A large anthology of sci.., p.101
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 101
It soon proved that it could dive, but its progress was hardly swift enough to appear spectacular to a couple of impatient explorers. As I came up to the machine, Mr. Kingston was trying out the mechanism; and the various devices were performing in dumb show, for all the world like the tentacles of some great beetle, doing the things which to us seem futile and meaningless, but which to beetles are no doubt of great importance.
So we took up our abode in the meteor mole where we were destined to live for many weeks, and embarked upon such a voyage as no human being had ever experienced, destined to be so full of adventure and discovery that it. manifestly marked the beginning of a new epoch of human knowledge, and opened up a line of scientific research that far transcends anything that had gone before. The result of this research laid at our feet the accumulation of knowledge, the wealth of thought, and the scientific progress of a civilization that was masterful and progressive, perhaps a great many centuries before our ancestors emerged from the caves.
But I am getting ahead of my story.
When all was in readiness, the mechanics released the wedges, and allowed the machine to slip down the ways into the shallow, tunnel-like hole that had been dug by hand, in order to give the mole a firm footing, and afford normal conditions for its operating parts.
Then, with no more ceremony than one observes in turning on an electric light, Mr. Kingston turned on the power, and composed himself in his seat, as if his troubles for the day were over. So the meteor mole started to dig, and at last the expedition was under way.
On the whole, everything seemed to work as planned, and except for a few minor difficulties, such as a control motor getting hot and a fuse blowing out, we burrowed steadily for the greater part of an hour. By this time the rear of the meteor mole was well below the surface; and a tunnel wall was developed far enough to assure us of its stability. So we turned off the current and made our final preparations to leave camp.
We established a telephone line and tried out our emergency wireless, and gave the camp superintendent final instructions about how to send us supplies and how to operate the air-pumping device. Then we took formal leave of a few friends and scientists who had come, not without profound misgivings, to see us off.
We took one parting look at the great out-doors, which in this part of the world is nothing much but encircling vastness, and descended into the meteor mole.
CHAPTER III
Into the Hole
ALL the rest of that day, all night and most of the next day we burrowed steadily into the depths, encountering only blue clay and limestone, interspersed here and there with a vein of yellow sand. Then we came upon a huge boulder, no doubt one that had been dropped somewhere in the vicinity by a passing glacier in some prehistoric age. This old boulder proved too hard to be penetrated by our excavator. So we were obliged to telephone to camp for blasting materials and an electric drill. We had rigged a car on broad rubber tires fashioned to fit the curve of the tunnel, and operated by means of a motor-driven windlass and a cable. This was our first occasion to use the car, and we had some misgivings about trusting explosives on the first trip; because if the car should get out of control on this steep incline, it would not be hard to imagine what would happen when it came in sudden contact with the mole. So we let them make a couple of trial trips before we told them to load the explosives. However, the car seemed to be under perfect control, and on the third trip brought us our material.
After no little clambering, and working in cramped positions, I was able to drill a hole deep enough for a blast; and, after tamping in a charge, we attached the battery and withdrew by means of the car to a safe distance, trusting that the mole, being withdrawn a few feet and being constructed so strongly, would not be harmed.
These necessarily close quarters precluded the use of dynamite, which would have been much more effective, and could have been used without drilling. But even if we could have withdrawn the mole to a safe distance, the shock of dynamite would no doubt have crumbled our freshly-laid walls and perhaps wrought irreparable damage. So we thought it advisable to rely on the more tedious method of blasting with drill and powder.
Upon setting off the charge and returning to the mole, we were gratified to find that little disturbance had been caused; but the rock was so well broken that we were able to bury the larger fragments under the floor of the tunnel, and leave the smaller ones to the crusher.
During the next few days, we encountered several of these boulders; but happily none of them was large enough to impede our progress for more than a couple of hours. On the fifth day, we decided to take a day off and give the machinery a rest.
We had been moving day and night since our start, one watching while the other slept. And a great deal of time we were both working, as when we were obliged to blast rocks or prepare our meals. In fact, the days and nights were all alike; and only the chronometer told us whether it was morning or evening. So after taking a good sleep we took account of our progress, and found it had been unexpectedly rapid. By measuring the cable of the transportation car, it was determined that we had made nearly 250 feet each twenty-four hours. At this rate we would make a mile in a little more than three weeks. This was indeed success of an encouraging sort.
At the end of 24 hours, feeling much refreshed and heartened, we said giddap to the mole, and settled down for a long hard pull.
For a period of nearly five weeks our work was comparatively uneventful and even monotonous. I dare say we would have become very tired of the ceaseless noise of the machinery and of the endless routine of the work, with nothing to distinguish day and night, had it not been for an anxiety and alertness for any signs of the object of our quest. There was also the necessity for redoubled activity to devise means for dispelling the ever-increasing heat, which by this time threatened to put a stop to our progress. We had feared that this internal heat of the earth would be too intense for us, and in preparation had gathered such information as was available about it. The 1926 year book of the Encyclopedia Britannica says that coal mining is being carried on in Belgium at a depth of 4,000 feet; and the mining of minerals to a depth of 6,000 feet in Brazil.
