The Great White Space

Nine

The honour of being the first one within the great portal was given to Holden; I say honour, such as it was, because the event, like most long-awaited incidents, was almost an anticlimax. We were awake and out early next morning and soon after six a.m. the three tractors affronted the morning air with their motors. What little sun there was penetrated our dank spit of dark sand reluctantly and its gilt was soon lost again against the black, basaltic rock which seemed to absorb light and somehow stain it. The simile is fanciful, I know, but the only one that readily springs to mind.

Holden drove the tractor across past the obelisk and into the cave-mouth where the machine was rapidly lost to sight; Scarsdale was already alongside the entrance and followed him in on foot. We waited for perhaps ten minutes and then both men appeared; Holden re-joined Van Damm in Number 2 tractor and Scarsdale assumed command of Number 1. He put the key of Number 3 vehicle into a drawer in the chart-table; we would pick up the spare vehicle on the way back.

I looked out through the windscreen; Van Damm's machine was describing a circle, ready to fall in behind us and the tinny static of the radio receiver in our cabin was already alive with the doctor's waspish injuctions.

'I will take over the controls, Plowright, if you please,' said Scarsdale. 'I know the route, as you realise and I shall need you to control the radio and searchlights. We shall carry out the same routine we have regularly practised.'

As he spoke I was already vacating my padded chair at the chart-table; to be perfectly candid, I welcomed the arrangement because the radio and other work was nominal, whereas the control of the tractor was exacting, both physically and mentally and likely to be difficult within the winding caverns of which Scarsdale had so often spoken. Besides, I hoped to do some photographic work with the special fast film I had brought along, if Scarsdale's lighting units permitted.

I acknowledged Van Damm's perfunctory verbal message and thanked him for the formal good wishes to Scarsdale for the success of the enterprise. Scarsdale could, of course, hear perfectly well what was being said via the monitor speaker mounted on the bulkhead over the chart-table and he gave an irascible snort at what he considered to be Van Damm's excessive formality. I left the switch at the open position, for that was the instruction, and I should also have to relay back to Van Damm any special orders relating to obstacles we might meet en route.

I ran my eyes over the lighting switchboard and then looked ahead as the massive portal of the huge doorway loomed in front, the lintel lost to sight high above. In the steel rear mirror I could see Van Damm's machine, pennants fluttering, skirting the obelisk; then we were within the cave- mouth and the darkness reached out to embrace us like a cloak. A warm wind blew from the interior of the earth — we had the air vents open and I could feel this — and the whine of the motors echoed back shrilly within the cave walls.

The noise died as Scarsdale reached forward and cut off the air vents from the outside; at the same moment the light of the sky faded to a feeble yellow. At a nod from Scarsdale I switched on the main searchlight, which was mounted in a nacelle above the tractor windscreen and could be swivelled by a control from within the machine. The yellow incandescence, with which we were all to become so familiar, outlined the faint contours of a rocky wall which was lost as it curved upwards into a blackness darker than any night known to outer earth. Shadows fled fantastically across the middle distance and I was momentarily startled to see a vast fluttering until I realised it was our own image thrown upon the tunnel by the searchlight of Van Damm's vehicle behind. I looked briefly in the mirror to see that he had taken station about thirty feet back and acknowledged his movement by using my microphone.

Holden replied laconically; I concentrated ahead and saw that Scarsdale was following the tracks of Number 3 tractor. We saw it a moment or two later, parked up against the right- hand side of the tunnel wall, where it bulged out to make a natural bay. We did not stop but drove straight on, only virgin sand before us now. The tunnel was about thirty feet wide here and it was not to vary much for the next few hours; I had already switched on our measuring instrument so that we could keep a constant check on the miles we covered each day.

I reached for my camera and as Scarsdale grimly concentrated on his steering, I briefly put on all the lighting equipment we possessed; the effect was startling and I busied myself in taking several photographs, both front and rear, before switching down again to the main searchlight only. I had noticed something however, that raised a number of startling conjectures in my mind. Firstly, the roof did not, as is usual in cave formations, come down fairly close to the ground at any point.

