The Great White Space (17 page)

At last we moved on, reaching the far shore without incident. I looked back towards the city but it was already lost in the haze. I could not help reflecting, with a sinking of the heart, that we were committing ourselves more and more into the interior of this bizarre and terrible place, with every day that passed; if anything malignant were encountered it would be very difficult, if not impossible to fight the long miles back.

We lunched on the opposite bank of the stream, where there were no buildings or vegetation of any kind, just the bare unyielding rock and sandy particles of grit to which we had long become used. Scarsdale had decided by this time that we would continue in the northwards direction together and to do this it was necessary that Holden rejoin us. I contacted him by radio — we had been in touch at intervals all the morning - and Van Damm said that he would go back. The two men would then load the machine-gun and heavy equipment on the trolley and rejoin us in the afternoon.

Van Damm had been gone several minutes and had in fact disappeared in the haze across the bridge only a short while before when there came a sudden stammer from the machine- ' gun which reverberated and echoed in the most awful way across the miles of caverns. There were separate and distinct bursts but the muted thunder of the explosions was constantly repeated under the cave roof and created such a menacing effect that our party instinctively cowered away as though we ourselves were under fire.

The noise was so unexpected and so shocking that none of us could at first think what it meant; that Holden had fired at something was obvious but this underground atmosphere was so arid and lifeless that it was difficult to think of a possible target.

I found Prescott at my side; his suggestion was that of a signal but Scarsdale immediately ruled that out as Holden had only to use his radio. We expected Van Damm would immediately hurry on to Holden's assistance and indeed he came through on his handset almost at once. I then tried to reach Holden on the radio link but with no success.

'Keep trying,' Scarsdale told me, almost savagely. His bearded face looked more like a Viking than ever as he gazed about him, his revolver cocked and ready for use. I remembered then the fate of the dwarf Zalor and realised what had never been absent from our leader's mind; that this underground world harboured many ancient and evil things which would only reveal themselves when they were ready.

'Has Holden been attacked, do you think?' Prescott asked the Professor.

Scarsdale shook his head impatiently. 'We shall know in good time,' he said crisply. 'I blame myself for splitting the party. Holden was possibly the wrong person to leave on his own like this. His nerves have been uneven ever since we found the dwarf”s body.'

I looked at him in surprise as it was the first time he had ever directly mentioned the incident.

I shall never forget the long hour we sat by the bridge parapet, looking across the stygian water and listening to the incessant crackle of the radio set; my own nerves were stretched high and I expected minute by minute to hear another shattering series of explosions from the machine-gun. But nothing came and my tension eventually died away.

Then, at about two o'clock in the afternoon to our intense relief we heard Holden's voice on the radio. He apologised for what he knew must have been a startling incident. He had fired, he said, at something which was moving towards him between the buildings at the edge of the plaza. He had then gone off to investigate, leaving the radio, and had only just returned.

Scarsdale moved to take the microphone from me at this point. I forget his exact words but his clipped tones and reproving, if urbane, remarks had the desired effect; Holden did not afterwards forget the Professor's strict instructions.

'Well,' he said at length. 'There appears to be no harm done and I think you can take it that anything down here would be alien to human life as we know it. We will not come back but I'll await your report when you return with the doctor.'

Scarsdale instructed Holden to dismantle the equipment; he and Van Damm could then investigate the area further on their way to re-join us. He would keep the radio link open constantly from now on. A few minutes later Van Damm's tetchy voice came through. When the two men came across the bridge pushing the trolley full of heavy equipment later in the afternoon, Holden told his story in person to Scarsdale as we all crowded round. He had been sitting in the square making notes, he said, when he became aware of some faint shadowy thing which appeared to flit between the far buildings at the end of the plaza.

The occurrence was so unusual that he kept watch on the one point for several minutes; he had thought that it was the optical illusion which we had found common to the city but he soon realised that a large 'hopping thing' as he described it, was moving about between the block-like structures at the edge of the square and gradually coming closer. Not surprisingly, he did not like this, and rapidly got behind the machine-gun.

