Darkness and Dawn (37 page)

"But if everybody's dead, as you say, why hunt for men?"

"Perhaps a handful may have survived among the highlands of the
Rockies. I imagine that after the first great explosion there followed
a series of terrible storms, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tidal
waves and so on. You remember how I found the bones of a whale in
lower Broadway; and many of the ruins in New York show the action of
the sea—they're laid flat in such a manner as to indicate that the
island was washed on one or two occasions by monster waves.

"Well, all these disturbances probably finished up what few survivors
escaped, except possibly among the mountains of the West. A few
scattered colonies may have survived a while—mining camps, for
instance, or isolated prospectors, or what-not. They may all have died
out, or again, they may have come together and reestablished some
primitive form of barbarous or even savage life by this time. There's
no telling. Our imperative problem is to reach that section and
explore it thoroughly. For there, if anywhere, we'll find survivors of
our race."

"How about that great maelstrom that nearly got us?" asked the girl."
Can you connect that with the catastrophe?"

"I think so. My idea is that, in some way or other, the sea is being
sucked down into the interior of the earth and then hurled out again;
maybe there's a gradual residue being left; maybe a great central lake
or sea has formed. Who knows? At any rate all the drainage system of
the country seems to have been changed and reversed in the most
curious and unaccountable manner. I think we should find, if we could
investigate everything thoroughly, that this vast chasm here is
intimately connected with the whole thing."

These and many other questions perplexed the travelers, but most of
all they sought to know the breadth of the vast gap and to determine
if it had, as they hoped, another side, or if it were indeed the edge
of an enormous mass split bodily off the earth.

Stern believed he had an answer to this problem on the afternoon of
the second day. For many hours he had hung his pendulums over the
cliff, noted deflections, taken triangulations, and covered the
surface of the smooth stone with X's, Y's, Z's, sines and cosines and
abstruse formulae—all scrawled with charcoal, his only means of
writing.

At last he finished the final equation, and, with a smile of triumph
and relief, got to his feet again.

Back to the girl, who was cooking over an odorous fire of cedar, he
made his way, rejoicing.

"I've got it!" he shouted gladly. "Making reasonable allowances for
depth, I've got it!"

"Got what?"

"The probable width!"

"Oh!" And she stood gazing at him in admiration, beautiful and strong
and graceful. "You mean to say—"

"I'm giving the chasm a hundred miles' depth. That's more than anybody
could believe possible—twice as much. On that assumption, my tests
show the distance to the other side—and there is another side, by the
way!—can't be over—"

"Five hundred miles?"

"Nonsense! Not over one hundred to one-fifty. I'm going on a liberal
allowance for error, too. It may not be over seventy-five. The—"

"But if that's as far as it is, why can't we see the other side?"

"With all that chemicalized vapor rising constantly? Who knows what
elements may be in it? Or what polarization may be taking place?"

"Polarization?"

"I mean, what deflection and alteration of light? No wonder we can't
see! But we can fly! And we're going to, what's more!"

"Going to make a try for Chicago, then?" she asked, her eyes lighting
up joyfully at thought of the adventure.

"To-morrow morning, sure!"

"But the alcohol?"

"We've still got what we started with from Detroit, minus only what
we've burned reaching this place. And we reckoned when we set out that
it would far more than be enough. Oh, that part of it's all right!"

"Well, you know best," she answered. "I trust you in all things,
Allan. But now just look at this roast partridge; come, dear, let
to-morrow take care of itself. It's supper-time now!"

After the meal they went to the flat rock and sat for an hour while
the sun went down beyond the void. Its disappearance seemed to
substantiate the polarization theory. There was no sudden obliteration
of the disk by a horizon. Rather the sun faded away, redder and
duller; then slowly losing form and so becoming a mere blur of
crimson, which in turn grew purple and so gradually died away to
nothing.

