The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  THE MICROSCOPIC GIANTS

  Paul Ernst

  It happened toward the end of the Great War of 1941, which was an indirect cause. You’ll find mention of it in the official records filed at Washington. Curious reading, some of those records! Among them are accounts of incidents so bizarre—freak accidents and odd discoveries fringing war activities—that the filing clerks must have raised their eyebrows skeptically before they buried them in steel cabinets, to remain unread for the rest of time.

  But this particular one will never be buried in oblivion for me. Because I was on the spot when it happened, and I was the one who sent in the report.

  Copper!

  A war-torn world was famished for it. The thunder of guns, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from the Pacific to the Atlantic and back again, drummed for it. Equipment behind the lines demanded it. Statesmen lied for it and national bankers ran up bills that would never be paid to get it.

  Copper, copper, copper!

  Every obscure mine in the world was worked to capacity. Men risked their lives to salvage fragments from battlefields a thousand miles long. And still not enough copper was available for the maws of the electric furnaces.

  Up in the Lake Superior region we had gone down thirty-one thousand feet for it. Then, in answer to the enormous prices being paid for copper, we sank a shaft to forty thousand five hundred feet, where we struck a vein of almost pure ore. And it was shortly after this that my assistant, a young mining engineer named Belmont, came into my office, his eyes afire with the light of discovery.

  “We’ve uncovered the greatest archaeological find since the days of the Rosetta stone!” he announced bluntly. “Down in the new low level. I want to phone the Smithsonian Institution at once. There may be a war on, but the professors will forget all about war when they see this!”

  Jim Belmont was apt to be over-enthusiastic. Under thirty, a tall, good-looking chap with light blue eyes looking lighter than they really were in a tanned, lean face, he sometimes overshot his mark by leaping before he looked.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “What have you found? Prehistoric bones? Some new kind of fossil monster?”

  “Not bones,” said Belmont, fidgeting toward the control board that dialed our private number to Washington on the radio telephone. “Footprints, Frayter. Fossil footsteps.”

  “You mean men’s footprints?” I demanded, frowning. The rock formation at the forty-thousand-foot level was age-old. The Pleistocene era had not occurred when those rocks were formed. “Impossible.”

  “But I tell you they’re down there! Footprints preserved in solid rock. Men’s footprints! They antedate anything ever thought of in the age of man.”

  Belmont drew a deep breath.

  “And more than that,” he almost whispered. “They are prints of shod men, Frank! The men who made those prints, millions of years ago, wore shoes. We’ve stumbled on traces of a civilization that existed long, long before man was supposed to have evolved on this earth at all!”

  His whisper reverberated like a shout, such was its great import. But I still couldn’t believe it. Prints of men—at the forty-thousand-foot level—and prints of shod feet at that!

  “If they’re prints of feet with shoes on them,” I said, “they might be simply prints of our own workmen’s boots. If the Smithsonian men got up here and found that a laugh would go up that would ruin us forever.”

  “No, no,” said Belmont. “That’s impossible. You see, these prints are those of little men. I hadn’t told you before, had I? I guess I’m pretty excited. The men who made these prints were small—hardly more than two feet high, if the size of their feet can be taken as a true gauge. The prints are hardly more than three inches long.”

  “Where did you see them?” I asked.

  “Near the concrete we poured to fill in the rift we uncovered at the far end of the level.”

  “Some of the workmen may have been playing a trick—”

  “Your confounded skepticism!” Belmont ground out. “Tricks! Perhaps they’re prints of our own men! Didn’t I tell you the prints were preserved in solid rock? Do you think a workman would take the trouble to carve, most artistically, a dozen footprints three inches long in solid rock? Or that—if we had any men with feet that small—their feet would sink into the rock for a half inch or more? I tell you these are fossil prints, made millions of years ago when that rock was mud, and preserved when the rock hardened.”

