Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/43

Rh towers so fantastically vaulting skyward were suspended the roads, the connecting arteries of the huge planet city's parts. The world whirled giddily as the eye of the recorder swung into a focus upon the Gargantuan structure near at hand, and whirled again as we seemed to be borne in the air and magically inserted within the interior of the building.

Somebody was in hot water! A group of swarthy men were scatered about the great chamber, peering out the windows over the snouts of ugly ray-weapons into the cloud-wrack of the sky outside. Far in the distance, the gleaming bodies of a dozen planes swung down from the shielding clouds as they neared, and as swiftly swept up into the alternate white-and-grey hovering mass of mist again. For the men within the chamber threw a bolt of deadly energy at every gleaming sky-fish that showed a fin. Some preparations for departure seemed going on, files were burned and an elevator appeared, was swiftly loaded and shot upward out of sight again. Ten minutes of this intensive defense went on, the swarthy men then dropped their weapons and boarded the elevator. It shot up and up dizzily, and when we stepped out, the windows through which one peered at the sky outside were shrouded and wet with the clouds obscuring all sight.

Now they mounted a flight of steps and emerged on a platform, the height of which must have been dizzying. Poised on the platform that was the center of the down-sloping roof was a long, slim ship. Its nose, from which projected a deadly looking ray-cathode for space use, slanted up at a sharp angle. The men scrambled in and the ship blasted up and away—into the space above that was swiftly the utter cold of space.

Far below a pursuit of five long ships flamed after, but the men laughed excitedly, and seemed confident that their ship would not be overtaken. Now the mind was told of the lapse of some twenty years and then the ship was circling down, down and crashing into the water of a great, calm sea. The record told me in some way that this was the Mediterranean before it had acquired that name.

Our great penetray beams reached out and down, searching the water and the rock below, for still afar could be heard the thunder of the pursuit rockets augmented by our detectors. Now down and down, we crashed toward some hiding-hole the rays had spied out of the rocky bottom of the sea. A long tube of hollowness could be seen on the screens far below, and this ended in a great metal door on the sea's bottom. This hollowness I knew was the surface ending of one of the under-earth tunnels that form a network over all earth. Our beams reached out ahead of us, wrenching magnetically at the mechanism of the door, and the lock swung open as we came, letting us in—closing behind us. As swiftly the inner door opened protestingly, creakingly—an age already had the door waited unused—and we shot through, flying now just above the dry floor of a cavern under the sea. On and on, down and down, the ship careened, narrowly missing the fate that the slightest unsureness of control would have meant: death in a crushing blast of weight and momentum as the fuel exploded in the crash against the walls. But it did not happen, and at last our leader cried out and pointed ahead—where arose the great doors that meant: Within lies a city, a forgotten city built here by some ancients unknown to us.

VER the great gates of the city were these words, "THE CITY OF DIS."

These doors likewise opened to the searching, pulling rays under our leader's swift fingers. This leader's name I knew—"Mephistopheles." Into the vast city of tremendous dwellings we shot, turning and searching—for what? At last I knew as we settled on a huge square pile from which the long electrode snouts of ray-cannon protruded. With shouts we piled out of the ship as she slid to a halt.

"Now let them come—with this armament we will give them a welcome."

I knew again, from the dogged pursuit, that no twenty years had elapsed since we lifted from that unbelievable city of metal, gargantuan towers, but that some paradox of space-time-speed had conquered some unit of space called by a mental symbol