by Damon Knight
“Where to now?” he asked.
The aliens glanced up but did not speak. Even the child Yegga, was staring at him silently.
The Earth became a blurred green ball, spinning massively below. The sense of motion was so powerful that Naismith had an impulse to brace himself against it. But when he closed his eyes, there was no feeling of movement at all.
When the Earth’s giddy motion slowed, Naismith saw a glint of silver ahead, and realized that they must be approaching one of the Great Lakes, probably Lake Michigan. Now they were dropping closer to the ground, skirting the rim of the lake… slowly, now, almost at a walking pace… The egg came to rest.
Churan’s fingers touched the controls. Outside, day was abruptly replaced by night: then day again, like a sudden white blow. Night, day, night, blending now into a shivering gray-ness. Once more Naismith saw the sun arching over them like a fireball, and the ground below seemed to heave and then subside, while a mist of foliage came and went, came and went.
Abruptly, there were roads. They sprang into being as if die-stamped—real highways, crisscrossing the land. At the foot of the lake there was a blurred city, growing and changing too fast for Naismith to catch its outlines. There was an impression of mud-brown hovels, replaced instantly by taller, paler buildings; then skyscrapers were sprouting upward, glittering, like a sudden growth of crystals.
Now the growth stopped, fell back. In another moment the city was gone; the roads were gone: nothing was left but the bare earth and a scattering of tiny, cone-roofed structures no bigger than barrels.
“What’s happened?” Naismith demanded.
“They went underground,” Lall said tonelessly. “The city is still there.” A breath of darkness crossed the sky; there were glints of fiery light in it, gone almost too quickly to see. “There was a war,” she added.
“Here?” Churan asked.
“A little farther,” the woman muttered.
Day again: night; day. And the shadow-egg was hovering, under a late-afternoon sky. It moved, drifting down toward the nearest of the cone-roofed objects. Naismith saw now that the thing was a ventilator.
The shadow-egg went on dropping. The ground came up around them like a tide of darkness, and Naismith held his breath instinctively as it mounted over their heads. There was an instant of stifling blackness, and then they were dropping down through a blue-green cavern… a vast place, acres of gigantic machines under a rock ceiling, illuminated by the eye-hurting glare of mercury vapor lights. The place was gigantic, throbbing with power… and empty.
Naismith looked around as the shadow-egg touched. “Where are all the people?”
“Dead,” said Lall tensely. “There was a war. They are all dead.” She moistened her lips. “Now let me give you your instructions. You realize that once we have dropped you here, you are on your own. When you were thrown back in time, this is where you will say you landed. You will find here an unfinished time vehicle, the first crude prototype. You will complete it, following the plans you find beside it. Then you will go forward to the City. After you get through the Barrier, the rest is up to you.” The shadow-egg was drifting down a wide corridor between gigantic machines.
“There it is,” she said.
Naismith saw a clear space, some low workbenches, and leaning against the wall, a thing that might have been the skeleton of a rocket-sled. It was a tapered bar of metal, six feet long, with two crosspieces. Controls were set into the upper crosspiece, and Naismith could imagine the rider lying on the shaft, feet on the lower crosspiece, hands gripping the upper one like handlebars….
“That is the time machine?” he asked, half incredulously.
“No, not yet. It can be adapted as such. The inventors were trying to make a device for exploring the interior of the Earth.
They hoped in this way to escape the devastation which over-took them. But all they succeeded in doing was to neutralize matter. If you boarded the machine as it now is, you would simply fall through the Earth, and go on falling. The pro-pulsive unit is not installed.”
Naismith glanced around. Tools lay on the workbenches, among scattered papers, as if someone had laid them aside only an hour ago.… He felt a touch of uneasiness. “What happened to them?” he asked.
“Killed in the first attack,” Lall said emotionlessly. “That black cloud you saw, just before we stopped—that was the bombs.”
“How—?” began Naismith. But already Lall was drawing the child back beside her; Churan’s fingers were busy on the controls. Naismith felt himself lifted as the shadow-egg bulged again. Then he was dropped unceremoniously on the stone floor. The shadow-egg hovered a few feet away.
“One thing she forgot to tell you,” said Churan, with an unpleasant smile. “The second attack is going to take place in just thirty seconds. That is the one that pulverizes this City to a depth of fifty meters.”
It was like a pailful of icy water in the face. Naismith found himself thinking with cold clarity, Then the workers must have gone down to shelter. That’s why there are no bodies.
“But why?” he said, taking a step closer. His mind was ferociously concentrated on the shadow-egg: he must succeed in getting back in, somehow…
“You should not have told us about the gun, Mr. Naismith,”
said Lall, watching him through narrowed eyes.
Realization struck him. The aliens had not sent the apparition of the gun. They had not sent the dreams, either. Then there were others, who—
“Ten seconds,” said Churan, glancing up from his controls.
“The lie detector—” said Naismith desperately.
“They know about you,” replied Lall. “Therefore you are useless to us.” Her face went hard and ugly. “The whole effort is wasted.”