  “And I tell you,” I replied a little hotly, “that it’s all impossible. Because I supervised the pouring of that concrete, and I would have noticed if there were prints before the rift.”

  “Suppose you come down and look,” said Belmont. “After all, that’s the one sure way of finding out if what I say is true.”

  I reached for my hat. Seeing for myself was the one way of finding out if Belmont had gone off half-cocked again.

  It takes a long time to go down forty thousand feet. We hadn’t attempted to speed up the drop too much; at such great depths there are abnormalities of pressure and temperature to which the human machine takes time to become accustomed.

  By the time we’d reached the new low level I’d persuaded myself that Belmont must surely be mad. But having come this far I went through with it, of course.

  Fossil prints of men who could not have been more than two feet high, shod in civilized fashion, preserved in rock at the forty-thousand-foot level! It was ridiculous.

  —

  We got near the concrete fill at the end of the tunnel, and I pushed the problem of prints out of my mind for a moment while I examined its blank face. Rearing that slanting concrete wall had presented some peculiar problems.

  As we had bored in, ever farther under the thick skin of Mother Earth, we had come to a rock formation that had no right to exist there at all. It was a layer of soft, mushy stuff, with gaping cracks in it, slanting down somewhere toward the bowels of the earth. Like a soft strip of marrow in hard bone, it lay between dense, compressed masses of solid rock. And we had put ten feet of concrete over its face to avoid cave-ins.

  Concrete is funny stuff. It acts differently in different pressures and temperatures. The concrete we’d poured down here, where atmospheric pressure made a man gasp and the temperature was above a hundred and eighteen in spite of cooling systems, hadn’t acted at all like any I’d ever seen before. It hadn’t seemed to harden as well as it should, and it still rayed out perceptible, self-generated heat in the pressure surrounding it. But it seemed to be serving its purpose, all right, though it was as soft as cheese compared to the rock around it….

  “Here!” said Belmont, pointing down in the bright light of the raw electric bulbs stringing along the level. “Look!”

  I looked—and got a shock that I can still feel. A half inch or so deep in the rock floor of the level at the base of the concrete retaining wall, there were footprints. The oddest, tiniest things imaginable!

  Jim Belmont had said they were three inches long. If anything, he had overstated their size. I don’t think some of them were more than two and a half inches long! And they were the prints of shod feet, undeniably. Perfect soles and heels, much like those of shoes we wear, were perceptible.

  I stared at the prints with disbelief for a moment, even though my own eyes gave proof of their presence. And I felt an icy finger trace its way up my spine.

  I had spent hours at this very spot while that concrete fill was made over the face of the down-slanting rift of mush rock. And I hadn’t seen the little prints then. Yet here they were, a dozen of them made by feet of at least three varying sizes. How had I missed seeing them before?

  “Prints made millions of years ago,” Belmont whispered ecstatically. “Preserved when the mud hardened to rock—to be discovered here! Proof of a civilization on Earth before man was thought to have been born…For heaven’s sake! Look at that concrete!”

  I stared along the line of his pointing finger, and saw another queer thing. Queer? It was impossible
!

  The concrete retaining wall seemed slightly milky, and not quite opaque! Like a great block of frosted glass, into which the eye could see for a few inches before vision was lost.

  And then, again, the icy finger touched my spine. This time so plainly that I shuddered a little in spite of the heat.

  For a moment I had thought to see movement in the concrete! A vague, luminous swirl that was gone before I had fairly seen it. Or had I seen it? Was imagination, plus the presence of these eerie footprints, working overtime?

  “Transparent concrete,” said Belmont. “There’s one for the book. Silicon in greater-than-normal amounts in the sand we used? Some trick of pressure? But it doesn’t matter. The prints are more important. Shall we phone the Institution, Frank?”

  For a moment I didn’t answer. I was observing one more odd thing.

  The footprints went in only two directions. They led out from the concrete wall, and led back to it again. And I could still swear they hadn’t been there up to three days before, when I had examined the concrete fill most recently.

