Down and down the mechanical mole drilled, meeting no material obstacle that its blasting rays could not whiff to unresistant dust. Once their rate slowed by half, as they went through a hard-grained granitic stratum, packed densely by the crushing weight overhead.
York did not fear collapse of the tunnel about them. The braced diamond-walls of the ship would have survived the weight of Mount Everest, balanced on its tip, on each square inch of surface.
A week later, York stopped the ship when his gravity instruments read twenty-five miles below Earth’s sea level. For three days he and Vera rested their bruised bodies and jangled nerves.
“Well,” said York then, “here we are, twenty-five miles down, deeper than man has ever been before, within the Earth he lives upon, like”—he thought of an appropriate metaphor—“like bacteria swarming about a marble.”
With Vera’s skilled help, York made tests of temperature, pressure, density of the solid rock about them, with instruments that extended out of walled pockets in the hull. Most important of all, he measured the strain imposed by the mighty masses of rock above, and the pressing hot core of Earth below. The figures represented leashed forces whose unbinding would have buckled Earth’s crust like a toasted apple skin.
“They are ordinarily in balance, these brute forces,” said York. “The Three Eternals have unsettled them to the extent of raising two continents and lowering the rest. We have to restore the balance.”
A week later, he again started the motor and drilled downward.
“My answer doesn’t lie here,” he decided. “We’ll have to penetrate almost fifty miles down, right through the crust to the barysphere. It is semi-fluid and hot. We’ll have to be very careful.”
Vera knew without saying that, they were risking their lives. But so they had many times before, out in space. They were calm in the thought that if they went, they would go together. York was glad now that Vera had insisted on coming along.
At a depth under Earth of forty-five miles, York again halted. Strangely, the temperature was not much greater here than it had been at twenty-five miles. In fact, not much more than man’s deepest mines.
“Earth’s skin, is a good conductor of heat,” York explained for his own satisfaction. “And brings most of it directly to the surface, which accounts for volcanic action, hot springs, and the non-freezing of the sunless ocean bottoms.”
Slowly he dictated a mass of measurement data to Vera, using his instruments. Hourly, he became more excited. Finally, a day later, he was jubilant.
“I have it now, Vera!” he cried. “The plasma stresses have a node, a point of concentration, right here! It runs as a straight line up to the island next to the one we bored down into. When we destroy that island, counter waves in the crust will cancel those started by the Three Eternals and then—”
“Tony!” It was a sharp cry from Vera. “Tony, I feel strange! I feel as though someone were near us—telepathy—”
“Nonsense!” snapped York, slightly annoyed. “Who could be forty-five miles under the surface?” He started. “Except the Three—”
“Eternal Three!” came the distinct telepathic message, mockingly.
And at that moment, one entire side of the tunnel in which their ship rested dissolved away. A craft lay revealed beyond. It was segmented, like theirs, but larger and with a hull of some clear, greenish material through which were plainly visible the three leadenly-calm, almost unhuman features of the three dwellers of Mount Olympus!
6
YORK felt the alarmed pumping of Vera’s heart, her body pressed against his, and his own pulse raced. Fool that he hadn’t thought of bringing down a weapon with him! But even that, he reflected with sagging spirit, would not have helped, against the impregnable Three.
“Anton York,” came the telepathic voice, heavy with threat from the other Earth-boring ship, “you have signed your own death warrant. We have been picking up your conscious thoughts, with certain long-range psychic instruments, ever since you left us, at Mount Olympus. We detected that you were trying to upset our plans. We did not think you would succeed in finding the necessary data. But when you dived underneath the Earth, we followed in the mechanical mole ship we used for our measurements twelve years ago. As a scientist you are seemingly a little more adept than we thought.”
The Eternals paused as though to give the ironic compliment full play.
“So adept that we must now destroy you. There cannot be two masters of Earth!”
“I do not wish to master Earth!” remonstrated York. “Only save it!” He tried pleading. “Think once, what you are doing—murdering ten billion people! Even if you live to the end of eternity, your conscience could never be free of that stigma!”
“You are an idealist, Anton York,” responded the implacable trio. “We are realists. The present race and civilization do not deserve continuance. They are cluttered with traditions, superstitions, periodic setbacks of their own devising. Scarcely three centuries ago, there was again a worldwide depression, accompanied by needless famine, rioting and maladjustment-of affairs. Civilization fell back as it has so many times.”
“But it climbs steadily!” reminded York.
“When we have raised Atlantis and Mu,” the voice went on, ignoring his remark, “we will people them with a new race, set in a super-civilization, like a precious stone glittering in a setting of purest gold.”
“And in ten years there will be bickering, struggle for power, and anarchy,” predicted York quickly. “You are the idealists, so divorced from your former life that you do not realize the fundamental rule of life—experience! Your new civilization, started at the topmost stage, would collapse into the hollow sands of its non-existent foundations.”
For the first time, a trace of anger came from the Eternals, as though their pride had been pricked by this calm, searching analysis.
“Cease fool! You are to die. But one thing we wish to learn from you before you go—the secret of your gamma-sonic weapon. Though it did not destroy us, and though we have equal forces, we wish to add it to our knowledge!”
York’s silence was stinging.
“Very well,” resumed the Eternals’ spokesman. “We will get it anyway. In advance, knowing your nature, we’ve planned how. You will be left to die, in this cavern, without your ship. Without a single implement with which to dig—, or commit suicide. You will go insane, before death by asphyxiation. In that condition, your mind will automatically throw off all its thoughts, willed and unwilled. Back in our laboratory at Mount Olympus, an instrument is set to pick up the mental record, and at our leisure we will extract from it the gamma-sonic data. Thus you will die and serve us at the same time.”
There was no fiendish note in the quiet exposition of their hideous plan. It was a cold, passionless scheme, in which human feeling meant nothing. York doubted that they knew the meaning of love, anger, hate, mercy, or any emotion. Twenty thousand years of living had drained them dry of all but crystallized intellect.
A few minutes later, York and Vera stood alone in the cavern that had been formed by the two mechanical moles. Their ship was gone, disintegrated before their eyes by a cold beam which caused matter to fall into rotting grains. York and Vera had previously been carried out of the ship, under the Eternals’ paralysis ray. Then the Three had released one tank of oxygen into the space, lest they die too soon. Finally, their ship had left, spraying a heat ray behind it that fused its own trail, as the Eternals had fused off the tunnel made by York’s ship.