Two Thousand Miles Below Part 8

But there was no use in further argument, he admitted to himself. Dean was going to the crater again--there was no stopping him--but he was not going alone; Smithy could see to that.

Again Rawson took the more difficult ascent. They went first to the ghost town: the slope above Little Rhyolite would save weary miles.

But, once there, they knew that the route was not a place where they would care to be in the night. The realization came when Smithy, walking where they had been the day before, pa.s.sing the sand dune where the wind had been scouring, seized Rawson's arm.

"I thought so," he said softly. "I thought I saw something there the other day, but the sand fell in and hid it. I didn't know the old-timers went in for subways in Little Rhyolite."

And Rawson looked as did Smithy, in wondering amazement, at the roughly round opening in the sand, a tunnel mouth, driven through the s.h.i.+fting sands--a tunnel, if Rawson was any judge, lined with brown glistening gla.s.s.

Understanding came quickly.

"The jet of flame!" he exclaimed half under his breath. "They melted their way through; the sand turned to gla.s.s; they held it some way for an instant while it hardened." He walked cautiously toward the dark entrance and peered inside.

Darkness but for the nearer glinting reflections from walls that had once been molten and dripping. The tunnel dipped down at a slight angle, then straightened off horizontally. Rawson could have stood upright in it with easily another two feet of headroom to spare.

"And that," said Smithy, "is how the dirty rats got over to the camp.

Like moles in their runway. No wonder they could pop up from nowhere.

But, Dean, old man, I'm thinkin' we're up against something we haven't dared speak of to each other. Don't tell me that it's just men we've got to meet--"

"Wait," Rawson begged in a hushed whisper. "Wait till we know. That's why I didn't dare go out without something definite to report. We'll go up--but not here. We'll get a line on this up top."

He led the way from the crumbling walls and skirted the mountain's base to the place where he had climbed before. And, with the help of a supporting arm at times, he found himself again in the great cleft in the rocks.

Darkness now made the pa.s.sageway a place of somber shadows. The broad cupped crater lay beyond in silent waiting; the vast sand-filled pit seemed, under the starlight, to have been only that instant cooled.

The twisted rocks that formed the rim had been caught in the very instant of their tortures and frozen to deep silence and eternal death: the black ma.s.ses of tufa, protruding from the packed ashy sand might have been buried by the smothering ma.s.s but a moment before. It was a place of death, a place where nothing moved--until again the breeze that whirled gustily over the saw-tooth crags s.n.a.t.c.hed at the sand in that lowest pit and drew it up in a spiral of dust.

The word was on Rawson's lips. "Dust--dust in the crater. Fool! I said I could read sign; I thought I was a desert man."

"Dust? And why shouldn't there be dust? How do you usually have your volcanoes arranged, old man?"

"Fine dust!" Rawson interrupted in the same whisper. He was glancing sharply about him as if in fear of being overheard. "See, the wind is blowing it. Coa.r.s.e sand and pumice--that's to be expected; but light dust in a place that the winds have been sweeping for the last million years! I don't have them arranged that way, Smithy--not unless the sand has been recently disturbed!"

He moved soundlessly across the sand. There was no chance for concealment; the surface was too smooth for that. Yet he wished, as he moved onward down the long, gentle slope, that he had been able to keep under cover. In all the wide bowl of the great crater top was nothing but dead ashes of fires gone long centuries before, coa.r.s.e, igneous rock--nothing to set the little nerves of one's spine to tingling. Rawson tried to tell himself he was alone. Even the gun in his hand seemed an absurd precaution. Yet he knew, with a certainty that went beyond mere seeing, that invisible eyes were upon him.

The blocks were ma.s.sive when he drew near to them. They were buried in the sand, their sides like mirrors, their edges true and straight.

"Crystals," Rawson tried to tell himself, but he knew they were not.

Gun in hand, he moved among the great rocks. Open sand lay beyond, running off at a steeper pitch to make a throat--a smaller pit in the great pit of the crater itself. Rawson noted it, then forgot it as he stooped for something that lay half hidden, its protruding end s.h.i.+ning under the light of the stars, as he had seen it gleam before at the derrick's base.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the metal tube, noting the lava tip, and that it was like the one Smithy had found in the ghost town. The tube, clearly, was part of some other mechanism, and Rawson realized with startling suddenness that he was holding in his hand the jet of a flame-thrower--the same one, perhaps, that had almost sent him to his death.

The thought, while he was still thinking it, was blotted from his mind. He was thrown suddenly to the sandy earth; the sand was slipping swiftly from beneath his feet; he was scrambling on all fours, clawing wildly for some anchorage that would keep him from being swept away.

