Sawyer said thoughtfully, “How could you remove the transceiver? You said it had a ceramic-bone seal to my skull, didn’t you?”
“Not yet—not for weeks. Until then, I can turn off the power entirely, and if I do that—and only if I do that—can you lift the transceiver from your head without committing suicide. Yes, I can turn off the power. There is a way. The secret is here, in the control case in my pocket—but I spent more time devising that shut-off switch than I spent on the rest of the work combined. So don’t waste time hoping you could find the way to turn off the power-switch, by examinging my control case. Houdini couldn’t find the way, and it would take a differential analyzer to find the—ah—combination. So I think you understand that you’ll do what I tell you. Yes, you’ll do that, my boy,” and here Alper smiled ferociously, “or you’ll die.”
They were looking at each other with a measuring stare, each waiting for the other to make a definitive move, when from outside a sudden earsplitting din made the windows rattle.
Both men wheeled toward the sound. A siren screamed its high, shuddering wail for three piercing beats and then subsided. A voice, amplified to hollow impersonality, spoke tremendously through the darkness of Fortuna’s noon.
“Trouble in Level Eight!” the voice informed the little city and the cold, still night of the Pole. “Trouble in Level Eight!”
Alper turned snarling to the younger man.
“The little fool!” he said. “She went down! After all my warnings, Klai went down, and now Nethe’s got her!”
III
Like a man in a dream, Sawyer followed Alper’s stumping, fur-swathed figure through the turmoil of Fortuna toward the mine. In the distance he could see the bare, windswept ice of Little Slave Lake giving back reflections from the eternally lighted town. Fortuna was set down like a small medallion of humanity on the vast curve of the globe, clasped to it as the transceiver was clasped to Sawyer’s skull, and as alien to the rock as the transceiver to the head.
They stumbled and slipped on icy planks as they made their way toward the mine. Fortuna had no streets. Plank steps and runways linked the buildings, which were anchored tight to the bedrock of the planet itself, for there was no soil here. Nothing grew except Fortuna. No roads led into it. The silence of the world’s end seemed to close it in. Whenever human noises faltered here, the vast silence of the Barrens closed over them like water.
Slipping on ice, breathing the dry, incredible cold, Sawyer followed the stumping Alper. Out of bunk houses, offices, shack-like private homes, curious crowds were flocking. Alper thrust them aside, answering no questions. They passed the lighted commissary, the cook-house, the powerhouse, hearing the huge diesels that generated the lifeblood of Fortuna, lighted the houses, drove the mine machinery, pumped the waters of Little Slave Lake continually and forever out of the shafts where continually and forever they seeped.
They passed the last of the ugly, utilitarian buildings which two hundred people needed for their encysted life above the pitchblende veins. And they came at last to the mouth of the great mine.
Alper shouldered through the excited knot around the entrance. The voice had ceased to echo its alarm-signal from amplifiers spaced under eaves all along the streets, but other voices had taken it up now, a babble of them, excitedly predicting disaster.
“The ghosts are loose!” Sawyer heard one miner say to another. “Down in Eight they’re busting through the walls!”
“Miss Ford’s down there,” someone else volunteered as Alper passed. “The ghosts have got Miss Ford!”
Alper shrugged them off. He had one purpose now and one only, and his strength was visibly lagging. Sawyer, following him into the lift, thought with grim amusement that at any rate, for the moment, they had one goal in common—neither wanted Klai Ford to die.
There was always pandemonium underground at Fortuna. The noise of drills, carts, automatic muckers never ceased. Men’s voices echoed and re-echoed endlessly. It was a disorderly pandemonium now. All work seemed to have come to a full stop, and shouts from below made hollow reverberations that rebounded among the shafts. The lift passed opening after opening that swarmed with grimy faces with lights burning above every forehead. Abandoned drills and shovels leaned against the walls where shining ribbons of pitchblende showed the marks of labor, steel-hard stuff, heavy as lead and rich with uranium as a pudding with plums. Rich, that is, Sawyer thought, unless the ghosts have been at it…
“They’re swarming like bees in Level Eight!” someone called warningly as the descending men passed. Alper only grunted. He had taken Sawyer’s arm as they stepped into the elevator, and now his weight was heavy against the younger man. As the mechanism ground toward a halt, he muttered thickly, his breath coming in uneven gusts:
“Don’t—try anything. I warn you, Sawyer. Got to help me. Used up too much back there. My last energy—”
“What you were saving to put this gimmick on Miss Ford?” Sawyer asked. “You made a mistake, Alper. If any harm comes to her, the government’s going to ask some pretty close questions. Killing me won’t help. It won’t save you.”
“Let me handle this,” Alper wheezed. “Do as you’re told. Come on.”
They stepped out into the mouth of Level Eight, into a cluster of pale, excited men. Voices echoed dully here and the air felt thick and heavy, pressing upon the ears. Sawyer noticed an unexpected smell of—ozone?
“She went in there,” one of the men at the shaft-mouth said, turning his helmet-light toward them as the two stepped out of the lift, Alper’s heavy weight sagging on Sawyer’s arm. “Here’s Joe, Mr. Alper. He was with her.”
“What happened?” Sawyer asked crisply. The miners’ troubled, frightened faces swung round toward him, their lights moving in flickers across the wet walls. One of them stepped forward.
“Miss Ford had Eddie and me come down with her,” he said. “She waited right here. Nobody else was around. We don’t work Level Eight any more, because—well, we don’t work it. Miss Ford sent Eddie in to get a camera she wanted.”
A murmur from behind him made everyone look up. The tunnel twisted out of sight into the rock ten feet away. From beyond the bend, a faint flicker of light showed, faded, showed again. The air seemed to ring soundlessly, as if bells were swinging far away, sending out sound-waves that compressed the inner ear. The smell of ozone grew stronger.
“Go on,” Alper grunted, shuffling forward. “Go on, I’m listening.” The miners made way for him. Sawyer let the grip on his arm pull him on. He was very alert, every sense straining for impressions.
“Eddie got just around that bend, out of sight,” the miner told them. “Excuse me, Mr. Alper—I don’t feel like coming any farther.” He stood back stubbornly. “I’ll finish in a minute. There isn’t much to tell. Eddie started yelling. Then the ghosts came—Anyhow, we saw those lights begin to flash and Eddie yelled. Miss Ford said for me to come. She said we had to get the camera. We—well, she got ahead of me. And Eddie let out one awful scream and stopped, and—Miss Ford was around the bend, and I—I came back fast to set off the alarm.” The man’s voice was guiltily defiant.
“Did Miss Ford scream?” Sawyer asked.
“No sir. Not a sound.”
Alper grunted again and lurched forward, toward the darkness and the flickering of unearthly lights around the bend of the tunnel. It was very silent there. The underground had swallowed up Klai Ford and the man named Eddie, and only the flicker seemed alive in there now. The miners’ faces, scared and awed, watched the two men around the bend and out of sight. No one made a move to follow.
“Sawyer!” Alper wheezed, leaning heavily against him as they made their slow way forward. “Let me handle this. Don’t make any moves on your own. I’ll stop you if I have to. Understand? I’ve got my hand on the control of the transceiver right this minute. One touch and I could kill you in your tracks. I think Nethe has got the girl. I want to keep her alive if I can, but—”