by Don Wilcox
“Out of dry rock?”
“Of course. You and Banalog, in making your tests, never found any rock so dry that it didn’t yield quantities of water on an average run.”
“What is an average run, an hour or a day?”
“On your tests you made twenty seven miles in nine hours, but you claim you’re good for three days, non-stop.”
The instruments were acting up in a way that absorbed Hank’s attention, and I was left to think things over. I recalled something that had been shouted at me when it all started. One of the voices had yelled, “We’ll see you again in a few days— we hope.”
The more I thought of it, the more I was certain this howling hatchet was off on a job too big for its britches.
Through the several hours that followed, I tried to observe everything Hank did. I began to know, from the whine of the machinery, that certain granite formations gave us a bad time. At other times we struck soft spots, and a few times, between mountains, we nosed up for a glimpse of daylight.
That was dangerous business. The enemy has sharp eyes. Once, right after we had caught a flash of sunlight, we felt the earth rock, and knew that a shell had exploded not far off. That, Hank muttered, was a bad break. We had been spotted, and the enemy nest was sure to be warned. They would know that their own underground tank, sent out to intercept us, had muffed its job.
We quickly bored in. Our emergence had occurred in the depths of a steep V-shaped valley. We plowed into the bank of the stream, and the river waters came hissing in after us, rushing against the blasts of fire that streamed back from the rear.
“The river will follow us right in,” I said.
“For a hundred feet, yes.” He turned our boring boat upward a moment later. “There—in case anyone tried to follow us, let them find their way through that water trap.”
“If we ever get back, it won’t be on foot.”
Hank muttered something scornful. “You seem to have the optimistic notion we’re going to get back.”
That remark rattled around in my head like a spiralling bullet. I moved back into the narrow passageway and found the compartment Hank had called the bunk. I examined, in this privacy, the dog tag I was wearing, and discovered that it bore the name of this fabulous character Steven Thomas Sanders. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen to the real Steve if I never came back. Would he, an inventor, find himself rudely forced into my role of newspaper correspondent?
No—he’d never allow the exchange to go that far. Not if he was in his right mind.
Probably by now, I told myself, he was already raving at the doctors for causing such a mix-up.
“By now the jeeps are racing down our tunnel trying to overtake us,” I muttered to myself, seeing it all in my mind. “I’ll bet Steven Thomas Sanders is in the front jeep yelling at them to step on it. All he wants is to overtake his howling hatchet and get back in the driver’s seat.”
Then I thought, “They’ll come to the river. That devilish river will stop them, and an enemy shell will blast them to dust, and that will be the end of Stevie. And here I am, stuck with his job.”
I tried to take a quick nap. I was still weak from the hospital experience, and all this terrorizing hatchet ride had tied my nerves in knots. I came out of a brief rest, however, with new strength.
We shared a meal while Hank stayed on at the controls. Again I watched him, trying to pick up everything. And it was well that I did, in the light of what followed.
I was beginning to like Hank. It troubled me to see that he was so deeply fatalistic. “It’s like I told you two months ago—”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t remember.”
“You’d remember if you remembered anything,” he said. “I’m beginning to think you’re not Stevie—”
“I’ve been telling you. I’m Bill Barth.”
In a moment he went on glumly, “It’s like I told you two months ago. I’ve had a hunch from the start that I’ll not come through alive.”
We roared on, watching our maps and making routine checks from our dials.
“All I hope is that I live to see the enemy’s nest mussed up. If we can once break into the central cavern and score one direct hit, three-fourths of their radio-controlled warfare will go berserk.”
The charts and maps showed it all plainly enough, and I knew, from the dials, that the subterranean headquarters we meant to blow up were now less than an hour away.
“Another hour will do it,” I said. “If we don’t smack into any mines.”
“Won’t our instruments warn us?”
“You should know.” He traded places with me now, and said he guessed he was entitled to a few minutes’ rest before the action started. “I don’t exactly trust myself to dodge the web of tunnels when they come too thick.”
