When a small bunch of these fibres were placed around the end of the glowing string, and gently blown on, it was just possible to get the fibre to burst into flame.
Sandy was not happy at the unpredictability of the arrangement, but it was all they had at the moment.
‘I’ve got a couple of the dried meat strips, and a small container of water, just in case.’ said Ben. ‘Always better to be on the safe side.’ Sandy grinned to himself, he had chosen well to have Ben as a partner, but then realized that Ben had chosen him.
They went down to the digester room, where all their waste was broken down into compost for Bell’s plant growing in the pseudo gas plant.
‘What’s that smell?’ asked Ben as they neared the twin cylinders of the plant.
‘Probably from the remains of our old clothing.’ Sandy replied, pointing to a small heap of rags. ‘I asked Jez to add it a little at a time to the rest of the rubbish, we may as well break it down for compost.’
‘Good God, and we wore that!’ exclaimed Ben, hardly able to believe his eyes and nose.
‘I still don’t understand this gas plant,’ Ben continued, ‘why try to fool us that it produces our gas?’
‘I haven’t worked that one out fully yet,’ Sandy replied, ‘either it was put in by our predecessors, or the people who set this place up in the first place, and then dumped us here.
‘We may get some clues when we explore the tunnels and other caves we’ve not been in yet. I’m certain of one thing though, this place is not what is seems.’ Ben just nodded.
In the far corner of the cavern, hidden from normal view by a buttress of rock, a tunnel sloped gently downwards.
After checking and adjusting their lamps for maximum light, the pair entered it, Sandy pointing out that the walls were definitely man made, because when looked at closely, the tool marks were still visible.
‘Aren't all the passages man made then?’ asked Ben, who had never given it much thought.
‘No, if you look closely, you’ll see some are almost smooth, where liquid rock must have flowed through at some time when this volcano was active, others are like this one, tool marked, and the one leading down to your storerooms has been cut using a boring machine of some sort. The surface is smooth, until you examine it close up, and then you can see very fine marks where something has cut the rock consistently, not with random cuts like these.’ He illustrated the point, by holding the lamp up against the wall.
The incline got steeper as they went along, traces of moisture glistening on the walls every now and again, but not enough to warrant collecting for use, not that they needed to now that they had the condensing room.
The passageway ahead branched into three, one branch only going about four metres, as if someone had changed their mind about the direction, or hit a particularly hard section of rock. Of the other two, one had a dank stillness about it, which neither of them felt tempted to enter.
‘Looks like we go down this one,’ Sandy said, ‘there’s something about that other one which makes me feel uneasy.’
They had only gone a few metres, when it became apparent that the passageway was curving off sharply to their right, the spiral tightening as they went along.
‘This reminds me of something,’ Ben said, his voice suddenly acquiring a strange echo effect, ‘it’s like going down a spiral staircase, except we’re on a slope.’
‘And it’s getting steeper,’ Sandy added, ‘watch out for any damp patches on the ground, if we slip and lose our footing God knows where we’ll wind up.’
The curve of the tunnel was now such that they felt they were walking directly above the section underneath, only a thin layer of rock on which they trod separating them from the passage below.
Sandy was on the point of calling a halt to their journey and returning to the sanity of the digester room, when the tunnel opened out into the biggest cavern they had ever seen.
It stretched off in all directions, the light from their feeble lamps unable to reach the far walls, the roof of the cave a black ominous hole above them.
‘The only way we can explore this cave is to go around the outer walls until we come back here.’ Sandy suggested.
‘What if there are other openings like this one, and we can’t tell one from the other? We could be stuck down here for ever trying to find our way out.’ Ben was rightly worried.
‘How about leaving your water bottle by this one as a marker?’ Sandy said after a few moments thought.
Placing the water bottle to one side of the opening, they set off, going around the vast cavern a few metres away from the towering black walls, looking for any sign of other tunnels, but there were none.
They both began to worry as the featureless walls seemed to go on for ever, just a gentle curve indicating that they were in what appeared to be a very large circular chamber.
By the time they had come full circle, they were almost on the point of panic, and then they saw the glint of the metal water bottle shining in the lamp light.
‘God, am I glad to see your bottle,’ Sandy gasped out, ‘that was unnerving, to say the least of it. One thing puzzles me though, why make a tunnel all the way down here to just finish in this bloody great cavern with no other exits? There must have been some reason for doing it, surely.’
Ben could find no sensible reason for the tunnel either.
‘We could walk across the middle, to see if there’s anything out there.’ Ben then suggested.
‘OK, but how the hell are we going to maintain a straight line? Without bearings, people always curve off to one side, it’s a natural quirk we have.’
‘How about I go out towards the middle, and put one of the lamps down, then walk on again. You can call out, keeping me in line with yourself and the lamp on the ground. You then come forward and pick up the lamp and join me. If we keep doing that, it should keep us fairly straight.’
‘That’s a good idea.’ Sandy was impressed with Ben’s logical approach to the problem. ‘But I expect you’ll find wandering about in the middle of this cavern, surrounded by nothing but blackness, an unnerving sensation. Are you sure you want to try it?’
