The fresh food was all but gone, and everyone was surviving on army-issue MREs. Surviving was the word: the meals kept you alive but didn't exactly excite the palate. One night Michael Sullivan dreamed of a Big Mac.
Finally, the airship swerved away from the pole and flew parallel to the Transarctic Mountains. As the Destiny Explorer approached Wilkes Land, the peaks of Mount Erebus appeared in the distance on her starboard side. The cone of the volcano was smoking, and lava rolled down the icy slopes.
It was obvious that Erebus had erupted in recent weeks.
Finally, the airship entered Wilkes Land, and everyone grew tense, wondering just what they would find when they reached the place where all the horrors of the past few weeks had originated.
***
Captain Dolan focused on the distant horizon, where a thin black line seemed to stretch from one end to the other, as far as his eyes could see.
Is it an optical illusion? he wondered. Or am I going snow-blind?
The winds had been strangely calm in the past few hours, and he'd relieved Shelly at the helm at 2:00 A.M., anticipating that bad weather would strike at any moment.
Instead, the sky seemed to grow more clear, and the headwinds actually abated. Now, as he commanded the bridge alone, the airship seemed to be cruising as easily and smoothly as it would if they were flying over the New Jersey flatlands where the Destiny Explorer was born.
Things were going amazingly well. And then that long, dark line appeared.
Placing the ship on autopilot, Dolan stepped up to the window and drew the binoculars from their sheath on the bulkhead. He focused the lenses on the horizon and squinted through the eyepiece for a few minutes. Then his thin mouth turned up in a smile of triumph.
He checked the time: 4:15 A.M. But in the eternal daylight of the Antarctic summer, there was enough light to know he was not mistaken.
Dolan stepped up to the intercom and tapped the button.
"Shelly, Nick, Robin, and Corporal Brennan ... this is Captain Dolan. Could you come to the bridge, please? I think we have arrived."
A few minutes later, everyone was gathered on the bridge - even Shelly, who was wrapped in a blanket and rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
When Captain Dolan was finished speaking, Sean Brennan wasn't sure what he'd heard. Sean thought that when they reached the abyss, he and his men would have to climb down inside of it. Maybe parachute in, or fly the Messerschmitt-XYB down to the bottom.
He never imagined that they would be able to fly the airship right into the hole - yet that is exactly what Captain Dolan was saying they could do! Shelly and Nick Gordon grasped it immediately, but the others were having a hard time of it.
"That line on the horizon is the pit," the captain explained once again, so that Robin, Michael, and Sean could understand it. "It's like a double horizon. As we get closer, we will simply fly into the pit. It's certainly wide enough."
Dolan stepped up to the search radar and keyed the monitors. Nick studied the images on the screen. "That opening looks wide enough to fly through to me," the science correspondent said.
Realization suddenly dawned on Michael's face as he examined the radar images. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "The entrance to that tunnel is about five miles high!"
"And as wide as the horizon," Captain Dolan added. Nick Gordon whistled.
"When do we arrive?" Robin Halliday asked.
Captain Dolan looked at his watch. "Barring bad weather, in about five hours ..."
"I'm going to prepare my men," Corporal Brennan announced. "I suggest everyone get some sleep. We'll meet on the bridge in five hours."
Monday, January 22, 2001, 9:00 A.M.
The entrance to the Kemmering Passage
Wilkes Land, East Antarctica
By 7:30 a.m., Shelly, Sean, Nick Gordon, and Robin Halliday had joined Captain Dolan and Michael Sullivan on the bridge. Despite the fact that Dolan had been on duty for hours, the excitement of the impending discovery kept him awake and alert.
By 8:00 A.M., the entrance to the Kemmering Passage - as Jack Dolan had named it, in honor of its discoverer - yawned ahead of them.
As the Destiny Explorer approached the huge cavernous entrance, the people on the bridge peered ahead, attempting to pierce the darkness.
