Beyond The Barrier Part 11

Naismith saw a clear s.p.a.ce, some low workbenches, and leaning against the wall, a thing that might have been the skeleton of a rocket-sled. It was a tapered bar of metal, six feet long, with two crosspieces. Controls were set into the upper crosspiece, and Naismith could imagine the rider lying on the shaft, feet on the lower crosspiece, hands gripping the upper one like handlebars....

"That is the time machine?" he asked, half incredulously.

"No, not yet. It can be adapted as such. The inventors were trying to make a device for exploring the interior of the Earth.

They hoped in this way to escape the devastation which over- took them. But all they succeeded in doing was to neutralize matter. If you boarded the machine as it now is, you would simply fall through the Earth, and go on falling. The pro- pulsive unit is not installed."

Naismith glanced around. Tools lay on the workbenches, among scattered papers, as if someone had laid them aside only an hour ago. ... He felt a touch of uneasiness. "What hap- pened to them?" he asked.

"Killed in the first attack," Lall said emotionlessly. "That black cloud you saw, just before we stopped-that was the bombs."

"How-?" began Naismith. But already Lall was drawing the child back beside her; Churan's fingers were busy on the controls. Naismith felt himself lifted as the shadow-egg bulged again. Then he was dropped unceremoniously on the stone floor. The shadow-egg hovered a few feet away.

"One thing she forgot to tell you," said Churan, with an unpleasant smile. "The second attack is going to take place in just thirty seconds. That is the one that pulverizes this City to a depth of fifty meters."

It was like a pailful of icy water in the face. Naismith found himself thinking with cold clarity, Then the workers must have gone down to shelter. That's why there are no bodies.

"But why?" he said, taking a step closer. His mind was ferociously concentrated on the shadow-egg: he must succeed in getting back in, somehow ..."You should not have told us about the gun, Mr. Naismith,"

said Lall, watching him through narrowed eyes.

Realization struck him. The aliens had not sent the apparition of the gun. They had not sent the dreams, either. Then there were others, who- "Ten seconds," said Churan, glancing up from his controls.

"The lie detector-" said Naismith desperately.

"They know about you," replied Lall. "Therefore you are useless to us." Her face went hard and ugly. "The whole effort is wasted."

"Five seconds," added Churan. "Four. Three. . . ."

Naismith whirled. In one leap he reached the skeletal machine; feet and hands were on the crosspieces. He found a lever under his fingers, pulled it over hard.

The world went grayish and unreal around him. As it toppled, the machine began to sink into the floor-falling, as if the stone floor and the earth beneath it were so much mist.

Once more, before the darkness closed over his head, the last things he saw were the triumphant smiles of the aliens.

Chapter Eleven.

Naismith's first emotion was a consuming rage. Gathering himself, he kicked against the crossbar, flung his body upward -and was hurled back again by a curved, elastic wall. He landed hard against the metal framework, which began to revolve slowly and dizzyingly around him. The falling sensa- tion continued.

His one opportunity was gone: for a moment that was all he could think of. If he had been able to leap out of the machine's field during the first second of its fall . . . but it was impossible to get out of the field without turning off the machine, as he had just discovered.

In fact, the opportunity had been illusory. He had been doomed from the moment he turned on the machine. Now he was falling, falling endlessly-to what fate?

The aliens had told him one truth and one lie; he had taken the lie for the truth, exactly as they had intended him to do.

Rage and despair all but choked him, as he clung to the metal frame work, falling, in darkness and silence. He wanted to live!

A faint hope came, as his fingers touched the control k.n.o.bs on the crossbar. If the aliens had lied about this, too . . .

Cautiously he tried one k.n.o.b after another, avoiding the lever which had turned the machine on. There was no perceptibleresult, except that, when he had turned the third k.n.o.b, he felt a cool breath of air.

There was something he had not even considered: at least he would not smother on his way down. . . . But he did not succeed in arresting his fall, or changing its direction, so far as he could tell, by a hair's breadth.

The thought of the gulf below him was hideous. What, actually, was happening to him at this moment? The answer came at once. He was acting out one of the oldest physics problems in the book, something that every freshman "was familiar with-the imaginary tunnel drilled through the Earth.

In fact, his body was a harmonic oscillator. a.s.suming a h.o.m.ogeneous Earth and a non-rotating frame, he would de- scribe a long narrow ellipse around the Earth's center. His grip on the crossbar tightened convulsively. Of course-and unless friction r.e.t.a.r.ded him too much, he would rise at the antipodal point to exactly the same level he had started from!

Wait, now-he had fallen from the floor of an underground chamber perhaps a hundred feet or so under the surface . . .

Where was he going to come out?

The moment the question occurred to him, he realized that It was of vital importance. He had entered the Earth near Lake Michigan, probably not far from the site of Chicago. If he went straight through the planet, he should come out some- where in the Indian Ocean ... and Chicago, he was sure, was several hundred feet above sea level!

