The tunnel plunged into its former state of utter darkness, and for a moment Snook found himself trembling with relief at the sheer luxury of not being able to see anything. He stood perfectly still for a time, breathing heavily, then turned on his flashlight.
“How’s it going, George?” he said tentatively.
“Not too well,” Murphy replied. “I feel sick.”
Snook gripped Murphy’s arm and urged him away from the end wall of the pipe. “So do I, but we’d better save it for later.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know how high our visitor intends to go, but I think you should get the men out of the level above this one. If they see what we just saw the mine will close down for ever.”
“I…What do you think it was?” Murphy sounded as though he wanted Snook to produce an immediate scientific label for the apparition and render it harmless.
“It was a ghost, George. By most of the classical definitions it was a ghost.”
“It wasn’t human.”
“Ghosts aren’t.”
“I mean it wasn’t the ghost of a human being.”
“There’s no time to worry about that now.” Snook put his Amplite glasses on again and found his vision still filled with a cloudy radiance which partially obscured details of what he could see in the tunnel, even with the flashlight on. He took them off and checked the time on his watch. “Let’s see…this pipe is about two metres high and the thing we saw went up through it in about six minutes.”
“Was that only six minutes?”
“That’s all it was. Is there a pipe directly above this one?”
“Only the whole Seven-G system, that’s all.”
“How far?”
“Varies according to the shape of the clay deposits—could be only five or six metres in some places.” Murphy’s voice was mechanical, remote. “Did you notice its feet? They were like a bird’s feet. A duck’s feet.”
Snook shone his light directly into Murphy’s eyes, trying to irritate him into coming to grips with the problem. “George, if the thing keeps rising at the same speed it’ll be on the next level in maybe less than ten minutes. You should get the men out of there before that happens.”
Murphy covered the light with his hand, fingers redly translucent. “I haven’t the authority to take the men out.”
“All right—just stand back and watch them take themselves out. I’ve got to look after these cameras.”
“There’s going to be a panic.” Murphy was suddenly alert. “I’d better get on the phone to the mine manager. Or even the Colonel.” He switched on his own handlight and began hurriedly picking his way over the vacuum pipes which curved along the floor.
“George,” Snook called after him, “the first thing to do is get the men to take off their Amplites and make their way out by ordinary light. That way they won’t see anything unusual.”
“I’ll try.”
Murphy passed out of sight around a curve in the tunnel and Snook busied himself with the task of dismantling his improvised camera equipment. In the absence of proper tripods he had set the four cameras up on a small folding table. He was working as quickly as possible in -the hope of transporting everything to a higher level in time to intercept the ghost again, but it was cold in the tunnel and his fingers refused to function properly. Minutes passed before he had loaded the cameras and the connecting servos into a cardboard carton, gathered up the table and set off in the direction of the main shaft. He had just reached the continuous elevator when the first panic-stricken shouts began to echo down from above.
The electric lighting was stronger on the Level Eight gallery which surrounded the shaft, but Snook was severely hampered by his load and almost missed his footing as he stepped into one of the ascending cages. He steadied himself against a steel mesh wall and made ready to get out at Level Seven-C. The shouting grew louder during the few seconds it took to reach the next gallery, and as Snook was leaving the cage he found his way blocked by three men who were pushing their way in. They jammed the exit momentarily, each clawing the other back. By the time Snook had forced his way out the cage had risen more than a metre above the rock floor and he made an awkward bone-jarring landing, dropping the table in the process.
Other miners, most of them wearing Amplites, had surged out of the south tunnel and were already fighting their way into the succeeding cage. Snook heard the lightweight table splintering beneath their boots.
Protecting his carton of photographic equipment, he breasted the tide of frightened men until he had reached a clear space at the entrance to a pipe which was not being worked. Breathing heavily, he felt in his pocket for his magniluct glasses and put them on. His picture of his surroundings instantly flared into brightness and he saw that he and the other men on the gallery were apparently waist-deep in a pool of radiance. Snook thought of it as a kind of floor on which the spectral visitor stood, and the sight of it confirmed what he already knew from the behaviour of the miners—that the creature had penetrated to Level Seven.
“Take off your Amplites,” he shouted to the men who were milling around the elevator, but his voice was lost in the aural flux of shouts and grunts. Snook decided against trying to make his way into the south tunnel in case his cameras got smashed. He stood with his back to the wall, waiting for the steadily-moving elevator to carry the miners up to the surface, then became aware of another facet of the ghostly phenomenon. The plane of bluish radiance, the phantom floor, was sinking towards the level of the rock floor. As he watched, the two levels merged and—coincidentally—the exodus of men from the south pipe abruptly ceased.
Snook darted into the tunnel and found that it veered quite sharply to the west. He “swung around the first bend, ran along a lengthy straight section with its tangle of vacuum pipes and discarded projectors, and reached a second bend. When he got round it he stumbled to a halt.
Here, at least ten of the luminous figures were visible.
All were sinking into the floor at a noticeable rate, but in addition these beings had lateral movement. They were walking, with a curious turkey-like gait, some of them in pairs, emerging from one wall of the tunnel and fading into the other. The complex transparencies of their robes swirled around the thin legs as they moved; the eyes—too close to the tops of the tufted heads—rolled slowly; and the impossibly wide slits of mouths, alien in their degree of mobility, pursed and twisted and reshaped in silent parodies of speech.
Snook, paralysed with awe, had never seen anything so essentially alien, and yet he was reminded of textbook illustrations of ancient Roman senators strolling and conversing at their leisure about matters of empire. He watched for the several minutes that it took for the figures to sink down into the tunnel floor, until only the glowing heads were visible moving purposefully through the skeins of vacuum tubes, until finally there was nothing to be seen but the normal evidences of human existence.
When the last luminous mote disappeared it was as if a clamp had been released from about his chest. He took a deep breath and turned away, anxious to get back to the surface world and its familiar perspectives. On his way to the elevator it occurred to him that he had not tried to photograph the alien scene, and that the chance to do so would probably recur were he to go back down to Level Eight. He shook his head emphatically and kept walking at a steady pace to the elevator, clutching his box of cameras. The circular gallery was deserted when he got there, and he had no difficulty in stepping into an empty cage. At Level Four two young miners—one of whom was in Snook’s English class—jumped into the cage with him. They were glancing at each other and smiling nervously.
“What been happen, Mister Snook?” said the boy who was in Snook’s class. “Somebody say we all go to a special meet up top. Others all go pesi.”