CHAPTER XIII.

THE UNDERGROUND CELL.

I recovered consciousness to find myself lying on a soft bed. I seemed comfortable, luxurious, with a feeling of well-being and pleasure. I opened my eyes; shuddering memory leaped to me. I sat up.

I was on a low couch of soft, furry skins. In a dim, vaulted stone room. On the bed beside me sat Arturo.

“Well, Jeff!” He smiled at me; relief in his smile. He seemed uninjured, sitting there waiting anxiously for me to recover consciousness.

“You’re not hurt, Jeff? Lean back--take it quietly.”

My head was suddenly whirling; I leaned against the stone wall behind me.

“They said you’d be all right, Jeff.”

My skin was smarting as though it had been burned; but in a moment my head steadied. Strength came to me. I sat up vigorously beside Arturo.

“What was it? Where are we?”

“In the Castle. They got us. That accursed Bhool--”

Memory of Bhool came to me. He had betrayed us. A spy, that Gian. I recalled now, how he had eyed me. How in the garden he had kept edging me away. All under cover of that sniveling cowardice. An actor, that fellow!

Arturo laughed wryly. “I guess so, but I imagine he’s a coward just the same. It’s a wonder Fen never suspected him. They want you, Jeff, evidently. She--”

“That woman Rhana?”

“Yes. She heard of your arrival. Bhool must have been told to get you.”

I tried to stand on my feet, but I was still shaky.

“How long have we been here?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been sitting here watching you, six or eight hours.”

“Did you faint, or whatever it was happened to us?”

“Yes. For how long, I don’t know. I found myself lying here with you. Then a woman came in, gave me something to drink. She said you’d be all right--that the stronger person always suffered most from the light. I imagine she’ll be back--”

I got on my feet. “We’ll have to get out of here.”

He acquiesced in that. But quite evidently he had already examined our cell--it was no less than that; and he seemed not very hopeful. We were in a stone room some twenty feet square. The rough stone walls had a gleaming black metallic look to them; the floor was smooth burnished metal. The low, flat ceiling barely cleared my head by an inch; it was gray, smooth as polished steel. There was the couch; a metal table, shaped like a huge cup; and a metal chair.

Arturo followed me about the room. “Not much chance, Jeff. I’ve been trying to plan something, but I haven’t yet decided.”

There were two small orifices in the ceiling. From one came the faint purple glow of light; its tiny shade was pushed aside; it spread downward like an electrolier and cast a six-foot circle on the floor. The other hole seemed to be admitting a current of fresh air. The room was queerly dank; beads of moisture were sweating on the ceiling.

There was a small door, convex like the round door to a bank vault. It had a pane the size of my face; I stood and peered through it--a substance as transparent as glassite, brittle evidently, and solid as ancient glass. It seemed fully two feet thick, like a bull’s-eye. Beyond it there was the dim vision of a vaulted metal corridor.

The opposite wall, up against the ceiling, held a similar small pane like a window. It was level with my eyes; I could see a barred grating beyond the bull’s-eye; and outside that, not the garden as I had hoped, but seemingly another corridor.

“No good, Jeff. There’s no chance,” Arturo said.

* * * * *

I fancied we might wrench a piece of metal from this bed, or table. The walls were of stone; they crumbled a trifle as I scratched at them with my nails. They might not be very thick--if we could dig our way out--

“And find ourselves--where?” Arturo objected. “That isn’t an outer wall. I tell you there’s no use trying. Give me time; I’m planning something.”

“I know it isn’t an outer wall. This woman who brought you the drink--did she come alone?”

“Yes. But there were voices just outside the door.”

“If we could leap on her--make a run for it--”

“With others in the corridor?”

“There might not be, next time she comes. Is she armed?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

Nor did he know the inner lay-out of the castle, or whether we were at its top, or bottom. He thought there were two floors.

“I’ve never been in here before. Tad has, before I came--before we got this revolution under way. She knows about that, Jeff; it’s open hostility now. God, we’re prisoners here--she’ll be coming down to see us. What she’ll do to us eventually! That woman, Jeff--” He shuddered. “You don’t know--”

“You’re not very coherent, Arturo. But you’re right enough; it seems to me I know almost nothing about all this.”

He was sitting on the bed, chin in hand, staring. I sat down beside him.

“See here, Arturo--haven’t you taken a little too much on yourself?”

He seemed suddenly breaking. This pale, slender boy of nineteen was trembling. He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

“You overrode your father. Easy, lad, I want to talk plainly to you. You told your father nothing. Nor Polly--nor me. You’ve got me down here into this--”

“I wouldn’t voluntarily endanger you, Jeff. I didn’t mean--”

“Don’t be a fool!”

