 CHAPTER XXV of TWO THOUSAND MILES BELOW by Charles Willard Diffen. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. SMITTY. Scarcely more than a vault in the solid rock, the room where Rosson lay. He had seen it for an instant when the priest, after tying his hands behind him, had hurled him viciously into the room. He had but one entrance, though up high on one wall was a crack some two feet in width that admitted fresh air, a little room, only some twenty feet square, but he would not suffocate. The priest did not intend that he should die, not yet. He saw one of the giant yellow workers bring a big metal plate. He put it before the doorway. Then, by the red glow, he knew that they had sealed him in. I got fee-e-all, he thought. I did that much to help. That may put a crimp in their plans. Check the invasion up above. But Gore didn't do, as I told him, or it didn't work. The twenty-four hours must have gone by. Then even in that thought he found happiness. That means Loa is safe, he told himself. The shaft is clear. She's on her way back right now. He pictured the Janna falling swiftly through that dark shaft. He saw in his mind the beautiful figure of the girl, lithe and slender, standing at the controls. About him was a silence like that of the grave. His blood pounded in his temples like a throbbing drum. It was some time before he knew that. With that throbbing other faint sounds were mingled. They came from the wall beside him, sharp tappings muffled by distance, the faintest whispering echo of rock striking upon rock. Tap, tap, tap, a longer pause, tap. They were making dots and dashes that blurred with the beating in his own brain. In that dreadful silence he strained every nerve in an agony of listening. There was nothing more. He had been roughly handled by the savages. His whole body was bruised and aching, his thoughts hazy and blurred. Woosy, he told himself. Guests the old bean must have got a bad crack. Hearing things mustn't do that. Again he tried to picture the girl, speeding on toward that inner world. Was she thinking of him? Surely she was. They could hear her calling his name. Dean, she was saying. Dean-san. The words were repeated, an agonized ghostly whisper repeated again. Dean-san. Oh, Dean-san. Before he knew that the sound was coming from overhead. Then a light flashed once in the little room, and he saw her face looking down. She was beside him an instant later. Dean-san, she was saying. Did you think that I really would leave you? She was pressing her lips to his. Uncovering her light, she worked frenziedly at the metal cords that bound his wrists, pausing only to repeat her caresses, and at last he was free. I reached the Janna, she told him, in hurried whispers, and then I came up. Their great room, where the pathway to the light begins, was deserted. With a cord I pulled the lever, and the Janna vanished. I could not leave it for them to use. Then I followed. I knew by the sounds where they were taking you. And now, what can we do, Dean-san? Where can we go? It was real. Loa was there beside him. He had her in his arms. His bruised, bleeding arms, whose hurts he no longer felt. And then, through his mind, flashed the question. If this was real, what of the other? The wrappings he had heard. Perhaps it hadn't been a dream. He lifted a fragment of rock, and crashed it against the wall from which the wrappings apparently had come. Laboriously, he spelled out his name, remembering the dots and dashes from earlier flying days when planes had been equipped with key-senders. He spelled it slowly and waited, while only the silence beat upon him and the blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it. The answer came from a quicker hand. Rosson, this is Smitty. But Smitty was dead. What could it mean? Slowly Rosson pounded out the letters of his question. Where are you? The answer dispelled his last doubt, as to the reality of what he had heard. It was Smitty. Others were with him, for Smitty said we, and they were prisoners, sealed up in a living tomb. But where? Smitty did not know. He knew only that they were in a big room where the rocks had been shattered, and molten gold spilled on the floor. There was a hole in the roof, but too small to get through. A round hole, about eight inches in diameter. And at that Rosson interrupted to tap out a single word. Coming, he said, and turned toward Loa in the light. The girl had found a metal rope in her wanderings. She had used it to let herself down into the cave. And now it was she who helped Dean to pull his bruised body up and into the narrow crack. Loa had clung to the flamethrower. They found it where she had left it above. The tapping rocks she could not understand, but she knew Dean had a definite plan in mind