I drew back on lever number ten, and cut the speed almost in half. Our big growling tank ploughed on into the wilderness of stone at a dogged pace. My eyes flicked back and forth from dials to maps and across to the little three-dimensional chart that warned of our approach to any underground openings.
Steering became more difficult. I could see from the map that the enemy “Underquarters”—the subterranean headquarters we sought—was like the hub of a wheel. It was charted as a big natural cavern, larger than a football gridiron, into which artificial tunnels had been built from several directions. The enemy’s top brass motored in and out of those Underquarters at high speed, according to the description that went with our orders. We weren’t to spill any hints of our approach until we broke in on the real nest.
“How are we going to help it?” I asked. “Don’t they have the same instruments we have?”
“That depends on how much Banalog knows.”
“Banalog. That’s the other inventor.”
“You’re the only one who knows how many of your inventive secrets you shared.”
“I wouldn’t remember,” I said blankly. “Banalog. I never heard of him.”
“Cut it out!”
“What’s wrong? I just stated a fact.”
Hank squared around as if to tell me off once and for all. “Stevie, there’s a soft spot in you. You know it’s a hundred to one that you’ll have to kill your friend Banalog on this mission. You’ve guessed that he’ll be there, in the middle of their nest of equipment, and it’ll be your ugly job to blow him to hell. You can’t face it, can you!”
“Hank,” I said coldly, “you’re a good joe and I like you. But you’re so far off your base—”
“Look!” Hank interrupted. “We’re about to bust into a path. Hold up!” I struck out at the levers, and number ten bounced back toward me as we groaned to a stop.
“The eggs!” Hank said, whirling to the bomb compartment. “If we’re going to give their seismographs the proper jitters, we’d better do it fast.” He fed fifteen of the metal baseballs into a chute. There was a patch of darkness ahead, off to the right, which might have been a crevice or a break into a natural tunnel. The transparent chute projected forward at the touch of a lever, and turned off into the crevice like an elephant’s trunk as Hank manipulated the direction levers. The “eggs” rolled down the plastic pathway and deposited themselves somewhere outside the path of our light.
Bui one of those loaded baseballs came rolling out into our immediate pathway, and we didn’t care to take the chance of running over it. What it contained would make TNT seem like a small firecracker.
“That was my own fault, damn it,” Hank said, perspiring as he worked at the levers. “I can’t seem to pick it up, and there’s no time to waste. Those eggs are ticking—so here goes!”
“Where are you going?”
“Out!”
He opened a forward door that I hadn’t remembered seeing. He crawled out through the geometric pattern of rock-cutting teeth, temporarily at rest. He walked into the glare of the headlights toward the uncut wall ahead of the foremost augurs. He held a pistol, ready for possible trouble from the dark opening off at the right. He bent to p
ick up the “egg”.
His body suddenly twitched. He turned painfully, sinking to one knee. His pistol spat fire into the unlighted cave. The he dropped the gun and with both hands lifted the egg and threw it—pushed it, like a track man putting the shot. It rolled off into the blackness, and Hank crumpled to the floor.
I reached him as soon as I could climb out the door. I flashed a light into the narrow cave and saw a single fallen guard, no one else. I bent to lift Hank into my arms.
He groaned a little as I bore him back into the interior of the hatchet “Keep going I Don’t bother with me, just keep going.”
I ripped his jacket open and tore at his bloody shirt.
“No time,” he cried. “They’re set. Keep moving!”
He made a mad struggle, freeing himself momentarily from my grasp, so that he reached forward and struck lever number ten. The big machine growled and roared into action, and on we moved, past our planted explosives into the wall of stone.
“The controls!” he moaned. “You’ve got to put this job over, Bill Barth. Whoever you are, you’ve got to . . .” And that was all I heard. The life had gone out of Hank Longworth.
