Astounding Stories of Super-Science 2

Astounding Stories of Super-Science 2

Tommy opened the throttle to the limit, zooming, and, like a spurred

horse, the biplane shot forward and upward. She touched five thousand,

six, seven--and that, for her, was ceiling under those conditions, for a

sudden tremendous shock of wind, coming in a fierce cross-current, swung

her round, tossed her to and fro in the enveloping white cloud. And

Tommy knew that he had the fight of his life upon his hands.

 

* * * * *

 

The compasses, which required considerable daily adjusting to be of use

so near to the pole, had now gone out of use altogether. The air speed

indicator had apparently gone west, for it was oscillating between zero

and twenty. The turn and bank indicator was performing a kind of tango

round the dial. Even the eight-day clock had ceased to function, but

that might have been due to the fact that Tommy had neglected to wind

it. And the oil pressure gauge presented a still more startling sight,

for a glance showed that either there was a leak or else the oil had

frozen.

 

Tommy looked around at Dodd and pointed downward. Dodd responded with a

vicious forward wave of his hand.

 

Tommy shook his head, and Dodd started forward along the cabin,

apparently with the intention of committing assault and battery upon

him. Instead, the archaeologist collapsed upon the floor as the plane

spun completely around under the impact of a blast that was like a

giant's slap.

 

The plane was no longer controllable. True, she responded in some sort

to the controls, but all Tommy was able to do was to keep her from going

into a crazy sideslip or nose dive as he fought with the elements. And

those elements were like a devil unchained. One moment he was dropping

like a plummet, the next he was shooting up like a rocket as a vertical

blast of air caught the plane and tossed her like a cork into the

invisible heavens. Then she was revolving, as if in a maelstrom, and by

degrees this rotary movement began to predominate.

 

Round and round went the plane, in circles that gradually narrowed, and

it was all Tommy could do to swing the stick so as to keep her from

skidding or sideslipping. And as he worked desperately at his task Tommy

began to realize something that made him wonder if he was not dreaming.

 

* * * * *

 

The snow was no longer snow, but rain--mist, rather, warm mist that had

already cleared the windshield and covered it with tiny drops.

 

And that white, opaque world into which he was looking was no longer

snow but fog--the densest fog that Tommy had ever encountered.

 

Fog like white wool, drifting past him in fleecy flakes that looked as

if they had solid substance. Warm fog that was like balm upon his frozen

skin, but of a warmth that was impossible within a few miles of the

frozen pole.

 

Then there came a momentary break in it, and Tommy looked down and

uttered a cry of fear. Fear, because he knew that he must be dreaming.

 

Not more than a thousand feet beneath him he saw patches of snow, and

patches of--green grass, the brightest and most verdant green that he

had ever seen in his life.

 

He turned round at a touch on his shoulder. Dodd was leaning over him,

one hand pointing menacingly upward and onward.

 

"You fool," Tommy bellowed in his ear, "d'you think the south pole lies

over there? It's here! Yeah, don't you get it, Jimmy? Look down! This

valley--God, Jimmy, the south pole's a hole in the ground!"

 

And as he spoke he remembered vaguely some crank who had once insisted

that the two poles were hollow because--what was the fellow's reasoning?

Tommy could not remember it.

 

But there was no longer any doubt but that they were dropping into a

hole. Not more than a mile around, which explained why neither Scott nor

Amundsen had found it when they approximated to the site of the pole. A

hole--a warm hole, up which a current of warm air was rushing, forming

the white mist that now gradually thinned as the plane descended. The

plateau with its covering of eternal snows loomed in a white circle high

overhead. Underneath was green grass now--grass and trees!

 

* * * * *

 

The fog was nearly gone. The plane responded to the controls again.

Tommy pushed the stick forward and came round in a tighter circle.

 

And then something happened that he had not in the least expected. One

moment he seemed to be traveling in a complete calm, a sort of clear

funnel with a ring of swirling fog outside it--the next he was dropping

into a void!

 

There was no air resistance--there seemed hardly any air, for he felt a

choking in his throat, and a tearing at his lungs as he strove to

breathe. He heard a strangled cry from Dodd, and saw that he was

clutching with both hands at his throat, and his face was turning

purple.

 

The controls went limp in Tommy's hands. The plane, gyrating more

slowly, suddenly nosed down, hung for a moment in that void, and then

plunged toward the green earth, two hundred feet below, with appalling

swiftness.

