Лю Цысинь: The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

A faint smile slowly blossomed on Huabei’s face. “I do not care; I will be able to see the Earth Tunnel again be the pride of humanity!”

The police officer chortled in surprise. “However do you expect that to happen? This project has been a complete loss; it will forever be a pillar of shame for father and son.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha…” Huabei laughed out loud, swaying on his weightlessness-weakened legs. His spirit, however, burned strong with excitement. “The Great Wall and the Great Pyramids of Giza were a complete loss as well; the former failed to prevent the invasions of the rider people from the North and the latter never did resurrect the mummified pharaoh within. In the long run, that turned out to be utterly immaterial. Now all we see them as are eternal monuments to the human spirit!” He pointed to the Earth Tunnel’s terminal towering in the distance. “And compared to this mighty Great Wall of the Earth’s Core, you are pitiful wretches, wailing and railing against the inevitable! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…” He continued to happily chuckle.

Throwing his arms open, he embraced the cold Antarctic wind rushing over his body. “Yuan, my son, this life is enough,” he said, fully content and happy.

Huabei woke again, another half-century later. After leaving cryo-sleep, things played out much as they had done when he had awakened 50 years ago: A group of strangers bundled him off into a car and to the Mohe Earth Tunnel Terminal; he was again put into a sealed suit for some reason that he did not understand. This suit was actually a good deal more massive than the one he had donned half a decade ago, but before he could question this strange development, he once more plummeted into the Earth Tunnel, beginning that long fall anew. Decades had passed, but the tunnel seemed completely unchanged and he was again greeted by the blue concentric rings of lights, marking his descent into that bottomless well.

This time, however, he had company as he rushed downward. His fellow faller was a striking young woman who had introduced herself as his tour guide.

“Tour guide? I was right! My premonition has come true◦— the Earth Tunnel really has become like the Great Wall and the pyramids!” Huabei almost shouted in elation as they fell.

“No,” his guide replied. “The Earth Tunnel has not become like the Great Wall and the pyramids. It has become…” She took Huabei’s hand as they descended weightlessly, carefully ensuring that they fell in unison.

“What has it become?” Huabei asked, now anxious.

“Our Earth Cannon!” the guide answered happily.

Huabei did not understand. “What?” His head spun as his eyes shot from one side of the tunnel rushing by to the next. Again, he was to learn of past events while falling through the Earth as his guide began her account.

“In the years after you entered cryo-sleep, the Earth’s environment continued to deteriorate; pollution and the destruction of the ozone layer killed the world’s plants. Breathable air became a valuable commodity.” She paused in a heavy sigh. “At the time, we were left with one option if we wanted to save the Earth: Shut down all heavy energy industries.”

“That would probably allow the environment to recover, but it would mean the end of human civilization,” Huabei interrupted.

“Given what we faced then, many would have gladly made that sacrifice, but there were many more that looked for another way out. The most workable option was to move all of Earth’s industry into orbit and to the Moon,” she continued.

“So, you built a space elevator?” Huabei assumed.

“We did not. Not for lack of trying, though, but building up turned out to be much harder than digging down,” his guide explained.

“Then, was a method of anti-gravity flight discovered?” Huabei gave his next guess.

Again he was off the mark. “Not even close,” his guide said. “In fact, we understand enough to know that it is fundamentally impossible.”

“Nuclear powered rockets?” Huabei was now grasping at straws as he fell.

“Those we do have, but they cost almost as much as conventional rockets to get into orbit. Transferring Earth’s industry to space with them would have been another economic catastrophe on the scale of the Earth Tunnel,” his guide said, revealing the problem with his latest idea.

“So you never managed to transfer it? Has the world above then entered…” Huabei’s face twisted to a bitter smile, “…a post-human age?”

His guide did not answer and the two fell further down the bottomless abyss in silence. The lights rushing past them appeared to grow closer, finally again merging into a single blue glow that seemingly completely covered the tunnel’s walls. Another 10 minutes passed and the blue lights changed to red, plummeting at five miles per second as they passed through the Earth’s core without so much as a word. Moments later the tunnel’s walls glowed blue again. As soon as they did, his guide nimbly spun herself a full 180 degrees, inverting her body’s posture. Huabei followed her lead, clumsily turning himself around.

“Oh!” he suddenly shouted in surprise as he realized that the display at the corner of his visor was showing a speed of 5.3 miles per second.

The center of the Earth was behind them, but they were still accelerating!

And there was something else that made him recoil: He no longer felt weightless! The moment they had fallen through the center of the Earth he had begun to feel gravity’s pull; last time he had been weightless throughout his entire fall, yet he was now definitely feeling its forces pulling on his body! Huabei’s scientific intuition quickly corrected his feelings: This was not gravity◦— it was thrust ◦— thrust that allowed them to overcome the ever-growing pull of Earth’s gravity, thereby continuing their acceleration.

“You can surely recall Verne’s Moon gun?” his guide suddenly asked, although it sounded more like a statement to Huabei.

“I read that silly book when I was young,” he replied, not really paying her strange question any heed. More focused on his surroundings, he was still trying to figure out what exactly was happening.

“It’s not silly at all; using a large cannon is by far the easiest and fastest way to move significant numbers of humanity into space,” his guide explained.

“Only if you want to crush everyone you shoot out of your cannon into a meat smoothie,” he answered off-handedly, distinctly uninterested in this bizarre digression.

“The only reason they would be crushed is excessive acceleration and only a cannon that is too short would need to resort to excessive acceleration. With a sufficiently long cannon barrel, the ‘shells’ can be given a smooth and gentle acceleration, just like we are experiencing right now.” There was an air of mischief in his guide’s voice.

“Are you saying that we are in a Verne Cannon?” he asked incredulously.

“Like I said, this is the Earth Cannon,” she finally said.

Looking up at the blue glowing tunnel, Huabei did his level best to imagine it as the barrel of cannon. Their incredible speed had long left the tunnel’s walls a single streak of blue, robbing him of any real sensation of movement. To Huabei it felt as if they were hanging motionless, suspended in a giant blue tube.

“In the fourth year of your second cryo-sleep, we began manufacturing another kind of new solid state material. Beyond the usual qualities, this material was also a very potent conductor. Now, this half of the Earth Tunnel’s surface is wholly wrapped in large coils made of this material. We have turned more than thirty-nine-hundred miles of Tunnel, stretching through half the Earth, into a gigantic electromagnetic coil,” she said, revealing the inner workings of the mystery.