when he whispered, The room where you first found me. Do you remember? Do you know the way? I will always remember, she said simply, and yes, I know the way. Rosson caught glimpses now and again of that broad thoroughfare along which he had once traveled, a prisoner of the Mole-men. But Loa knew other, and seldom used passages that roughly paralleled it, and then after a time Rosson himself knew in what direction they must go. He knew, too, that they had followed a circular route, and that the room in which he had been sealed was not a great way from the place in which Smitty was a prisoner. Yet this had been his only way to reach it. When they came to a sudden sharp turn he realized that they were close. Beyond that bend would be the branching lateral tunnel that led to Smitty's prison. The main runway had been deserted by the Reds. Stopping often to listen, starting at times in the side passages at some fancied alarm, they had met with no opposition. But now, from beyond the angling passage came the familiar shrillness of the Mole-men's voices. Again, the two concealed themselves, but no one approached. It's a guard we hear, Rosson whispered. They're guarding that entrance where we must go. They're taking no chances on Smitty's escaping. Then he crept to the point where the passage turned, the flamethrower ready in his hand. He drew back. For the moment it seemed to him physically impossible to turn this weapon upon them. They were savages true, but it seemed horrible to slash living bodies with a weapon like this. Then he thought of the devastation those same weapons had wrought among the people of his own world. His momentary hesitation vanished. With one spring he leaped into the open where a hundred feet away red bodies were massed, and the air above was quivering with the green jets of their weapons. His own flamethrower he had turned to a tiny point of light, and now it roared forth in fury as he swung it forward. They had no time even to aim their weapons or to turn them on. They were stampeded by the astounding attack, and still Rosson sickened as he saw them fall. There were some who, panic-stricken, dropped their cylinders and leaped for safety in a narrow branching way. Rosson knew he should have killed them, knew it in the instant that they vanished. But that momentary uncontrollable revulsion within him had stayed his hand. He rushed forward now, Loa still bravely at his side, passed the fallen bodies through the choking odor of burned flesh. Grabbing up one of the weapons that had been dropped, he thrust it into her hands and said, Wait here, stand them off if they come back. Then he was rushing up the side corridor, toward a room where once, in a far distant past, he himself had been confined. The flamethrower lighted the way. It showed him the metal plate and the smooth, glassy rock that had been melted around its edge. He pounded on the metal and shouted Smitty's name. Voices answered from within, voices almost unintelligible for the wonder and unbelief and joy that made them a confusion of wordless shouts. Then he stepped back and turned the blast of his weapon upon the rock at the edge of the plate. The metal sheet moved at last. Its top swinging slowly outward. Its base was held by the gummy, hardening rock. Then it broke free and crashed to the floor, and the light of Dean's weapon showed through the black opening upon the blanched faces of men, whose eyes were still wide in disbelief. Though they were looking at one of their own kind, it must have taken them a moment to realize that the naked body, clad only in a golden loincloth, and the hands that held one of the fearful green-flamed weapons were those of a human. Then one of them broke from the others, sprang heedlessly across the still-glowing plate and threw his arms about the barbaric figure. Dean, he choked, Dean, is it really you? You're alive? And Rawson's voice, too, was husky as he said. Smitty, I thought you were gone. The radio said they had got you, old man. The other khaki-clad bodies, a dozen of them, were crowding through the hot portal, and Rawson came suddenly to himself. Quick, he shouted, they'll be after us in a second. Follow me. Lola was waiting. Her own flamethrower spat a little jet of green. It was the only light. Rawson saw here, she had gathered up the other weapons, and it turned them off, so that even their little light would not blind her as she kept watched down the dark passage. Do we want them? Dean shouted to the others, and Smitty echoed the question. Do we want them, Colonel? Colonel Culver, his face almost unrecognizable under its smears of powder stains and blood, snapped a quick answer. No, we outranged them with our rifles. Their only flamethrowers, not ray projectors. Wait it, run