Collected short fiction, p.48
Collected Short Fiction, page 48
Father took charge of the work in general of seeing that raw metal and food were ready. Gardiner went over my plans for the ships, to determine the best methods of procedure, and to find what tools and technicians would be required. Until Doane came, he was “Admiral” in authority over everyone. I was to undertake some researches to perfect the D-ray; but before beginning that, I asked for and received the job of opening and clearing the great cavern.
Forty hours ahead of the rising of the sun, I left Firecrest with a dozen men in space suits. We drove atomotored tractors, that dragged three of the great mining D-ray machines, borrowed from the gold workings. When we arrived at the little crack that was the opening of the great cavern, I fastened the end of a long line about my middle, and ventured with a searchlight, a thousand feet down the fissure, to where it widened into the cavern proper. A few measurements and a simple calculation enabled me to determine the place to begin our vertical shaft.
Twelve hours of herculean toil saw a circular vertical shaft, a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, sunk three hundred feet through the roof of the cave. Then I sent the men back to the city to rest while a fresh crew came out to operate the great boring machines.
Fatigue drove me back to the city for a few hours’ rest. But I did not sleep until I had sketched plans for the great metal valve, which was to close the top of the shaft. I left a dozen men busy on the blueprints of the valve, its frame and hinges, and the atomotor which was to operate it.
The men worked on at the shaft in my absence. When I got back, the boring was six hundred feet down. I brought back two additional tubes, and the work went on more rapidly than before. It was a splendid sight to see the five red beams, like fingers of fire, driving down into the pit from the vast glistening machines on its rim, the living rock melting beneath them into a flaming inferno of blinding light, with the inert gases of the disintegration rising in a furnace-hot hurricane. A strange contrast—beneath was the pit of flame, with the blistering heat pouring from it, and above about us all was night, where the chilling gases from the pit, cooling, condensed in a sort of fog, and fell, a crystal snow, upon the huge machines and the busy men.
Twelve hours later, when the sun came up, a splendid ball of white flame, we were down thirteen hundred feet. In ten hours more, at twenty-three hundred feet, the fissure we were following opened out into the vast cavern. The incandescent bottom fell out of the shaft, and looking down its straight walls, we saw the purple gleam of phosphorescent vegetation.
I went back to the city to snatch a few hours of sleep, and to exchange my space suit for the topi and light cotton uniform worn in the day. I left a crew excavating recesses about the mouth of the shaft for the hoisting machinery and the mechanism of the great valve. When I returned, the machinery had already been hauled out on tractor-drawn vehicles, and the installation was almost complete. The huge sliding lid was already in place, with a thin shell of rock over it for camouflage, and the motors, cages, and cable-drums were being set up in the space cut out beneath it.
Four hours later a cage dropped down that great shaft, as the winch unwound the steel cable that supported us. I was in it, with father, Gardiner, Tom Dowling, and sixteen other men, equipped with searchlights and D-rays.
A strange and splendid scene it was that burst upon us at the bottom of that half-mile shaft. We emerged into sheer space. Our brilliant searchlights played on an inverted forest of pendant stalactites—a fantastic, topsy-turvy world of glittering, snowy whiteness, dazzling in our intense lights.
The floor of the vast cave was still seven hundred feet below us. A weird thick jungle covered it—rippling with the eerie light of luminescent vegetation. The growth was thick and dense. Great fleshy, fungoid plants rose half a hundred feet high, glowing with pale, uncanny white. Even above them swayed the feathery fronds of fern-like trees, gleaming with viridescent green. Here and there were thickets of low violet growth. The whole floor of the cave was splotched irregularly with patches of fire—white and green and violet, bloody red and shimmering opal and flaming purple.
Almost directly below us was the long black lake I had seen as a child, shimmering with the green and purple of the shining jungle that overhung its silent shores. From it, the flaming jungle sloped up to forests of glittering stalagmites. Beyond the stalagmites the walls of the cavern rose, winding, cragged, frosty with crystalline deposits that scintillated wondrously in the many-colored light of the luminous jungle.
