The Earth-Tube (19 page)

He saw that they still were not convinced.

“Who,” asked the red-haired man, “invented this device, or devices? We understood that you hadn’t even a sample of the Asian metal to experiment with.”

Another interjected a question. “Why do you say you have or expect to have’ these devices? Is that another way of saying that they haven’t yet been invented or discovered, but that you hope they soon will be?”

The Secretary had frequently granted interviews to reporters in the kindlier days of his first glory; he had then learned to expect from them a mild, though somewhat cynical deference. Their new attitude alarmed him; he felt that he must make some further explanation. He could, at least, admit part of the plan afoot and save the situation by not admitting all of it.

“You reckon without our resources, gentlemen,” he replied, with a large gesture. “Last night we sent a brilliant and able technician into the Asian stronghold itself to spy upon these people and learn their secrets first-hand. Of course we could have worked them out in our laboratories, but we preferred the quicker and cheaper way. Our investigator. if I may call him that. will be back in a day or two at the most, and we will then hurl these fellows back, you may depend on that!”

He saw that the red-head was regarding him with incredulity.

“Who,” he asked abruptly, “is this technician?”

The Secretary hesitated. He had not intended the disclosures to carry him so far in that direction. He had certainly not intended to disclose the name; it might do untold harm, to himself, to King, and perhaps to all the plans of the defense. He was alarmed at what he had already revealed.

“That,” he said firmly, “I cannot tell you.”

The reporters began to move toward the door. The red-head turned and grinned.

“Upon such a flimsy basis you ask us to believe that the Government is actually doing something to protect North America,” he said. “If. “ and he placed a long emphasis upon the word of doubt, “if, indeed, you have actually sent a spy to the Asian stronghold, I have serious doubts that he will survive to tell you any secrets he happens to learn. There are only two or three men in the country to-day who could do it. and I don’t believe you have sent any of those.”

“I have,” declared the Secretary firmly, “sent one of those!”

“King Henderson, for instance?”

A look of horror crossed the Secretary’s face. He could not deny it and keep his voice steady. Yet he refused to affirm it. He kept his lips tightly together as the correspondents filed out of the door and appeared to bq glancing airily about the room, to avoid meeting their eyes. But he did not miss the malicious gleam of a smile on the face of the red-head as he, the last of them, passed through the door. The reporter had trapped him into admitting what he had clearly determined not to admit, and both knew it.

An hour later he saw that the lead had been followed up. The afternoon papers were full of the news that King Henderson, Dr. Scott’s assistant and a member of the War Council, had gone voluntarily into the Asian city alone, to spy out the invaders’ secrets in a desperate attempt to save the continent. They carried the further information that no word had been heard from him since he had landed on the island, though it was known that he had carried with him a special radio transmitter for communication with his base.

By nightfall the news radio was carrying broadcasts of the story, with additional details. Dr. Scott and his daughter, as well as the President, were both vexed and alarmed at the announcement, fearing that the Asians would ultimately get hold of it and make King’s work more difficult, if indeed he were still alive. Translating his anger into action, the President had temporarily suspended the Secretary and had placed the necessary work of directing the army upon two of his subordinates.

In addition, he ordered the broadcasting stopped, but it was too late. Already it had been picked up on the short wave networks and sent to Europe and South America. By ten o’clock the Asians had also picked it up, and word went to Tiplis that a spy was hiding in the metal city, seeking the secrets of undulal. What had been only a routine police-hunt, in search of a suspected lady and her servant, instantly became an intensified siege of great military importance. Extra guards were posted in every corridor. All citizens and slaves who could not produce their credentials and account for their actions were rounded up and held for investigation. It would take a clever spy indeed to slip again through the fingers of the Asian police in Tiplis, and as for King and Diane, a patrolman would be waiting for them at whatever rabbit-hole or trapdoor they should choose to show their heads.

V

The secret passage was narrow and winding and lighted only by the dim glow overhead, which revealed little of the route. King walked ahead, his fingers upon the butt of his automatic, inspecting at each turning the passage beyond before venturing into it.