“I’ve been trying to do my best.”

“Of course you have. But I’m trying to show you. You take too much on yourself.”

He stared at his feet. “I’ve only been doing my best.”

“I know. But I’m trying now, Arturo, to show you--I’m older than you are--maybe I’ve got more sense and more judgment than you have--”

He looked up and smiled. “Of course you have. I haven’t been reticent, or I don’t want to be--”

“You haven’t made much effort to take any one into your confidence, Arturo.”

“You’re wrong, Jeff. Old Fen, and Tad--they wouldn’t say I’ve tried to run them, or force my ideas--”

“I’m talking about myself. And your father and Polly, up there in the Dolphin when this thing began. We may be in a desperate position now, Arturo.”

“We are. This horrible woman--”

“I know you’re trying to help our world up there, Nereid, and these Middge people as you call them--you’re not afraid for yourself. But, Arturo, we may never get out of here alive. The help we could have given--don’t you see? You may be wrong. I want to start now, if it isn’t too late. I want a chance to use my own judgment, not yours, Arturo. Nor Nereid’s, nor Fen’s--nobody’s but my own, understand?”

The rasp of the cell door opening brought us to our feet. It swung slowly outward.

In the corridor stood the woman Rhana.

* * * * *

She stooped and came quietly in. At the doorway, which remained open, a gray woman stood guard. Rhana advanced to the center of the cell. The light from above slanted down on her, and her metal headdress gleamed--a white banded thing of carved metal. Tiny chains with flashing jewels hung from it; at her forehead, a metal image, hideous as a gargoyle, raised its beak--a grotesque bird screaming defiance, a red gem for its single eye. The thing was so hideous, it gave her face beneath it a greater beauty.

She had come in with a barefoot tread; her body, incased in the gray heart-shaped sheath, was catlike. A giant feline.

Barbaric creature! But there was a strange aspect of civilized modernity about her also. Her gray limbs were bare; the chains hung from her arms. Barbaric. The headdress; the heavy metal anklets, with pendent gems tinkling on them as she moved. But mingled with the barbarism was that look of modernity; a narrow black band like soft velvet encircled her throat; across the back of her shoulders, a black cloak hung in folds to her waist; a black ribbon around her neck held what seemed a pair of eyeglasses, with darkened lenses.

She stood for a moment calmly surveying us as we moved instinctively away. Her long gray fingers, with a bank of jewels covering the back of her hand, toyed idly with the hanging eyeglasses.

She spoke. “So you are the big man from the world of light?” Her gaze ignored Arturo; it was fastened on me. Calm, dark-eyed gaze. I felt the power of her then. There is an aura surrounding greatness. It cannot be mistaken. This woman had it, the aura of genius. An aura of evil, a fascination--evil but compelling. She gestured calmly. “Come over here. Stand up--here, near me.”

I obeyed. I was alert, tense. I stood before her, taller than she by an inch or two.

“So? They are right--you stand higher.” Her voice, with the most perfect use of my language I had heard from any of these people, had a purring, musing quality. She frowned a little.

“So? They told me true--you stand higher.”

“What do you want of me?” It was an effort to hold my voice quietly level, but I managed it.

“He speaks, this man, when not directly questioned--”

This darkling gaze. Not like Nereid’s, these eyes. Black pools, with a black fire down in them. Her lips curled with a faint irony.

“You are not then afraid of me?”

“No.”

“So?”

“Should I be?”

“He questions--he dares!”

Her jeweled hands came up. For an instant I thought she would strike me. But her hands dropped to my shoulders and rested lightly. One of the chains clanked against me.

“He questions--he stares at me--he is not afraid, this man. What is your name?”

She snapped it out with a rasp, so sudden a change it startled me. I jerked away from her involuntarily; but with a leap, feline, incredibly swift, she caught at my shoulders again and twisted me around. I stood docile.

* * * * *

“He is strong, solid.” Her appraising fingers bit into my shoulders. She added, calmly, this time:

“What is it, the name they call you?”

“Geoffry Grant.”

She repeated it, memorizing it. “Why is it you come here to my world?”

I said carefully, “My friends are here. We are going back--up there--”

It seemed to amuse her. “So? You have your plans? That is wrong--men should have no plans. Men and children with plans are annoying.”

A sound from the doorway made her drop my shoulders and swing around. Bhool came slinking in. He cringed.

She rasped, “What do you want?”

He answered her in his own language, but she checked him imperiously. “We do not talk that here.”

“He is tall as I said, great Rhana?” He whined ingratiatingly. He cast a sidelong glance of triumph at me.

Arturo had been standing back against the wall. He took a sudden step. “You cowardly little hangar-rat!”