The subject of limitation of possible depth of working has been very carefully studied in Belgium by Professor Simon Stassart of Mons, in Les Conditions d’ Exploitation a grande Profondeur en Belgique, he points out that no special difficulty has been met with in workings more than 1,100 meters deep, from increased temperature or atmospheric pressure. From data secured in deep mines, he concluded that 1,500 meters would be a possible workable depth. It seems to be the consensus of opinion that the temperature rises about one degree for each one or two hundred feet of depth.
On the other hand, Jones, assistant to the Astronomer Royal of Greenwich, says we have no direct evidence as to the temperature gradient at great depths.
No doubt the fact that the earth’s crust had been disturbed at a comparatively recent date was a circumstance in our favor. But we had not been on the way many days when it was borne in on us beyond all argument that the heat was increasing with great rapidity. While former calculations might be grossly inaccurate, they were undoubtedly based on fact. We were obliged to telephone to camp for ever increasing supplies of ice, and the ventilating system had to be speeded up to its utmost capacity. Even then the heat became almost unendurable.
We were now about a mile below the deepest mine. During all this time, we had encountered very little change of soil, except that it had become much more compact. This was due to the increased pressure of the lower levels. We were in the habit of taking samples of the soil at intervals of 12 hours; and these samples were examined very carefully for any signs of the asteroid.
At length we found fragments of what appeared to be cinders from a furnace, and upon analyzing them found them rich in metal. This gave us renewed hope, although we reasoned that they might have been the result of some early volcanic action and not related to our meteor.
Not many hours after finding the cinders, we came upon a large fragment of semi-transparent material, resembling glass. Upon cleaning and examining this, we found to our great astonishment that it contained several short pieces of round metal rods, unmistakably of human design.
What They Found
HE immediately stopped the machinery and proceeded to examine our find with the utmost care. It was an irregularly shaped mass, like a fragment that might be broken off in wrecking a reinforced concrete structure; perhaps six inches in its greatest dimension. It seemed a great deal heavier than the same quantity of glass and iron or copper ought to be. Upon trying to break off a piece for analysis, we found that it possessed a resistance far greater than that of any ordinary glass. And when we tried to melt it in a little electric furnace, we found that the temperature which readily melted glass had no effect on this material. When we tried to saw off the protruding end of one of the small rods, our hack-saw blade would not even penetrate the surface.
This metal was also much more impervious to heat than any metal with which we are familiar. In color and structure it resembled platinum.
After much discussion and speculation, we were unable to decide whether this fragment had originally been part of a structure, or whether, in the heat generated by the fall of the meteor, the glasslike substance had melted and accidentally enveloped the rods. Personally, I was inclined to believe that it was reinforced material used in construction, in the same manner that we reinforce concrete with steel rods; although there seemed To be no system to the arrangement of the rods.
At any rate, this was a find of tremendous importance, and there seemed to be but two possible explanations for the existence of anything of human origin at this great depth. Here we were, down in the bowels of the earth—twice as deep as the deepest known mine—under a country only recently inhabited by civilized man.
There was indeed a bare possibility that this quarter of the globe had been inhabited in prehistoric times, by people who had known the use of glass and metal; and that some earthquake of gigantic proportions had buried this specimen of their handiwork to this great depth. And then there was the other possibility—that one that our hope led us to favor—that this so-called meteor was not a meteor in the sense that we are in the habit of thinking of them. Perhaps we thought it was not a solid mass of rock or metal—but that it had been a miniature world; clothed with soil and water and atmosphere, and inhabited by intelligent beings, and that this was a specimen of their craft. However it might have come here, it was evident that it originated in a civilization other than ours.
Being greatly impressed with the importance of our find, we decided to return to camp, where we might escape the oppressive heat; and where, with minds refreshed, we could determine our future course of action.
As a matter of fact, I think we both secretly doubted our own sanity; having been cooped up there so long, without daylight, under the stress of constant noise of the machinery, and enduring the increasing heat. Certain it is that we felt but one impulse, and that one to get to the surface of the earth. We lost no time in calling up camp and telling them to send the car to bring us.
While we were waiting for the car, we experienced a great deal of anxiety, lest the cable might not be long enough; as we knew that when they sent the car down with the supplies, they had used nearly all the cable on the drums. A new length had been hastily ordered; but of course it would take some days to have it transported to this remote place. We were already devising means for climbing up the shaft to meet the car when, to our great relief, it made its appearance. Immediately we scrambled aboard, and gave the signal to haul away.
We reached the camp in such a state of exhaustion that we could hardly summon energy enough to give directions for sending messages to a few metallurgists and geologists, before we took to our beds for a long sleep.