The second detail which struck me was that the corridor of stone stretched monotonously ahead for perhaps half a mile and did not vary greatly in its width. The floor also was no longer composed of sand but seemed to be made of rock. This heightened the noise levels within the tunnel considerably, though it made little difference to the comfort and stability of our ride within the tractor. The thing which impressed me most of all, however, was the regularity of the cave walls; before an hour had gone by I had become convinced that the tunnel was not a natural formation at all but had been engineered at some distance remote in time. This raised in its turn a number of fascinating conjectures because I had formed the impression that the inscriptions on the obelisk and the portals of the great doorway were of great antiquity. The engineering problems involved in the vast tunnel along which we were now travelling so smoothly and with as much facility as one would in a modern city's underground system, would have been incredibly complex and difficult without modern machinery and tools. There was a stupefying engineering talent at work here greater than that of the Incas and the Mayans and incomparably older, if what Scarsdale had said was true, and an excitement similar to that which must have animated the Professor in his long years of research and study on the project, began also to animate my own mind.

This must have occurred to Van Damm at almost the precise moment because his high fluting voice came through the loudspeaker, asking to speak to Scarsdale. I told him that was impossible for the moment, as the Professor was at the controls. There was a brief lull, broken only by the crackle of the instrument.

'You have noticed, I take it, the regular conformation of the walls of the tunnel, Plowright,' he began.

'The implications had not escaped me, doctor,' I said.

Scarsdale smiled quietly to himself at the controls.

'Would you please ask the Doctor to maintain radio silence except in emergency,' he said. 'There will be time for discussion and examination of the tunnels when we stop for lunch.'

I conveyed the Professor's message to Van Damm in a more diplomatic manner and with that he had to be content. We drove along the seemingly endless tunnel for several miles; once I went to the rear of the tractor and read off the mileage indicator. Already it registered fifteen. I told Scarsdale and he merely nodded in a satisfied manner; it was obvious that he knew our destination. His confidence at the controls was masterly and it was uncanny to see the way he almost foresaw any slight shift in our direction; the wind continued to blow steadily and warmly, as I regularly noted by opening the vents. Although the compass needle swung quite broadly on the shallow curves we were sometimes encountering, we were steadily heading almost due north. Eventually, if the Professor's scale models in the far-off study in Surrey were accurate, we should be at an enormous distance beneath the earth. There had been no calls from Van Damm's machine during the remainder of the morning, though the radio switches remained open, but I could see that they were keeping pace with us effortlessly; both tractors were doing a steady ten miles an hour and there was little or no dust beneath the treads to obliterate the view. I was keeping the log this morning and I entered all these details at fifteen minute intervals, to Scarsdale's evident satisfaction. I asked if I might take over the tractor and give him a rest but he shook his head.

'After lunch will be time enough,' he said. 'Compared with the desert this is an extremely comfortable morning's drive.'

We exchanged no further words and I packed up my photographic equipment, my mind completely at rest for the first time since we began our field operations. We were going slightly uphill, I indicated in my last log entry of the morning, made just before our first breaK at 12.15 p.m. The mileage indicator, allowing for a pace that varied between five and ten miles an hour, indicated an awesome fifty-five miles beneath the surface of the mountains.

We did not spend much time within the tractors at lunchtime; the two machines were set up side by side and with the main searchlights illuminating the camping area and the tunnel ahead of us. It was a bare, antiseptic atmosphere; the floor, of hard whitish rock was dry and free of insect or any other type of life that we could see. The walls bore the marks of ancient cutting tools of a type I had never seen before; Van Damm and the others were somewhat excitedly conferring with Scarsdale and I wandered at will, taking pictures and thinking of the people who could have built upon this terrifying scale. I had tilted one of the searchlights upwards toward the roof but despite its power I could not find its limits; there was nothing but inky darkness above and no sign of any bat or bird-life. There would have been an awesome silence that I would have found personally hard to bear, had it not been for the warm and steady breeze that blew from somewhere far off down the tunnel. Altogether, it was a strange, and fascinating place in which we found ourselves.