Wait a moment ... he was neglecting the rotation of the Earth; that would bring him out some distance westward of the antipodal point. How far depended on the period of his motion. . . . Call the radius of the Earth four thousand miles -about twenty million feet, for convenience. Gravity at the surface of the Earth, thirty-two feet per second per second. The square root of twenty million over thirty-two would be two hundred and fifty times the square root of ten ... times pi...

about twenty-five hundred seconds. Call it forty-two minutes.

He ran through the calculation once more, found no error.

Very well, in forty-two minutes, if he was right, he would be emerging from the far side of the planet. In the meantime, the rotation of the Earth would have brought his exit point about ten or eleven degrees westward. ... It was all right: that would still be in the ocean.

He took a deep breath. At least he would come out, not cycle inside the Earth until his momentum was used up. If his calculations were right- How long had he been falling?

Cursing himself, he fumbled for his wrist.w.a.tch. The dial was not luminous, but with a nail-file from his pocket he pried up the crystal, felt the hands with his fingertips. They indicated about ten minutes after nine. He had been falling for whatseemed half an hour or more, but was probably less than five minutes. a.s.sume, then, that he had begun his fall at 9:05 by this watch. The time it showed was local California time as of 1980 A.D.-curious to think of this mechanism still faithfully keeping track of the minutes now buried thousands of years in the past... but that did not matter.

At 9:47, he should emerge. If friction was a negligible factor, and he could not a.s.sume otherwise, then he would rise to a height of two or three hundred feet above the ocean . . . top high. He felt himself begin to sweat, as he realized that it would be necessary to chance falling back through the Earth -all the way through to the Western hemisphere, then back again, hoping that in those two additional pa.s.sages, friction would bring him out at a level from which he could hope to fall safely.

Luckily, there was plenty of room in the ocean. Two more pa.s.sages would bring him westward only twenty-odd degrees. ...

A feeling of discomfort drew his attention. He was uneasy: what had he been neglecting?

Friction: what if it were not negligible? For that matter, what about the interior heat of the Earth?

He was to pa.s.s near the center of the core, which was thought to be at about four thousand degrees centigrade . . .

Something was wrong. He reached out quickly, touched the hollow curve of the force-sh.e.l.l. It was neither warm nor cool to his senses. But he had already been falling ... he felt the hands of the watch again . . . more than six minutes . . . t squared, call it a hundred thirty thousand, times one-half the acceleration-two million feet, or something close to four hundred miles.

While part of his mind to grasp that, another part went on coldly calculating.

Temperature of the Earth's crust increased with depth, by about thirty degrees centigrade every kilometer. And the sh.e.l.l he was in was transparent to visible light. Therefore . . .

He was through the crust, falling through the mantle.

He should have pa.s.sed the red-heat stage long ago; by now he should be well into the white. And yet- He touched the sh.e.l.l again. It was still neither hot nor cold.

The darkness was unbroken.

Doubt struck him. Was he really falling? Suppose he was simply hanging here, suspended, without gravity . . . drifting, like a disembodied spirit, forever under the Earth?

He gripped the crossbar fiercely. The Universe obeyed certain laws, among these were the mutual attraction of material bodies and the equivalence of gravity and inertia. Hissenses told him that he was falling, and in this case it happened to be true-he was falling.

He touched the hands of the watch once more. They seemed hardly to have moved. He held the watch to his ear to listen for the whirr of the motor, then swore at himself impatiently.

Of course the watch was running: it was his own perception of.

time that was at fault.

If he only had a light. .. He would be seeing what no man had ever seen, the rocks of the deep mantle. In a few minutes he would be pa.s.sing through the rim of the outer core, into that curious region where nickel-iron was compressed into a liquid. ...

The watch again. The minute hand had moved, just per- ceptibly. Falling into this dark emptiness, Naismith could not help thinking again of lost spirits, wandering forever under the Earth. The Greeks had imagined a h.e.l.l like that; the Egyptians, too. A phrase from some chance reading came back to him: "the chthonic ourobouros."

He shuddered, and gripped the crossbar hard. I am a man, not a ghost.

He wondered if what he was experiencing had ever hap- pened before: if any other living soul had made this incredible plunge. Such a man, failing to reach the surface again, swing- ing back and forth, thousands of times ... until eventually his lifeless body came to rest at the center of the Earth.

What would have happened then, when the machine's power ran out? A gigantic explosion, probably violent enough to cause vulcanism all over the planet, perhaps even shift the balance of the continents.... Therefore it had probably never happened.

But suppose the power had never run out? Then what was left of the man must be still hanging there ... or perhaps a cl.u.s.ter of corpses, each in his sh.e.l.l of force . . .

Time pa.s.sed. In the darkness and silence, Naismith found himself becoming intensely aware of his physical substance- his body's att.i.tude, the partly flexed limbs, the sense of half- perceived processes going on inside him. What a curious and almost incredible thing it was, after all, to be a living man!