Swiftly the cage dropped at the end of the cable, the cavern opening up about us. Three thousand feet wide, perhaps, the penetrating rays of our searchlights showed it to be. Its length seemed infinite. The white dazzling rays traced its rugged walls until they lost themselves westward in infinite distances.
E were entering an empire, within the moon! That such a great cavity is possible on the planet is due only to the slight force of its gravity; on earth the rock walls would have become plastic under the enormous weight, “creeping” until the abyss was closed.
As our cage dropped low over a dense forest of entwined, palm-like trees brilliant with soft green flame, a strange winged thing sprang up from the black lake-shore. Black it was, and covered with glistening scales. It had two vast eyes, immense oblong orbs, glowing with intense violet. It bore itself on deliberately flapping, leathery black wings, that must have spread a hundred feet.
One of the men in the cage raised his D-ray tube nervously. Indeed, I felt a momentary thrill of alarm on my own part, for the monstrous creature had come directly toward us. But with a word, Gardiner restrained the man.
And the huge black thing, seemingly dazzled by our battery of blazing searchlights, turned and winged a silent way off down the dark passage to westward, until our thin white rags lost it in a maze of ghostly, glittering passages.
Then, swinging there two hundred feet above the luxuriant luminous jungle, we set to clearing the vegetation away. Fantastic glowing plants melted beneath our vividly brilliant D-rays.
As is well known, the D-ray itself is colorless, since it is a vibration in the ultra-violet spectrum, of a wave-length far shorter than that of visible light. The flaming colors seen in practice are due to secondary radiation, which aids in controlling the ray. The difference in color is due to the variation in atomic structure of the three kindred metals used in generating the ray. The platinum electrode produces a brilliant scarlet beam. When osmium is used, the color is a bright, emerald-green. Iridium generates a vivid orange-yellow ray.
Within two hours we had swept the cave from wall to wall, and for about two miles east and west. Where there had been a weird, luminous jungle, only naked rock and bare black soil was left. Then we landed, and left the cage. Gardiner and I set immediately about surveying the spot on the lake-shore beneath the shaft, for the buildings and yards to be constructed there, while several expeditions were sent up and down the cavern.
The men sent westward reported that the cavern curved about, and stretched back to the east in many tangled passages, wider even than the one in which we were, and all grown up with luminous jungle and swarming with ferocious winged monsters. It was through that region that I must have passed in my escape from the cavern years before, when I had come out in a crater many miles east. I was appalled at the men’s description of it.
The men sent in the other direction reported that the cavern extended only a few miles that way. We seemed to be in a relatively small, bottle-necked chamber, with the curved neck of the bottle opening out into vast and unknown space beyond.
As we worked, the cage made repeated trips to the surface for more men and supplies. Soon a dozen flimsy towers had been set up about the lake, with powerful atom-disruptor lights blazing from their tops. The stalactites of the white roof caught the light and reflected it in a brilliant flood.
Father and Tom soon went back to the city, to look after the mines and our supply of raw materials. Gardiner and I stayed in the cavern, to get work started on the new ships as soon as possible. The cage brought us increasing streams of men—engineers and laborers from Theophilus and Colon and from the smaller cities. Quickly we erected barracks in which we slept; and a vast open shed, under which cooking and eating was done. Gardiner and I superintended the work, taking alternate shifts of twelve hours each.
With amazing speed the spidery framework went up, which was to support the keels of the score of new vessels. In a week the cradles along the lake-shore were almost completed, and our quickly erected foundries had patterns for the casting of the first huge plates.
A strange industrial city grew up along the cavern wall, above the yards. There were furnaces that sent an endless infernal glow upon the hanging roof above, and thundering hammers and rolling mills, and great power plants that hummed with atomotors totalling millions of horsepower. Part of the equipment had been moved in sections from the shops at Firecrest, much more had been built, and other units were always planned, needing but time, men, and money to make them complete.
We had been at work for two weeks, when Gardiner told me that another engineer—his name was Nordeau—I think he came from Colon—was ready to take my place, to give me the time to work out refined plans for the D-rays, with which to arm the new fleet.
