Two Thousand Miles Below Part 26

"You must go, Dean-San," she said gently. He knew it was a term of endearment. "You must go if you say you must. But you do not go alone, nor die alone. Long ago the voice of the mountain spoke beautiful words. I know now it was one of your priests telling of a woman of your own race. Always have I remembered. 'Wheresoever thou goest, I shall go; thy people....'"

But Dean Rawson had gathered the slender figure, starry-eyed and sobbing into his arms.

CHAPTER XXIII

_Oro and Grah_

[Sidenote: As part of their t.i.tanic plan, Rawson and Loah-San return to sacrifice themselves in the flaming caverns of the Red Ones.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Then there were footsteps approaching the chest._]

"The Place of Death!" said Dean Rawson. "Whoever named it had the right idea."

He looked out across the wide stretch of ground with its covering of white salt almost entirely stripped of the carpet of vines. The bodies of the mole-men lay where they had fallen; their flame-throwers still tore futilely at the earth or stabbed upward in vain, thrusting toward the green-gold sun that shone pitilessly down.

"Still I do not understand," said Gor. "My people pressed the strong, burning water from the vines and poured it into the pool as you directed. But the Red Ones did not touch it--how could it burn them?"

"I'll say it was strong!" said Rawson. He looked at his hands, red and burned where the liquid had touched. "And it got stronger by standing.

It was an acid, and when it touched the white earth a gas was formed--hydrocyanic acid gas. And that's nothing to fool with."

He walked cautiously out where the liquid had been poured over the white ground. No odor remained; the air was clean. Then he picked up one of the flame-throwers and experimented with it until he found the sliding sleeve that shut off the blast.

"All right," he called to Gor. "Bring on your men; we've got to clean up this place and get rid of the bodies before the sun gets in its work. They're the ones that will go into the ocean instead of you." He moved carefully along the straggling line of bodies, salvaging the weapons and turning off their fearful blasts.

They worked and slept and worked again before their gruesome task was done and Rawson was ready to begin the other work that he had in mind.

Beside the mouth of the great shaft, resting on the rocks, was a cylinder, almost exactly a counterpart of the one Loah had used. But this was larger--fully fifty of the red savages could have crowded inside.

"It is the only one they had," said Loah. "I have seen, and I know."

"But they can make more," Gor argued. "This one and the one we have,"

he told Rawson, "were made thousands of years ago. There were masters of metal-work among them, and they had learned to use Oro and Grah.

Even then the people were divided. He who was then Gor and his followers fought with the others. But he left them one _jana_--this very one here. Then Gor followed the Pathway to the Light, though he sealed it as you know. But--but they will build others. Sooner or later they will come."

"I think not," said Rawson. "Now what about this Oro and Grah material? What was it you called them--the Sun-stone and the Stone-that-loves-the-dark? I must know how they work." But Loah was reluctant to experiment with the _jana_ of the Reds; she had her own sh.e.l.l brought instead--and then Rawson learned the secret of what seemed its miraculous flight.

A cylindrical metal bubble, just buoyant enough to lift itself above the ground--Gor and some of the others brought it from the village.

Gor brought, too, a little box which he carried with great difficulty.

"It is Grah," he said, when he showed Rawson a little scattering of black dust within the box. "Always it tries to fall back under the ground. Both Oro and Grah grow deep down near the Zone of the Fires; we find them in the caves, Oro on one side and Grah on the other. Oro is as heavy in its upward falling as Grah is in its downward.

"Then"--he pointed to the central vertical tube in the sh.e.l.l--"we put both of them in here, bringing it a few grains at a time. One falls to one end and the other to the other. And then, with these simple valves, we let out a little of whichever we wish--release it a grain at a time, if that is best. We let out a few grains of Grah, and Oro, being stronger, draws us upward; or we let a little of the Oro escape, and we fall downward swiftly. You see it is simple, as I said."

Rawson's reply was not an answer to Gor so much as it was an argument with himself. "Heavy," he said. "Specific gravity beyond anything we've ever known. Osmium, the heaviest substance we have, would be light as a feather compared to this. But wait. This Grah, as you call it, falls downward, but that means it falls toward the outside of the earth. With us it would be light--light! And Oro would be heavy. New substance--new matter! One feels only the attraction of our normal gravitation; the other doesn't react to that at all, but is driven outward with tremendous force by counter-gravitation, the repulsion of this Central Sun. You've used it cleverly, but we'd have done more with it up on top."

He was lost in thought for some minutes, muttering figures and calculations half aloud. "Two thousand miles from the Central Sun to us; two thousand more through the solid earth. And if that repelling force follows Newtonian laws it will decrease as the square.... But, coming down from up on top, normal gravity would decrease directly as the distance!" He made scratches with one small stone upon a larger one in lieu of paper and pencil, but, to his listeners, his muttered words could have meant nothing.

