Astounding Stories, August, 1931 Part 21

"Now we'll run!" Mich'l ordered, giving Lane a shove. "Coming, Nida?"

She was dragging her father along joyously. They crossed the broad pedestrian walk, and in the street found an official car nestling on one of the tracks.

"Heave in the riot-ray, will you, old fellow?" Mich'l requested jovially, and Lane did. Then the listless chauffeur turned a controller, and the big car rose a few inches, lightly as a feather, and sped away swiftly through the maze of traffic.

Sometime later they were in a service lift; not one of the great public lifts that carried their hundreds at a trip, but one of the small lifts used mostly by the technies, and known to few outside their ranks. Mich'l, standing blissfully close to Nida and her father, enjoyed his moment of relaxation. Many things had been attended to.

Lane had been released at last, in one of the catacomb cemeteries. It would take him at least two hours to find his way out. They were discussing the riot-ray, which they had with them.

"I hope we won't have to exhaust it in a fight before we get out,"

Senator Mane said anxiously. "It would be a splendid weapon if we encounter a hostile environment Outside."

"The Gate is guarded," Mich'l said practically, "but we expect to surprise them. No use worrying."

The lift came to a stop at an air-lock. The great elevator shafts were closed by airlocks every 2,000 feet. The reason is obvious. If the air of the great, spheroid subterranean nation were allowed to freely obey the laws of gravity, it would be oppressively dense in the lower levels, and excessively rarified in the upper ones. While the airlocks were operating Mich'l stepped to a telucid and gave the agreed-on signal.

In another half hour they were at 37X. The great, dusty, and little-used storeroom was only poorly lighted; it was dank, and had an uncomfortable chill. Technies and their families were coming in from all sides, and it was not long before some five hundred persons, men, women and children, were a.s.sembled. Many of them were pale and frightened looking, for they were staking everything on an ideal, a theory. There would be no coming back. The statute books of Subterranea decreed only one penalty--death--for even the merest tampering with the Frozen Gate. It was not like this that they had visioned the opening of the Gate. Under properly controlled conditions, it would have been possible to open the gate for preliminary explorations. But not now. They were outside the law.

Nida, standing beside Mich'l, s.h.i.+vered and pulled her over-robe closer around her. There was sadness in her voice as she said:

"These children.... They remind me of the thousands of children we must abandon with our people. If I could, I'd steal a few to take with us."

Mich'l grinned without mirth.

"And be d.a.m.ned as a kidnapper of a particularly horrible sort, as long as Subterranea lasts!"

"I know. I know. But what will happen to them all when the automatic machinery fails?"

"They may learn to run it, if they have to. Or if we succeed in establis.h.i.+ng ourselves in the outer world we can tunnel back to them around the Gate in a year or so. Don't worry about them too much.

We're taking the big risk, not they."

Gobet Hanlon, accompanied by Flos Entine and Mila Mane, approached. He was loaded down with a huge case of concentrated food.

"I've given orders to bring with us all the cold resisting fabrics we could carry. Got 'em loaded down, eh?"

"All here?"

"Every last one."

"Let's go, then." Mich'l stepped to a small door that led into the main corridor close to the Gate. This door had not been used by the technies when a.s.sembling. Through a tiny hole the guard, four soldiers, could be seen about a blanket, tossing sixteen-sided dice.

Mich'l opened the door, his needle-ray pointed.

"Don't move, or you burn!" he commanded harshly.

The guards, taken completely by surprise, did not move. In a few moments they were bound, gagged, and dumped into a corner of 37X.

Eager technies were swarming over the complicated mechanism that they had dared to touch, before, only for inspection and maintenance. The Frozen Gate was like a huge stopper in a bottle, made of chromium steel. It was thirty feet in diameter, and thirty feet thick from its well insulated inside face to that enigmatical Outside that had been a grisly mystery to the race for some five hundred centuries.

There was a flash of sparks, and the quiet hum of motors. With a shuddering groan the great plug freed itself from the grip of millennia; turned a few inches in its hole. The supporting gimbals took the load now, and slowly the great ma.s.s moved inward, carried by an overhead traveling crane whose track was bolted to the rock roof.

The rate of movement was slow, not much over three or four inches a minute.

An excited murmur filled the cavern--almost hysterical joy. But Mich'l, watching that widening margin for the dreaded gush of liquid air, only trembled with relief. At least the calamity that had visited rash Atlantica would not be repeated here.

