SteampubkPrime

by Mike Ashley

  When the sledges were stopped, they put on their snowshoes and followed the line of the kite-cable for about a mile and a half until they came to the edge of what appeared to be an ice-cliff. The cable hung over this, hanging down into a dusk which quickly deepened into utter darkness. They hauled upon it and found that there were only a few yards over the cliff, and presently they landed the great kite.

  “I wonder if it really is the tunnel?” Said Brenda, taking a step forward.

  “Whatever it is, it’s too deep for you to fall into with any comfort,” said her husband, dragging her back almost roughly.

  Almost at the same moment a mass of ice and snow on which they had been standing a few minutes before, hauling up the cable of the kite, broke away and disappeared into the void. They listened with all their ears, but no sound came back. The huge block had vanished in silence into nothingness, into a void which apparently had no bottom; for even if it had fallen a thousand feet, an echo would have come back to them up the wall.

  “It is the tunnel,” said Brenda, after a few moments’ silence, during which they looked at each other with something like awe in their eyes. “Thank you, Arthur, I don’t think I should have liked to have gone down, too. But, uncle,” she went on, “if this is the tunnel, and that thing has gone on before us, won’t it stop and come back when it gets near the North Pole? Suppose we were to meet it after we have passed the centre. A collision just there wouldn’t be very pleasant, would it?”

  “My dear Brenda,” he replied, “there is really no fear of anything of that sort. You see, there is atmosphere in the tunnel, and long before it reached the centre, friction will have melted the ice and dissipated the water into vapour.”

  “Of course. How silly of me not to have thought of that before! I suppose a piece of iron thrown over there would be melted to vapour, just as the meteorites are. Well now, If we’ve found the tunnel, hadn’t we better go back and get ready to go through it?”

  “We shall have to wait for the moon, I suppose,” said Princeps, as they turned away towards the sledges.

  “Yes,” said the Professor. “We shall have plenty of moonlight to work by in about fifty-six hours. Meanwhile we can take a rest and do as Brenda says.”

  It was just fifty hours later when the moon, almost at the full, rose over the eastern edge of the snow-wall, casting a flood of white light over the dim, ghostly land of the World’s End. As it rose higher and higher, they saw that the sloping plain ended in a vast semicircle of cliff, beyond which there was nothing. They went down towards it and looked beyond and across, but the curving ice-walls reached away on either hand until they were lost in the distance. They were standing literally on the end of the earth. No sound of water or of volcanic action came up out of the void. They brought down a couple of rockets and fired them from the edge at a downward angle of sixty degrees. The trail of sparks spread out with inconceivable rapidity, and then, when the rockets burst, two tiny blue stars shone out, apparently as far below them as the stars of heaven were above them.

  “I don’t think there’s very much doubt about that,” said the Professor. “We have found the Axial Tunnel: but, after all, if it is only a very deep depression, our balloons can take us out of it after we have touched the bottom. Still, personally, I believe it to be the tunnel.”

  “Oh, it must be!” Said Brenda decisively. And so, in fact, it proved to be.

  As the moon grew rounder and brighter, the work of preparation for the last stage of their amazing enterprise grew apace. Everything had, of course, been thought out to the minutest detail, and the transformation which came over their impedimenta was little short of magical.

  The sledges dissolved into their component parts, and these came together again in the form of a big, conical, drum-like structure, with walls of thick papier mache. It had four long plate-glass windows in the sides and a large round one top and bottom. It was ten feet in diameter and fifteen in height. The interior was plainly but snugly fitted up as a sitting-room by day and, by means of a movable partition, a couple of sleeping berths by night.

  The food and water were stowed away in cupboards and tanks underneath the seats, and the gas-cylinders, rockets, etc., were packed under the flooring, which had a round trap-door in the centre over the window.