After another quarter of an hour passed, the thing, which appeared to be grey in hue and of enormous size, stood still; Holden got the uncomfortable impression that he himself was being studied and he reached for his binoculars. He had difficulty in focusing the glasses but as soon as the thing began to come into reasonably clear view, its aspect was so disturbing that Holden became greatly agitated and was unable to hold the binoculars properly. It was only a few seconds after that before he let off a burst with the machine- gun, followed by two others, as the thing made off into the distance.

Courageously, under the circumstances, but foolishly as it now appeared, Holden then set off with one of the elephant rifles to see whether he had wounded the creature. The satisfying noise of the machine-gun had given him back his courage and he hoped to find whether he had hit it. He did find one or two of the flattened bullets from the gun lying at the edge of the square but so far as he could see, there was no sign of the creature and of course the buildings themselves were of too hard a material for the impact of the bullets to make any impression on them.

It was only after he had reported to us on the radio and Van Damm had reached him that they had seen any other evidence of the creature. He and Van Damm had taken a slightly different route out of the city, in order to pass by the spot where the hopping thing had been seen.

'There was a trail of slime leading off the edge of the square,' said Van Damm grimly. 'The stench was awful and we didn't follow it up.'

1

We didn't talk much about this among ourselves. As if by tacit consent each member of the Great Northern Expedition busied himself with the work in hand. Scarsdale wanted to press on to the limit of exploration in the northern direction; that was his prime purpose in mounting the project at all, he emphasised. We would be able to take in the ancient city of Croth on the return journey; he planned to spend a month charting, photographing and investigating every last building and artefact, he assured us.

There would also be a system of 'leave', with two members at a time returning to the outside air for a fortnight, both for relaxation and to safeguard the lines of communication. This seemed an excellent idea to me as I for one found the life underground oppressive and chilling, with the never- changing light and the haunting silence, broken only by the faint thumping of the great pulse in distance.

Scarsdale also made the implicit promise in his remarks that we would deal with the strange creature seen by Holden on our return; that there might be more of them and that somehow they might prevent our return to the outside world did not seem to have occurred to him. Or rather, to correct myself, I was sure that it had, but that he did not want to go into any detailed explanation for reasons of his own. I remembered then that the Great Northern Expedition was to crown Scarsdale's work of a lifetime and that he would naturally oppose anything which stood between him and its completion. He was determined to reach the furthermost northern limits where beat the strange heart we had travelled towards so long and to this end he was prepared to overlook any dangers and difficulties which might loom large in the mind of a lesser man.

Against this I had to weigh the possible dangers to the other, less knowing members of the party and whether Scarsdale, as leader, was entitled to risk the lives of his companions in this way; I maintained in the end that he was. i After all, he had made the same proposition to each one of us in the great study back in Surrey, and had emphasised the I dangers. After weighing things up each had made the identical decision; which implied absolute trust in Scarsdale as head of the party; in his integrity; and in his judgement as a I leader of men.

I had also to remember his great hardships and bitter disappointments in penetrating so far on his previous journey; and then being forced to return - at great risk to his own life. I put all these questions, arguments and counter arguments to myself as we walked onwards through the twilight for the rest of that day and I came ever to the same conclusion. That we 5 had trusted Scarsdale this far - in my own case quite blindly - I and we were, on balance, correct to continue to trust him right up to the edge of what many people would call, under those circumstances, folly.

Having come to this conclusion I marched with an easier mind; we saw nothing and heard nothing on this stretch, save that the wind now blew stronger, freshening to a fairly stiff I breeze at times and that the slow rhythmic thump, like a pile driver, was more audible and quite distinct. Van Damm and I were manoeuvring the trolley over fairly easy ground; there was a very slight gradient, leading uphill which was not, I however, at all fatiguing. I did most of the pushing while Van Damm walked at the front, occasionally steadying the equipment with his hand.

