Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (42 page)

I had an uneasy feeling as I stared down at a landscape becoming progressively less real the closer we approached.

“No,” I said. “Not quite Pellucidar. Rather, the mysterious thing that hangs in Pellucidar’s sky.”

A three-dimensional projected image? What was it hiding?

Our descent slowed above a fuzzy-looking mountain. Perry released gas via the safety valve and our descent picked up more speed—

—and passed straight through the top of the mountain!

For an instant, light blazed around us and we could see nothing else. Then it faded to reveal a smooth, featureless curved plane below.

“Is that steel?” I said. “It can’t be.”

“It looks like the same unidentifiable alloy that comprised that seed sphere you brought from Thuria.”

“Then I guess there can no longer be any doubt as to where the seeds came from.”

Perry looked at me. “It means something else, David. It means the Dead Word is artificial—it’s not a moon, it’s an artifact!”

I was speechless for a moment. The portent was staggering. Finally I found my voice. “Made by whom?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid to even hazard a guess.”

Koort had risen from his ball of terror and joined us at the edge. He cried out and pointed below.

“The rivers and trees! Where have they gone?”

How to explain a three-dimensional projection to a Pellucidarian . . . I didn’t even try.

“It was a painting,” I said, pointing up. “An air painting.”

In the sky above us, faint traces of the fake landscape were visible, like afterimages. Through it we could see shadowed Thuria and the sparkling waves of Sojar Az. But when I turned, I could also see the sunlit Lidi Plain. With a pang I noted the green mist seeping across it like a plague.

And then, wonder of wonders, a crescent glow began to grow along the Dead World’s curved surface.

I pointed. “Look!”

As we watched, Pellucidar’s miniature sun began to creep above the artificial horizon.

“Sunrise!” Perry said softly.

“The only place in Pellucidar where it occurs.”

Dinosaur III
was moving with the Dead World’s rotation, and soon we were basking in the noonday light of Pellucidar’s sun. Its glare completely washed out the hologram and etched the Dead World’s bald surface in sharp detail. I picked out seams here and there, most running like latitude lines, although not evenly spaced.

“Where are the little men?” Koort said. “Who is going to replace my lidi?”

“No lidi up here, Koort. I’m afraid you’ll—”

“Look!” he cried, pointing. “A cave. That is where the little men live!”

I saw what he meant—a dark pocket in the surface. I wouldn’t have called it a “cave” by any stretch. But if the Dead World were populated by “little men”—which I was sure it wasn’t—they could possibly move in and out of an opening that size.

Perry was looking, too, squinting in the harsh light. “It appears about the right size to fit that seed sphere you brought me.” He glanced my way. “You don’t think . . .?”

“It’s possible.”

“Take me down!” Koort said. “I must talk to the little men.”

“About a new lidi?” I said.

He seemed surprised. “Yes! How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Yes. Very lucky.”

Sarcasm was lost on Thurians.

I turned to Perry. “Should we release a little more gas?”

“If we land, how do we get back up?”

“We took on extra ballast with the second balloon. We simply have to jettison it when we want to leave.”

“But will we have enough lift? I very much doubt we’ll find a source of natural gas down there. I don’t want to be stranded a mile above Thuria for the rest of my days. If we were down on the inner surface, we could find another way home. But here . . . if we can’t float away, we die of starvation down there.”

I couldn’t argue. “Yes, they don’t call it the Dead World for nothing.” Then I remembered. “We do have an anchor. We can release enough gas to bring the surface within reach of it and hope we snag something.”

Perry was nodding vigorously. “That way
Dinosaur III
will stay afloat. And once we dump the ballast we’ll sail home.” He cocked his head toward Koort. “Well,
his
home at least.”

Like so many things, it worked better in theory than in execution.

We released some gas,
Dinosaur III
drifted lower; we dropped the admiralty-style anchor on its extra-long rope and let it drag along the surface. However, its flukes caught on nothing, because the surface offered no purchase.

Perry was muttering in frustration every time the anchor slipped over a seam without catching. I felt pretty frustrated myself, but not as much as Koort, apparently. With an almost feral growl he slipped over the side and began shimmying down the rope.

We watched in amazement as he reached the surface and took hold of the anchor’s shank. Using his prodigious strength, he began carrying it—all the while dragging
Dinosaur III
along behind—toward the “cave” he had spotted earlier.

Once there, he must have found a lip or an outcropping of some sort to secure one of its flukes. He let it go, straightened, and waved.

“Come down! I go to see the little men!”

With that, he dove into the cave despite shouted warnings from both Perry and myself.

“Whatever he finds in there,” I said after he had disappeared, “I doubt very much it will be little men.”

Perry nodded. “As do I. Whoever fashioned that seed pod and ejected it into Thuria must also have fashioned this moon. That puts them technologically beyond anything we’ve seen here in Pellucidar or the outer world.”

I was having a nightmare while awake. “I’m imagining some far-evolved subspecies of Mahar.”

Perry gasped. “Don’t even think such a thing!”

“Well, the Mahars build their cities underground. Do you see any structures? And imagine their fury at watching their evolutionary ancestors driven from their cities.”

Perry was nodding. “It might even goad them to strike against the world below.”

