“This is our end, Tony!” whispered Vera, huddling close to him. “Dying like trapped rats, forty-five miles under Earth’s surface, in a sealed pocket of rock. But we’ll fool them, Tony, in one thing. We won’t go insane. We’ll talk over our life—two thousand years of it. It’s been glorious. We’ll die in peace!”
York kissed her tenderly for her bravery and they talked. They renewed stirring memories of their sojourn in space, and of their last two visitations to Earth. But within an hour their voices faltered and their nerves shrieked.
They could see each other by weird radio-active glow from the surrounding rock. It was more hellish than darkness would have been. Aching silence greeted every pause in their speech. The excessive warmth began to torture their bodies, unrelieved by a breath of current in the confined air.
They were buried alive! That corrosive thought ate into their enforced resignation.
Vera began to babble aimlessly, her eyes wild. York fought back the darkening cloud of madness. Was there no escape? They had no slightest tool, implement, or material object other than their clothing and their bodies.
No escape! They had not even a spoon with which to start digging, useless as that would have been with forty-five miles of stone to penetrate. York had the inane thought for a moment that they had fingernails, something to scratch with—madness!
“One thing I have,” he remembered, without the slightest surge of hope. “The brain-wave instrument within my left ear, with which I commanded the councillors, The Three Eternals missed it, or disdained it. But what good is it? I can command minds with it, but stone is mindless.”
And soon they, too, would be as mindless as their prisoning walls.
“I can hear your thoughts,” Vera mumbled, laughing hysterically. “You won’t give up, Tony, but how foolish. You’re trying to think a way out—think a way out—think a way out—”
Her voice began to repeat like a cracked phonograph record, as her mind teetered.
“Think a way out!” echoed York, his mind clicking. Suddenly he grabbed Vera, shaking her violently. “Vera, maybe that’s it! My brain-wave concentrator projects telekinetic forces. With it, I made other minds cause their bodies to act, move. Perhaps, without the relay minds between, I can use telekinesis to make movement—even of stone!”
“Move stone?” Vera said sepulchrally, in a moment of calm. “But that would take energy, much more than to cause mobile human machines to move, as with the councillors. Energy, lots of it, to move tons of stone over which are tons more—” Her voice broke. “Tony, why do we even think of it? False hopes are just added torture.”
“Energy,” mumbled York defeatedly. “More energy than our bodies contain, if we could use even that.”
He ground the thought of telekinesis out of his mind and joined in Vera’s resignation.
“Die in peace—we must,” Vera murmured, straining against another attack of hysteria.
“It’s a little ironic, isn’t it?” mused York. “Two thousand years of science at my fingertips, gathered in thirty lifetimes of thought and research. And yet, without tools, I’m as helpless as any single-lived man would be, in this same dilemma. A thousand years ago, in a great ship, I moved planets. Today, stripped of implements, I’m no better than a worm.”
Something probed into his mind. He had felt it many times before in the past years, without realising it had been—, the Three Eternals, spying out his thoughts.
“Still sane?” came the cold, blunt psychic voice of one of the Eternals, rather faintly. “You have remarkable fortitude, Anton York. But you will succumb, even as we might, be it admitted. We are halfway to the surface. When we reach it, you will be babbling, spilling your mind into our recorders.” The voice clicked off.
Vera shrieked. She had heard too.
“Don’t, Vera!” soothed York. “Don’t you see? They did that to drive us to insanity more quickly. Let’s remember our resolve—to die in peace.’
“If we only could!” she moaned. “But it’s such torture. And my skin, itching—that radioactive emanation—”
York felt it too, a bothersome tingling on his skin, to add to their discomfort. It was caused by radium in the rock.
York leaped up.
“Radium—energy!” he cried. “Energy for the telekinesis! There it is, all around us! Vera, I’m going to try it. My brain wave should be able to utilize this energy as well as that of a human body.”
He offered up a prayer to all the gods in the Universe that he was right.
Vera, sobered by hope, watched him. York stood, facing one wall, his face drawn into a pucker of fierce concentration. The same intangible force with which he had impelled the councillors to sit down and listen to him now, sprang against the rock. York had never fully tested the mental ray’s possibilities. Could he command matter to fall away before him?
New beads of sweat joined those from the heat, on his brow. Nothing visible, nothing of which he even knew the formula, hurtled against adamant rock. Radioactive energy lay pulsing there. Could he tap it, mould it to his use, with nothing more than pure mentality?
Aching minutes passed, then slowly the rock began to slough away into a depression. There was a rustle, as of billions of crystals rubbing against one another, changing position.
Matter obediently aligned itself in a circular wall forming a tunnel.
York walked forward, step by step, like a god before whom nothing could stand. Foot by foot, the tunnel shaped itself.
“Follow me!” York said to Vera, in clipped phrases, without turning his head. “It’s working—mind over matter—telekinesis, energized by radium.”
York fashioned his mind-wrought tunnel on the steepest upgrade they could climb. It was no use to bore to the ship’s tunnel, as that rose almost perpendicularly. He would have to push on at a slant, through perhaps a hundred miles of rock, before reaching the Sun. A problem arose—that of thinning air, as the tunnel extended. York stopped to command oxygen to spring out of the rock. It did, in gusty abundance.
“Chemical telekinesis!” he said to Vera. “Even the electrons and protons shape new atoms, under this mental force. Vera, this is a true miracle of science!”
He went on, shaping his tunnel. The lack of radium in certain strata, later, did not stop York, for his mind had subtly found the way to extract even the locked energy in non-radioactive rock. In foresight, he made the tunnel oval-shaped, distributing the tremendous pressures in the rock around Nature’s sturdiest geometrical design. The unbolstered cavern held, for the same reason that a fragile-shelled egg can resist terrific pressure.
Back of them, a while later, they heard a sudden rumble, as their former prison space collapsed. York stopped, facing Vera.
“Quick!” he said, in inspiration. “Will your broadcast thoughts blank. Let the Three Eternals think we died!”
For an hour they remained quiet. They could feel the strange mental probe darting about their closed minds—the Three Eternals trying to discover some mental sign of life from their recent prisoners. York cautioned Vera to hold out, even when the tunnel back of them progressively collapsed.
At last the psychic finger left. The Eternals were convinced of their deaths!
7
HOPEFUL now of true escape, York forged ahead. His mental chisel, powered by mighty demons of energy, forced the creaking, groaning rock aside, against blind, brute gravity. When his mind began to reel, drained of energy he transferred his brain wave concentrator into Vera’s ear. Her progress in forming the tunnel was little slower than his.
Later, when food and water became necessity, York commanded these. Water dripped from the rock overhead, into their mouths. Food, though a more stubborn problem, was solved when York dug up from memory the exact chemical formulae of starches, proteins and sugars, which he had determined as an esoteric research, centuries before. At command, the pliant rock molecules gathered into globules of the nutritious compounds and fell into their hands.