"A radar scan of the area suggests no obstacles to prevent our entry," Dolan declared. "About a mile inside, the floor of the tunnel begins to incline downward at a slight angle ... leading downward, I'd surmise, to the very center of the Earth itself."
"And the tunnel is miles wide," Michael added. "We can turn around and come back out if we reach a point at which we cannot proceed any further."
As the minutes ticked by, the airship warily approached the mouth of the passage. The roof of the cavern loomed above them. From cameras mounted on the top hull, Ned and Peter scanned the ceiling of the cave. It was made mostly of ice, with huge stalactites hanging from the roof. The roof of the entrance was nearly two miles thick and consisted of both Antarctic ice and some of the continental crust itself. It was Peter who suggested that the top of the passage was the natural landscape - it was the floor of the passage that had actually receded into the Earth, inclining to provide the gentle descent.
"Here we go," Captain Dolan announced. "I'm slowing the ship to half speed."
On the hull, the turbofan engines whined and slowed, decreasing the speed of the massive airship to less than fifty miles an hour. As everyone aboard held their breath, the nose of the Destiny Explorer slid into the mouth of the pit.
As the airship entered Kemmering Passage, a dark shadow fell over it. Boldly and courageously, the crew of Destiny Explorer plunged into the unexplored darkness of the gateway.
"Running lights on," Dolan, at the helm, declared as spotlights all over the airship ignited, illuminating the interior of the unimaginably vast cavern.
As they moved a mile or so into the passage, Dolan tilted the nose of the airship downward and they began to descend. Shelly and Captain Dolan carefully probed the darkness ahead with their spotlights even as Michael continued to scan the tunnel for unexpected obstacles with the radar.
Far behind them, at the mouth of the passage, a dark, gigantic figure lumbered into the cavern, too. Unknown to the crew of the airship, Godzilla had entered the tunnel. Whether he was guided by a higher power, or by some bizarre instinct, the creature slowly followed the Destiny Explorer into the pitch-darkness of the passageway.
"Right full rudder," Dolan ordered as he turned the ship slowly.
After proceeding for several miles, the Explorer was forced to detour around a column of ice that was miles high and ran from the top of the cave to the bottom. The diameter of the base of the column was so large it was measured in miles.
As they circled around it, spotlights played on the icy shaft. Nick and Robin, who were taking photographs, were sure they detected movement inside the icy column. The asked for more spotlights to illuminate the thick, translucent shaft.
"It's water!" Nick proclaimed after a moment.
He was right. The icy column acted as a huge pipeline. Water rushed from some point on the surface of Antarctica down through the thick-boled shaft of ice. When the Destiny Explorer finally circled the column, the observers saw a flood of water gushing out of a gigantic hole at the base. Beyond that, a river as wide as the Mississippi flowed downward toward the bowels of the Earth.
After this brief detour, the tunnel continued down with no further obstacles. The airship flew parallel to and above the crashing white waters of the underground river. The level of the passage floor inclined more and more drastically. Soon the river was transformed into a series of waterfalls, each of them dwarfing Niagara Falls.
The Destiny Explorer was descending at an almost forty-five-degree angle. Inside the airship, crewmen and passengers alike gripped handholds as the ship plunged into the claustrophobic darkness. Outside the hull, the sound of the roaring waters echoed off the cavern's roof.
The airship lights
played off the walls, roof, and floor of the passage. Eerie, flickering shadows danced around the airship. The temperature climbed steadily until the explorers were unnaturally warm in their winter gear.
"It's the internal temperature of the Earth's crust," Peter Blackwater speculated. "I wonder how deep we really are."
From the bridge, Captain Dolan answered that question. Over the ship's intercom system - which remained open for all aboard to hear - he announced, "We're now about sixty miles inside the passage, and a mile or more under the surface of Antarctica."
The walls of the cavern had long ago turned from ice to rock and earth. The darkness outside the hull was now absolute. Even the spotlights had trouble piercing the preternatural blackness.
But still they descended, lower and lower, as the hours passed....
3:25 P.M.