Their direction seemed steadily upward, which Diane thought indicated that it was leading right to reach the laboratory. But before long they had lost entirely their sense of direction; they were unable to tell whether they were moving toward the center of the city, or toward its outer shell, or in a spiral fashion traversing a sector of it. They were surprised and a little frightened to observe, as they went along the tunnel, that the lights were blinking out behind them, so that the only illumination was in the portion of the tube in which they were walking. King paused once and retraced his steps to investigate, and was relieved to see that the lights, apparently operated by pressure contacts in the floor, came on again as he approached.

Reassured, they continued their tortuous upward journey. The hollow chambers through which they passed gave off eerie echoes of their footsteps; the lights from above cast weird shadows of the flowing Asian robes. Before them there was darkness and uncertainty; behind them darkness also and a danger from which they had narrowly escaped. It seemed hours before they came to the end of the passageway at a second round chamber almost exactly like the first. Across the way was a small platform, about five feet square, similar to the elevator upon which they had descended into the entrance of the passage.

Approaching firmly, King stepped upon the square of metal. Diane followed. For a moment they stood still, without speaking, listening eagerly for the whir of the machinery which would lift them to the door above.

But nothing happened. There was no sound.

Were they trapped within the hollow metal walls of Tiplis? King looked into Diane’s eyes seriously.

“I thought it was a lift, like the other,” he said.

Diane considered.

“It undoubtedly is,” she replied, “but we’ve got to start the machinery in some way as we did before.”

King was running his hands over the wall, tapping it lightly, but there was no response.

“Four is a mystic number with the Asians, as three used to be throughout most of the ancient world,” said Diane. “Four taps opened the other door. Try tapping four times on the platform at our feet.”

King raised his heel and brought it smartly against the metal. Again he struck it, and twice more. There was instantly the familiar whirring sound. The platform began, evenly and slowly, to rise. The light in the room went out as soon as they were clear of the floor, and in complete darkness they were borne upward a great distance, through a shaft whose metal walls were smooth and glassy to the touch. The platform was propelled by some quiet force from beneath. Only the odd, distant buzzing betrayed the presence of machinery of any kind.

“I am certain we are about to enter the laboratory,” whispered Diane. “At what part I don’t know; 1 am none too familiar with it as you might guess. If we succeed in getting in safely, we must observe quickly and be ready instantly to escape, for in the face of the edict barring visitors, I believe something of great importance is going on there.”

A glimmer of light showered down upon them suddenly from overhead, and they saw that a panel was slowly opening for them in the side of the shaft. They approached it at an even speed, and as their heads passed the threshold of the orifice King saw that an enormous room lay before them, a treasure house of mechanical, electrical, and chemical apparatus. It was the laboratory. at least one wing of it. The lift had brought them to a small balcony near a corner of the huge room and well above the heads of the workers in it. The balcony ran for a good way in either direction and seemed partly to encircle the laboratory. From it, at several points, flights of stairs ran down to the floor below.

So far they had been unobserved. The sound of the panel and the secret machinery was too low to be heard in such a place, where the hum and vibration of industry were going on everywhere. There were thousands of mechanics in the room, and most of them, King observed, were busy duplicating a contrivance which, he saw with horror, was an American airplane. The Asians had turned it upon its back, and partly dismantled it, the better, perhaps, to take the necessary measurements. There were as many as fifty skeleton fuselages already being constructed on nearby platforms, and mechanics were hurrying to and fro, adding parts and making calculations.

Lying as flat as possible upon the balcony, King crawled cautiously toward the edge, to obtain a view of another part of the enormous plant. Directly beneath the spot where he lay a section had been screened off from the rest of the laboratory by movable metal shields, as if to prevent others from seeing what was going on there. Inside this sheltered area, which was large enough for many men, only one worker was to be seen, and he, unlike the others, was dressed wholly in black, with a black half-mask drawn over his eyes. His garments were long, like draperies, and hung and trailed in points. A Mui Salvo, without doubt; his weird and unholy appearance branded him at once a priest, a wise man, or a charlatan.