like the devil. Rawson snatched Lola's weapon and threw it with the others. It would be hard going ahead. She must not be uselessly burdened. But he kept his own. Then, with his one free hand, he swept her up till she was racing beside him, as they led the way. I should have kept the fire-weapon the girl protested. I, too, can fight. Rawson speaking between breaths reassured her. Too heavy. The guns will protect us. Behind them a man's voice cried out once, a single, hoarse scream of agony. Then the rock wall took the sharp crackle of rifle fire, and threw the sound into crashing, thundering echoes. CHAPTER XXVI A girl whose creamy body was strangely unsoiled by smoke or grime, whose jeweled breast-plates flashed in the light of her torch, while the loose wrapping about her waist whipped against her as she ran. Then Rawson, naked but for the golden loincloth running beside her. Then Smitty and ten others in the khaki uniform of the service. It was all that was left of the fifty who had dared the depths. And now all of them were harried and driven like helpless animals in the burrows and runways of that underworld. But not entirely helpless. Colonel Culver had been right. Their rifles outranged the flamethrowers. Then Rawson, looking past that first burst of rifle fire, saw the one flame that had reached them whip upward as its owner fell. Others of the Reds came crowding in after, and the jets of their weapons made little areas of light as they crashed to the floor. Then Colonel Culver took charge of the retreat. Ahead of them and behind them was impenetrable darkness. Only the nearby walls were illuminated by the torch that Loa had been forced to turn on. And out of that darkness at any moment might come devastating flames. Culver detailed two men as a rear guard, and two others to run ahead a few paces in advance. At intervals of a minute or two their rifles would crack, and the echoes would be pierced by the whining scream of ricochets as their bullets glanced from the walls. We may not need them up ahead, Culver shouted to Rawson. I don't understand it. The place seems deserted. There were plenty of them here before. They've got something else to think of, Rawson shouted and reply. I killed Fee-E-All. He was their leader. But they're after us now. They'll be running through other passages, cutting in ahead of us. The tunnel turned and bent upward. For a full half-mile they ran straight in a stiff climb. In gasping breaths, Colonel Culver shouted hoarsely, won't it ever turn? If they bring up their damned heat ray machines, they'll get us on a straight away like this. Then Smitty's voice outshouted his with a note of hope. We're almost there. I remember this place. There's where we mount at the searchlight. They've ripped everything out. Up ahead one turn to the right, then a quarter-mile, then a turn toward the crater. That runs straight for a mile, but there's a field-gun at the bottom of the volcano. We'll be safe when we're on that last stretch. Ahead of them, the rifles of the two who had ran in advance, crashed out in a fury of fire as green glow appeared. But this time the flame did not die, and Rawson, staring with hot, wide-open eyes, saw that the ribbon of green swept transversely across the tunnel. He could hardly stand when he came to a stop. Beside him, Loa was swaying with weariness. The walls echoed only the horse panting breath of the men. Then they crept slowly forward, where the passage went steadily up. Loa's light was out. She had slipped the cap on the torch at the first sight of that green. They stopped but ten feet short of the deadly blaze. From a narrow rift in the left wall it strained outward, the rock at the edges of that crack turning to red at its touch. It beat upon the opposite wall, where already the stone was melting to throw over them a white glare and the glow of heat. And like a shimmering, silken barrier, whose touch could mean only instant death, it reached across the wide tunnel at the height of a man's waist, and moved slowly up and down. The heaviest armor plate ever rolled could have formed no more impenetrable a barrier. "'And we almost made it,' said Smitty slowly. "'Look, beyond there, another hundred feet. There's the bend in the tunnel, a sharp turn, and we almost got around.' Rosson reached for Loa's light. In the wall, where the flame was striking, only a dozen steps back he had seen another dark mouth, a ragged crack in the rock. He sprang to the entrance. It might be there was another way around. His first glance told the story, for he saw the walls draw together again, not a hundred feet off. A blind alley he groaned. One of the two, who had been their advanced guard, snapped his rifle to his shoulder. He was aiming at the glowing crack where the