Two Thousand Miles Below by Charles Willard Diffin (black books to read .txt) π
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- Author: Charles Willard Diffin
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Rawson knew his disappointment was unreasonable, but his weary mind was tired of mysteries. Some understandable bit of machinery would have been reassuring. And then in his next thought he asked himself what difference did it make. If this childish balloon thing were really capable of carrying them somewhere, what of it? It could only mean more of this hideous inner world that grew more unbearably fantastic with each new experience.
His life had been saved. True, but for what end? The girl's eyes were upon him, reading the expression on his face. She smiled encouragingly. Then Rawson's hands tightened upon the metal bar. The man who stood by the central post had moved one lever the merest trifle. Rawson felt the floor lifting beneath him. Then the shell, like a bubble of metal, pitched and tossed as the powerful air currents caught it.
is own lightness saved him from injury. He gripped the bar and held himself free of the wall. The round top of their strange craft grated against the domed roof. Then again the ship steadied and seemed motionless, and Rawson knew they had slipped up into the still air of that upper shaft.
For one wild instant, filled with impossible hope, Rawson saw this as a means of ascent to his own world. Then reason tore those wild hopes to shreds.
"It's closed up above," he thought. "It must be. That's why it sounded that way. That's why the air drove off through those side passages."
The next instant held no time for thought. Rawson's whole attention was concentrated upon the bar to which he clung. For, quicker than thought, the metal shell, the little cylindrical world in which he and these others were, fell swiftly beneath them.
His body twisted in mid-air. He knew the others were being thrown in the same manner. Then, what an instant before had been the ceiling was now a floor beneath his feet, pressing up against him and giving him weightβand by the whistling rush of the air that tore past their shell he knew they had fallen with marvelous swiftness straight down through the throat of that lower shaft.
And now what had been down was up. The ceiling of this strange room was now their floor, but Rawson was not deceived. "Acceleration," he said. "It's crowding us. The shell tends to fall faster than we do. It's like an elevator traveling downward at a swifter rate than a free falling body."
e had glimpsed the glassy-side of that well into which he knew they had been flung. He knew that the shrieks that filled the room time and again were caused by the touching of their shell's guiding and protecting bars against one glassy wall. Those sounds came always from the same side and Rawson found momentary satisfaction in his own understanding of the phenomenon.
"We're falling free," he argued within his own mind, "falling toward the center of the earth. And a falling body wouldn't follow a vertical course. It would tend to hug against one wall." And by that he knew something of their speed. The necessity for it was apparent a moment later.
Above his head the bull's-eyes pointing forward in the direction of their flight were faintly red. Swiftly they changed to crimson. Rawson was standing beside a window in the wall of their craft. That, too, grew quickly to an area of dazzling brightness. Slowly the heat struck in. The air in the little room was stifling. He saw the girl turn her head and give a sharp order.
The man by the central post responded with another slight movement of the lever. Beneath Rawson's feet the floor pressed upward in a surge of speed that bent his knees and bore him downward. Under his hands the rod to which he clung was hot. The shining walls were dimly glowing. They were being hurled through the very heart of hell....
nd then it was past. The crimson horror beyond those windows grew dull and then black. In the blunt nose of their craft a tiny crevice must have opened. The one who drove that projectile in its shrieking flight had touched another control that Rawson had not before seen. And with a piercing shriek a thin jet of cold air drove down into the hot room.
No wine could have been one-half so potent. That thin jet filled the room with buffeting whirlwinds that grew quickly cold.
Then their speed was checked. Abruptly Rawson was weightless, his body hanging in air, moved only as he moved his hand upon the bar. Only a few feet away was the body of the girl floating weightless like himself. The others were shouting loud words of satisfaction, but her face was turned toward Rawson, her eyes were smiling into his; while, outside the little shell that fell in meteor flight, were only shrieking winds and the blackness into which they plunged.
CHAPTER XVII Gorhrough an ordinary experience, Dean Rawson, like any other man, would have kept unconscious measurement of the passing time. An hour, no matter how crowded, would still have been an hour that his mind could measure and grasp. But now he had no least idea of the hours or minutes that had marked their flight. Each lagging second was an age in passing. Even the flashing thoughts that drove swiftly through his mind seemed slow and laborious. Painstakingly he marshaled his few facts.
"They know what they're about, that's one thing dead sure. They're onto their job, and they've got something here that beats anything we've ever had." He mentally nailed that one fact down and passed on to the next. "And that's the bow end of our ship, up there." He looked above him at a dented place in the ceiling, the ceiling that had been the floor of the room when first he stepped into it. "There isn't any up or down any more. I've been flipped back and forth every time we slowed down or accelerated until I don't know where I'm at, but I saw that dented plate in the floor when I got in and we started falling in that direction. But whether we're falling toward the center of the earth still or whether we passed the center back there at that hot spot and now this crazy, senseless shell is flying on and up, perhaps these people knowβI don't!"
