York said nothing but his face burned with humiliation. They had been cast away as though they had been vermin. He looked down as the ship floated at even keel. The shimmering mist lay over the hollow, hiding its three eternal inhabitant. Hiding a menace supreme!
York knew it was no use to continue aggression openly. His gamma-sonic weapon—never before unsuccessful—had failed to pierce the defence of the Three Immortals. Even the furies of atomic power were a lesser force. The Three were impregnable. If York was a god in his powers, they were super-gods.
“What can we do against them?” wailed Vera. “Against twenty thousand years of science?”
York sent his ship away from Mount Olympus. He did not attempt to answer a question that had no immediate answer. But a bleak look had come into his eyes—the reflection of a super-mind wrestling with a super-problem.
5
DURING the next year, the crews and passengers of various ocean liners and huge transoceanic aircraft sighted York’s globular ship, here and there. At times it hovered motionlessly over water, at other times over islands. Several times it was seen at the docks of Sol City, picking up certain apparatus that the council had had manufactured at York’s orders. No one knew, not even the councillors, what the instruments were for.
Inside the ship, York laboured as only a man with a set idea can work. The instruments were ultra-divining rods. By an intricate sonic principle, they were able to make clear the structure of inner Earth, as the X-ray reveals a skeleton. York could send down a sound wave that would reflect, hours later, from the hot core of Earth.
York finally accumulated a sheaf, of papers scrawled with condensed mathematical equations and notes. Salted throughout the manuscript were dynamical formulae involving mountain-sized masses of land, water and air, Trembling, he fingered the pages.
“No time to make them look pretty,” he murmured to Vera. “But I have it almost completely worked out. With my seismological observations of the past year to go by, the Earth as a whole has been moved into the laboratory. I have dealt with this planet as though it were a compound in a test tube, or a slide under a microscope. With these Earth dynamics, I can predict the result of any major geological phenomenon, just as the Three Eternals worked it out. Look!”
He spread out a large flat map of the world and put his pencil tip on a spot in the Atlantic Ocean.
“An island existed here ten years ago. The Three Eternals knew it to be the key to their aim. They exploded it. The tremendous ground waves this started touched off certain strains in Earth’s crust. Atlantis and Mu, long buried, began rising. The other lands are slowly sinking. But I can stop it!”
York’s pencil moved to the Pacific, circling a dozen tiny atolls among the Polynesian group.
“The key lies somewhere here,” he explained. “The antidote to their poison. The explosion of one of these islands will send out ground waves setting off related, but opposing strains. There will be a cancellation of effects. In a decade or less, Earth will quiet down with no more than a few coasts undermined. Atlantis and Mu will not rise!”
“All humanity, now and in the future, will owe you its life!” cried Vera, happy in his success. Suddenly a deep horror flooded her eyes. “But the Three Eternals will destroy you—us—for it, Tony! What is to prevent them? Can they destroy us, Tony, or—”
To Vera it was a strange thought that anyone or anything could destroy them. For had they not lived two thousand years?
York nodded sombrely. “They can!” He clamped his teeth together firmly. “But first we’ll finish our job, and then think of that. I still have to determine exactly which island to demolish.”
A few hours later their ship hovered over Southern Pacific waters. Only a few uninhabited islands speckled the vast, reaches of ocean. York carried on his sub-surface probings, but finally gave a baffled grunt.
“I’ve narrowed the field down to three of these islands,” he mused, “but I can’t seem to go any further with the data, from here. I have to be dead sure I explode the right island. If I hit the wrong one, the result might be just as catastrophic as what the Three Eternals started.”
He thought a moment. “Vera, there’s only one way. These measurements involve the strains within Earth’s crust. I must map the strains at first hand. I must go down there, in person. Down miles and miles below the ocean, to where the greater ocean of subsea plasma fumes.” His brow wrinkled thoughtfully, as the mind behind already began shaping a machine unknown to Earthly science: “No mines or man-made submarines go down that far, of course. I’ll have an Earth-boring ship made—a mechanical mole.”
Vera was quick to sense something, in her husband’s words. “You’re using too many ‘I’s, Tony. You’re not going down without me!”
“It’s liable to be very dangerous, Vera. World-shattering forces lie down there.” Seeing the set of her, jaw, he tried a humorous tack. “Why don’t you visit your aunt for a few weeks?”
But instead of smiling, her eyes became a little sad. She had no aunt, or relatives at all from that long-gone day of their birth. Neither had York.
“We even have no descendants,” she murmured, for that had been the price of immortality. “No one on this Earth we can remotely call kin. Tony, don’t you see? If I stayed up here and you, going below, never came back, I’d be more lonely than the loneliest meteor in space!”
Within another year, the precision factories of the Forty-first Century industry had turned out the parts from York’s blueprints. Time, of which they had a plethora, meant nothing to the eternal pair as they superintended the construction.
The mechanical mole took shape as a segmented cylinder of fused, transparent diamond—York’s secret—buttressed with steel of colossal strength. Its front end held the fan-wise jets of York’s gamma-sonic force, for converting solid matter to impalpable dust. The technicians who assembled the machine understood little of what they made, further than that it could possibly plow through anything short of neutronium.
The completed vehicle was shipped to one of the Polynesian Islands, via barge dragged by the world’s largest freight ship, and here York dismissed all attendants. Alone with Vera, he drew a breath.
“I’ve been wondering all this time if the Three Eternals would find out and interfere in some way,” he confided, “despite the secrecy with which it was done.”
Vera shuddered, as she always did at mention of the Three. “They’re like three vultures, waiting, waiting—”
York waved a hand. “Take a last look at the Sun, dear. We may not see it again for weeks!”
Then he led the way into the craft, sealing its pneumatic hatch. An hour later, after carefully checking the supplies of tanked air, food, water, and his many instruments, he started the motor.
The titanic energies of gravity warped into his coils, spraying disintegrative forces from the under nose jets, The nose of the ship dived into the pit formed and like a great worm, it bored downward, roaring powerfully. In seconds, the segmented tail of the ship had vanished beneath the surface. When it had penetrated through top soil and loose ground, it struck bed-rock and there the rate of boring settled to an average of eight hundred feet an hour.
Swirls of black soot shot back from the rock-eating noses so that they saw little of their course into Earth’s skin. It was a bumpy ride, and vibration shook them so violently that they clamped their teeth tight to keep them from rattling like castanets. Each hour York stopped the ship and let their aching bodies recuperate somewhat.