"Around six seventy-six hundred and seventy miles to the neutral zone, the Zone of Fire. And a column of water--it would carry on by, plug the shaft, check the back-pressure, and then...." For the first time since that night when the mole-men had poured out into the crater, his eyes were alight with hope, though his face seemed tense and grim.

Then the lines about his lips relaxed; he smiled at Loah.

"I would like to investigate this under-world," he said, "--not very far down. Will you take me?"

The girl's adventurous spirit had led her on many exploring trips in that subterranean world. She laughed happily when Rawson told her what he wanted. "But, yes," she said; "of course I know such a place." And from some two or three miles below, after anchoring the _jana_ securely, she led him through a winding tunnel where he knew he was steadily climbing.

It was a wide corridor that they followed, where the walls came together high above their heads; he could hardly see where they met by the light of Loah's torch. Now and then there were lateral pa.s.sages, but they were narrow, hardly more than cracks; and Rawson, looking into them, nodded his head with satisfaction.

Occasionally his footsteps rang hollowly on the stone, and he knew that the floor was thin between this and other caverns below. "What an old honeycomb it is!" he exclaimed. "And we had it all figured as being solid. The weight is all here, of course, but it's concentrated in that red stuff down near the neutral zone. But anyway, Loah has shown me just what I wanted."

He had gathered a handful of little fragments, and, keeping count of his steps, had s.h.i.+fted a bit of rock to his left hand for every hundred paces. By this he knew they must have gone five or six miles when he reached the tunnel's high point. Many times it had widened.

Here, too, was a cave more than a hundred feet across.

From the farther side the tunnel continued, pitching sharply downward, but Rawson did not explore farther. "I can seal that off with a flame-thrower," he said. "I've seen how they use them." Then he took Loah's light and looked with every evidence of approval at the rocky walls and the roof that seemed heavy with dew.

He had wondered about the air, but he found that it seeped through from that central shaft, although Loah told him that in some deeper pa.s.sages the air was bad. Here, although it was moving gently, it seemed wet as if charged with moisture. Rawson, staring upward, felt a drop strike him in the face, dripping from the rocks above.

"It's a gamble," he said, "just a gamble. But the stakes are worth while. And now, Loah-San, we will return."

He made crude work with the flame-throwers at first but finally he got the knack, and the mouth of the tunnel beyond the big room was sealed.

Then, with the help of Loah and some few of the others, he brought in more and more weapons of the Reds. He was curious as to their construction, but his curiosity had to go unsatisfied. They were only cylinders, so far as he could see, cylinders a foot long and six inches through, of some metal with the dull l.u.s.tre of aluminum. But they were sealed, and he dared not cut one open with another flame-thrower for fear of what might come forth.

On the top of each cylinder a tube was connected that ended in a lava tip; but at the base of the tube, where it joined the cylinder, was a sliding sleeve that checked the flame to nothing when it was moved, or opened it to the full blast.

He had a hundred of them in the room when at last he was through--one hundred fearful instruments of destruction. And still he told no one of his plans; he only told Gor what he wanted done later on. "It may not work," he had to admit to himself. "I'm just guessing at the thickness of the rock and the power of these machines. It's a gamble, nothing but a gamble."

He arranged the flame-throwers in a circle along the outer wall. The tops of the cylinders were curved, but the bottoms were flat and they set solidly on the rock. But he tipped them backward and braced them firmly with fragments of stone until every crooked-neck tube was pointed upward and toward the center. Finally he was done.

It was only a matter of a few hours later when Rawson stood on the island's end by the mouth of the shaft. In his ears was the ceaseless rush of the air as it entered the pit; it was the only sound in a silent world. And for the first time there came overwhelmingly upon him a realization of what this moment meant.

The time had come. Loah was beside him, her lovely eyes unnaturally bright in her face from which all the blood seemed to have flowed. He felt the slight trembling of her body as she pressed against him; he knew she was struggling to keep back the tears. Then Rawson half turned with one final entreaty that she let him go alone; but he left the words unsaid--he had argued it several times before.

Before them stood Gor, then the Wise Ones, the Servants of the Mountain, deserting their post for the first time since the Mountain had been given a voice. Beyond them all the people of this little world were gathered.

It had seemed only a fanciful dream, this thought of going; in fact, he had been too busy, too pressed with his own preparations, to give it thought. Now he was learning to his own surprise how closely he had identified himself with this world and its people. It had given him Loah; it had been a haven, a sanctuary.

He let his eyes slowly take in the full splendor of that emerald sea, the s.h.i.+ning land under a green-gold sun, the Mountain in white, crystal purity against a green-blue sky. And he was leaving it, he and Loah; they were going to--death!