green light was issuing. A ricochet he growled. It may go on in and mess him up. But there was no whine of a glancing bullet that followed his shot. The softened wall had cushioned the impact. Another man sprang beside him. He was shouting at the top of his voice, while one hand reached into a bag that hung at his waist. "'Get back, everyone,' he said, "'if I miss.'" He did not finish the sentence, but pulled the pin from a hand-grenade, then took careful aim and threw. It went high, thrown there purposely. He had not dared aim it into the flame. But it struck the crevice fairly, and they heard it rattle on the inside. The next instant brought the crack and roar of its explosion. Like a winking signal light the green barrier vanished. Where it had been was only blackness and the dye and glow of molten rock. Then a hundred feet beyond, up close to the roof, the bend of the tunnel turned red. It seemed the bursting in the flame. Far back of them, down the long sloping way where they had come, shrill voices were screaming. And still there was no green flame to account for that tunnel and flaming red. Rossen stood motionless. Loa and the others beside him seemed likewise petrified, until the voice of Culver jarred them into action. "'The ray,' he shouted. "'It's the heat ray, damn them. Quick, jump into that cave!' They had all retreated through fear of the grenade. They were opposite the black place into which Rossen had looked. Loa was close beside Dean. He threw her with all his strength into the black mouth of the cave. Then he was one of a crowding, stumbling mass of men who followed after, and their going was lighted by a terrible torch of flame. One man had stood apart from the others, farther across the wide corridor. This khaki-clad body flashed suddenly to incandescence, then fell to the floor. And inside the cave where the walls came abruptly together to cut off any further retreat, Colonel Culver spoke softly. One more gone, he said. That was Oakley. Well, he never knew what it was that hit him. And it looks as if we'll all get the same. Through it all Rossen had clung to his flamethrower, unconsciously his hand had held fast to the bent handle of the cylindrical weapon. Now he set it down slowly upon the floor, then straightened his aching body laboriously. Loa's light was still gleaming. He saw her eyes searching for his, half in terror, half in wonderment. Strange men with strange, thundering weapons. He knew she was wondering if they still dared hope. Wondering if these warriors of Rossen's race might be able to work further magic. Dean put one arm tenderly about her and drew her close, and his other hand came the rest upon Smitty's shoulder. It's the end, dear, he told the girl softly. It's the end of our journey. You've been so dear and so brave. Pretty tough to lose out when we'd almost fought clear. Then the Smitty. Loa came back to save me, refused to go when she could have got away and been safe. Immediately the air was sipheling. The tunnel beyond the mouth of the cave was hot, though only at its end, where the invisible ray struck the rock surface squarely. Was there red, glowing heat? Rossen suddenly saw none of it. He was seeing in his mind the world up above, his own world of great, free, sunlit spaces. Suddenly he was hungry for some closer link, no matter how slight, to bind him to that world. What day is it, he asked? Have you kept track of time? Smitty looked at him, wonderingly. Yes, he said, then added. Oh, I see. You want to know what day this is when we die. It's the twentieth, Dean. He looked at the watch on his wrist. Just two o'clock, the afternoon of the twentieth. Within him Rossen felt a dull resentment. He was being denied even this last trifling solace. You're wrong, he said sharply. You slipped up on your count. It doesn't make any real difference, Smitty said. But Rossen went on. We left the inner world on the nineteenth. At noon on the twentieth Gore was to cut loose the flamethrowers, melt a hole in the floor of the ocean. But it didn't work. I had hoped I could wipe out the Mole-men, turn a solid stream of water down a shaft for over six hundred miles. It would have gone through the zone of fire, come flooding up into the Mole-men's world, and spread out all over down deep where it's hot. It would have hit the lake of fire. All that. I don't know what you're talking about, Dean. Smitty's voice was intentionally soothing. He knew Rossen was talking wildly. But I know I am right on the time. We've kept track of it every hour since. Rossen's talk had sounded like insanity, the Smitty's ears. He would have gone on, but he didn't want to see Dean Rossen go out like that. But now he stopped. The rock was quivering beneath his feet. And now Rossen, with a wild, wordless