Inside the Kemmering Passage
It was Shelly Townsend who noticed the subtle change in the darkness ahead. She stepped up to the front of the bridge and peered into the distance.
"Turn off the forward spotlights," she ordered.
Dolan looked at her curiously, but obeyed. "Keep scanning with the search radar, Michael," Dolan commanded, concerned that another obstacle might appear in the unlit passage.
When the spotlights dimmed and their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, they saw a glow flicker in the distance ahead of them.
"Bingo," Jack Dolan muttered.
"There are no obstacles ahead of us," Michael announced, looking up from his search radar. "But the tunnel is beginning to narrow a little."
"As if we're being herded forward, to a precise location," Corporal Brennan muttered.
Unknown to the crew of the airship, miles behind them Godzilla slipped into the rushing waters of the mighty underground river and was swept rapidly and helplessly downstream.
The dim glow increased in intensity as the airship approached it. The roof of the passage changed subtly, too. As they watched from the observation deck, Ned and Peter noticed crystal structures forming and re-forming on the cavern walls.
"The walls look alive," Ned said. Peter nodded mutely, staring out the windows at the complex and beautiful patterns that appeared and disappeared with every passing second.
On the bridge, Dolan killed all the external lighting. Though the passage was dim, there was enough light for him and the others to see. The explorers noticed that the walls, floor, and roof of the cavern were glowing with their own internal luminescence.
But by far the brightest light in the underground world came from far ahead of them.
Soon they neared the source of that light, but to their surprise they could not proceed. The light came from beyond a semi-translucent wall of crystal. Behind that wall, brilliant lights glowed and flickered. At the base of the wall, the underground river flowed into a vast, deep lake. The black waters shimmered beneath their hull and lapped against the crystal barrier.
"I don't think we can go any farther," Captain Dolan announced. But even as he spoke, a tiny hole appeared in the center of the crystalline wall. Then, the hole began to widen. Michael spotted it first and pointed it out to the others.
As the rest of the bridge crew watched in amazement, the hole continued to expand, like a huge crystal iris. They watched hopefully as it opened wider and wider, until a gateway a mile in diameter yawned before the airship's nose.
Multicolored lights danced and flickered beyond the opening and were reflected on the black waters of the underground lake.
"I think that's our invitation to come in," Shelly Townsend proclaimed.
"And we didn't even have to knock," Nick Gordon added.
Suddenly the airship shuddered, and the collision alarm went off. But the vibration quickly ceased. As Michael killed the alarm, Captain Dolan immediately realized that the ship was no longer in his control. The intercom crackled, and Peter Blackwater spoke from the observation deck.
"Long crystal arms that popped out of the walls have taken hold of the mooring hooks on the hull," he announced.
"He's right; we're being dragged inside," Captain Dolan declared.
"Reverse engines!" Shelly cried, but Dolan overruled her.
"No!" he cried. "That maneuver could rip this ship apart!"
Then, in a much calmer voice, Sean Brennan spoke. "We've been invited inside," he remarked. "We might as well go in." The Airborne Ranger smiled. "Maybe this is all a big misunderstanding," he stated hopefully. "Maybe we can all just get along."
But no one really believed it.
As they watched helplessly, the Destiny Explorer was dragged through the entrance to an undiscovered world.
Unseen by the others, Leena Sims stumbled onto the bridge and peered through the observation windows. What she saw made her gasp.
Robin heard the girl's sharp intake of breath and turned. "What's the matter, Leena?" she asked.
"It's ... it's the underground city from my dream," the teenager proclaimed.
Spread out before them, in a huge roofed cavern, was an obviously ancient, and obviously abandoned, city. But it was unlike any city known to man.
All the buildings were constructed of living, moving crystal. The structures shimmered and rolled with colors - indescribable colors that could blind anyone who stared at the skyline for too long. The vast metropolis stretched out for miles in all directions. There were areas of low, individual buildings like suburbs, and other sections where the high crystalline towers were taller than any building built by humankind.