With that unpleasant thought spurring our efforts, we hauled on the anchor rope and forced the
Dinosaur III
to the smooth, alloy surface of the Dead World. Once the rope was securely cleated, I jumped out and checked the anchor. Koort had indeed found a good-size lip inside the opening. Since the Dead World had no winds to play tricks on us, I felt confident the anchor would remain fixed there.

I was helping Perry out of the basket when I heard a sound echoing from the opening. Perry must have heard it, too. Without a word, he handed me my revolver and grabbed a double-barreled musket for himself. As the sound grew louder, we cocked our weapons and pointed them toward the opening, ready to fire. Suddenly Koort appeared, panting with exertion, his face paler than usual.

“No one is inside, yet someone spoke to me—in Thurian!”

“Those are contradictory statements,” Perry said. In response to Koort’s baffled expression, he added. “If no one is there, how can anyone be speaking to you?”

Koort shrugged, grabbed his club and shoulder sack from the basket, then motioned us to follow. We glanced at each other—we both knew we couldn’t resist—and bent to it, crawling on our hands and knees through what appeared to be a sloping tunnel or chute.

. . .
someone spoke to me—in Thurian!

Thurian? Most of Pellucidar’s human cultures had their own language and communicated with each other via a common tongue. Why would the voice Koort heard be speaking in Thurian? Then I reminded myself that Thuria lived in the Dead World’s shadow. A connection?

The light from outside faded but enough filtered down to reveal that the chute ended in some sort of spring-loaded mechanism. A sliding panel revealed a short side channel. This dropped us into a narrow, curving hallway with smooth walls, almost Gothic in the way they arched to a point that glowed with a soft red light.

I experienced a hint of vertigo as I tried to orient myself: my head was toward the outer surface, my feet were toward the center of the Dead World.

“Welcome back,”
said a voice.
“We received your signal and began the protocol.”

“See!” Koort said. “He speaks Thurian!”

“Not in the least,” said Perry. “That’s English.”

I’d heard English too.

“Thurian! Thurian!” Koort said, becoming agitated.

I was wondering, What signal? What protocol?

“Because of the time interval, I will review what has gone before.”

It occurred to me then that this wasn’t a voice at all. The words were echoing in my brain.

“Telepathy!” I said. “He’s speaking directly to our minds!”

“
As your records surely show
—”

“Stick your fingers in your ears!” I cried, doing just as I’d said.

“—the mining craft arrived here in the immediate post-war period.”

No lowering of the volume. Perry had his fingers in his ears, and I could tell by his expression he’d come to the same conclusion.

“Whoever that is, he’s projecting ideas, concepts, directly to the brain! We must be ‘hearing’ them—more accurately,
translating
them—into our own native tongues!”

The voice droned on, and, as it related its story, the words were enhanced by mental images. Slowly a staggering, mind-numbing narrative began to emerge.

When it was done, Perry looked as if he was about to collapse. He wobbled, and I caught him. As he leaned against me he said, “David! Did you hear? Do you see? Pellucidar didn’t just happen—it was
created!
”

“They raped the Earth!” Perry cried.

Or so it seemed. An ancient race—conical beings with a fringe of tentacles below an encircling ring of black eyes—had developed near the core of our galaxy. They mastered a method of leaping through space via multiple light-year jumps and had built an interstellar civilization with an insatiable appetite for raw materials. The name in my head for them was “
Fashioners
.”

We watched a planet from the huge mothership hovering in orbit. I didn’t recognize the planet as Earth—it had only one giant continent, after all—but the words in my head said this was our planet before it was mined. The mothership released smaller mining vessels that bored through the Earth’s crust into its molten heart. We saw huge pulses of glowing liquid iron and other elements jettison from the core into orbit, where they solidified into a ring of ragged moonlets. When the core had been stripped of its value, the mothership extended a magnetic field that drew the lumps into its gargantuan cargo hold. The process wasn’t perfect. A number of moonlets—one I estimated to be the size of Rhode Island—failed to achieve a stable orbit and crashed to Earth with catastrophic results. Huge volcanoes burst through the crust, boiling the seas and searing the land before enveloping the Earth in a stifling layer of cloud.

“They had no right!” Perry said.

“And they killed my lidi,” Koort added.

We both glared at him. His sudden sheepish look said he’d gotten the message. He broke eye contact.

“Well, they did,” he muttered.

“They did more than kill your lidi, my Thurian friend,” Perry said, his expression grave. “Judging by the timing of their depredation, I believe the moonlets that fell to Earth triggered the great Permian extinction.”

“How long ago was that?” I said.

“Somewhere between two-hundred-fifty and three-hundred million years. That single landmass we saw was Pangaea, which later broke up into the continents of today. The cause of the Permian extinction has always been a mystery, but now you and I know what killed off ninety-five percent of the life forms on land and in the sea.”

But robbing the planet of its iron core wasn’t enough. They liked to experiment with the hollow shells before they left them behind. In Earth’s case, they terraformed the inner surface.

I turned to Perry. “What about the inner sun? The explanation is in my head, but my poor brain can’t quite grasp it.”

“Neither can mine. Their science is so far ahead of ours it is almost magical. I feel like a caveman who has come across a working lightbulb. They created a reverse gravitational field in Pellucidar that negates the Earth’s natural field. Apparently they have an almost alchemical ability to transmute certain minerals. They used that technology to create the inner sun—powering it with some sort of renewable fusion that is beyond my ken—then suspended it in the center of the shell.”