For four years he had believed himself to be Gordon Naismith. Then he had been told that this ident.i.ty was a mask, that in reality he was a member of a different race, from a world twenty thousand years in the future.... But this ident.i.ty was no more real to him than the other.

What was the truth? Where had he really come from, and what was the goal to which he felt himself so irresistibly driven?

Blurred, illusory shapes swam before his eyes in the darkness.

He blinked irritably, then closed his eyes, but the shapes re-mained. He felt himself growing drowsy.

He came awake with a start, realizing that time had pa.s.sed.

He felt the hands of the watch. It was nine-thirty. Twenty-five minutes had gone by. But- Naismith clutched the crossbar hard, as the icy shock struck him. In twenty-two minutes, he should have reached the center of the Earth. Surely, at that depth, there would have been some rise in temperature in the capsule!

He reached out, touched the sh.e.l.l. It was just perceptibly warm.

He deliberately let five minutes go by, then touched the sh.e.l.l again. It was definitely warmer....

Was there a delay factor in the capsule's transmission of heat? Or had he somehow taken longer than twenty-two minutes to reach the center? But that was impossible.

Again he waited five minutes before he touched the sh.e.l.l.

This time there was no mistake: it was hot.

After a moment, even the air in the capsule began to seem unpleasantly warm and heavy. Naismith found he was sweat- ing; his clothes began to stick to him.

After five minutes more, it was not necessary to touch the wall again. It was glowing dull red.

Two minutes dragged by. The sh.e.l.l brightened through the red, into the orange, yellow, then white.

Naismith was in agony. Even with his eyes tight shut, the glare and heat were unendurable. He was being burnt alive.

He buried his face in his arms, sobbing for breath. The heat pressed in relentlessly upon him from all sides; he could feel it like a heavy weight on his clothing. Now he could smell his hair beginning to crisp and smolder.

The metal framework grew too hot to touch. Naismith retreated from it as far as he could, touching it only with the soles of his feet; but to do so was to draw nearer to the white- hot sh.e.l.l of the capsule.

He groaned aloud.

It seemed to him, after a moment, that the heat and glare had abated a little. He opened his eyes warily. It was true: the sh.e.l.l had turned from white to orange. As he watched, it faded slowly onto the red.

Naismith breathed in a great, tortured gasp of relief. The crisis was over-he was going to live!

Time-he must notice the time. Ignoring the pain of his blistered skin, he felt for the hands of the watch. It was exactlyten o'clock.

His pa.s.sage through Inferno had taken about fifteen minutes.

Ten o'clock-fifty-five minutes from the beginning of his fall. By now, if his calculations had been correct, he should have emerged on the far side of the planet.

But he had just pa.s.sed through a zone of heat that could only be the core!

The air in the capsule was growing cooler by the moment.

The sh.e.l.l faded from dull red into hot darkness again. A few minutes later, Naismith dared to touch it cautiously; it was hot, but bearable.

Naismith felt totally bewildered. The period of his transit through the Earth had to be approximately forty-two minutes, no matter from what height he began his fall. Could his watch be running too slowly? Was time in the capsule moving at a rate different from that of time outside?

As the fall continued in darkness, Naismith grew aware of both hunger and thirst. He had been penned up here for only about an hour, and that ought to be well within his tolerance; but how long was this going on? How long could he last?

Once more, by an effort of will, he calmed his mind. The sh.e.l.l steadily cooled; otherwise no change was perceptible.

If he a.s.sumed a lag in the capsule's absorption and re- radiation of heat, Naismith drowsily thought, then it could be supposed that he had reached the mid-point of his...o...b..t in just about twice the predicted time. That would imply that there was a difference of time-rate inside the capsule, or else that some other factor had been reduced for unknown reasons... .

For a moment he allowed himself to speculate on what he would do to the two aliens, if by some incredible chance he came out of this alive and met them again; but he cut off the thought. He felt himself drifting again into sleep, and aban- doned himself to it willingly.

He snapped back to awareness with a start. How long had he been dozing?

He felt the watch. It was 10:17. He had been in free fall for seventy-two minutes.

Tension began to build in him again. Unless his understand- ing of the situation was simply, grossly wrong, then the zone of heat he had pa.s.sed must have been the core of the Earth; and his period must be about twice what he had originally calculated. But why?

Time dragged. It was 10:19; then 10:23; then 10:27. Nai- smith waited tensely. Ten-nineteen. Now, if ever-One moment he was still in utter blackness. The next, stars bloomed out beneath him, a galaxy of them, blindingly brilliant in their half-globe of night. Above him was a dark orb that occluded the other half of the sky; it was drifting away as he watched.

Naismith blinked up at it in uncomprehending wonder for a moment, until he realized that it was the night side of the Earth-that he had burst out of it feet-foremost.