  But of course they must have been there—for a million years or more!

  “Let’s wait a while on it,” I heard myself say. “The prints won’t vanish. They’re in solid rock.”

  “But why wait?”

  I stared at Belmont, and I saw his eyes widen at something in my face.

  “There’s something more than peculiar about those prints!” I said. “Fossil footsteps of men two feet high are fantastic enough. But there’s something more fantastic than that! See the way they point from the concrete, and then back to it again? As if whatever made them had come out of the concrete, had looked around for a few minutes, and then had gone back into the concrete again!”

  It was Belmont’s turn to look at me as if suspecting a lack of sanity. Then he laughed.

  “The prints were here a long, long time before the concrete was ever poured, Frank. They just happen to be pointing in the directions they do. All right, we’ll wait on the Smithsonian Institution notification.” He stopped and exclaimed aloud, gaze on the rock floor.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “An illustration of how you could have overlooked the prints when you were supervising the fill,” he said, grinning. “When I was down here last, a few hours ago, I counted an even twelve prints. Now, over here, where I’d have sworn there were no prints, I see four more, made by still another pair of feet back before the dawn of history. It’s funny how unobservant the eye can be.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “It’s very—funny.”

  For the rest of the day the drive to get more ore out of the ground, ever more copper for the guns and war instruments, drove the thought of the prints to the back of my mind. But back there the thought persisted.

  Tiny men, wearing civilized-looking boots, existing long, long ago! What could they have looked like? The prints, marvelously like those of our own shod feet, suggested that they must have been perfect little humans, like our midgets. What business could they have been about when they left those traces of their existence in mud marshes millions of years ago….

  Yes, of course, millions of years ago! Several times I had to rein in vague and impossible impressions with those words. But some deep instinct refused to be reined.

  And then Carson, my foreman, came to me when the last of the men had emerged from the shafts.

  Carson was old; all the young men save highly trained ones like Belmont and myself, who were more valuable in peace zones, were at the various war fronts. He was nearly seventy, and cool and levelheaded. It was unusual to see a frown on his face such as was there when he walked up to me.

  “Mr. Frayter,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ll have trouble with the men.”

  “Higher wages?” I said. “If they had a spark of patriotism—”

  “They’re not kicking about wages,” Carson said. “It’s a lot different than that. Steve Boland, he started it.”

  He spat tobacco juice at a nail-head.

  “Steve works on the new low level, you know. Near the concrete fill. And he’s been passing crazy talk among the men. He says he can see into the concrete a little way—”

  “That’s right,” I interrupted. “I was down there this afternoon, and for some curious reason the stuff is a little transparent. Doubtless we could investigate and find out what causes the phenomenon. But it isn’t worth taking the time for.”

  “Maybe it would be worth it,” replied Carson quietly. “If it would stop Steve’s talk, it might save a shutdown.”

  “What is Steve saying?”

  “He says he saw a man in the concrete, two hours ago. A little man.”

  I stared at Carson.

  “I know he’s crazy,” the old man went on. “But he’s got the rest to halfway believe it. He says he saw a man about a foot and a half high, looking at him out of the concrete. The man was dressed in strips of some shiny stuff that made him look like he had a metal shell on. He looked at Steve for maybe a minute, then turned and walked away. He walked back through the concrete, like it was nothing but thick air. Steve followed him for a foot or so and then was unable to see him anymore.”

  I smiled at Carson while sweat suddenly formed under my arms and trickled down my sides.

  “Send Steve to me,” I said. “I’ll let him tell me the story too. Meanwhile, kill the story among the men.”

  Carson sighed.

  “It’s going to be pretty hard to kill, Mr. Frayter. You see, there’s footprints down there. Little footprints that might be made by what Steve claimed he saw.”

  “You think a man eighteen inches high could sink into solid rock for half an inch—” I began. Then I stopped. But it was already too late.