 

Tommy realized that a crash was inevitable. He threw his goggles up over

his forehead, turned and waved to Dodd in ironic farewell. He saw the

earth rush up at him--then came the shattering crash, and then oblivion!

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

_Beetles and Humans_

 

 

How long he had remained unconscious, Tommy had no means of determining.

Of a sudden he found himself lying on the ground beside the shattered

plane, with his eyes wide open.

 

He stared at it, and stared about him, without understanding where he

was, or what had happened to him. His first idea was that he had crashed

on the golf links near Mitchell Field, Long Island, for all about him

were stretches of verdant grass and small shrubby plants. Then, when he

remembered the expedition, he was convinced that he had been dreaming.

 

What brought him to a saner view was the discovery that he was enveloped

in furs which were insufferably hot. He half raised himself and

succeeded in unfastening his fur coat, and thus discovered that

apparently none of his bones was broken.

 

But the plane must have fallen from a considerable height to have been

smashed so badly. Then Tommy discovered that he was lying upon an

extensive mound of sand, thrown up as by some gigantic mole, for burrow

tracks ran through it in every direction. It was this that had saved his

life.

 

Something was moving at his side. It was half-submerged in the

sand-pile, and it was moving parallel to him with great rapidity.

 

A grayish body, half-covered with grains of sand emerged, waving two

enormously long tentacles. It was a shrimp, but fully three feet in

length, and Tommy had never before had any idea what an unpleasant

object a shrimp is.

 

Tommy staggered to his feet and dropped nearer the plane, eyeing the

shrimp with horror. But he was soon relieved as he discovered that it

was apparently harmless. It slithered away and once more buried itself

in the pile of sand.

 

Now Tommy was beginning to remember. He looked into the wreckage of the

plane. Jim Dodd was not there. He called his name repeatedly, and there

was no response, except a dull echo from the ice-mountains behind the

veil of fog.

 

* * * * *

 

He went to the other side of the plane, he scanned the ground all about

him. Jimmy had disappeared. It was evident that he was nowhere near, for

Tommy could see the whole of the lower scope of the bowl on every side

of him. He had walked away--or he had been carried away! Tommy thought

of the shrimp, and shuddered. What other fearsome monsters might inhabit

that extraordinary valley?

 

He sat down, leaning against the wreck of the fuselage, and tried to

adjust his mind, tried to keep himself from going mad. He knew now that

the flight had been no dream, that he was a member of his uncle's

expedition, that he had flown with Jim toward the pole, had crashed in a

vacuum. But where was Jim? And how were they going to get out of the

damn place?

 

Something like a heap of stones not far away attracted Tommy's

attention. Perhaps Jim Dodd was lying behind that. Once more Tommy got

upon his feet and began walking toward it. On the way, he stumbled

against the sharp edge of something that protruded from the ground.

 

It cut his leg sharply, and, with a curse, he began rubbing his shin and

looking at the thing. Then he saw that it was another of the fossil

shells, half-buried in the marshy ooze on which he was treading. The

ground in this lower part of the valley was a swamp, on account of the

very fine mist falling from the fog clouds that surrounded it

impenetrably on every side.

 

Then Tommy came upon another shell, and then another. And now he saw

that there were piles of what he had taken to be rock everywhere, and

that this was not rock but great heaps of the shells, all equally

intact.

 

Hundreds of thousands of the prehistoric beetles must have died in that

valley, perhaps overcome by some cataclysm.

 

* * * * *

 

Tommy examined the heap near which he stood; he yelled Dodd's name, but

again no answer came.

 

Instead, something began to stir among the heaps of shells. For a moment

Tommy hoped against hope that it was Dodd, but it wasn't Dodd.

 

_It was a living beetle!_

 

A beetle fully five feet high as it stood erect, a pair of enormous

wings outspread. And the head, which was larger than a man's, was the

most frightful object Tommy had ever seen.

 

Jim Dodd would have said at once that this was one of the Curculionidae,

or snout beetles, for a prolongation of the head between the eyes formed

a sort of beak a foot in length. The mouth, which opened downward, was

armed with terrific mandibles, while the huge, compound eyes looked like

enormous crystals of cut glass. Immediately in front of the eyes were

two mandibles as long as a man's arms, with feathery processes at the

ends. In addition to these there were three pairs of legs, the front

pair as long as a man's, the hind pair almost as long as a horse's.