I obtained a short leave of absence, and went to spend a day with father and Valence and her family, up at Firecrest—for father had gone back to the city at once.
Before I left Gardiner, I did my best to persuade him that I should be assigned to the new fleet. I wanted desperately to be with it when it went to earth, so that I might have a chance to find Leroda. And I was afraid that Gardiner meant to send me back to Warrington, as soon as the work was well under way.
The old scientist grinned quizzically at my request, and reminded me that it would be a year before the fleet could hope to leave the cavern, even if all went well. He refused to give me any definite promise.
I got out of the cage, and climbed up the short footway to the great valve to the surface. Once more I looked upon the city of my youth. The gleaming walls rose perhaps five miles away, westward. The city was circular and compactly built, many stories high. It was shaped like a great round disc dropped by the rim of the crater—as it gleamed in the bright sunlight, it looked very much like a vast silver coin.
The rich mines, from which had been drawn all the wealth to make this wondrous city, were in the crater beyond, with its grim circular rim rising behind the glistening walls.
AS I stood and looked at Firecrest, a fierce pride in it welled up in me. It was ours. We had made it. When father had come here, this had been bare desert. All this he had built. I had helped; part of it was mine.
In a new topi and white uniform, I hurried across the five miles of bare desert to the city, beneath the blazing noon-day sun. I went at once to father’s office, found him at work behind a great desk piled with papers. I saw that he was doing more work than he had tried in years; but his thin shoulders were straight, and his blue eyes bright with enthusiasm.
He was glad as ever to see me. He told me that Jenkins had come and gone, with his inevitable “dispatches from Warrington.” And mother had come with him. It had been a hard and perilous trip. The old scout had not wished to bring her; she had been compelled to get an order from Warrington. But she said that the old fellow had cared for her most devotedly.
When father and I went to the apartments, she was triumphant, happy and smiling, as well as ever now, though the fatigue of the trip had left her in bed for a day or two.
When I jokingly scolded her for her hardihood in making the trip, she said, laughing, “I may look like a faded old lady in lavender, John, but I am a girl—and I mean to stay one! Do you think I wanted to stay in Theophilus when I had a chance to come to be with all of you?”
Jenkins, it seemed, had not brought good news. An army gathered near Colon under General Hall had marched for New Boston at the beginning of the lunar day, with the object of uniting with Warrington in retaking the city. Hall had been met by a combined force of three space ships and five thousand negroes under Masonby, and a horde of the Selenites called Ossinae, with whom the Tellurians were allied. Hall had been disastrously defeated, retreating with only a fraction of his men. Four thousand dead were left upon the field—upon which, it was said, the mooncalves had made a horrible banquet.
Then Masonby’s force of war-fliers, negroes and moon-calves had marched against the little mining center of Kirby Peak. This had fallen after a short but spirited defense. Of the two thousand inhabitants, only a handful had escaped the general massacre. The mining machinery and the store of metals on hand had been largely carried off, and the buildings and shaft houses wrecked with the D-rays from the ships.
Another and larger force, working out of New Boston as a center, had met Warrington in a battle between that city and Theophilus. While the combat had been indecisive, Warrington had lost several thousand men and a good deal of equipment, and had been forced to retire upon the appearance of six ships of Humbolt’s fleet.
After a few happy hours with my parents, I went back to our new laboratories in the cavern, to set about the experimental work on the D-rays. Remarkable progress, I found, had been made even in the day of my absence. Some of the new factories were running, turning out mostly the tools with which the ships were to be built.
Weeks went by, weeks of exhausting toll, of slow and painful toil. Slowly my efforts with the D-ray brought forth a military weapon that promised to equal the improved tubes carried on the new Tellurian ships. Slowly the great spherical hulls of the new ships were rising by the lake—though they were yet but hulls, without engines and without weapons.
Warrington, after his defeat, had retired to Theophilus again. Now another day had come and he had advanced again, as Jenkins—the old scout was a frequent visitor now, with his dispatches—had informed us.