“Five seconds,” added Churan. “Four. Three….”
Naismith whirled. In one leap he reached the skeletal machine; feet and hands were on the crosspieces. He found a lever under his fingers, pulled it over hard.
The world went grayish and unreal around him. As it toppled, the machine began to sink into the floor—falling, as if the stone floor and the earth beneath it were so much mist.
Once more, before the darkness closed over his head, the last things he saw were the triumphant smiles of the aliens.
Chapter Eleven
Naismith’s first emotion was a consuming rage. Gathering himself, he kicked against the crossbar, flung his body upward
—and was hurled back again by a curved, elastic wall. He landed hard against the metal framework, which began to revolve slowly and dizzyingly around him. The falling sensation continued.
His one opportunity was gone: for a moment that was all he could think of. If he had been able to leap out of the machine’s field during the first second of its fall… but it was impossible to get out of the field without turning off the machine, as he had just discovered.
In fact, the opportunity had been illusory. He had been doomed from the moment he turned on the machine. Now he was falling, falling endlessly—to what fate?
The aliens had told him one truth and one lie; he had taken the lie for the truth, exactly as they had intended him to do.
Rage and despair all but choked him, as he clung to the metal frame work, falling, in darkness and silence. He wanted to live!
A faint hope came, as his fingers touched the control knobs on the crossbar. If the aliens had lied about this, too…
Cautiously he tried one knob after another, avoiding the lever which had turned the machine on. There was no perceptible result, except that, when he had turned the third knob, he felt a cool breath of air.
There was something he had not even considered: at least he would not smother on his way down…. But he did not succeed in arresting his fall, or changing its direction, so far as he could tell, by a hair’s breadth.
The thought of the gulf below him was hideous. What, actually, was happening to him at this moment? The answer came at once. He was acting out one of the old
est physics problems in the book, something that every freshman “was familiar with—the imaginary tunnel drilled through the Earth.
In fact, his body was a harmonic oscillator. Assuming a homogeneous Earth and a non-rotating frame, he would describe a long narrow ellipse around the Earth’s center. His grip on the crossbar tightened convulsively. Of course—and unless friction retarded him too much, he would rise at the antipodal point to exactly the same level he had started from!
Wait, now—he had fallen from the floor of an underground chamber perhaps a hundred feet or so under the surface…
Where was he going to come out?
The moment the question occurred to him, he realized that It was of vital importance. He had entered the Earth near Lake Michigan, probably not far from the site of Chicago. If he went straight through the planet, he should come out somewhere in the Indian Ocean… and Chicago, he was sure, was several hundred feet above sea level!
Wait a moment… he was neglecting the rotation of the Earth; that would bring him out some distance westward of the antipodal point. How far depended on the period of his motion…. Call the radius of the Earth four thousand miles
—about twenty million feet, for convenience. Gravity at the surface of the Earth, thirty-two feet per second per second. The square root of twenty million over thirty-two would be two hundred and fifty times the square root of ten… times pi…
about twenty-five hundred seconds. Call it forty-two minutes.
He ran through the calculation once more, found no error.
Very well, in forty-two minutes, if he was right, he would be emerging from the far side of the planet. In the meantime, the rotation of the Earth would have brought his exit point about ten or eleven degrees westward.… It was all right: that would still be in the ocean.
He took a deep breath. At least he would come out, not cycle inside the Earth until his momentum was used up. If his calculations were right—
How long had he been falling?
Cursing himself, he fumbled for his wristwatch. The dial was not luminous, but with a nail-file from his pocket he pried up the crystal, felt the hands with his fingertips. They indicated about ten minutes after nine. He had been falling for what seemed half an hour or more, but was probably less than five minutes. Assume, then, that he had begun his fall at 9:05 by this watch. The time it showed was local California time as of 1980 A.D.—curious to think of this mechanism still faithfully keeping track of the minutes now buried thousands of years in the past… but that did not matter.
At 9:47, he should emerge. If friction was a negligible factor, and he could not assume otherwise, then he would rise to a height of two or three hundred feet above the ocean… top high. He felt himself begin to sweat, as he realized that it would be necessary to chance falling back through the Earth
—all the way through to the Western hemisphere, then back again, hoping that in those two additional passages, friction would bring him out at a level from which he could hope to fall safely.
Luckily, there was plenty of room in the ocean. Two more passages would bring him westward only twenty-odd degrees.…
A feeling of discomfort drew his attention. He was uneasy: what had he been neglecting?
Friction: what if it were not negligible? For that matter, what about the interior heat of the Earth?
He was to pass near the center of the core, which was thought to be at about four thousand degrees centigrade…
Something was wrong. He reached out quickly, touched the hollow curve of the force-shell. It was neither warm nor cool to his senses. But he had already been falling… he felt the hands of the watch again… more than six minutes… t squared, call it a hundred thirty thousand, times one-half the acceleration—two million feet, or something close to four hundred miles.
While part of his mind to grasp that, another part went on coldly calculating.