‘Yer, what the hell, we’re down here, may as well.’
They had reached what they thought must be the middle of the empty blackness, taking it in turns to go forward with the lamps, when a large dark shape loomed up ahead of them.
‘What the hell’s that?’ exclaimed Ben, who was in the lead, and had now stopped. ‘It’s huge.’
Ahead of them was a twenty metre high round dome of rock, its smooth curved surface glistening in the flickering light from their oil lamps.
‘I suppose it’s what it looks like,’ Sandy answered cautiously, ‘a massive great dome of rock. But look at the surface, it’s been machined smooth, that’s not natural.’
‘It’s certainly different to the floor of the cavern, that looks as if it’s been chewed flat by something,’ Ben observed, ‘it’s covered in tiny grooves. Do you think it’s the same material?’
Sandy went to run his hand over the glistening surface of the dome, and withdrew it immediately, looking puzzled,
‘The damn thing’s warm, or seems to be, what do you think?’
Ben put his hand flat on the floor of the cavern, and then gingerly on the dome, and then repeated the process again.
‘I don’t think it’s warm so much as giving the illusion of being warm, but how it does that beats me. Let’s take a look around the other side of it, there may be something different there.’
Keeping their lamps trained on the shiny surface, the pair slowly walked around the huge stone block and nearly bumped into something else in the darkness. They cannoned into each other, Sandy nearly dropping his lamp and swearing as he tried to regain his balance.
‘Well, that’s different, and it’s not made of stone. Seems to be some kind of machine, although I’ve never seen anything like it before.’ Sandy brought the lamp up close to the surface of the machine,
noticing several narrow grooves which ran from end to end of the four metre block.
New Lands Beckon
‘These odd looking grooves run all around it, and on the ends as well. I think it opens up to become something. At the moment it’s all folded up, possibly ready to be moved off to another job, maybe. We could come down here again, and see if we can get it to open up, and possibly make it work. That’s if we can figure out what it’s supposed to do.’
‘I don’t think we should fiddle with it just now.’ Ben didn’t like the idea of starting something they may not be able to control or stop. ‘I think coming down later is a good idea.’
They left the machine, Sandy reluctantly, and moved on around the dome, but had only gone a few metres when Ben stopped again, pointing to a large black hole in the mound.
‘That looks like another tunnel going downwards, do we chance it?’
‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Sandy replied brightly, ‘lead on, but carefully, I’ve got a feeling about this one.’
The passage began to curve, tightening into the spiral like the one which had brought them into the huge cavern above, and then it straightened out again, and began to widen.
‘Slow down a bit.’ Sandy called out to Ben, who had hurried on ahead, and was some five metres in front. ‘We don’t know what’s down here, or what this place is for.’
The slope increased sharply, and then in the distance, could be seen to flatten out again.
‘It looks as if there’s some white sticks on the ground in front, I’ll move up a bit and see what they are.’ Ben went quickly on ahead, despite Sandy’s earlier words of caution.
‘Good God, it’s a bloody skeleton. Some poor sod’s come down here and died, by the look of it.’
Then his lamp burnt a deep red colour, flickered twice, and went out.
‘Back up,’ Sandy called out desperately, ‘now, do it NOW.’
Ben turned, and staggered back towards the only remaining light, Sandy was reluctant to go forward to help him in case he too got trapped in the gas filled tunnel.
‘God, I can’t get enough air into my lungs,’ Ben gasped, ‘I feel dizzy and faint, what happened?’
‘I think I know,’ Sandy replied, helping a wobbling Ben back up the tunnel, ‘it’s to do with oxygen, or the lack of it.’
‘What’s oxygen?’ asked Ben, still panting for breath.
‘It’s a gas in the atmosphere, which we need to breathe to stay alive, and anything that’s burning, needs it also. That’s why the flame in your lamp went out, there’s no oxygen down there, and that’s probably why that poor sod died in the first place, he couldn’t breathe either, and just collapsed.’
Ben sat down, leaning against the tunnel wall, while Sandy opened the top of the two lamps so that a flame could be transferred to the unlit one.
With both lamps now lighting the tunnel with their cheerful yellow glow, the place seemed less frightening, and the feeling of panic eased away.
‘Do you think it’s a trap to stop anyone from going any further?’ asked Ben, his breathing having returned to near normal.
‘I doubt it, they’d have just blocked off the passage if they wanted to stop anyone. No, I think it’s a natural phenomenon, volcanoes generate carbon dioxide, and other noxious gasses, so it’s quite likely it drifted up from below somewhere.’
‘Won’t it gradually fill up the cavern, and then come up to our level?’ asked a worried Ben, who could see them all having to move into another cave complex, if they could find an unoccupied one.
‘I don’t think we need to worry about that. If you noticed, the flame of your lamp went out at about the same height that man’s head would have been when standing up, so the gas level hasn’t gone up much since he died, and that must have been some time ago as there are only bones left. We’ve heard about someone going ‘down below’ and never returning, but that happened a long while ago, so I’m told.’
‘I’d like to take a closer look at him, but how can we do it safely?’ asked Ben, having now fully recovered.