I had kept renewing my request to Gardiner for a position on the new fleet. Always he had refused to commit himself. But on this day Jenkins came with dispatches. He brought the news that Warrington had met Humbolt again and had defeated him in a hot battle, winning all he had lost in the previous engagement, and more. The whole moon was rejoicing for the victory.
After Gardiner had read the dispatches and sent Jenkins back with our reports on the progress of the work, he brought me a yellow envelope, addressed to John Adams, Jr., and marked “General Orders.” He had always bantered me about my desire to go to earth, with questions about my motive. Now he gravely informed me that I was ordered to return to Theophilus, to resume my place as engineer-attaché.
“Warrington is planning a big coup, in conjunction with Doane’s little fleet,” he said, solemnly. “He wants you along, to help plan some temporary fortifications.”
“Very good, sir,” I agreed, saluting and trying to conceal my disappointment. “I had been hoping to be assigned to the fleet.”
Thereupon Gardiner broke into roars of laughter. Presently he recovered his composure and whispered in my ear, “As if I didn’t know! And I know why you are so anxious! Ha! Ha!”
Dazed and wondering, I opened the envelope for confirmation of his words. I read: “It is my pleasure to inform you that you are assigned to Lafollette as his military secretary. You will make the voyage to earth with the fleet in order to be able to work with him on the return voyage. You will use your knowledge of conditions on the moon and your engineering skill to aid him in every possible way in his preparations for operations here. B. Gardiner.”
As I looked up, too much overcome to speak, and wrung the old scientist’s hand in silent thanks, he grinned and said:
“Why not bring her back with you?”
CHAPTER XIX
Treason
ON April 18, 2328, Gardiner and I left the Firecrest cavern for the new capitol of the moon, at Kurrukwarruk. It had been nearly a year since the opening of the great cave. The ships were almost done. On May 1, the sun would rise. That was the time set for departure for the earth. We were to attend a last conference in the hidden city, to perfect the plans for the voyage and for the military operation with which Lafollette might take part on our return.
The cavern was a changed place now. All the great chamber, five miles long, had been cleared, and brightly lit by atomic lights suspended from the glistening stalactites of the roof. It was cut off from the unexplored wilderness of the lower cavern by an impenetrable yellow curtain—an unbroken wall of fan-rays.
There was a new city, of many thousand people, above the fresh-water lake, with fertile gardens of vitamine plants covering the soil where once the luminous forest had stood. The lake-shores hummed with industry, vibrating to the ceaseless throb of machinery—smelters and furnaces, power plants and rolling mills, foundries and machine shops. The reverberation of the mighty hammers that forged the armor plates for the ships vied with the endless rattling clang of the thousand riveting hammers that were fastening them together. And all the activity of the place was drawn from the boundless energy of the atom.
Twenty great ships lay in their cradles about the lake, like vast balls of silver. Already their atomic blast engines were being installed; and the heavy armaments of D-rays, with all the refinements that I had labored so many months upon, were being mounted on the ray-decks. Ten thousand men, from all over the moon, were being trained to man the mighty fleet of space. Two months before, Doane had left the little Eagle, to come and relieve Gardiner of his duties as Admiral.
Jenkins had come for Gardiner and me. We left Doane in charge of the fleet, and set out for Kurrukwarruk upon the moon-calves of the old scout. The night had fallen two days before, but in Gardiner’s improved space armor, with comfortable freedom of movement and ease in breathing, travel by night was fully as comfortable as in the stinging heat of the lunar day.
Jenkins, as usual, was garrulous, but on this night his talk was mostly of his varied adventures in the last year. He had been almost always on the move, keeping Warrington in touch with us at Firecrest, and with Hall, who was still campaigning out of Colon. Jenkins’ talk was almost a history of the war. The moon’s fortunes had risen and fallen; there had been enthusiasm and encouragement. Warrington had fought battles that seemed victories, and battles that appeared to be defeats; Humbolt was still trying persistently to widen his territory outside of New Boston. All in all, conditions stood about as they had a year before, except that the moon was learning to depend more and more upon her own resources.