cry, threw himself toward the flamethrower on the floor. His voice rose to what was almost a scream. It worked, he shouted, in a delirium of joy. It's the end of the Brutes. Then in words which the others could not comprehend, but which somehow fired them with his own emotion. Gore has cut it loose. Water millions of tons of it. The zone of fire, steam. He threw himself flat on the floor, as close to the hot mouth of the cave as he dared go. And the green flame of his weapon ripped outward and up as he aimed it. From the passage where it sloped downward toward the source of the heat ray, the sound of shrill whistling voices had swelled louder. The whole tunnel now glowed green from the flames of an advancing horde. They were bringing their ray projector with them, Rossen knew. Not that its beam was visible, but the white, dazzling glow from the end wall where the tunnel turned was still there. Shoot above me, Rossen shouted. Don't stick your guns out into that ray. But aim as straight down the tunnel as you can. Keep him busy. Keep him from coming too close. His head he heard the beginning of rifle fire as the men crowded close to aim at the opposite wall at as flat an angle as they could. The air grew shrill with a sound of ricochets as the bullets glanced. But still the enemy came on, as their screeching voices told. His own weapon was aimed up above. The roof of the tunnel was rough and broken. He directed the flame against the top of the great black granite block. In one place it was fractured. If he could cut it off above, make it fall to the steeply slanting floor. He worked the full force of the blast methodically along the line he had chosen. The air of the tunnel had been blowing gently, but now it came in sharp gusts that whipped in through the mouth of the cave, while it brought an unending growl and roar, like distant gunfire, from deep within the earth. The breeze had swelled to a steady blast when the rock crashed down. But that's no use, Culver had shouted, when the deafening sound of its fall had ceased. They'll melt it in a second with their ray. Even as he spoke, the great mass of granite softened and rolled downward as the enemy shot their ray on its lower side. The heat of it struck blastingly into the entrance to their retreat. It still rossed and kept on, sawing doggedly with the weapon of flame at the other great blocks above. Now the distant thunder grew hugely in volume, and again the rocks trembled beneath them. The wind in the tunnel grew suddenly to a wild blast. It brought to them from a thousand other passages the shrill, demoniac shrieking of air that was torn and ripped on projecting ledges of rock. The sound of voices that screamed in terror and the echo of running feet in mad flight down the tunnel. The mass of stone that had been melting under the invisible ray cooled to red then to black. Outside the tunnel, now a place of roaring winds was lighted only by the single flame of Dean's weapon. They've gone, Culver shouted, the rays off, get outside. Now we'll run for it. And with the others, rawson sprang to his feet and leaped out into the tunnel, which was no longer a place of death. He heard the sound of their hurrying feet and a voice that cried, Look out for the turn, the rocks hot, but he did not look after them. He was standing squarely, bracing himself in the blast of air, still directing the flame upon a block that hung stubbornly and would not let go. He knew that Loa alone stood near. He heard other feet, someone was returning. Then Smitty was upon him, almost jarring him from his careful pose. Smitty was shouting, Come back, Dean, he cried, Are you crazy? Don't you know they'll be after us again? Rawson sprang as the big rock let go. It too crashed deathenly upon the floor and rolled sluggishly downward beside the high hummock of glass that the first rock had become. They balked hugely in the passage. They were eight or ten feet high, reaching across from one wall to the other. Above them was still a space of four feet. Rawson estimated it carefully while he looked at the ceiling above. Then he shook off Smitty's hand that was dragging at him and returned to the attack. For now, above the top of the barricade he had built, white ribbons of vapor were streaming. He had to shout to his utmost to make Smitty here above the shrill shriek of the blast. "'Steam,' he screamed in the Smitty's ear, live steam. We could never make it. Before we got to the top we'd be cooked to a pulp. I've got to block it, got to seal it off.' A whole section of the ceiling tore loose as he spoke, and the wind raised its voice like the scream of a wounded animal, or the cry of an overwhelmed and stricken people as it tore through the space that remained. It whipped the molten drops