For a long time they sat in the deepening gloom, their rifles close at
hand, saying little, but thinking much. The coming of night had
sobered them to a sense of what now inevitably lay ahead. The solemn
purple pall that adumbrated the world and the huge nothingness before
them, so silent, so immutable and pregnant with terrible mysteries,
brought them close together.

The vague, untrodden forest behind them, where the night-sounds of the
wild dimly reechoed now and then, filled them with indefinable
emotions. And that night sleep was slow in coming.

Each realized that, despite all calculations and all skill, the morrow
might be their last day of life. But the morning light, golden and
clear above the eastern sky-line of tall conifers, dispelled all
brooding fears. They were both up early and astir, in preparation for
the crucial flight. Stern went over the edge of the chasm, while
Beatrice prepared breakfast, and made some final observations of wind,
air currents and atmosphere density.

An eagle which he saw soaring over the abyss, more than half a mile
from its edge, convinced him a strong upward current existed to-day,
as on the day when they had made their short flight over the void. The
bird soared and circled and finally shot away to northward, without a
wing-flap, almost in the manner of a vulture. Stern knew an eagle
could not imitate the feat without some aid in the way of an up-draft.

"And if that draft is steady and constant all the way across," thought
he, "it will result in a big saving of fuel. Given a sufficient rising
current, we could volplane all the way across with a very slight
expenditure of alcohol. It looks now as though everything were coming
on first-rate. Couldn't be better. And what a day for an excursion!"

By nine o'clock all was ready. Along the land a mild south wind was
blowing. Though the day was probably the 5th of October or thereabout,
no signs of autumn yet were blazoned in the forest. The morning was
perfect, and the travelers' spirits rose in unison with the abounding
beauty of the day.

Stern had given the Pauillac another final going over, tightening the
stays and laterals, screwing up here a loosened nut, there a bolt,
making certain all was in perfect order.

At nine-fifteen, after he had had a comforting pipe, they made a clean
getaway, rising along the edge of the chasm, then soaring in huge
spirals.

"I want all the altitude I can get," Stern shouted at the girl as they
climbed steadily higher. "We may need it to coast on. And from a mile
or two up maybe we can get a glimpse of the other side."

But though they ascended till the aneroid showed eight thousand five
hundred feet, nothing met their gaze but the same pearly blue vapor
which veiled the mystery before them. And Stern, satisfied now that
nothing could be gained by any further ascent, turned the machine due
west, and sent her skimming like a swallow out over the tremendous
nothingness below.

As the earth faded behind them they began to feel distinctly a warm
and pungent wind that rose beneath—a steady current, as from some
huge chimney that lazily was pouring out its monstrous volume of hot
vapors.

Away and away behind them slid the lip of this gigantic gash across
the world; and now already with the swift rush of the plane the solid
earth had begun to fade and to grow dim.

Stern only cast a glance at the sun and at his compass, hung there in
gimbals before him, and with firm hand steadied the machine for the
long problematical flight to westward. Behind them the sun kept even
with their swift pace; and very far below and ahead, at times they
thought to see the fleeing shadow of the biplane cast now and then on
masses of formless vapor that rose from the unsounded deeps.

Definitely committed now to this tremendous venture, both Stern and
the girl settled themselves more firmly in their seats. No time to
feel alarm, no time for introspection, or for thoughts of what might
lie below, what fate theirs must be if the old Pauillac failed them
now!

No time save for confidence in the stout mechanism and in the skill of
hand and brain that was driving the great planes, with a roaring rush
like a gigantic gull, a swooping rise and fall in long arcs over the
hills of air, across the vast enigma of that space!

Stern's whole attention was fixed on driving, just on the manipulation
of the swift machine. Exhaust and interplay, the rhythm of each
whirling cam and shaft, the chatter of the cylinders, the droning
diapason of the blades, all blent into one intricate yet perfect
harmony of mechanism; and as a leader knows each instrument in the
great orchestra and follows each, even as his eye reads the score, so
Stern's keen ear analyzed each sound and action and reaction and knew
all were in perfect tune and resonance.