‘You really want to?’ asked a surprised Sandy, and then paused to think, while Ben just nodded in the dim light.
‘We could use one of the lamps to show us where the gas level is. It’ll go reddish before it goes out, due to incomplete burning of the oil. If you then take a deep breath and run forward you should have a few seconds to reach him and then get back to clean air again. I’ll bend the reflector on my lamp to focus the beam to give you maximum light on the skeleton.’
When the little flame on his lamp flicked and turned red, Ben hesitated for a moment. He then backed up a couple of metres, put his lamp on the floor of the tunnel, took a deep breath and rushed forward.
He was beside the untidy scatter of bones in seconds, and noticed a silver coloured object lying next to the remains of what had once been a hand. He picked it up, looked around quickly to make sure he had not overlooked anything else interesting, and ran back to Sandy.
‘Pick up the lamp on your way,’ Sandy called out calmly, ‘or you’ll have to go back again.’
Ben scooped up the lamp as he passed, letting out the breath he had been holding with a great whoosh, and nearly knocking Sandy over as he drew level.
‘Good God man, what’s the rush? You should be able to hold your breath longer than that.’
Ben took up his sitting position against the tunnel wall again, while he tried to get his breathing under control.
‘What’s that thing you picked up?’ asked Sandy, sitting down beside the still panting Ben. ‘It looks metallic from here.’
Ben handed over the object he had found without thinking, his head still spinning from lack of oxygen.
Sandy turned the shiny metal object over in his hand, examining it carefully in the soft light of the oil lamps.
‘My memory is coming back in big chunks, I think I know what this is,’ he exclaimed excitedly, ‘it’s a gun!’
‘What’s a gun?’ asked Ben, not showing the interest he would normally have done.
‘It’s a thing for shooting with, like the gas guns you have up top. It propels a missile out at high velocity. I wonder why anyone down here would need one of these?’
‘Don’t suppose he lived down here,’ Ben commented, ‘he probably came from up top, as we do.’
‘Probably, as you say, but what’s he doing with a weapon like this? We don’t have anything like it, nor do any of the other groups, or we would have found out about it long ago.’
Sandy pointed the gun down the tunnel, and gently squeezed the firing stud. A thin beam of red light made a tiny red dot on the tunnel floor, just past the scattered bones of its previous owner.
‘Don’t think that would stop very much,’ said Ben, not in the least impressed.
Sandy increased the pressure on the stud without really meaning to, and a section of the tunnel floor exploded in a mist of fine particles, leaving a quarter metre hole.
‘Now I’m impressed, said Ben, ‘but how does it do that? There was no bang like our guns.’
‘Not sure yet, but I think the red light is used for finding the target, and when I pressed a little harder on this stud, the floor blew up. As you said, there was no bang, and certainly no kick back, so it must be some form of energy beam. It would have been a little more humane, and definitely more effective than our flame-thrower, had we had it earlier.’ he added thoughtfully.
As there was little else they could do with regard to exploring the tunnel system, because of the gas pocket, it was decided to return to the surface, neither of them realizing just how much time had gone by since they began their exploration that morning.
Halfway up the long spiral slope leading to the digester room, Sandy called a halt, as both were out of breath.
‘Still got your container of water?’ he asked an equally exhausted Ben.
‘Yes, and a couple of dried meat strips, want one?’
After a much needed drink, they both began to chew on a m
eat strip, leaning against the tunnel wall for support.
As the strips softened, they were able to break bits off and swallow them, easing the emptiness of their stomachs.
‘God, it’s tough, but it tastes good, and is probably nutritious.’ Ben said, Sandy nodded, his mouth too full to speak.
Another drink of water meant their supplies were all spent, and the long haul up the seemingly never ending spiral slope was continued.
Reaching the digester room, they both paused for a rest before the last short climb to the domestic section of the complex. They wondered how much time had passed, and if they had been missed.
As there was no sign of life in the tunnels, they assumed rightly that the group had assembled for a meal, but which one they had yet to find out.
As the pair entered the main cavern, a few weak cheers went up, but these soon faded away as Nan drew himself up to his full height, with a face as black as thunder said,
‘And where have you two been? We’ve been searching for you ever since mid morning.’
Suddenly realizing the trouble they had caused by not advising any one of their intentions, Sandy decided a contrite response was called for, along with humble apologizing,
‘I’m sorry, Nan, we should have told someone what we were up to. We just didn’t realize how long it would take us, and we have no means of measuring the passage of time.’
‘You still haven’t said where you were.’
‘We’ve been down the tunnels below the digester room, and you’ll be amazed what we found there.’ Sandy added quickly, hoping to divert some of Nan’s anger.
‘That area is forbidden. You have no right to go there, it isn’t meant for us to use. That area belongs to the Great Light, that’s why you die if you trespass on its sacred ground.’
‘There’s nothing sacred down there,’ Sandy’s patience was beginning to falter, ‘just a mass of tunnels, and a cavern the size of which you wouldn’t believe, in the middle of it
‘You have no right to go there, it is forbidden.’ Nan thundered, his face going an even darker shade of purple.
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