Lever number ten shifted between full speed and half speed during the next twenty or twenty-five minutes. I moved on a course of my own choosing not identical to the one mapped out on paper. Part of my weaving about was the result of my state of mind. Then there were other factors.
On a straight shot, where the three- dimensional chart assured me I wasn’t coming close to any underground trafficway, I set the controls and took time to move Hank back to the bunk. I still had a wisp of hope there might be life in him, but the hope was a vain one. I plastered a bandage across the bullet hole in his chest, closed his jacket and spread a towel over him. Looking at his white face for the last time, I couldn’t help thinking of the last words he had spoken. Now the job was mine. He had called me by name, and charged me with my responsibility.
“So it’s up to me,” I whispered to myself, drawing the towel up over his face. The knowledge of this machine that dwelt in his brain had passed away into the nothingness of death. I hurried back to the instruments.
“So it’s up to me. It’s up to Bill Barth!”
I had the strange feeling that I was another person, looking in at myself form these walls of rocks I was moving through. I was seeing myself as the inventor Steven Thomas Sanders might have seen me. And I thought what he might have said to me.
“You’ve inherited our machine, Bill Barth. By a trick of fate it has fallen into your hands. The victory is tied up in this machine, Bill Barth. Keep it going, keep your head, and destroy the enemy Underquarters. Do that, and the howling hatchet will be worth the investment. Fail, and our lives—Hank Longworth’s and mine—have come to nothing.”
“Can I do it?” I kept asking myself. “Can I do it?”
“Find the nest, plough into it, and get one direct hit,” the voice of my unseen observer seemed to be saying through the roar of the machine. “Find the nest. . . Find the nest . . . Kill the enemy . . .”
It was only the roaring, howling screeching noises of steel against stone. Walls of stone grinding away under the impact of the hatchet. Noises screaming through my brain, prodding me, knifing me, electrifying me with the one challenge to keep going—to do the thing that must be done.
I moved on a course of my own choosing, not identical to the one that had been mapped out. I was now going over the top of the enemy nest, according to the little three-dimensional :hart, the dials, the auditory signals.
Every source of information convinced me that this was the nearest I had come to the Underquarters. And the nearest that I would come until I came up from underneath!
That was my own chosen strategy. This was my job now, and I would take my own chances doing it my own way. Only sometimes, through the screeching howling noises of the rock drills, I tried to hear that imaginary voice again, the voice of Stevie, calling to me through the roar of rock and wind and steel, telling me to keep going.
And telling me how to go.
Was k I who had thought of looping over the nest and then drilling back from the underside? Or had that mysterious invisible companion been whispering to me again?
Or was it the spirit of Hank Longworth, saying, “Go to it, Bill Barth. It’s up to you!”
I was moving over the nest, to the west of it. The ceiling of the cavern I hoped to blow up was less than a hundred feet below the path I was cutting.
Now, I knew, the “eggs” we had planted somewhere back yonder would soon start exploding. I dodged all areas that showed signs of containing paths into the central nest, and planted number ten down solid, cutting as fast as I could go.
Then, getting well to the west of the nest, I did something I hadn’t tried before. I made a straight cut. I stopped. I backed away, leaving a spur of perhaps thirty feet.
Into that spur I poured the remainder of my supply of eggs, with the time triggers set.
I pressed the forward lever, veered to the right again, and started on a downward path. Now there were two well-planted pockets full of timed eggs, set to go off in series. I held the machine down to a slow pace and watched everything.
Was I close enough to the nest for the enemy’s seismographs to have picked me up?
If not, I soon would be. I was now embarked on the last sweep toward the nest, a long, low curve like the bend of a giant fishhook. My progress toward the paint of the hook would bring me closer and closer to the nest. I knew that the danger of rolling into land mines increased with every foot of progress, and I depended heavily upon my dials for warnings. But apart from the mines that might be already planted, I knew my fate would be determined by the artillery that waited down in the big cavern itself.