The machine—no early and experimental model, such as were used in the
first days of flying, from 1900 to 1915, but one of the perfected and
self-balancing types developed about 1920, the year when the Great
Death had struck the world—responded nobly to his skill and care.
From her landing-skids to the farthest tip of her ailerons she seemed
alive, instinct with conscious and eager intelligence.

Stern blessed her mentally with special pride and confidence in her
mercury equalizing balances. Proud of his machine and of his skill,
superb like Phaeton whirling the sun-chariot across the heavens, he
gave her more and still more speed.

Below nothing, nothing save vapors, with here and there an open space
where showed the strange dull purple of the abyss. Above, to right, to
left, nothing—absolute vacant space.

Gone now was all sight of the land that they had left. Unlike
balloonists who always see dense clouds or else the earth, they now
saw nothing. All alone with the sun that rushed behind them in their
skimming flight, they fled like wraiths across the emptiness of the
great void.

Stern glanced at the barometer, and grunted with surprise.

"H'm! Twelve thousand four hundred and fifty feet—and I've been
jockeying to come down at least five hundred feet already!" thought
he. "How the devil can
that
be?"

The explanation came to him. But it surprised him almost as much as
the noted fact.

"Must be one devil of a wind blowing up out of that place," he
pondered, "to carry us up nearly four thousand feet, when I've been
trying to descend. Well, it's all right, anyhow—it all helps."

He looked at the spinning anemometer. It registered a speed of
ninety-seven miles an hour. Yet now that they were out of sight of any
land, only the rush of the wind and the enormous vibration of the
plane conveyed an idea of motion. They might as well have been hung in
mid-space, like Mohammed's tomb, as have been rushing forward; there
was no visible means of judging what their motion really might be.

"Unique experience in the history of mankind!" shouted Stern to the
girl. "The world's invisible to us."

She nodded and smiled back at him, her white teeth gleaming in the
strange, bluish light that now enveloped them.

Stern, keenly attentive to the engine, advanced the spark another
notch, and now the needle crept to 102 1/2.

"We'll be across before we know it," thought he. "At this rate, I
shouldn't be surprised to sight land any minute now."

A quarter-hour more the Pauillac swooped along, cradling in her swift
flight to westward.

But all at once the man started violently. Forward he bent, staring
with widened eyes at the tube of the fuel-gage.

He blinked, as though to convince himself he had not seen aright, then
stared again; and as he looked a sudden grayness overspread his face.

"
What?
" he exclaimed, then raised his head and for a moment sniffed,
as though to catch some odor, elusive yet ominous, which he had for
some time half sensed yet paid no heed to.

Then suddenly he knew the truth; and with a cry of fear bent, peering
at the fuel-tank.

There, quivering suspended from the metal edge of the aluminum tank,
hung a single clear white drop—
alcohol!

Even as Stern looked it fell, and at once another took its place, and
was shaken off only to be succeeded by a third, a fourth, a fifth!

The man understood. The ancient metal, corroded almost through from
the inside, had been eaten away. That very morning a hole had formed
in the tank. And now a leak—existing since what moment he could not
tell—was draining the very life-blood of the machine.

"The alcohol!" cried Stern in a hoarse, terrible voice, his wide eyes
denoting his agitation. With a quivering hand he pointed.

"My God! It's all leaked out—there's not a quart left in the tank!
We're lost—lost in the bottomless abyss!"

At realization of the ghastly situation that confronted them,
Stern's heart stopped beating for a moment. Despite his courage, a
sick terror gripped his soul; he felt a sudden weakness, and in his
ears the rushing wind seemed shouting mockeries of death.

As in a dream he felt the girl's hand close in fear upon his arm, he
heard her crying something—but what, he knew not.

Then all at once he fought off the deadly horror. He realized that
now, if ever, he needed all his strength, resource, intelligence. And,
with a violent effort, he flung off his weakness. Again he gripped the
wheel. Thought returned. Though the end might be at hand, thank God
for even a minute's respite!