  The liquid air-engines and the driving apparatus of the sledges were strongly secured to the lower end with chains which, in case of emergency, could be easily released by means of slip-hooks operated from inside. There were also two hundred pounds of shot ballast underneath the flooring.

  Attached to the upper part of the structure were four balloons, capable at their full capacity of easily lifting it with its whole load on board. These were connected by tubes with the interior, and thus, by means of pumps worked by a small liquid-air engine, the gas from the cylinders could either be driven up into them or drawn down and re-stored. In the centre of the roof was another cable, longer than those which held the balloons, and to this was attached a large parachute which could be opened or shut at will from inside.

  VI

  When the moment chosen for departure came, there remained no possible doubt as to the correctness of the Professor’s hypothesis. The sun was dipping below the horizon and the long polar night was beginning. The full moon shone down from the zenith through a cloudless, mistless atmosphere. The sloping snow-field and the curved edge of the Axial Tunnel were brilliantly illuminated. They could see for miles along the ice-cliffs, far enough to make certain that they were part of a circle so vast that anything like an exact calculation of its circumference was impossible.

  The breeze was still straight to the southward, to the centre of the tunnel. The balloons were inflated until the Brenda — as the strange vehicle had been named by a majority of two to one — began to pull at the ropes which held her down. Then, with a last look round at the inhospitable land they were leaving — perchance never to see land of any sort again — they went in through the curved sliding door to windward. Princeps started the engine, the balloons began to fill out, and three of the four mooring-ropes were cast off as the Brenda began to rock and swing like the car of a captive balloon.

  “Once more,” said Princeps, giving his wife the knife with which she had cut the sledges loose.

  “And this time for good — or the North Pole — or — well, at any rate, this is the stroke of Fate.”

  She gave her left hand to her husband, knelt down on the threshold of the door, and made a sideward slash at the slender rope which was fastened just under it. The strands ripped and parted, the Brenda rocked twice or thrice and became motionless. The ice-cliffs slipped away from under them, the vast, unfathomed, and fathomless gulf spread out beneath them, and the voyage, either from Pole to Pole or from Time to Eternity, had begun.

  The Professor, who was naturally in command, allowed the Brenda to drift for two-and-a-half hours at a carefully calculated wind-speed of twenty miles all hour. Then he said to Princeps, “You can deflate the balloons now, I think. We must be near the centre. I will see to the parachute.”

  They had been thinking and talking of this journey, with all its apparent impossibilities and terrific risks, until they had become almost commonplace to them. But for all that, they looked at each other as they had never done before, as the Professor gave the fateful order. Even his lips tightened and his brows came together a little as he turned to cast loose the fine wire cables which held the ribs of the parachute.

  The powerful little engine got to work, and the gas from the balloons hissed back into the cylinders. Then the envelopes were hauled in and stowed away. Through the side windows, Brenda saw a dim, far-away horizon rise up all round, and through the top window and the circular hole in the parachute, she saw the full disc of the moon growing smaller and smaller, and so she knew that they had begun their fall of 41,708,711 feet.

  Taking this at 7,000 miles, in round numbers, the Professor, reckoning on an average speed of fifty to sixty miles an hour, expected to make the
passage from Pole to Pole in about six days, granted always that the tunnel was clear all through. If it wasn’t, their fates were on the knees of the Gods, and there was nothing more to say. As events proved, they made it in a good deal less.

  For the first thirty-six hours everything went with perfect smoothness. The wind-gauges at each side showed a speed of fifty-one miles an hour, and the Brenda continued her fall with perfect steadiness.

  Suddenly, just as they were about to say “Good night” for the second time, they heard a sharp snapping and rending sound break through the smooth swish of the air past the outer wall of their vehicle. The next instant it rocked violently from side to side, and the indicators of the gauges began to fly round into invisibility.

  “Heavens, uncle! What has happened?” Gasped Brenda, clinging to the seat into which she had been slung.