He had not detected the presence of King upon the balcony above him, so great was his concentration upon a tremendous wheel of undulal which lay before him upon a weighty bench of polished wood. The metal wheel was large, but it appeared to have been spoiled in the making. It was eccentric, lop-sided; and at one edge, where there should have been cogs, there were only ungainly lumps, as if in some softer state the wheel had been dropped and ruined.

King gripped the edges of the bare metal floor, and hardly dared to breathe as he recognized the significance of what was happening below. The man in black, working with sure, quick movement, locked the ungainly wheel upon a truss, and muttering to himself, stood back a little and surveyed his work with approval. Behind him, upon the floor, stood a row of small, long-necked bottles,
¹⁹
apparently made of glass and silvered on the outside to reflect the light and heat. Taking up one of these by the neck, the Mui Salvo moved ceremoniously, once to the right and once to the left, and bowing, brought the silvered flask downward with a crash upon the deformed undulal. The glass shattered, and a pale, bluish liquid spurted suddenly out upon the wheel, boiling and fuming upon the metal.

The result was astonishing. At first there was only a sensation as of frost in the air. King and Diane, who had by this time joined him upon the edge of the balcony, felt suddenly as if they were standing before the opened door of a refrigerator. But they did not long notice the discomfort, for, as they watched, the portion of the wheel which had been wetted by the liquid changed its color. It lost the familiar glassy brightness which characterized undulal; it became dull, like old lead, and appeared somewhat crystalline. The black-robed magician stood back at a safe distance and applied another bottle of the liquid to the doomed wheel. Only a very little more was needed. The metal which had withstood unmeasured pressure and heat, which could not be blown apart by explosives or chipped or cut or scorched with flame, began to melt away under the influence of the boiling blue liquor with a furious crackling sound, like the exploding of a handful of firecrackers at a Fourth of July celebration.

The dissolution spread,
²⁰
like the melting of ice, passing from the imperfect parts first wetted to the perfect. The entire wheel began to decay, and in a minute it was gone.

The tall black priest was upon his knees before the table, moving his hands back and forth to the rhythm of a low-toned incantation. The undulal was no more. In its stead there lay upon the table and the floor near by a crumbled litter of crystalline substance, and drops of a liquid which might have been molten silver, save that they were very cold. On everything there was frost; it had settled upon the table and the crystals and the floor. The whole corner of the room had been thoroughly chilled like the air after a summer hailstorm.

King rose to his feet, unable to contain his excitement any longer.

“Cold!” he exclaimed aloud. “Cold. liquid air! It was the cold that did it!”

“Be still!” Diane, unceremoniously scrambling back from the edge of the balcony, clutched upward at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

King recovered immediately from his hysterical emotion and went down on his hands and knees beside her. Together they crawled rapidly toward the secret door, which had now closed. King tapped four times in the proper place, and was relieved to hear the answering whir which meant safety and escape.

But it was too late. The crews of mechanics in the room, aroused by King’s impulsive exclamation
²¹
and the calls of the frantic and alarmed Mui Salvo, swarmed toward the stairways leading to the balcony. It was immediately evident that the leisurely panel would not open in time for them to escape. King perceived with despair that his own lack of control had betrayed him to the enemy just as he had made the discovery which would have liberated the Americas.

Diane was clutching at the door, but all her strength would make it open no faster. Drawing his automatic, King eyed the nearest stairway for the appearance of the first of the Asian mechanics.

“Diane,” he whispered, “they probably did not see you. Slip through the door as soon as it is open wide enough. Hide in the passageway until you can escape and get to your apartment. Then, for God’s sake, take my boat and leave the city, or get word to the Americans somehow that they should attack the undulal with cold. Cold, remember that! Tell them to fill their shells with liquid air or anything that will produce intense cold, and the metal tanks will melt away!”