CHAPTER II

Mystery Below Ground

Lights were snapped on in the gathering darkness. Long lengths of drill-shaft were pulled out of the boring, whose dark maw hid the unknown.

Perry put on a coverall garment of rubberized silk. Over his face he fitted an oxygen mask, and to his shoulders he attached several oxygen bottles. The air blow, after so many countless ages of stagnation, would probably be unbreathable. And though Perry had meant merely to unnerve Kerwin when he had mentioned the possibility of some kind of contamination, one could not quite be sure. It was best to have one's body encased in a sealed garment.

When he had completed his preparations, there was even a small toolkit at his hip. Attached to an elbow there was a powerful electric lamp, fitted with a long cord by means of which it could draw power from the generator here on the surface. And there was a small phone incorporated into his headgear. With the phone, like a subsea diver, he could maintain communication with Rod and the rest of the crew here above ground. And of course he had his motion picture camera--strapped across his chest.

With a stout steel cable fastened under his armpits, Perry clambered over the edge of the boring, and was lowered below. The trip down--nearly three hundred feet--was uneventful. The stillness in the narrow shaft, scarcely wider than his shoulders, deepened with the depth of his descent. There was only the scraping of his kit against the rough walls, and the sleepy trickle of seepage water.

He reached the punctured metal barrier at last, and passed through it. Two feet thick, the shell was. A moment later his feet touched a solid floor, wet with the water that had dribbled down through the opening.

"I'm here, Rod," Perry called into the phone. "At the bottom."

It was a moment before the older man answered, and in this interval Perry heard disquieting sounds from the phones over his ears--sounds from the surface, which seemed so infinitely far away to him now. Automobile motors racing. Voices in much larger numbers than those of the small drill crew. And to Perry Wilcox came a conviction of pending trouble.

Then Murgatroyd spoke: "We've got company up here, Perry," he said, a note of anxiety in his tone. "A lot of curious people from Brenton. Sight-seers rushing to a fire, so to speak. Kerwin couldn't think of anything dirtier to do to gum up the works for us, so he spread the news around that something was up out here. Naturally I've got a whole crowd on my hands. We're trying to keep 'em outside the fence. Of course they ought to be harmless enough, really; but damn it, I wish they'd go someplace else! What do you see down there?"

Perry had his electric lamp blazing at full now. On his chest, his camera, driven by a little spring motor, was turning. And he was staring about him intently, to grasp the character of his surroundings. He began to talk--to describe what he saw and felt.

* * * * *

"I'm in a passage, Rod," he said. "It slants down. Its alloy walls are all bent and crumpled. It must have been the movement of the ground through the ages that did that. Gosh, Rod, but you can feel the length of eternity here! It's written in these tunnel walls, Rod. The way they're bent and rebent. I can understand now why they were made of something tough and pliable, like this lead alloy. It's twisted everywhere, but unbroken. They--whoever built this place--must have known pretty well what they were doing--whatever their purpose was...."

Perry advanced slowly down the slope of the tunnel, cautiously drawing his descent cable and his telephone and electric cords after him.

He reached a room of heroic dimensions, walled with the same grey alloy as the tunnel. The Stygian gloom that obscured it parted before the intense white path of his lamp.

There were tall metal boxes, like packing cases for heavy machinery, arranged in rows on the buckled and humped pavement of the chamber--metal boxes, each with a closed and perhaps hermetically sealed door. And near the farther wall was a machine--an engine or something--that displayed a gigantic, dusty fly-wheel. The walls, at a head-high level, were covered with something crystalline, like glass; though where it had bent it had bent like metal--not shattering as a brittle substance would have done. Behind those crystal panes were compartments, housing queer, complicated devices. They looked a little like astronomical or surveying instruments, Perry thought. Were they perhaps instruments for the navigation of interplanetary or interstellar space?

Seeing charts traced on the walls above the compartments that protected this array of apparatus--charts dotted with winking, diamond-bright bits of glass, which must represent scattered suns of the void--he was half sure that his guess was right. The charts were marked with countless interlocking lines and circles, which might be the geometric equivalent of latitude and longitude, applied not to the navigation of the ocean, but to the limitless, three-dimensional reaches of the cosmos.

This much Perry Wilcox was able to note, before his eager inspection was interrupted. In the heavy stillness there was a rustling whisper, which penetrated easily the thin, rubberized fabric of his hoodlike mask. The sound swiftly built itself up into a regular, soft rhythm. Perry spoke a few warning words about this development into his phone, and described briefly the room he was in. Meanwhile he stared ahead, ready in every taut nerve and muscle to leap out of danger, yet eager to see what it was that caused the disturbance.

His lamp beam focused on the engine near the opposite wall. Its fly-wheel was turning, maybe after half a billion years of motionless waiting in this sealed vault. But why? How?

Perry bounced back a step, icy fingers of dread tickling his flesh. "On your marks up there, Rod," he said tensely into his phone. "I can't tell what kind of a show it is I've started; but you may have to yank me up in a hurry!"

* * * * *

The engine was whizzing now, ancient dust spraying from its fly-wheel. For a few seconds there were no more developments, except that Perry noticed the decorative frieze around the high, shadowy ceiling. Human faces carved in the metal. They smiled down on the young man mysteriously.

Then there was a soft clank in the far distance, muffled apparently by the turn of many passages, and echoed back and forth by crumpled, vaulted ceilings and walls. The sound might have been that of a door opening, or the rattling of chains. Perry was beginning to feel very much like beating a hasty retreat; but he waited a trifle longer.