  “It can only be one thing,” replied the Professor, steadying himself against the opposite wall. “Some of the stays have given way, and the parachute has split or broken up. God forgive me! Why did I not think of that before?”

  “Of what?” Said Princeps, dropping into the seat beside Brenda and putting his arm round her.

  “The increasing pull of gravitation as we get nearer to the earth’s centre. I calculated for a uniform pull only. They must have been bearing a tremendous strain before they parted.”

  While he was speaking, the vehicle had become steady again. The wind-gauges whirled till the spindles screeched and smoked in their sockets. The rush of the wind past the outside wall deepened to a roar and then rose to a shrill, whistling scream.

  Long, uncounted minutes of sheer speechless, thoughtless terror passed. The inside air grew hot and stifling. Even the uninflammable walls began to crinkle and crack under the fearful heat developed by the friction of the rushing air.

  Brenda gasped two or three times for breath, and then, slipping out of her husband’s arms, fell fainting in a heap on the floor. Mechanically both he and the Professor stooped to lift her up. To their amazement, the effort they made to do so threw her unconscious form nearly to the top of the conical roof. She floated in mid-air for a moment and then sank gently back into their arms.

  “The centre of the Earth!” Gasped the Professor. “The point of equal attraction! If we can breathe for the next hour, we have a chance. Quick, Arthur, give us more air! The evaporation will reduce the temperature.”

  Even in such an awful moment as this, Professor Haffkin could not quite forget his scientific phraseology.

  He laid Brenda, still weighing only a few pounds, on one of the seats and went to the liqueur-case for some brandy. Princeps meanwhile turned the tap of a spare cylinder lying beside the air-engine which drove the little electric-light installation. The sudden conversion of the liquid atmosphere into the gaseous form brought the temperature down with a rush, and — as they thought afterwards, with a shudder — probably prevented all the cylinders from exploding.

  The brandy and the sudden coolness immediately revived Brenda, and after the two men had taken a stiff glass to steady their shaken-up nerves, they sat down and began to consider their position as calmly as might be.

  They had passed the centre of the earth at an enormous but unknown velocity, and they were, therefore, endowed with a momentum which would certainly carry them far towards the northern end of the Axial Tunnel; but how far, it was impossible to say, since they did not know their speed.

  But, however great the speed, it was diminishing every second, and a time must come when it would be nil — and then the backward fall would begin. If they could not prevent this, they might as well put an end to everything at once.

  Hours passed; uncounted, but in hard thinking, mingled with dumb apprehension.

  The rush of the wind outside began to slacken at last, and when Princeps at length managed to fit another wind-gauge in place of the one that had been smashed to atoms, it registered a little over two hundred miles an hour.

  “Our only chance, as far as I can see,” said the Professor at length, looking up from a writing-pad on which he had been making pages of calculations, “is this. We must watch that indicator; and when the speed drops, say, to ten miles an hour, we must inflate our balloons to the utmost, cut loose the engines and other gear, and trust to the gas to pull us out.”

  There was literally nothing else to be done, and so for the present they sat and watched the indicator, and, by the way of killing the weary hours, counted the possibilities and probabilities of their return to the civilised world should the Brenda’s balloons succeed in lifting her out of the northern end of the Axial Tunnel.

  Hour by hour the speed dropped. The fatal pull, which, unless the balloons were able to counteract it, would drag them back with a hand resistless as that of Fate itself, had got them in its grip. Somewhere, an unknown number of miles above them, were the solitudes of the Northern Pole, from which they might not get away even if they reached them. Below was the awful gulf through which they had already passed, and to fall back into that meant a fate so terrible that Brenda had already made her husband promise to shoot her, should the balloons fail to do their work.

  The Professor passed most of his time in elaborate calculations, the object of which was the ascertaining, as nearly as possible, their distance from the centre of the earth, and, therefore, the number of miles which they would have to rise to reach the outer air again. There were other calculations which had relation to the lifting power of the balloons, the weight of the car and its occupants, and the amount of gas at their disposal, not only for the ascent to the Pole, but also for their flight southward, if happily they found favourable winds to carry then back to the confines of civilisation. These he kept to himself. He had the best of reasons for doing so.