Upon waking, the next day, we received news that Professor Ricks, of the Bureau of Mines, in company with H.C. Scott, of the Geodetic Survey, were already on their way to our camp, and that news of our find was being received with great interest in all scientific circles.
Mr. Kingston immediately set to work with renewed enthusiasm, arranging our scanty laboratory equipment, in order further to test and analyze the strange materials. But I decided that I needed recreation, and betook myself to the nearest mountain stream to fish for trout.
The trout escaped the hook, however; for I sat down on the bank of the stream and in a moment my immediate surroundings were forgotten; and my thoughts flew away to that other little world, which I now felt sure had come to such a tragic end. What kind of people had they been? Were they really people at all, or were they only superior animals, with entirely different shapes from ours? Why had they fallen into the earth with such terrific force? What further traces of their lives might be left there in those torrid depths, and what ones must have been obliterated by the resistless impact of their descent?
I was still deep in these speculations when the setting sun warned me that it was time to return to camp, fishless, but refreshed.
With the beginning of the next week, the two professors arrived, and immediately set to work to verify our supposition that we had found substances of human manufacture, entirely different from our present-day products; substances with hardness and heat-resisting qualities far greater than those of our somewhat similar-appearing modern substances.
Mr. Scott, after some hesitation, consented to go down to the mole with us, and make a survey of the soil at the end of the shaft. He confirmed our belief that we were encountering debris left in the wake of the sinking body; and expressed the opinion that the mere force of impact of the falling body could not have driven it so far into the earth; but that the falling body had been of much greater density, and that it had gradually sunk into the lighter soil, as a stone will sink into a bin of flaxseed.
He discussed at some length the theory that mountains are caused when a portion of the earth’s surface is lighter than its surroundings, and is consequently heaved to a higher altitude in order to equalize the pressure confining the molten mass of the earth’s interior.
Although our visitors arrived in a rather skeptical frame of mind, they soon became convinced of the genuineness of our discovery, and took a great interest in the furtherance of our work. They promised their aid in raising more money, for by this time our available funds were sadly depleted.
After a week in camp, we prepared to go on with the shaft, and descended again to the mole, full of hope for early success.
CHAPTER IV
An Obstacle
LITTLE did we know that this was only the beginning of our adventures, and that our weeks underground would stretch out into months; and that our discoveries would far transcend our strangest dreams.
Now we progressed very cautiously, stopping the machine and going forward every hour to examine the soil, and search for foreign deposits.
Presently the cinders and heat-fused rock and metal became more abundant, and by the end of the week we were in the midst of much matter that seemed to belong to the asteroid rather than to the earth. At length we encountered surface soil that resembled our own surface to a marked degree; although it was intermingled with so many cinders and other debris that it was hardly recognizable. Here we halted, and held a “council of war.”
It. was manifest that, if we had reached the surface of the asteroid, here if anywhere we should find the objects of interest. But how to find them; that was the question. It was impossible to deviate very far from a straight line with the mole, since it had no steering apparatus; and since it was only equipped to manufacture blocks of a regular shape and uniform size. Again, it seemed impractical to dig into the sides by hand, since we had no means of disposing of the excavated material. And to carry it to the surface in the car and dump it would be such a slow and expensive process that only by the rarest streak of luck could we hope to secure any commensurate results.
So, after several telephone consultations with friends and backers on the outside, we decided to establish a way-station and with the help of the car and a few miners, try to make branch tunnels and explore the immediate neighborhood. Later, perhaps we could establish a few more stations at other points, and ascertain if possible the size and interior composition of the asteroid.
But the establishment of a way-station with miners was more easily said than done. When we called Mr. Thomas, who was in charge of the camp, he said he knew just where he could no doubt get two or three men, and he would try to fit them out and send them down the next day. But the next day he phoned and said the men he had in mind would not take the job, and that he now foresaw considerable difficulty in finding anybody who would attempt it.
So we were delayed several days in securing proper equipment, and in searching for competent men to do the work. At length an agent secured two Welshmen, direct from the deep coal mines of Wales, and although we had difficulty in making them understand just what we were mining for, they agreed to take up the work for a bonus of 20% above the prevailing miner’s wage. After getting them started, we repaired to the faithful mole, and proceeded to bore a hole in the interior of the asteroid.
From the size of the crater where it entered the mountain, we had estimated that it could not be more than three quarters of a mile in diameter; although it was safe to assume that it might have been somewhat distorted in shape by its long fall. Even so, we hoped to penetrate it in two or three weeks. Here it was very much cooler, for some reason which we were unable to ascertain, and for the first couple of days we made good progress; but then the soil began to grow more solid and dense, and we were hard put to it to make away with all the dirt taken out. Our hole was reduced to as small an opening as would accommodate the mole; and even then we were accumulating a surplus of soil.
At length we had to call for the car, and send a load of it out to the surface. The next day we had to send two loads, and by the end of the week we had the car working nearly, all day, and were scarcely able to spare it long enough to do the carrying for the men at the way-station.