 

* * * * *

 

Paralyzed with horror, Tommy watched the monster, which had apparently

been disturbed by the vibrations of his voice, extract itself from among

the shells. Then, with a bound that covered fifteen feet, it had

lessened the distance between them by half.

 

And then a still more amazing thing happened. For of a sudden the hard

shell slipped from the thorax, the wing-cases dropped off, the whole of

the bony parts slipped to the ground with a clang, and a soft,

defenseless thing went slithering away among the rocks.

 

The beetle had moulted!

 

Tommy dropped to the ground in the throes of violent nausea.

 

Then, looking up again, he saw the girl!

 

* * * * *

 

She was about a hundred yards away from him, very close to the fallen

plane, and she must have emerged from a large hole in the ground which

Tommy could now see under a ledge of overhanging rock.

 

She seemed to be dressed in a single garment which fell to her knees,

and appeared to fit tightly about her body, but as she came nearer,

Tommy, watching her, petrified by this latest apparition, discovered

that it was woven of her own hair, which must have been of immense

length, for it fell naturally to her shoulders, and thence was woven

into this close-fitting material, a fringe an inch or two in length

extending beneath the selvage.

 

She was about six feet tall, and apparently made after the normal human

pattern. She moved with a slow, majestic swing, and if ever any female

had seemed to Tommy to have the appearance of an angel, this unknown

woman did.

 

She was so fair, in that flossy, flaxen covering, she moved with such

easy grace, that Tommy, gaping, gradually crept nearer to her. She did

not seem to see him. She was stooping over the very sand heap into which

he had fallen. Suddenly, with lightning-like rapidity, her arms shot

out, her hands began tunneling in the sand. With a cry of triumph she

pulled out the shrimp Tommy had seen, or another like it, and, stripping

it off the shell, began devouring it with evident relish.

 

In the midst of her meal the girl raised her head and looked at Tommy.

He saw that her eyes were filmed, vacant, dead. Then of a sudden a third

membrane was drawn back across the pupils, and she saw him.

 

She let the shrimp drop to the ground, uttered a cry, and moved toward

him with a tottering gait. She groped toward him with outstretched arms.

And then she was blind again, for the membrane once more covered her

pupils. It was as if her eyes were unable to endure even the dim light

of the valley, through whose surrounding mists the low sun, setting just

above the horizon, was unable to diffuse itself save as a brightening of

the fog curtain.

 

* * * * *

 

Tommy stepped toward the girl. His outstretched hand touched hers. It

was unquestionably a woman's hand he held, delicately warm, with

exquisitely moulded fingers, in whose touch there seemed to be, for the

girl, some tactile impression of him.

 

Again that membrane was drawn back from the girl's pupils for a fleeting

flash. Tommy saw two eyes of intense black, their color contrasting

curiously with the flaxen color of her hair and her white skin, almost

the tint of an albino's. Those eyes had surveyed him, and appeared

satisfied that he was one of her kind. She could not have seen very much

in that almost instantaneous flash of vision. Queer, that membrane--as

if she had been used to living in the dark, as if the full light of the

day was unbearable!

 

She drew her hand away. Soft vocals came from her lips. Suddenly she

turned swiftly. She could not have seen, but before Tommy had seen, she

had sensed the presence of the old man who was creeping out of the hole

in the mountainside.

 

He moved forward craftily, and then pounced upon the sand pile, and in a

moment had pulled out another of the big shrimps, which he proceeded to

devour with greedy relish. The girl, leaving Tommy's side, joined him in

that unpleasant feast.

 

And in the midst of it a flood came pouring from the hole--a flood of

living beetles, covering the ground in fifteen-foot leaps as they dashed

at the two.

 

To his horror, Tommy saw Jimmy Dodd among them, wrapped in his fur coat

like a mummy, and being pushed and rolled forward like a football.

 

For a moment Tommy hesitated, torn between his solicitude for Jim Dodd

and that for the girl. Then, as the foremost of the monsters bounded to

her side, he ran between them. The vicious jaws snapped within six

inches of Tommy's face, with a force that would have carried away an

ear, or shredded the cheek, if they had met.