Scarsdale was leading, naked revolver drawn, while Prescott brought up the rear, also with a cocked and loaded weapon at the ready. Both Scarsdale and Prescott had the lamps in their helments switched on, in case of emergency, and in order to augment the existing light which still shone duskily from some unimaginable roof far above our heads. But the terrain was gradually changing; from a level plain such as that which we had crossed to reach the embalming gallery, the sides were gradually closing in to form a large tunnel about forty feet across. Here Scarsdale decided to halt for the night so that in case of any alarm we should have plenty of open space across which any intruder would have to advance.

We passed an undisturbed night, each of us taking two-hour turns at sentry; this time we did not pitch the tents but simply slept in the open. Van Damm had found an oil lamp from somewhere and by its reassuring pool of golden light he sat long into the night hours — we still measured time by earth's days and nights — and made his endless algebraic calculations in his series of notebooks. One of the most astonishing things about the expedition to my mind was the fact that the leaders obviously knew so much more about its purpose than the rank-and-file.

Yet we three were quite content to follow, each using his own specialised skills none of us really knowing anything of the big questions that were taxing the complex minds of Scarsdale and Van Damm. I knew that they would, of course, tell us everything when they were ready but it argued a high degree of trust on the part of such highly qualified specialists as Holden and Prescott. With these and other such thoughts I passed an hour after coming off the midnight duty and my last vision was of Van Damm polishing his glasses in the cheerful aura of the lamp before sleep found me.

2

We were breakfasted and packed by six the next morning and on the move shortly after. There had been nothing to report during the night from any of the sentries but despite this Scarsdale insisted that Holden and Prescott, who were wheeling the trolley on tnis occasion, should mount the machine-gun on its tripod, ready for instant use. He also ordered that each of us should carry a Very pistol in addition to side arms. This was not only for signalling purposes - after all we had the radio link for that - but to illuminate anything which we wanted to investigate. We had already tried firing the pistols some days earlier to see if they would reveal the height and extent of the roofs of the gigantic cave system. While spectacularly illuminating the cloudy distances, they had been remarkably unsuccessful for that purpose.

Fired at the 'sky' they curved upwards for hundreds of feet and on exploding burned as a faint glow beneath the layers of misty vapour which hid the roof from us and which gave the illusion of the sky. But as they came closer to the ground they gave a brilliant and blinding light compared to the low intensity illumination we had been used to. To detect ground targets they would be incomparably useful. I for one, though secretly grumbling at the bulkiness and weight of the pistol I was forced to carry, later came to realise their usefulness in our situation and on at least one occasion the Very lights saved my life.

Soon after we started the day's march the tunnel became narrower — it was now down to about thirty feet wide and then started splitting up into branching tunnels and diversions; when we first came upon a tributary, something most unusual in our exploration so far, Scarsdale dealt with the matter quite simply. He chose the largest tunnel which still pointed to the north and down which the warm wind blew. There was a purpose behind the master tunnel as Van Damm called it and this remained the principle of selection throughout.

Scarsdale had also organised elaborate precautions for finding our way back from the labyrinth in which we were now picking our way. In addition to simple chalked arrows on walls and the tunnel floor, which reminded me of childhood games, small metal discs were fastened by suction pads at particularly difficult and elaborate junctions. These were miniature beacons which Holden and Prescott had developed and the radio equipment we carried could be tuned in to them to guide us back.

'Unless anything realises their purpose and removes them while we are gone,' said Van Damm grimly. I was impressed by the fact that he did not say 'anyone' and it was a thought which did not bear dwelling on. I queried in my mind yet again whether in fact the strange creature Holden had spotted was responsible for the unique and horrible manner in which the dwarf Zalor had met his end. And leading on from that, whether such creatures — I could not imagine that one only would be unique in such a vast underground complex and presupposed there must be others — had something to do with the people who had carried out the ancient embalming processes on the weird insect-like beings in the jars.