Then fact No. 3. "They live somewhere inside here. They're taking me there, of course. It must mean there's a race of themβand they don't like the mole-men. They know the way back, too, and if they'll help me.... Perhaps the fighting's not over yet!"
Through more endless, age-long seconds there passed through Rawson's mind entrancing visions. An army of men like these White Ones, himself at their head. They were armed with strange weapons; they were invading the mole-men's world....
The girl was reaching toward him. She laid one hand upon his, then pointed overhead.
awson looked quickly above. The glowing bull's-eyes startled him, then he knew it was white-light he was seeing, not the red threat of glowing rock. Their speed had been steadily cut down as the air pressure lessened. "They're decompressing," he thought. "They're working slowly into the lesser pressure."
The passing air no longer shrieked insanely. Above its soft rushing sound he heard the girl's voice; it was clear, vibrant with happiness. Her hand closed convulsively over his; her eyes beneath their long lashes smiled unspoken words of welcome, of comradeship, and of something more.
Within their room her light, which at close range seemed only a slender bar of metal with a brilliantly glowing end, had been clamped in a bracket against the wall. The illumination had seemed brilliant, now suddenly it was pale and dim.
Through the bull's-eyes above, a brighter light was shining, clear and golden, like the light of the sun on a brilliant and cloudless day. And to Rawson, who felt that he had spent a lifetime in the gloomy dungeons of that inner world, that flooding brilliance was more than mere light. It was the promise of release, the very essence of hope. His eyes clung to these little round windows; then the larger glass beside him blazed forth with the bright sunlight of an open world that was unbearable to one who had lived so long in darkness.
He held tightly to that slim hand that remained so confidingly within his own.
"It isn't true," Rawson was telling himself frantically. "It can't be true. It must be a delusion, another dream."
He gripped the girl's hand in what must have been a painful clasp. He told himself that she at least was real. Her lovely face was before him when at last he could bear to open his eyes.
bout him were the others. The cylinder rested firmly upon a surface of pale-rose quartz. Inside the shell he saw the floor where he had stood, and with that he added one more fact to the few he had gotten together. There was no dent in the floor. The shell's position was reversed. What had been up was now down. Rawson knew he was standing firmly, with what seemed his normal earth weight, upon a smooth surface of rock; he knew that he was standing head down as compared with his position at the beginning of their flightβas compared, too, with the way he had stood in the mole-men's world and in his own world up above.
"I've passed the center of the world." The words were ringing in his brain. And then reason shot in a quick denial. "You're as heavy as you were on earth," he told himself. "You'd have to go through and on to the other side, the opposite surface of the world, before your weight would come back like that!"
"What could it mean?" he was demanding as his eyes came back from the machine and swept around over a gorgeous, glittering panorama of crystal mountains, rose and white. Fields of strange plants, vividly green; a whole world that rioted madly in a luxury of color. Before him the girl stood smiling. Every line of her quivering figure spoke eloquently of her joy in seeing this world through Rawson's eyes.
man was approaching, a man like the others, yet whose oval face strangely resembled that of the girl. She led Rawson toward him, then Rawson, stopping, jerked backward in uncontrollable amazement, for the tall man drawing near had spoken. His lips were open, moving, and from them came sounds which to Rawson were absolutely unbelievable:
"Stranger," said the newcomer, "in the name of the Holy Mountain, and in the Mountain's language and words, I bid you welcome."
And Rawson, too stunned for coherent thought, could only stammer in what was half a shout: "But you're speaking my language. You're talking the way we talk on earth. Am I crazy? Stark, raving crazy?"
But even the sound of the man's voice could not have prepared him for what followed. There was amazement written on the face of the man. And the girl who stood beside himβher eyes that had been smiling were wide and staring in utter fear. Then she and the man and the other white figures nearby dropped suddenly to kneel humbly before him. Their faces were hidden from him, covered by their hands as they bent their heads low. He heard the man's voice:
"He speaks with the tongue of the Mountain! He comes from the Land of the Sun, from Lah-o-tah, at the top of the world! And I, Gor, am permitted to hear his voice!"
CHAPTER XVIII The Dance of Deathhrough an airplane's thick windows of shatter-proof glass, so tough and resilient that a machine-gun bullet would only make a temporary dent, the midday sun flashed brightly as the big ship rolled. Along each side of the small room, high up under the curve of the cabin roof, windows were ranged. Others like them were in the floor. And, above, the same glass made a transparent dome from which an observer could see on all sides.
Outside was the thunderous roar of ten giant motors, but inside the cabinβthe fire-control room of a dreadnought of the airβthat blast of sound became more a reverberation and a trembling than actual noise.
Certainly the sound of motors and of slashing propellers, as the battle plane roared up into the sky, did not prevent free conversation among the three men in the room. Yet
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