Лю Цысинь: The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

Mr. Deng paused giving Huabei a few moments to contemplate all he had heard.

Then Mr. Deng’s voice in Huabei’s headphone continued. “What I just described was no exaggeration and it was these fears that led another group to accuse Shen Yuan from the entirely opposite direction: They said that he should have closed the Gutenberg Gate sooner. In essence, what they charged was that he should not have waited for any of the elevators. This criticism was far more widespread than the accusations from the other side. In the end, it led to Shen Yuan being charged on two counts in the court of public opinion: For dereliction of duty and crimes against humanity. Even though these two charges ultimately did not pan out in the court of law, Shen Yuan nonetheless resigned his post, leaving his position as the director of the Antarctic Doorstep program. He refused all other appointments, later working as an ordinary engineer in the tunnel.”

Just then, the rings of light on the tunnel’s walls suddenly changed from blue to red.

You have reached a depth of 3,900 miles

Your speed is 5 miles / sec

You are passing through the center of the Earth!

Mr. Deng’s voice again rang through Huabei’s headphone. “You have now reached escape velocity, even though you are as far away from space as possible, right at the planet’s core. Right now, everything is spinning around you; all of the oceans and continents, every city and every human being. They are all revolving around you.”

Bathed in solemn red, music returned to Huabei’s mind. This time it was a grand symphony. Falling down this tunnel, plummeting through the center of the Earth at escape velocity, he felt as if he was floating in the Earth’s blood stream, and it made his own blood seethe with excitement.

Mr. Deng continued his lecture. “Even though the new solid state materials are incredible insulators, the temperature around you is now more than twenty-seven-hundred degrees. The cooling system of your suit is running at full power.”

The red lights on the wall continued for another 10 seconds, then they changed back to their serene blue glow.

You have passed through the center of the Earth

You are now rising and beginning your deceleration

You have reached a height of 310 miles

Your speed is 4.9 miles / sec

You are now in the solid Earth core

Huabei felt the cool of the blue glow soothe his soul. By now, he had long adapted to weightlessness and he slowly began to turn his body, moving his head to face the new up. As he sought to find the sensation of rising, he asked Mr. Deng, “It would seem that there was a third disaster?”

Mr. Deng was only too happy to answer. “The Lost Bolt Catastrophe occurred five years ago. Back then, the Antarctic Doorstep had been completed and the Earth Tunnel had formally begun regular operation and the Core Train ran it nonstop. The Core Train’s cars were twenty-five feet in diameter and a hundred-sixty-five feet long cylinders. On each journey, the Core Train would be made up of a maximum of two hundred of these cars. The train had a maximum capacity of twenty thousand tons of goods or nearly ten thousand passengers. A one-way journey with the train took a mere forty-two minutes and was enabled by pure freefall, consuming no energy.

“When it happened, a maintenance worker at the Mohe launch station carelessly lost a screw bolt◦— no bigger than four inches in diameter◦— in the tunnel. The bolts were made of a new solid state material and capable of absorbing electromagnetic waves. This made it invisible to the radar of the tunnel’s safety monitoring equipment. It fell straight down the tunnel, passing through the Earth’s core right up to the Antarctica station, and then back again. As it returned to the Earth’s core, it hit a Core Train just rising toward Antarctica. The relative speed of the bolt and the train was ten miles per second; the impact may just as well have been a bomb blast. It slammed right through the first two train cars, vaporizing everything within. The explosion of these two cars derailed the entire train, sending it crashing into the tunnel wall at five miles per second. In the blink of an eye, it was torn to tiny shreds, leaving a large field of debris falling through the Earth, spreading throughout the entire tunnel. Some of these fragments fell all the way back and forth through the entire planet; most, however, had lost their momentum in the collision and simply swung around the Earth’s core. It took an entire month for the tunnel to be cleaned of every last piece. None of the remains of the three thousand train passengers were ever found. Every last one of them had been cremated to nothingness in the heat of the Earth’s core.”

You have reached a height of 1,370 miles above the Earth’s core

Your speed is 4.7 miles / sec

You have reentered the liquid Earth core

“But the greatest disaster was the Antarctic Doorstep itself; the project was an unprecedented feat of human technology and also an act of unparalleled economic folly. Even to this day, we remain baffled how a project of such base economic stupidity could ever make it off the drawing board. Shen Yuan, with his demonic talents, certainly played a role, but the true fault lies with humanity’s feverish desire to conquer unclaimed worlds and its blind worship of new technologies.

“Economists say that the Antarctic Doorstep was doomed the very day it was completed. Certainly,” Mr. Deng said, “travel through the Earth was extremely fast and consumed almost no energy. People would even say things like, ‘Just throw it in’, and ‘Just jump in’. Even so, building the tunnel had been an immense investment. This meant the transport charges for the Core Train remained sky-high, offsetting the benefits of its speed and giving the Core Train no real competitive advantage over more conventional forms of transport.”

You have reached a height of 2,200 miles above the Earth’s core

Your speed is 4 miles / sec

You are now passing through the Gutenberg Discontinuity

You are reentering the Earth’s mantle

“Humanity’s Antarctic dream quickly came to ruin,” Mr. Deng said. “Swarming industry and excessive exploitation had soon devastated the last remaining pristine environment on Earth. Like the rest of the planet, Antarctica was ravaged, leaving nothing but a smog-smothered dump. The ozone layer above the continent was completely stripped, inevitably changing life on Earth. The ultraviolet radiation became so strong that constant protective measures became a necessity of life for everyone just leaving their house, even in the Northern Hemisphere. What is more, the accelerated melting of the Antarctic ice sheet led to a precipitous rise of global sea levels.

“Those were long and painful years, but in the end reason prevailed and all the member states of the United Nations signed a new Antarctic Treaty, leading to the withdrawal of all human activity from the continent; Antarctica was returned to an icy desert. What remained of the dream was the hope of a slow recovery of Antarctica’s environment.

“As the demand for transport to the Antarctic suddenly subsided and in the aftermath of the Lost Bolt Catastrophe, the Core Train service was altogether abandoned and the Earth Tunnel closed down. That was eight years ago. Even after all these years the economic devastation wrought by the Antarctic Doorstep still continues to haunt us. The endless thousands who bought stock in the Antarctic Doorstep Company lost all they had invested, giving rise to widespread social unrest; the investment black hole that this tunnel had become pushed our country to the brink of total economic collapse and even today we still struggle with the after-effects of this catastrophe. Your son’s work has become a valley of tears for us.”