I whirled. “Hush, Arturo!”

Bhool, fortified by Rhana’s presence, retorted. “Not so cowardly--I did capture you.”

Arturo avoided me; he took another step at Bhool, who retreated. I shoved Arturo away.

Rhana exclaimed, “You quarrel? Stop it--” She swished a chain, idly as though at disobedient quarreling dogs. It caught around Bhool’s legs; he groveled.

She said frowningly, “You annoy me, Bhool, to want praise. I gave you reward. You forget you have duties not done yet.” He slunk through the doorway at her gesture. She added abruptly, “You are interesting, Geoffry Grant--I will come again--”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

She smiled. “You shall be fed. I would have no man hungry unless he has done wrong.”

I added impulsively, “I want to get out of here!” I watched to see how she would take it.

She smiled further. “We all want many things. You are interesting. I will not come again--I will send for you.” Her gaze barely touched Arturo. She added to me, “He will die here pleasantly enough. We will leave him when we go.”

She turned, and stooped for the doorway. The heavy door closed after her.

* * * * *

“But see here, Arturo, what was it you planned for me, when you sent for me, brought me down here?”

“That’s of no use now, I tell you.”

We were sitting on the couch of our cell after Rhana had left us.

“Isn’t that for me to judge, Arturo?”

He was suddenly meek. My words had had effect. “You’re right, Jeff. What is it you wanted to know?”

“A good many things. What was I supposed to do with this Rhana?”

“I thought,” he said, “we could send you to her. Pretend you might help her with the coming war. And you might capture her, perhaps, or kill her. Without a leader these women would go to pieces. The Gian men are worse--you see?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Well, she would like you. Easy for you to get into her confidence. She does like you, Jeff; that’s obvious. There’s nobody would dare speak to her the way you did. It just made her smile--you could handle her.”

I had my doubts on that. “She said, take me with her--”

“Her army must be about ready, Jeff. And leave me here to die. Well--”

“But we’re going to get out of here,” I assured him.

We had decided that all we could do now was wait quietly for the woman to come with food, and be on the alert then to see if we might escape.

We sat for a time, there on the couch. Arturo talked freely. He knew a great deal of the situation, here, and the geography of this strange dark realm. He talked swiftly, at first with no comments.

This main abyss, through which we had flown, was lens-shaped--some forty or fifty miles between the surfaces at its greatest diameter, and in length perhaps three hundred miles. He thought that it lay, not as I had visualized, flat beneath the floor of our Pacific Ocean, but tilted diagonally edgewise.

We had entered near its upper end, where it reached within a few miles of the ocean bed. We had flown down its length. The City of the Mound, then, must lie two hundred miles or more underground.

There was, at the upper end, no exit except the system of locks down which we had come.

“There’s no escape that way, Jeff. The Gians have a few hundred of those sub-sea vehicles. A few are large ones--as large as the locks will take. The locks were built, a generation ago, for this purpose. The Gians have been planning this thing for that long. Rhana is about ready now. Her army--and all the Gians--will escape upward that way.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Not many. I suppose forty or fifty thousand. They’re all here in the City of the Mound, and in two other cities across on the other surface. They’ll be starting soon. But what about the Middge? A million of them, I imagine. They can’t get through the locks. No vehicles to spare--no room, no time.”

From this main lens-shaped abyss, caverns, tunnels and passageways everywhere opened off, especially at this lower end. It was a vast honeycomb. Tunnels led to caverns and pits glowing with molten fire. There were vast passages, black and unexplored; no one could guess where they led, in this vast honeycomb, the sub-surface shell of our earth--the porous, thick skin of an orange.

There was, near the City of the Mound, a passage a mile or two in width.

It plunged steeply downward. Erroneous term! Who could say, downward, or upward? It led, within a few hours on foot, to another great abyss. A black oily sea lay on one of its surfaces. The black space facing it--floor or ceiling as you will--had never been explored.

This watery abyss they called the realm of the monsters. No human lived there. Fearsome monsters of the deep, and flying things, and things that crawled, were there. Sometimes they would wander through the tunnel passage out into the abyss here where humans had their cities. The passage now was always guarded with flood lights. The monsters feared the light; its faintest glow blinded them; it turned them back. For generations now none of them had come through.

I said, “These people seem very advanced with their science, Arturo. Engineering achievements--why didn’t they wall up this connecting passage completely? You say it’s only a mile or two wide.”