  “Oh, you’ve seen them too!” said Carson, with the glint of something besides worry in his eyes.

  I told him of how and when the prints had been made.

  “I’ll send Steve to you,” was all he said, avoiding my eyes.

  Steve Boland was a hulking, powerful man of fifty. He was not one of my best men, but as far as I knew he had no record of being either unduly superstitious or a liar.

  He repeated to me the story Carson had quoted him as telling. I tried to kill the fear I saw peering out of his eyes.

  “You saw those prints, made long ago, and then you imagined you saw what had made them,” I argued. “Use your head, man. Do you think anything could live and move around in concrete?”

  “I don’t think nothing about nothing, Mr. Frayter,” he said doggedly. “I saw what I saw. A little man, dressed in some shiny stuff, in the concrete. And those footprints weren’t made a long time ago. They were made in the last few days!”

  I couldn’t do anything with him. He was terrified, under his laborious show of self-control.

  “I’m leaving, Mr. Frayter. Unless you let me work in an upper level. I won’t go down there anymore.”

  After he had left my office shack, I sent for Belmont.

  “This may get serious,” I told him, after revealing what I’d heard. “We’ve got to stop this story right now.”

  He laughed. “Of all the crazy stuff! But you’re right. We ought to stop it. What would be the best way?”

  “We’ll pull the night shift out of there,” I said, “and we’ll spend the night watching the concrete. Tell all the men in advance. Then when we come up in the morning, we can see if they’ll accept our word of honor that nothing happened.”

  Belmont grinned and nodded.

  “Take a gun,” I added, staring at a spot over his head.

  “What on earth for?”

  “Why not?” I evaded. “They don’t weigh much. We might as well carry one apiece in our belts.”

  His laugh stung me as he went to give orders to the crew usually working at night in the forty-thousand-foot level.

  We started on the long trip down, alone.

  There is no day or night underground. Yet somehow, as Belmont and I crouched in the low level we
could know that it was not day. We could sense that deep night held the world outside; midnight darkness in which nothing was abroad save the faint wind rattling the leaves of the trees.

  We sat on the rock fragments, with our backs against the wall, staring at the concrete fill till our eyes ached in the raw electric light. We felt like fools, and said so to each other. And yet—

  “Steve has some circumstantial evidence to make his insane yarn sound credible,” I said. “The way we overlooked those footprints in the rock till recently makes it look as if they’d been freshly formed. You observed a few more this afternoon than you’d noticed before. And this ridiculous concrete is a shade transparent, as though some action—or movement—within it had changed its character slightly.”

  Belmont grimaced toward the concrete.

  “If I’d known the report about the footprints was going to turn us all into crazy men,” he grunted, “I’d have kept my mouth shut—”

  His voice cracked off abruptly. I saw the grin freeze on his lips; saw him swallow convulsively.

  “Look!” he whispered, pointing toward the center of the eight-by-thirty-foot wall.

  I stared, but could see nothing unusual about the wall. That is, nothing but the fact we’d observed before: you could look into the thing for a few inches before vision was lost.

  “What is it?” I snapped, stirred by the expression of his face.

  He sighed, and shook his head.

  “Nothing, I guess. I thought for a minute I saw something in the wall. A sort of moving bright spot. But I guess it’s only another example of the kind of imagination that got Steve Boland—”

  Again he stopped abruptly. And this time he got unsteadily to his feet.

  “No, it’s not imagination! Look, Frank! If you can’t see it, then I’m going crazy!”

  I stared again. And this time I could swear I saw something too.

  Deep in the ten-foot-thick retaining wall, a dim, luminous spot seemed to be growing. As though some phosphorescent growth were slowly mushrooming in there.

  “You see it too?” he breathed.

  “I see it too,” I whispered.

  “Thank God for that! Then I’m sane—or we’re both mad. What’s happening inside that stuff? It’s getting brighter, and larger—” His fingers clamped over my arm. “Look! Look!”