Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

Sawyer shrugged slightly. “Okay,” he said. “Put it this way. I don’t mind failing when a job’s too big for me. But if that happens I figure it’s up to me to pass along the job to somebody good enough to handle it. Right now the Royal Commission’s depending on me to take care of what looked like a routine check-up. It isn’t routine. And maybe I’ve already failed. But if I have, it’s my responsibility to notify the Commissioner—”

“I’d be fascinated to know just how you intend to go about that little matter without getting yourself killed,” Alper said, with an unpleasant grin. “If you’re sensible, you could collect two salaries—and the one I’d pay you would be considerably more than what you earn from the Commission.”

“It would have to be a damned high salary,” Sawyer said, “to compensate for this—headgear!” He touched his head lightly.

“I can remove it,” Alper said.

He waited for Sawyer’s reaction, seemed disappointed, and went on:

“I would even feel safe in removing it, under certain circumstances. Who would believe your story? But first, I’d make perfectly certain that you intended to remain cooperative.”

Sawyer said thoughtfully, “How could you remove the transceiver? You said it had a ceramic-bone seal to my skull, didn’t you?”

“Not yet—not for weeks. Until then, I can turn off the power entirely, and if I do that—and only if I do that—can you lift the transceiver from your head without committing suicide. Yes, I can turn off the power. There is a way. The secret is here, in the control case in my pocket—but I spent more time devising that shut-off switch than I spent on the rest of the work combined. So don’t waste time hoping you could find the way to turn off the power-switch, by examinging my control case. Houdini couldn’t find the way, and it would take a differential analyzer to find the—ah—combination. So I think you understand that you’ll do what I tell you. Yes, you’ll do that, my boy,” and here Alper smiled ferociously, “or you’ll die.”

They were looking at each other with a measuring stare, each waiting for the other to make a definitive move, when from outside a sudden earsplitting din made the windows rattle.

Both men wheeled toward the sound. A siren screamed its high, shuddering wail for three piercing beats and then subsided. A voice, amplified to hollow impersonality, spoke tremendously through the darkness of Fortuna’s noon.

“Trouble in Level Eight!” the voice informed the little city and the cold, still night of the Pole. “Trouble in Level Eight!”

Alper turned snarling to the younger man.

“The little fool!” he said. “She went down! After all my warnings, Klai went down, and now Nethe’s got her!”

Like a man in a dream, Sawyer followed Alper’s stumping, fur-swathed figure through the turmoil of Fortuna toward the mine. In the distance he could see the bare, windswept ice of Little Slave Lake giving back reflections from the eternally lighted town. Fortuna was set down like a small medallion of humanity on the vast curve of the globe, clasped to it as the transceiver was clasped to Sawyer’s skull, and as alien to the rock as the transceiver to the head.

They stumbled and slipped on icy planks as they made their way toward the mine. Fortuna had no streets. Plank steps and runways linked the buildings, which were anchored tight to the bedrock of the planet itself, for there was no soil here. Nothing grew except Fortuna. No roads led into it. The silence of the world’s end seemed to close it in. Whenever human noises faltered here, the vast silence of the Barrens closed over them like water.

Slipping on ice, breathing the dry, incredible cold, Sawyer followed the stumping Alper. Out of bunk houses, offices, shack-like private homes, curious crowds were flocking. Alper thrust them aside, answering no questions. They passed the lighted commissary, the cook-house, the powerhouse, hearing the huge diesels that generated the lifeblood of Fortuna, lighted the houses, drove the mine machinery, pumped the waters of Little Slave Lake continually and forever out of the shafts where continually and forever they seeped.

They passed the last of the ugly, utilitarian buildings which two hundred people needed for their encysted life above the pitchblende veins. And they came at last to the mouth of the great mine.

Alper shouldered through the excited knot around the entrance. The voice had ceased to echo its alarm-signal from amplifiers spaced under eaves all along the streets, but other voices had taken it up now, a babble of them, excitedly predicting disaster.

“The ghosts are loose!” Sawyer heard one miner say to another. “Down in Eight they’re busting through the walls!”

“Miss Ford’s down there,” someone else volunteered as Alper passed. “The ghosts have got Miss Ford!”

Alper shrugged them off. He had one purpose now and one only, and his strength was visibly lagging. Sawyer, following him into the lift, thought with grim amusement that at any rate, for the moment, they had one goal in common—neither wanted Klai Ford to die.

There was always pandemonium underground at Fortuna. The noise of drills, carts, automatic muckers never ceased. Men’s voices echoed and re-echoed endlessly. It was a disorderly pandemonium now. All work seemed to have come to a full stop, and shouts from below made hollow reverberations that rebounded among the shafts. The lift passed opening after opening that swarmed with grimy faces with lights burning above every forehead. Abandoned drills and shovels leaned against the walls where shining ribbons of pitchblende showed the marks of labor, steel-hard stuff, heavy as lead and rich with uranium as a pudding with plums. Rich, that is, Sawyer thought, unless the ghosts have been at it…

“They’re swarming like bees in Level Eight!” someone called warningly as the descending men passed. Alper only grunted. He had taken Sawyer’s arm as they stepped into the elevator, and now his weight was heavy against the younger man. As the mechanism ground toward a halt, he muttered thickly, his breath coming in uneven gusts:

“Don’t—try anything. I warn you, Sawyer. Got to help me. Used up too much back there. My last energy—”

“What you were saving to put this gimmick on Miss Ford?” Sawyer asked. “You made a mistake, Alper. If any harm comes to her, the government’s going to ask some pretty close questions. Killing me won’t help. It won’t save you.”

“Let me handle this,” Alper wheezed. “Do as you’re told. Come on.”

They stepped out into the mouth of Level Eight, into a cluster of pale, excited men. Voices echoed dully here and the air felt thick and heavy, pressing upon the ears. Sawyer noticed an unexpected smell of—ozone?

“She went in there,” one of the men at the shaft-mouth said, turning his helmet-light toward them as the two stepped out of the lift, Alper’s heavy weight sagging on Sawyer’s arm. “Here’s Joe, Mr. Alper. He was with her.”

“What happened?” Sawyer asked crisply. The miners’ troubled, frightened faces swung round toward him, their lights moving in flickers across the wet walls. One of them stepped forward.

“Miss Ford had Eddie and me come down with her,” he said. “She waited right here. Nobody else was around. We don’t work Level Eight any more, because—well, we don’t work it. Miss Ford sent Eddie in to get a camera she wanted.”

A murmur from behind him made everyone look up. The tunnel twisted out of sight into the rock ten feet away. From beyond the bend, a faint flicker of light showed, faded, showed again. The air seemed to ring soundlessly, as if bells were swinging far away, sending out sound-waves that compressed the inner ear. The smell of ozone grew stronger.