The city itself was larger than New York City, larger than Tokyo. It was perhaps the largest city on the entire planet. But it was empty, a necropolis. A city of the dead.
Upon closer inspection, the bridge crew realized that much of the city was in ruins. Some of the mightiest towers were shattered. Others tilted precariously, or leaned against nearby buildings. This was not immediately apparent to those aboard the Explorer, for the architecture was strange and unsettling, as if the city were designed to appeal to an alien aesthetic. Shapes and sizes seemed jarring and irregular, though Captain Dolan was sure that they made perfect sense to the builders.
In the distance, a red glow reflected off the roof of the vast cavern. Bright flashes of fire appeared there. Ned Landson realized that a river of molten lava flowed beyond the city.
As they approached a wide central plaza, a massive structure of pastel blue crystal loomed over them. The building was shaped like a huge mushroom, with a wide rounded cap resting on top of a round crystal shaft at least three miles in diameter. The crown of the building - at least five miles across - had long, irregular shafts of crystal projecting from it at many angles. The central structure was decorated with weird modernist statues that looked to the explorers like the wildest examples of abstract art.
As they gazed at the structure, a door appeared in the pastel wall at about the same height as the bridge of the airship. There were no windows or joints in the structure; the door, like the iris gate, simply opened in the smooth wall.
The plaza under the airship gleamed as if paved with crystal-clear ice. But suddenly a shimmering tower began to grow up right in the center of the clearing.
"It's a mooring mast," Dolan exclaimed.
And just as he said the words, the tip of the airship touched the top of the crystal tower and was anchored. The Destiny Explorer drifted to a halt. As they watched, a delicate bridge of the same type of living crystal grew out from under the door in the massive structure ahead of them.
The airship moved to the side, until the edge of the crystal bridge touched the door where the elevator was usually mounted.
"What do we do?" Shelly asked.
"We go inside," Captain Dolan answered immediately.
Minutes later, a crewman opened the airlock. Then, Corporal Brennan and his ten Airborne Rangers rushed out, wearing full combat gear and with weapons ready. The soldiers moved uncertainly onto the delicate structure. The crystal bridge did not appear strong enough to hold even one man's
weight. Yet the bridge didn't sway, even when Johnny Rocco jumped up and down on it.
Sean Brennan signaled to the others. Shelly, Captain Dolan, Nick Gordon, Robin Halliday, and the teenagers exited the airship. As they crossed the high bridge, they looked out over the sprawling, gleaming city below.
"Look!" Peter cried excitedly, pointing to a dark area near the iris through which they had flown. The others saw it, too - a gigantic plant of some kind, hundreds of feet high, with vinelike tendrils growing out from its bole. The central core of the tree was a huge trunk that ended in a sharp tip that pointed to the roof of the cavern.
Oddly, the snakelike tendrils, which seemed to be moving, ended with pods that looked like they had openings - or mouths.
"That's definitely a plant," Peter observed. "It's the first thing I've seen entering the city that was not made of crystal."
Suddenly Corporal Brennan, who was in the lead, tensed.
On the other end of the wide crystal bridge, large insectlike creatures were filing out of the door in the structure and lining up on either side of the span. The creatures were not much bigger than human beings, and the soldiers noted warily that they seemed to be carrying weapons of some kind.
Ned Landson studied them with scientific curiosity. He noted that the creatures looked very similar to the Kamacuras that had decimated Kansas last year.
But these greenish creatures were much smaller - about seven or eight feet tall - and walked erect on four back legs connected to their thorax. Their forelegs were unusual, too. They ended not in sharp claws but in small, four-fingered appendages that looked very much like hands. Each creature carried a long pointed crystal pole.
As the creatures stood at attention, they made no sound at all.
"Our reception committee," Shelly whispered uneasily. Corporal Brennan continued on, pretending to ignore the creatures as he walked between their ranks. But Shelly, who knew him better than anyone else, realized that Sean was tense. He carried his weapon at the ready and flicked off the safety.
Godzilla at World's End Page 22
