Snook studied his loosely-packed aromatic cigarette for a moment. “Aren’t you taking a bit of a risk by talking to me like this?”
“I don’t think so. I take care to know the man I speak to.”
“It’s nice of you to say that,” Snook replied warily, “but would you be insulted if I went on thinking you must have a reason?”
“Not insulted—disappointed, perhaps.” Murphy gave a high-pitched chuckle which seemed incompatible with his solid torso, and the minty smell of his breath reached Snook. “The men like you because you’re honest. And because you’re nobody’s fool.”
“You’re still being nice to me, George.”
Murphy spread his hands. “What I’ve been saying is relevant. Look, if you will investigate this ghost thing and come up with some reassuring explanation the men will accept it. And you’ll be doing them a big favour.”
“Anything that teacher says must be true.”
Murphy nodded. “In this case, yes.”
“I’m interested.” Snook turned to face the steel-framed structures which covered the entrance to the three-kilometre vertical shaft. “But I thought visitors weren’t allowed down there.”
“You’re a privileged case. I talked to Alain Cartier, the mine manager, a while ago and he has already signed the special authorisation.”
Chapter Four
Snook had requested that lighting should be kept to a minimum, and as a result the darkness at the end of the south pipe on Level Eight was almost complete. He felt as though he was standing in a well of black ink which not only robbed him of light but drained all the warmth from his body. There was a flashlight attached to his belt, but the only relief he permitted himself from the pressure of night was occasionally to touch the display stud on his wristwatch. The fleeting appearance of the angular red numerals, telling him that dawn was approaching the world above, also created an illusion of heat.
He felt a gentle touch on his arm.
“What’ll we do if nothing happens?” Murphy’s voice, although he was standing only two paces away, was almost inaudible.
Snook grinned in the blackness. “There’s no need to whisper, George.”
“Damn you, Snook.” There was a pause, then Murphy repeated his question in a voice which was very slightly louder than at first.
“We come back tomorrow, of course.”
“Then I’m bringing a hot water bottle and a flask of soup.”
“Sorry,” Snook said. “No heat sources—one of the cameras has infrared film in and I don’t want to chance spoiling the results. Photography isn’t one of my fields.”
“But you think a magniluct filter will work on a camera?”
“I don’t see why it shouldn’t. Do you?”
“I see bugger all,” Murphy whispered gloomily. “Even with my Amplites on.”
“Keep them on—just before dawn seems to be the most likely time for an appearance, if there’s going to be one.”
Snook was wearing his own low-light glasses and, like Murphy, could see almost nothing. The magniluct lenses were designed to amplify meagre scatterings of light to a level at which the wearer’s surroundings became visible, but where there was less than a threshold level their performance was uncertain. He leaned against the end wall of the pipe, constantly moving his eyes, determined not to miss the slightest manifestation of anything unusual, and occasionally took the Amplites off for a second to compare the two forms of vision. Perhaps ten minutes had passed when Snook began to think he could sense a slight difference—it seemed to him that the blackness was less intense while he was looking through the glasses. No shapes were visible, not even a localised variation in the near-luminance, and yet he became almost certain his field of view was infinitesimally brighter, as if a faintly luminous gas was seeping in to the tunnel.
He said, “George, do you notice anything?”
“No.” The other man’s reply was immediate.
Snook cursed his lack of proper equipment. He had no way of proving that the apparent increase in brightness was not due to the sensitivity of his eyes improving with the long stay in darkness. Suddenly a speck of light, faint as a minor star, appeared at his left and wandered lazily across his vision. Snook pushed the button which, by means of a device he had built during the day, operated the shutters of four cameras. The multiple clicks and the sound of the winding-on mechanisms were shockingly loud in the taut blackness. He checked the time by his watch and memorised it.
“Did you see that?” he said. “A thing like a small firefly?”
There was a moment of silence, then Murphy said, “Gil, look at the floor!”
A spot of dim light Appeared on the floor and gradually became a disk. When the circle was as large as a man’s hand, Snook became aware that he was in fact looking at a transparent luminous dome, tufted on top like a coconut. He fought to control his breathing, and by an effort of will operated the cameras again. Within seconds the dome had risen and enlarged itself into a roughly spherical object resembling a head upon which travesties of human lineaments were barely visible. The body below it glowed within the rock.
There were two eyes near the top, and between them—only slightly lower down—was a third hole which might have been a nose, unadorned by nostrils. No ears were visible, and very close to the bottom was a slitted mouth, tremendously wide and mobile. Even as Snook watched, the mouth twitched and writhed, assuming compound curvatures and quirks which—on a man’s face—would have indicated an interplay of feelings ranging from boredom to anger to amusement to impatience, plus others for which there were no human counterparts.
The sound of Murphy’s harsh breathing reminded Snook that he still had a job to do. He took another set of photographs and, without conscious thought, kept on operating the cameras every few seconds as the apparition steadily rose higher, coming more completely into view.
The alien head was followed by narrow, sloping shoulders and strangely jointed arms which emerged from a complicated arrangement of robes, frills and straps, made more intricate by the fact that they were semi-transparent and thus could be glimpsed at the back of the figure as well as at the front. Shadowy organs slid and pulsed internally. The creature continued to rise through the floor at the same steady pace, in utter silence, until it was fully in view. It stood about the height of a small man, on two disproportionately thin legs which were hazily seen amid the hanging folds of its robes. The feet were triangular and flat, displaying radial arrays of bones among which wove the thongs of what appeared to be sandals.
When the creature had emerged fully into the tunnel it turned slightly and, in a curiously human gesture, raised one hand to its eyes as if shading them from a bright light. It gave no indication of being aware of the two men. Snook’s powers of reasoning were all but obliterated by a pounding dread, yet he discovered he still had capacity for further surprise. Conditioned by the physical laws of his own existence, he had expected the glowing figure to cease its upward movement when it was on a level with himself, but it continued rising at the same unchanging rate until its head passed into the tunnel roof. The head was followed into the solid rock by the rest of the blue-sketched translucent body.
Spreading outwards horizontally from the plane of its feet, like an insubstantial floor, was a surface of radiance which also travelled upwards, creating the illusion that the tunnel was filling with glowing liquid. When its level passed above Snook’s eyes he found himself blinded with cloudy luminescence and in sudden panic he snatched off the Amplite glasses.