  The hours went by, and the speed shown by the indicator dropped steadily. A hundred miles an hour had become fifty, fifty became forty, then thirty, twenty, ten.

  “I think you can get your balloons out now, Arthur,” said the Professor. “It’s a very good thing we housed them in time, or they would have been torn to ribbons by this. If you’ll cast them loose, I’ll see to the gas apparatus. Meanwhile, Brenda, you may as well get dinner ready.”

  Within an hour the four balloons were cast loose through their portholes in the roof of the car and attached to their cables and supply pipes. Meanwhile the upward speed of the Brenda had dropped from ten to seven miles. The gas-cylinders were connected with the transmitters and apparatus which allowed the gas to return to a normal temperature before passing into the envelopes, and then the balloons began to fill.

  For a few moments the indicator stopped and trembled as the cables tightened, then it went forward again. They saw that it was registering six and a half miles an hour. This rose to seven, eight, and nine. Presently it passed ten.

  “We shall do it, after all,” said Princeps. “You see, we’re going faster every minute. I wonder what the reason of that check was?”

  “Probably the increased atmospheric friction on the surface of the balloons,” replied the Professor quietly, with his eyes fixed on the dial.

  The indicator stopped again at ten, and then the little blue, steel hand, which to them was veritably the Hand of Fate, began to creep slowly backwards.

  None of them spoke. They all knew what it meant. The upward pull of the balloons was not counteracting the downward pull exerted from the centre of the earth. In a few hours more they would come to a standstill, and then, when the two forces balanced, they would hang motionless in that awful gulf of everlasting night until the gas gave out, and then the backward plunge to perdition would begin.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” said Princeps, keeping his voice as steady as he could. “Hadn’t we better let the engines go?”

  “I think we ought to throw away everything that we can do without,” said Brenda, staring at the fateful dial with fixed, wide-open eyes. “What’s the use of anything if we never get to the top of this horrible hole?”

  “That’s ra
ther a disrespectful way in which to speak of the Axial Tunnel of the earth, Brenda,” said the Professor, with the flicker of a smile. “But we won’t get rid of the impedimenta just yet,” he went on “You see, as the mathematicians say, velocity is momentum multiplied into mass. Therefore, if we decrease our mass, we shall decrease our momentum. The engines and the other things are really helping us along now, though it doesn’t seem so. When the indicator has nearly stopped, it will be time to cut the weight loose.”

  Then they had dinner, eaten with a mere pretence of appetite, assisted by a bottle of “Pol Roger ‘89.” The speed continued to drop steadily during the night, though Princeps satisfied himself that the balloons were filled to the utmost limit consistent with safety, and at last, towards the middle of the conventional night, it hovered between one and zero.

  “I think you may let the engines go now, Arthur,” said the Professor, “It’s quite evident that we’re overweighted. Slip the hooks, and then go up and see if your balloons will stand any more.”

  He said this in a whisper, because Brenda, utterly worn out, had gone to lie down behind the partition.

  The hooks were slipped, and the hand on the dial began to move again as the Brenda, released from about six hundred pounds’ weight, began to ascend again. But the speed only rose to fifteen miles an hour, and that was eight miles short of the result the Professor had arrived at. The attractive force was evidently being exerted from the sides of the tunnel as well as from the centre of the earth. He looked at the dial and said to Princeps —

  “I think you’d better go and lie down now. It’s my watch on deck. We’re doing nicely now. I want to run through my figures again.”

  “All right,” said Princeps, yawning and shaking hands. “You’ll call me in four hours, as usual, won’t you?”

  Professor Haffkin nodded and said: “Good night. I hope we shall be through our difficulties by the morning. Good night, Arthur.”