There came, then, a ponderous, soft thudding, growing nearer. It wasn't till the impression of the sound clicked into a groove in his mind, establishing itself as identical with the regular thud-thud of great, running, elastic-shod feet, entirely inhuman in their note, that he concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.

He had farther to return than he realized. And his electric and telephone cords, his hoist cable, hampered him.

"Draw in the slack of my rig," he shouted into his phone. "And for Pete's sake, if you love me, set the hoist winch going when I tell you!"

He got beneath the bore that penetrated the tunnel roof okay. But the thudding was catching up on him fast. "Up!" he yelled. "Quick!"

It seemed a century before he felt the reassuring tug of the cable under his arms. He had a chance to look back once into the Stygian darkness that concealed a reawakening and incredible ancientness. There a little red light wavered and hurtled nearer.

Perry's feet left the metal pavement. He heard a hiss, like escaping steam, just as he was drawn up into the narrow bore. Something clanked and scraped beneath him, like claws raking at his retreat. And the hissing continued.

He thought he could relax then, a little. But as he was pulled farther up the bore he felt heat burning through his rubberized silk coverall. It was just a harmless warmth at first, but it increased to a burning sensation about his legs. It made him dizzy and sick, and clouded his brain.

He heard Rod Murgatroyd yelling at him through the phone: "What's the matter, Perry? What's up?" And behind the voice of his friend there was the murmur of many other voices. The sightseers from Brenton. They didn't have any business being there; but if anything happened--if they got hurt--it was his and Rod's fault. Even though Kerwin, or someone under Kerwin's orders, had tipped them off for mere malice.

"Back!" Perry yelled. "Order everybody back! When you pull me up, Rod, don't touch me without gloves! And breathe cautiously. Gas, I think. Some kind of corrosive gas...."

* * * * *

The rest, for a while, was like a bad dream to Wilcox. He became aware of stars overhead, and of wind. He was up in the open air once more. Nearby, Herkett, one of the drill crew, was swearing at the inquisitive onlookers, trying to send them on their way. Some were retreating. Others, held by a kind of fascination, still crowded forward against the fence, and met Herkett's blasphemous pleas with boos, or ignored them with a kind of self-conscious indifference.

Perry was sick with that intense, burning pain in his right leg. To keep his senses was a struggle. He heard noises from within the Earth--like ragged drumbeats that made the ground shake. Something unknown, crescendoing on to a preplanned purpose. Hands touched him--Rod's hands, covered with thick gloves. Car headlights flared all around in the night, mingling confusingly with the chaos of voices. Perry's rubber-silk outer garment was crumbling away from him like rotten rags. It had been eaten by a virulently active gaseous chemical, all right. Like combustion, the activity had evolved heat. He was still alive only because he was wearing an oxygen mask.

He tried to stand, clinging to Rod's shoulders; but the burnt leg, which might still put him in danger of death by an unknown chemical poison, would not bear his weight. He sank down to one knee while Rod tore the remnants of rotted rubber and cloth from his leg, and smeared an unguent on the ragged, blistered injury.

"I'll get him to a doctor," someone was saying from very close by. "You can't tell. That's apt to be very dangerous. A physician will know better what to do."

It wasn't till then that Perry saw who it was that was holding the first aid kit. Lyssa Arthurs, the girl who had been with Kerwin and his boys. But she'd come back, somehow. Looking up into the confusing medley of light and shadow, Perry saw her curly chestnut hair blowing in the wind. She looked a little bedraggled, and her lips were pursed very tight.

"Okay!" old Rod snapped, for this moment might involve the question of life and death for his friend, and there was no time to question the connections of this girl, who had been helpful. "Come on, you!" he added, grasping Perry's arm. "You're out of action for a while!"

Perry Wilcox was too dazed to think of all the reasons why he didn't want to be taken away from the scene of action now, and why he didn't want to go with anyone associated with Lyman Kerwin. So his stubborn protests were mostly those of a hard man of action, clinging obstinately to the habit of wanting to be where things were happening.

"Can't leave, Rod!" he grumbled like a great obstinate, drunken child. "Everybody's in danger of--God knows what. Gotta stay with you, Rod...." His words were muffled by his mask.

A moment Murgatroyd hesitated, then his balled fist shot out and caught Perry on the chin with stunning force.

What he'd seen of Troubles Arthurs in the last few seconds made the old scientist like her a lot. But since she was tied up with Kerwin someway, he couldn't trust her entirely with the custody of his pal. So he said:

"Thanks, kid. Otto, here, will go along to help."

Almost as an afterthought, Rod unsnapped the motion picture camera from Perry's chest. Its record of a mystery would be safer in his keeping.

* * * * *

Otto, one of the drill crew, a great, blond bear of a man, picked Perry up and followed the girl through the throng to her car. In a moment it was speeding away toward Brenton.

But it hadn't gone far before the sounds of a fresh disturbance issued from the enclosure it had recently quitted. To the thudding from beneath the Earth, was added a droning note, faint but infinitely far-reaching. It was like the drone of a solitary electric generator in a deserted powerhouse at night. And there was a puffing noise from the direction of the enclosure. Voices waxed to screams. First of plain terror; then some of them changed to yelps of agony.

The reviving Perry half rose in the back seat of the speeding car. Then Otto, with all the good intentions in the world followed Murgatroyd's original example, hit Perry on the chin, and told the frightened girl up ahead to drive faster.

Meanwhile, safe in a hotel room in Brenton, a man sat at a writing table and waited. Lyman Kerwin had just received a phone call. One couldn't tell, yet, what was happening. But Kerwin's mind was quick and cold and ruthless. And somewhere in all this he saw a lot to his advantage--if he played his cards right.