* * * * *

“They doubtless would have,” he said. “But access to the monsters’ realm is necessary. Centuries ago--how long ago no one now can say--a downward pressure of water menaced all this realm. Water from up above--from our Pacific doubtless--must have started breaking through. The rift was on the other side--that black sea of the monsters’ realm. This civilization is far older than ours, Jeff. I’m talking now of some remote past time when we might have been struggling in the Stone Age. Or before that. A rift came, and water menaced all this honeycombed region. The ancient people living here then must have been far advanced in science. And human life was very plentiful and held cheaply.

“There is a system of dams and locks and watergates out there now, Jeff. I’ve never seen them, but I’ve heard them described. Like the dykes and canal gates, and dams of Holland, built gradually over centuries. It must have been a constant battle down here with the pressing water. They fought it. Out there now is a gigantic man-made barrier, with flood-gates, which if the pressure got too great, they could cautiously open to relieve it. Inconceivable to construct, but there it is. Like the pyramids, Jeff; patient toiling of millions of workers for generations. And they had science with them. The gates and wall must be hundreds of miles long, at the least. The gates are all controlled by one small mechanism--in a little fortress gate-house at this end of the dam. They are opened wide now--water is rushing through--”

His voice rose. “The Middge can’t close them. The revolution isn’t ready, the weapons aren’t assembled. We have no weapons ready at all. Nobody is armed, or trained for fighting. A mob attack on the gate-house--she’d see it coming, and laugh at it.”

“But Arturo, there in that other cavern, it must be two hundred miles beneath our Pacific.”

He quieted. “I think so. There is some abyss in the ocean floor which we never have yet discovered. That is it, undoubtedly. And from it some gigantic, water-filled passage. That passage, leading downward, ending down here--”

I tried to grasp the mathematics of it. But there was so little upon which to base a calculation. Water descending a passage, even hundreds of miles wide--passing down here through gates equally wide--it might take years to drain all our oceans. The gates were open full now. I recalled the newscasters of New York reporting the tides down a fathom in a day. Ten years, and there would still be water in the Nero Deep. I tried to estimate this abyss here across which we had flown. Fifty--a hundred like it might drain our Pacific.

But this abyss was comparatively small; the realm of the monsters was far larger. Both of them, for the Pacific Ocean is not much over two miles in average depth, would drain it. And what other vast subterranean realms might be down here! Passages a thousand miles in length. Other caverns, under the Americas--under the Atlantic.

But it would take years to drain our oceans. A year perhaps, to fill up the two main caverns here. I said it to Arturo.

“Yes, Jeff. But the gates and the walls and the dams out there won’t hold. They’ll break under the full surge of water and the erosion. The walls of the upper passage, with that torrent flooding down, will break sidewise--”

He burst into a half coherent description. The scientists of the Middge were able to estimate it. This whole region, from here up to the ocean bed, was honeycombed; and the rock strata themselves comparatively loose and porous. With the gigantic torrent of swiftly descending water, rifts would be made. Small, then greater. The whole region would collapse. And there were molten fire-pits everywhere. The water would reach them.

* * * * *

I said, “Last night, Arturo, the gates were opened for a time.”

“Yes. But only a trifle, at the distant end. The water escaped into passages across the monsters’ realm. They lead, no one knows where.”

“Everywhere,” I said. “And that water mingled with the fires of the earth--you remember, Arturo.”

He sat up abruptly. “Every volcano was active. Storms, earthquakes--”

“Yes,” I agreed. We had been thinking, Arturo particularly, only of this subterranean world. But what about the surface? Our own world up there? Our great nations, our millions of people? My mind went to little Polly.

My imagination widened. This rolling globe in space which we call earth, its teeming millions, its civilization, the gigantic unknown forces of nature, were being tampered with, so that one set of humans might bring harm to another. A titanic whirlpool of events, rushing to overwhelm us.

And in the midst of it all, Arturo and I sat here in this fortress cell. Two tiny grains of sand on a vast beach with the ocean pounding. What could we do about it? Of what use to try? A million minds were groping with it; our great nations, with all their far-flung resources; the Middge scientists down here.

But the human mind individualizes. I saw Polly.

In all the interwoven, complicated affairs of struggling nations, the individual always is supreme. Sometimes, just one individual. The keystone of an arch--you pull it out, and the arch falls. And with the arch, the whole great edifice comes down to destruction.

There was this one woman, Rhana. She had opened these gates, to start these tumbling, cataclysmic events. But might not the gates be flung closed, now while there was yet time? A single small operating mechanism--why, one hand, mine perhaps, might close them. And demolish the mechanism--one hand, mine perhaps, might do it. They would stay closed then. And with it done--that one vital thing like replacing the keystone of a crumbling arch--all these far-flung events would cease.

I leaped to my feet. “Arturo, see here--I’ve got to get to that gate-house! We must escape from here at once. I think I know how we might do it!”