He touched a corner of s.h.i.+ning stone, drew himself to it, reached its slanting side, then scrambled frenziedly to the top and threw himself about to face the place of slipping sands. But where the sand had been, his wildly glaring eyes found only a black hole--a vertical bore, like the ancient throat of the volcano; and this, like the tunnel in the sand, was lined with smooth and glistening gla.s.s.

It was black at first, a yawning, ominous maw, till the polished sides caught a reflection from below and blazed red with the glare of hidden fires.

No time was needed for Dean's quick searching eyes to grasp the meaning of the change. Whatever had menaced the camp had set this trap. He swung sharply to leap from the block, but stopped at the sight of Smith's chunky figure coming slowly across the sand.

"Back!" he shouted. His voice was almost a scream, shrill and crackling with excitement. "Get back, Smithy! I'm coming!"

He would have leaped. Below the block the sand bulged upward as a yellow animal-thing came clawing up into the night. Dimly he saw it--saw this one and the others that must have been hidden in the sand. They were between him and Smithy! A blaze of red came from behind him--there must be others there! He s.n.a.t.c.hed his gun from its holster as he turned.

Flames were hissing into the darkness, five or six of them in lines of hot crimson fire. They changed to green as he watched, and the livid light spread out in ghastly illumination over the creatures that directed them.

He saw them now--saw them in one age-long instant while he stood in horror on the black s.h.i.+ning rock. He saw their heads, red-skinned, pointed, their staring eyes as large as saucers--owl-eyes. They were naked, and their bodies, that would have been almost crimson in the light of day, were blotched and ghastly in the green light. And each one held in long clawlike hands a thing of s.h.i.+ning metal--a lava tip like the one he had found projected and ended in the hissing line of green.

A flame slashed downward. For one sickening second he waited to feel the heat of it, though it was many feet away; in his mind he cringed involuntarily from the ripping knife-cut of the fiery blade that would blast the life from him; then he knew that the flame had pa.s.sed--it was tearing at the rock beneath his feet. And the cold stone turned to liquid fire at that touch.

It leaped in a splas.h.i.+ng fountain to the sand. The blaze turned the whole pit to flame. On even the farthest rugged crag of the crater's rim the red light glowed. Before Rawson could raise his own weapon the blast had torn the rock from beneath his feet. The great ma.s.s tipped, rolled. Rawson's arms were flung wide in an effort to save himself.

Then below him was the black throat with its walls of gla.s.s: he was plunging headlong into it, turning as he fell--and somewhere, far down in that throat, was the red glow of waiting fires. He saw it again and again as he fell....

CHAPTER VII

_The Ring_

[Ill.u.s.tration: _One of them pointed at the shaft Rawson had drilled._]

[Sidenote: Town after town is fired by the emerging Red Ones as Rawson lies helpless, a prisoner, far down in their home within the earth.]

"Smithy," Rawson had called him when he found the youngster fighting gamely with death in the heat of Tonah Basin. And Gordon Smith was the name on the company records. Yet he remained always "Smithy" to Rawson, and the name, which Rawson never ceased to believe was a.s.sumed, became a mark of the affection which can spring up between man and man.

And now Smithy stood like a rigid carven statue in the midst of a barren sandy waste in the vast cup of a towering volcano top--sand that was in reality coa.r.s.e pumice and ash. This was a place of death, a place where raging fires had left nothing for plant or animal life.

And, over all, the desert stars shone down coldly and added to the desolation with their own pale light.

Smithy had seen Rawson pull himself to the top of the great square-edged rock. Sensing that danger of some sort was threatening, he had started to run to the aid of the struggling man. Then came Rawson's cry.

"Back!" he shouted. "Get back, Smithy! I'm coming--"

But he did not come; and Smithy, halted by the command, was frozen to sudden, panic-stricken immobility by that which followed.

He saw the leaping things, like grotesque yellow giants. They came from the sand; then red ones leaped up from the open throat that had suddenly formed. They held flame throwers, the red ones; and the green lines of fire melted the rock from beneath Rawson's feet. All in the one second's time, it was done, and Rawson's body, his arms wide flung, was hurtling downward into the waiting throat and the threatening red glow from within. Then the carriers of the flame throwers vanished again into the pit, and there was left only a huddle of giant figures that tore at the loose sand and ash with their hands.

They threw the material in a continuous stream; the air was full of cascading sand. To Smithy they were suddenly inhuman--they were almost animals; men like moles. And they and their companions had captured Dean Rawson--sent him to his death. Slowly the watching man raised himself from the crouched position that had kept him hidden.

They were through with their work, these great yellow-skinned naked men--or mole-men. Six of them--Smithy counted them slowly before he took aim--and two were armed with flame-throwers.