That artillery would be directed by seismographs; Perhaps by electrical detectors, too. The profusion of traffic, moving back and forth over the enemy’s underground lanes, would be enough to confound electrical equipment. Since they knew of the existence of this howling hatchet, by all odds they would depend upon pronounced earth vibrations to inform them of my approach.
A little checkerboard of red light suddenly flashed brilliantly from the darkest corner of the instrument board, and kept flashing with a weird vibrating rhythm, gradually growing more faint, then fairly melting back to blackness.
“That was the first egg!” I said under my breath. “Now is the time.”
I reached toward number ten. The scheme was obvious. Each time one of the eggs exploded, way off there to the northeast, many feet above the level of the cavern, the enemy seismographs would register the direction of the disturbance. Every disturbance would cover my forward motion.
“Zeeeeng!” Explosion number two. I struck the number ten lever and surged forward while the red checker board flickered, then retarded to a stop as it melted back to black.
“Set your drive on number eleven!” The words sang through my ears as if Stevie himself had been right beside me. “That’s it—the synchronized drive!”
Was it something that Hank had said an hour before that was echoing back to me? I couldn’t determine. There wasn’t time to trace the inspiration, only time to act on it. I struck number eleven, and the lighted button revealed the words “Synchronized Drive.”
“Zeeeeng!”
With the sound of the signal the big machine leaped forward with a scream of rock-cutting action. Then, automatically, it retarded with the fading of the vibration.
“Zeeeeng!” The action was perfect. I could imagine the enemy’s technicians down in their big cavern—up in their big cavern, rather, for I was now below the level of its floor. With each explosion from some point to the northeast and up from their instruments, they must have hurried to line up their guns on the most probable point of breakthrough.
I made fifteen lunges toward the area of the cavern, timed with fifteen explosions from another direction. Each jump, I knew, was more dangerous than the last, for the closer my approach, the more
likely that their instruments would detect overtones—or undertones—of vibrations from my true direction.
The second pocketful of eggs had been set for quicker action. Almost immediately they began popping at short-spaced intervals.
“Zeeeeng! . . . Zeeeng! . . . Zeeeeng! . . . Zeeeeng!”
I could only guess what a flurry this new outbreak must have caused. To the enemy it came from somewhere up west—and much closer than the northeast disturbances. Would the enemy’s guns be pointed only in false directions? Or were they simultaneously marking my true route with every forward surge?
In a moment I would know. There were at least ten more eggs to explode, and I was now only fifteen feet from a breakthrough up into the cavern floor.
“Zeeeeng! . . . Zeeeeng! . . . Zeeeeng!”
I cut off my headlights.
“Zeeeeng! Zeeeeng!”
I broke through.
“One direct hit!” It wasn’t Hank saying it. Hank was dead. It wasn’t I. It couldn’t have been, for my lips were fairly frozen, my teeth were set, my jaws tense. I couldn’t have said a word.
“One direct hit. Set your fire to synchronize!”
Who was saying it to me? The voice of Stevie was like my own voice. That was what Hank had said.
“Set your fire to synchronize. Lever number twenty! Hit it hard. Then get out! Your own life’s not worth a speck of dust after your guns start blasting.”
My eyes blinked hard against the dimness of the big cavernous room. They must have blacked out, hearing those explosions off to the northeast . . . off to the west . . . But they hadn’t heard me! Not yet!
Those explosions from the west side were still coming.
“Lever number twenty! Hurry! Hit it!”
My head was roaring with things I couldn’t have known. My eyes were fighting against the darkness of the big room. There were dim violet lights along the ceiling. There was a whole wall with tiny dots of red and purple and green.
It wasn’t a wall, it was a huge three- dimensional instrument in the center of the room. Men were moving around it in a mad flurry—men I couldn’t see—just black figures that would block out patches of tiny lights as they dashed across in front of the giant instrument.
