Two Thousand Miles Below, Charles Willard Diffin [best large ereader .txt] 📗

lready the air was stifling. 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. Rawson 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?"

Smithy 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, Rawson 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," Smithy said. But Rawson went on:

"We left the inner world on the nineteenth. At noon on the twentieth Gor was to cut loose the flame-throwers, 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 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 are talking about, Dean." Smithy's voice was intentionally soothing; he knew Rawson was talking wildly. "But I know I am right on the time. We've kept track of it every hour since—"

Rawson's talk had sounded like insanity in Smithy's ears. He would have gone on—he didn't want to see Dean Rawson go out like that—but now he stopped. The rock was quivering beneath his feet.

And now Rawson, with a wild wordless cry, threw himself toward the flame-thrower on the floor. His voice rose to what was almost a scream. "It's worked!" he shouted in a delirium of joy. "It's the end of the brutes!"

hen, in words which the others could not comprehend but which somehow fired them with his own emotion: "Gor 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, Rawson 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!" Rawson shouted. "Don't stick your guns out into that ray, but aim as straight down the tunnel as you can. Keep 'em busy. Keep 'em from coming too close."

Above 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 the 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 a 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.

he 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, yet still Rawson kept on, sawing doggedly with the weapon of flame at other great blocks above.

Now that 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. Mingled with it was the sound of voices that screamed in terror, and the echo of feet running 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 ray's 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.

e heard the sound of their hurrying feet and a voice that cried: "Look out for the turn—the rock's 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 Loah alone stood near. He heard other feet; someone was returning. Then Smithy was upon him, almost jarring him from his careful pose. Smithy 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 deafeningly upon the floor and rolled sluggishly downward beside the high hummock of glass that the first rock had become. They bulked 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 Smithy'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 Smith hear above the shrill shriek of the blast.

"Steam!" he screamed into Smithy'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.

t whipped the molten drops as they fell and made of them a deadly rain. Rawson, staring through the clouds of hot steam that now wrapped him about, called to Smithy to take Loah 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 playing 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.

Smithy and Loah 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 Smithy, and added: "I thought you were crazy. You've saved us all, Dean; we never could