Temperature of the Earth’s crust increased with depth, by about thirty degrees centigrade every kilometer. And the shell he was in was transparent to visible light. Therefore…
He was through the crust, falling through the mantle.
He should have passed the red-heat stage long ago; by now he should be well into the white. And yet—
He touched the shell again. It was still neither hot nor cold.
The darkness was unbroken.
Doubt struck him. Was he really falling? Suppose he was simply hanging here, suspended, without gravity… drifting, like a disembodied spirit, forever under the Earth?
He gripped the crossbar fiercely. The Universe obeyed certain laws, among these were the mutual attraction of material bodies and the equivalence of gravity and inertia. His senses told him that he was falling, and in this case it happened to be true—he was falling.
He touched the hands of the watch once more. They seemed hardly to have moved. He held the watch to his ear to listen for the whirr of the motor, then swore at himself impatiently.
Of course the watch was running: it was his own perception of.
time that was at fault.
If he only had a light… He would be seeing what no man had ever seen, the rocks of the deep mantle. In a few minutes he would be passing through the rim of the outer core, into that curious region where nickel-iron was compressed into a liquid.…
The watch again. The minute hand had moved, just perceptibly. Falling into this dark emptiness, Naismith could not help thinking again of lost spirits, wandering forever under the Earth. The Greeks had imagined a Hell like that; the Egyptians, too. A phrase from some chance reading came back to him:
“the chthonic ourobouros.”
He shuddered, and gripped the crossbar hard. I am a man, not a ghost.
He wondered if what he was experiencing had ever happened before: if any other living soul had made this incredible plunge. Such a man, failing to reach the surface again, swinging back and forth, thousands of times… until eventually his lifeless body came to rest at the center of the Earth.
What would have happened then, when the machine’s power ran out? A gigantic explosion, probably violent enough to cause vulcanism all over the planet, perhaps even shift the balance of the continents…. Therefore it had probably never happened.
But suppose the power had never run out? Then what was left of the man must be still hanging there… or perhaps a cluster of corpses, each in his shell of force…
Time passed. In the darkness and silence, Naismith found himself becoming intensely aware of his physical substance—
his body’s attitude, the partly flexed limbs, the sense of half-perceived processes going on inside him. What a curious and almost incredible thing it was, after all, to be a living man!
For four years he had believed himself to be Gordon Naismith. Then he had been told that this identity was a mask, that in reality he was a member of a different race, from a world twenty thousand years in the future…. But this identity was no more real to him than the other.
What was the truth? Where had he really come from, and what was the goal to which he felt himself so irresistibly driven?
Blurred, illusory shapes swam before his eyes in the darkness.
He blinked irritably, then closed his eyes, but the shapes remained. He felt himself growing drowsy.
He came awake with a start, realizing that time had passed.
He felt the hands of the watch. It was nine-thirty. Twenty-five minutes had gone by. But—
Naismith clutched the crossbar hard, as the icy shock struck him. In twenty-two minutes, he should have reached the center of the Earth. Surely, at that depth, there would have been some rise in temperature in the capsule!
He reached out, touched the shell. It was just perceptibly warm.
He deliberately let five minutes go by, then touched the shell again. It was definitely warmer….
Was there a delay factor in the capsule’s transmission of heat? Or had he somehow taken longer than twenty-two minutes to reach the center? But that was impossible.
This time there was no mistake: it was hot.
After a moment, even the air in the capsule began to seem unpleasantly warm and heavy. Naismith found he was sweating; his clothes began to stick to him.
After five minutes more, it was not necessary to touch the wall again. It was glowing dull red.
Two minutes dragged by. The shell brightened through the red, into the orange, yellow, then white.
Naismith was in agony. Even with his eyes tight shut, the glare and heat were unendurable. He was being burnt alive.
He buried his face in his arms, sobbing for breath. The heat pressed in relentlessly upon him from all sides; he could feel it like a heavy weight on his clothing. Now he could smell his hair beginning to crisp and smolder.
The metal framework grew too hot to touch. Naismith retreated from it as far as he could, touching it only with the soles of his feet; but to do so was to draw nearer to the white-hot shell of the capsule.
He groaned aloud.
It seemed to him, after a moment, that the heat and glare had abated a little. He opened his eyes warily. It was true: the shell had turned from white to orange. As he watched, it faded slowly onto the red.
Naismith breathed in a great, tortured gasp of relief. The crisis was over—he was going to live!
Time—he must notice the time. Ignoring the pain of his blistered skin, he felt for the hands of the watch. It was exactly ten o’clock.
His passage through Inferno had taken about fifteen minutes.
Ten o’clock—fifty-five minutes from the beginning of his fall. By now, if his calculations had been correct, he should have emerged on the far side of the planet.
But he had just passed through a zone of heat that could only be the core!
The air in the capsule was growing cooler by the moment.
The shell faded from dull red into hot darkness again. A few minutes later, Naismith dared to touch it cautiously; it was hot, but bearable.