 

* * * * *

 

Tommy struck out with all his might, and his fist clanged on the

resounding shell so that the blood spurted from his bruised knuckles. He

had struck the monster squarely upon the thorax, and he had not

discommoded it in the least. It turned on him, its glassy, many-faceted

eyes glaring with a cold, infernal light. Tommy struck out again with

his left hand, this time upon the pulpy flesh of the downward-opening

mouth.

 

An inch higher, and he would have impaled his hand upon the beak, with a

point like a needle, and evidently used for purposes of attack, since it

was not connected with the mandibles. The blow appeared to fall in the

only vulnerable place. The monster dropped upon its back and lay there,

unable to reverse itself, its antenna and forelegs waving in the air,

and the rear legs rasping together in a shrill, strident shriek.

 

Instantly, as Tommy darted out of the way, the swarm fell upon the

helpless monster and began devouring it, tearing strips of flesh from

the lower shell, which in the space of a half-minute was reduced simply

to bone. The most horrible feature of this act of cannibalism was the

complete silence with which it was performed, except for the rasping of

the dying monster's legs. It was evident that the huge beetles had no

vocal apparatus.

 

For the moment left unguarded, Jim Dodd flung down the collar of his fur

coat, stared about him, and recognized Tommy.

 

"My God, it's you!" he yelled. "Well, can you--?"

 

He had no time to finish his sentence. A pair of antenna went round his

neck from behind. At the same instant Tommy, the old man, and the girl

were gripped by the monsters, which, forming a solid phalanx about them,

began hustling them in the direction of the hole. Resistance was utterly

impossible. Tommy felt as if he was being pushed along by a moving wall

of stone.

 

Inside the opening it was completely dark. Tommy shouted to Dodd, but

the strident sounds of the moving legs drowned his cries. He was being

pushed forward into the unknown.

 

* * * * *

 

Suddenly the ground seemed to fall away beneath his feet. He struggled,

cried out, and felt himself descending through the air.

 

For a full half-minute he went downward at a speed that constricted his

throat so that he could hardly draw breath. Then, just as he had nerved

himself for the imminent crash, the speed of his descent was checked. In

another moment he found that he was slowing to a standstill in mid-air.

 

He was beginning to float backward--upward. But the wall of moving

shells, pushing against him, forced him on, downward, and yet apparently

against the force of gravitation.

 

Then of a sudden Tommy was aware of a dim light all about him. His feet

touched earth and grass as softly as a thistledown alighting.

 

He found himself seated in the same dim light upon red grass, and

staring into Jimmy's face.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

 

_Ten Miles Underground_

 

 

"What I was going to say when we were interrupted, was, 'Can you beat

it?'" Jimmy Dodd observed, with admirable sang-froid.

 

They were still seated on the red grass, gazing about them at what

looked like an illimitable plain, and upward into depths of darkness. It

was warm, and the light, furnished by what appeared to be luminous

vegetation, was about that of twilight.

 

On every side were clumps of trees and shrubs, which formed centers of

phosphorescent illumination, but for the most part the land was open,

and here and there human figures appeared, moving with head down and

arms hanging earthward.

 

"No, I'm damned if I can," said Tommy. "What happened to you after we

crashed?"

 

"Why, first thing I knew, I found myself riding on the back of a fossil

beetle, apparently one of the _curculionidae_," said Dodd.

 

"Never, mind being so precise, Jimmy. Let's call it a beetle. Go on."

 

"They set me down inside the hole and seemed to be investigating me,

the whole swarm of them. Of course, I thought I was dead, and come to

my just reward, especially when I saw those beaks. Then one of them

began tickling my face with its antenna, and I drew up my fur collar.

They didn't seem to like the feel of the fur, and after a while the

whole gang started hustling me back again, like a nest of ants carrying

something they don't want outside their hill. And then you bobbed up."

 

"Well, my opinion is you saved your life by pulling up your collar,"

said Tommy. "Looks to me as if it's a case of the survival of the

fittest, said fittest being the insect, and the human race taking second

place. You know what the humans here live on, don't you?"

 

"No, what?"

 

"Shrimps as big as poodles. If you'd seen that girl and the old man

getting outside them, you'd realize that there seems to be a food

shortage in this part of the world. Say, where in thunder are we,

Jimmy?"

 

"Haven't you guessed yet, Travers?" asked Dodd, a spice of malice in his voice.