A young technie, one of the heat distributors, climbed up the heavy bosses on the gateway's face.

"I'm going to be the first to see the Sun!" he shouted joyously. His challenging gaze roved over the waiting crowd, and suddenly his face turned ashen. For at the turn of the corridor, some hundred yards away, he had seen men. No mistaking those uniforms; they were soldiers. And Mich'l, following his gaze, saw a riot-ray being wheeled into place. His own riot-ray already commanded the corridor, but he dared not use it. The soldiers, under the partial protection of the turn, could incinerate the helpless technies with little danger to themselves.

"Wait!" Mich'l shouted, running into the open.

An officer came to meet him. He then recognized Captain Ilgen, whose exceptional shrewdness had almost undone him before. Ilgen could not see the slow movement of the gate, and Mich'l, himself weaponless, counted only on parleying for time.

They met midway between the two forces, and the small black lens of the captain's weapon pointed steadily at Mich'l's chest.

"Mich'l Ares, I arrest you." It seemed that the captain's fine gray eyes looked out of the lean face with real sympathy. "It may be there will be executive clemency for these people of yours, but for you--"

Mich'l, tense and deadly, saw the captain's vigilant attention leave his face for a second; saw his eyes widen in consternation. He could not know that Ilgen had seen a slender crescent of green light appear in the Frozen Gate, but he did not lose the opportunity. His fist crashed on the captain's jaw, so that the soldierly figure reeled and the needle-ray fell to the ground. Mich'l leaped after him, picked him up, held him. The riot-ray was turned full on him, and a soldier's hand trembled on the lever. But it did not pull.

"You'll kill him!" Mich'l shouted. And then he ventured to turn his head to look at the Gate. He saw the first of the fugitives struggle into the narrow crack. The gate seemed to have stuck, and there was barely room to pa.s.s. Ilgen, half conscious, was trying to rain blows on Mich'l's back, compelling him to stop and pa.s.s the officer's hands through the belt of his tunic and to manacle them with a pair of bracelets which he found in his pocket. As he staggered toward the Gate with his burden, he saw Gobet beside him, the stolen riot-ray menacing the soldiers, who would otherwise have rushed in.

Suddenly Ilgen struggled upright.

"Fire," he commanded in stentorian tones.

"They'll kill you too, you fool!" Mich'l exclaimed angrily.

"I am a soldier!" Ilgen answered with contempt. His legs barely supported his weight, and he was struggling to free his manacled hands. He threw himself into the narrow crevice of the Gate, to obstruct the stream of fugitives. He started to shout again:

"Fi--" Crack! Again Mich'l's fist caught him. He hooked the officer's elbows over two of the bosses, so that he was supported in plain sight of his men, and turned to urge haste. The last two stragglers were hurrying through, and with relief Mich'l turned to follow. But he set the closing mechanism in motion before he leaped for the narrow opening that was becoming still narrower, though very slowly. Now for that green crescent of light, and hope!

He felt a wave of heat. Glancing back, he saw the irresolute guards scattered by the enraged charge of a square, blocky man in civilian robe--the usually smiling Provisional President, Senator Mollon.

Mollon himself was fumbling with the lever of the riot-ray. Ilgen had evidently reported where he was going before starting in pursuit of the technies.

Again that withering flash of heat, and Mich'l saw Captain Ilgen, still semi-conscious, suddenly turn red-faced. Mollon would burn him up without compunction, in the hope of catching one of the fugitive technies. And now a figure in uniform leaped forward at Mollon's angry gesture, and bent purposefully to the sighting tube.

The crescent was now so slender that Mich'l had to turn sideways to squeeze back into the corridor. And slowly, inexorably, it was growing smaller still. With desperate haste the practiced, uniformed man was adjusting his range.

Captain Ilgen struggled when Mich'l seized him.

"I arrest--"

Mich'l thought for a sickening moment that he was caught in the closing gate. Then he was free in the cylindrical tunnel into which the plug was creeping. Luckily, Ilgen was slight. His body squeezed through with little more difficulty than Mich'l's own. Now the opening was too small for any man's body. A red glow illuminated that narrowing slit; an acrid wave of heat, and the smell of burnt metal came with the strong current of air that blew out of Subterranea.