in one degree from this one. The claw on this stone has six prongs; hers had only four, like a massive solitaire. Identical stone, certainly, and just as unclassifiable as hers. Another thing, her ring was a trifle too large; this one is a tight fit—or rather was.”
“Then—then the girl?” Conway asked in bewilderment. “I’d swear anywhere that it was Elsa Dallaway.”
“An uncanny likeness, I admit …” Munro frowned. “For a moment I was completely deceived myself—But consider!” he went on impressively. “Forgive the gruesome details; they’re necessary. Miss Dallaway, by this time, will be in a state of visible decomposition in the mausoleum. Even if by some mad fluke we admitted that she could have been transported here, nothing so ordinary as fresh air could have accelerated her decomposition so much as to make her vanish into mere dust. Besides, I repeat, the clothes were not the same. The girl who vanished was not wearing a shroud—No, no, the girl was not Miss Dallaway, but practically her twin, wearing a similar ring. Mystery—profound mystery, and somewhere it had a solution. What’s more, we’re going to find it.”
He tugged off his oilskins actively, rubbed his hands.
“Dawlish, throw down a couple of light extensions from the globes on the surface, then we’ll be able to see what we’re doing. We’re going to solve the mystery of this ship if we stop here for eternity. We’ve food enough in tabloids to last for a month, and there’s no time like the present. Let’s get started!”
Munro went to work with the air of a mastermind, turned all his ruthlessly analytical faculties to bear upon the mystery of the machine. Terry was filled with complete bewilderment, not unmixed with horror. This sudden and incredible happening had only served to stir up the unhappy memories he had been trying to outgrow.
Dawlish and Conway, having no emotions to overcome, went about their part of the business with relentless thoroughness. They made their headquarters inside the vessel, had meals there, slept there, spent all the time piecing the problem together, entirely oblivious to whatever grim happenings were taking place in the world outside. Their only contact with external events was the radio and the incessant howling of the wind down the shaft they had made. Corporation headquarters had been advised that they were busy on an important investigation, and there the matter finished.
One thing soon became evident. The glass globe control room was beautifully poised in the center of the ship itself, swung so perfectly even yet that it tilted gently when the men gathered in a group at one end of the place. The airlock of the glass globe was so perfectly let into the glass, so much a part of it in its sealed efficiency, that it took a surprising time to find it.
Even then it could not be opened—nor would ordinary blows splinter the glass. Only the flame gun did that, and once underneath the globe in the lower part of the perpendicular ship the four made the surprising discovery that the glass door had been locked on the outside—just as had the airlock on the outer shell. Somebody had gone out of the ship, bolting the doors on the way, and had never returned. The girl, shut inside, had died horribly. The discovery of empty oxygen tanks inside the globe were proof in themselves of the effort the girl had made to preserve her life, until at last the supply had run out.
In the very nose—the bottom—of the upended ship was a strange contrivance of electrical machines, all cupped in the very core of the nose and attached to a cable leading back through fused terminals In the globe to the internal switchboard. Munro’s cold eyes followed the cable steadily, became thoughtful.
“This machinery can’t surely be for motive power?” he muttered. “If it were, they’d surely have put it on the floor of the ship instead of in the nose? Wonder why the devil they tilted it on end like this —”
“Say, do you hear something, chief?” Dawlish broke in tensely, and the four of them stood in absolute silence in the reflected light from the illumined glass globe above.
Presently they detected the noise to which Dawlish had referred—a deep, far distant roaring noise seeming an incredible distance down in the earth itself. There was something frightening about it—a suggestion of colossal power, or wind, hemmed in by unknown forces and striving for an outlet. It sounded oddly like a gale blowing through a subway tunnel.
“I don’t like it,” Conway muttered with an uneasy glance. “It sounds just as though something is going to blow up!”
“In the present state of the earth’s interior anything may be causing that sound,” Munro answered. “Internal upheavals beyond doubt, the sound being conducted through the ground. It does sound weird, I admit.
“But what puzzles me is this confounded machinery. The more I look at it the less it resembles motive power. Looks for all the world like apparatus for relaying radio waves, though I don’t see how the devil that applies.”
He studied it again, shrugged his narrow shoulders, then returned to the glass control room and became absorbed in thought before the switchboard. For a long time he studied an object like a camera, its entire squat bulk tapering to an unlensed nozzle. With painstaking care he measured its distance to the two chairs before the control board, sat in the chairs themselves and studied the straps on the arms and back, straps that were already showing signs of rotting now the air had gotten in.
When he had completed his notes on the switchboard he set about the projector again, examined the complex system of clockwork-like devices inside it. Apparently satisfied he then took the girl’s ring and subjected it to an exhaustive series of tests with the scientific apparatus he had o
n hand from the stratosphere globe at the surface.
What line his reasoning took none of the others could guess. They only noticed that his work needed the flame gun several times; that at one period he seemed lost in a daze, almost as though he were intoxicated—then, recovering, he went to work again, tight lipped, non-informative, driving to the root of the puzzle with all the cold incisive reasoning of a detective solving a murder.
For two days he continued his prowling, thinking, and examining, only emerging from his pensiveness when Terry, by the sheerest accident, happened to discover a hitherto unnoticed inlet cupboard which formerly had been mistaken for a small pillar by the switchboards. Surprised, he stared at the thin metal rolls that tumbled out.
Instantly Munro pounced on them, took them eagerly to the experimental table and stretched them out, stared down on them with the others gazing eagerly round him.
“Hieroglyphics—not unlike Ancient Egyptian,” breathed Conway. “Looks as though they’ve been done with a stylus, or something. Metal instead of parchment.”
Munro’s bald head was nodding slowly. “Hieroglyphics that may explain the whole knotty problem,” he muttered. “I guess the only person likely to solve them is Wade, back at the Corporation. Dead languages and codes are his only delight in life—Hallo, what’s this?”
He had turned to the next metal sheet and frowned over the diagram thereon. It represented a perfectly drawn, rather pointed ellipse with a circle in the center, poised perpendicularly over something that resembled a cylinder, at the base of which was another, smaller ellipse around which were grouped objects that might be machinery. At the base of the cylinder were wavy lines.
“Say, it’s this very space ship!” Terry exclaimed suddenly. “Look, this round thing in the center of the perpendicular ellipse is this globe we’re in right now. The ellipse is the ship, and the cylinder it fits in is tapered all the way down so that the ship is wedged at the top. Guess I’m stumped, ’specially the wavy lines.”
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