as they fell, and made them a deadly rain. Rawson, saring through the clouds of hot steam that now wrapped him about, called the Smitty to take Lowe to safety, and kept the flame where it should be, until at length the last aperture was closed, the last gap in the wall filled in, and even after that Rawson kept the flame still plain above that wall till he had melted rock and more rock that flowed down to make the barrier a single heavy solid mass. Steam was coming now from the narrow cleft where the green light had flashed out to bar their way, but that was simple, and he sealed the gap shut with his flame. He was gasping. The radiant heat from that molten mass had been torture that his naked body could never have borne but for the desperate necessity that drove him. Smitty and Lowe were again beside him. Now he choked we can go, but if there are any cross passages I'll have to block them too. There aren't, said Smitty, and at it, I thought you were crazy. You saved us all, Dean. We never could have made it to the top. That steam was getting hot, hot as if it had come right out of hell. It did, said Rawson. Then the flamethrower fell from his nervous hand. He was swaying. His knees were trembling with weakness when Smitty and Lowe, on either side, took his burned arms tenderly and helped him on where the others had gone. Colonel Culver and a rescue party met them half way. The Colonel had seen his men safely to the bottom of the volcanic pit. Others had run from their station beside a field gun to meet them. Then Culver had called for volunteers and had gone back. And now there were plenty of willing arms to help. The big lift, with its platforms of metal plates, awaited them at the tunnel's end. There was room on it now for all who were left. There was no crowding of men's bodies as there had been on the downward passage. Rawson was stretched on the floor plates, whose touch was cool to his tortured body. Lowe was seated that his head might rest in her lap on that absurd little fragment of skirt. She bent above him, whispering brokenly, Dean Sahn, my dear, my own Dean Sahn. We live, Dean Sahn. I can scarcely believe it, but I know that we live, for I still have you. But Dean was able to stand when that journey was done. First though there were men who placed him carefully on a stretcher and carried him, when he commanded, to the crater's outer rim. On the ashy floor of the crater a big transport was waiting with idling motors. But Dean would not let them put him inside. He wanted to look out across the world, to see it in reality, as he had seen it in his own mind, when all hope was gone. He wanted to look out once more across Tauna Basin and let his eyes rest upon country he had known. Lowe and Smitty walked beside him, as the first aid men carried him toward that distant rim. The rocks there were cleft. It was the place where he had first seen the inside of the crater's cup. There he had them put him down, and with the help of Lowe and Smitty he got slowly to his feet. While they lifted him he wondered at the sound in this desert world where no sound should be. A terrific rushing, an endless roar, and then his eyes found the clouds of steam. Below him was the basin, the tangled wreckage of his camp, and there where the derrick had stood was a tall plume of white. It did not begin close to the ground. Superheated steam, until it cools and condenses to water vapor, is invisible, but a hundred feet above the sand. And from there on up, two thousand feet sheer into the air, was a straight shaft of vapor, rolling up for another thousand feet into billowing clouds that the afternoon sun turned to glorious white. Power, gas-browson, power, and it will be like that indefinitely. Then he laughed weakly. I had to go down there to do it, to make Erickson richer. But it was worth it. In there the ocean will slowly subside. Where and his people will find their lost lands. The column of water in the shaft will hold the back pressure of steam, and here I have Loa, and that's all, but that's enough. He put one arm, still with the bandages of the first-aidman, about the girl. I hope you'll be happy, dear, he said softly, and turned back. But Smitty barred the way. That isn't all, said Smitty, jubilantly. You see, Dean, Erickson fired you. Erickson thought you had run out on him. Instead of backing you up, he quit. So I bought them all out. Whatever is there, Dean, and it's worth more millions than I dare to think about you own half of. Now, get back on that stretcher. Just because you saved all our necks up here on top of the earth, you mustn't think that you can keep an army ship waiting all day. CHAPTER XXVI RECORDING by Richard Kilmer, Rio Medina, Texas END OF TWO THOUSAND MILES BELOW by Charles Willard Diffen