Geoffrey Prescott and Norman Holden both had an air of barely suppressed excitement, a sort of bubbling effervescence just below the surface, that came through even from under the facade of strictly impersonal scientific materialism which they carried about with them. Like the rest of us, they had now donned light overalls and the alloy helmets which Scarsdale had developed and which were meant to guard us against falling rocks.

This headgear, which bore stencilled numbers, from Scarsdale's appropriate One down to my humble Five, also incorporated powerful flashlights which we found extremely useful, as the light in such a position left our hands free to carry tools and equipment. Both Holden and Prescott carried notebooks and jotted down data, conferring among themselves, as they hurried here and there along the tunnel.

'It conforms fairly closely to your sketches and models, Scarsdale,' Van Damm told the Professor as I wandered close to them. 'Are there any places where the tunnel splits up into tributaries?'

'Only just this side of the water,' Scarsdale said shortly. 'We'll have to leave the machines there and take to the boats. * don't, of course, know what formations we shall find on the other shore. It is perhaps fortunate that there aren't many choices; we could spend years exploring blind alleys, otherwise.'

Van Damm cleared his throat. 'I have noted the marker posts of which you spoke. They would appear to correspond to measurements of ten of our miles.'

The Professor smiled, his face enigmatic in the yellow incandescence of the searchlights.

'I had cause to note them on foot,' he said. 'An experience, I can assure you.'

'How long did it take, Professor?' I asked.

Scarsdale turned his great bearded head toward me in the harsh glare of the lamps.

'I calculated afterwards, over a fortnight,' he said sombrely. 'The worst part was the darkness. I had only a couple of electric torches and some candles, and these had to be conserved. In the end I navigated by using my walking stick against the tunnel wall, much as a blind man might do. I calculated I wore nearly a quarter of an inch off the metal ferrule.'

I could not resist a shudder at the Professor's words and I thought again of the fantastic will inside the hard exterior which had kept him going along these miles of sinister corridors when lesser men might well have been reduced to gibbering idiocy by the darkness and the loneliness.

'You had a compass, I take it?' said Van Damm softly, after a long silence.

'Thank God,' said Scarsdale. 'One becomes completely disorientated. It might be thought a simple matter; right-hand wall going in, say; left-hand going out. But right is left and left is right in the darkness, if you see what I mean. North going in and south going out was the only way, allowing for slight deviations where the tunnel curves.'

I walked on down the tunnel, the faint throbbing of the searchlight generators from the tractors coming over the faint sighing of the wind; the black walls stretched on without a fleck of discoloration or a glimmer of any variation to break their monotony. It was an artery of darkness leading to utter stygian blackness; a man on his own could quickly degenerate to madness in a place like this. I felt for one moment that even without lighting one would still be able to discern the blackness of the tunnel walls. That was the impression the place had on one.

I halted abruptly in my perambulations and came quickly back at this point. There came the tapping of a hammer up ahead; Holden was taking a sample of the rock floor. He swore mildly as I joined him; I looked down and saw that the head of the hammer had snapped from its stout wooden handle. Scarsdale smiled grimly.

'You won't have much luck there, Holden,' he said. 'This material's harder than granite.'

'That's what worries me, Professor,' said Geoffrey Prescott. 'How the hell did these people work such material? And, for all that we're talking about thousands of years remote in time, they must have had more sophisticated tools than we've been able to develop.'

'I have my theories about that also,' said Scarsdale cryptically.

I noticed then that he kept his hand near the revolver strapped to his belt. And I noticed also that a light machine- gun on its stand had been brought out from Number 1 Command tractor, presumably by the Professor while we were finishing lunch. Its workmanlike barrel pointed straight down the tunnel ahead of us.