“And?” Dane prompted. Usually Foreman was direct and to the point, but whenever he wandered into theory he became more tentative and explanatory. Dane thought something about what Foreman had just recited was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t pin it down.
“Over the past sixty years,” Foreman said, “I’ve gone many places, listened to many strange stories and followed every possible lead I could find, no matter how outrageous. I learned early on to look into legends. Also, to search for those with the sight. I think Jules Verne had it. Much like you feel Frost heard the voices of the gods. After all, he considered himself a poet also.”
“How is that?” Dane asked.
“Verne considered himself a poet in the old sense-that of a maker. He once said that poets weren’t just dreamers, they were also prophets but a prophet who tried to stay grounded in facts as much as possible. If you check his books, other than the fictional assumptions underpinning them, they are factual to an amazing degree.
‘’Think about it. Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea long before anyone had drawn up a plan for a submarine. He wrote about cars and airships before they were invented.”
A prophet. Dane knew if he had been born in another time and another place, he, too, might have been considered one. He’d always been able to sense things, to see things others couldn’t. Some called it a sixth sense. During his tour of duty in Vietnam so many years earlier, he’d always taken point and his team had never been ambushed. That is until they went into the Angkor Gate under Foreman’s order to recover the U-2’s black box. There he had run into creatures not from this Earth and powers he could not comprehend and still didn’t, more than thirty years later.
Foreman got to his feet, agitated. “It all fits. I knew that for Ii long time. I just couldn’t, still don’t. totally understand it. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Think about it. Even the Buddhists had an inner kingdom. Agartha. A worldwide web of underground passages.”
Dane remained quiet, realizing Foreman was feeling guilty that he hadn’t understood the threat from the Shadow early enough to prevent all that had happened.
“Caves.” Foreman stared at Dane, as if he knew what Dane was thinking. “Our early ancestors lived in caves. Nowadays we all look to the sky, to the stars for the unknown. But the interior of the Earth itself-” Foreman pointed down-“has always been as much an unknown.”
Dane glanced at Ahana, who was listening raptly. Even as the Flip continued its rotation. She had been the one who had briefed them on the interior of the planet so they could understand-and defeat-the Shadow’s recent attempt to tap the power from the core of the planet. Dane had been shocked to learn how little science knew of the Earth on which they all walked, but upon reflection had realized that it wasn’t so strange. Although ships with men onboard had actually traveled into space, even to the moon-as Verne had predicated, he suddenly realized-the farthest man had penetrated into the planet was only about eight miles, hardly a scratch on the surface of the planet.
“Plato wrote about Atlantis,” Foreman continued. “Which we now know existed and was destroyed by the Shadow. But he also wrote of ‘tunnels. Both broad and narrow in the interior of the Earth.”
“The best way an ancient could explain the portals inside the gates,” Dane said.
Foreman nodded. “Yes. As good as ally. And I studied all the ancient myths and legends regarding routes through the planet and an interior world-which would be the best explanation an ancient could come up with if they had happened to survive going through a portal.
“Edmond Halley, who the comet is named after, was one of the first who tried to converge the myth of an interior planet with science. He was fascinated with magnetism and discovered that magnetic north was not always in the same place.”
Dane reached out and grabbed one of the chairs, sliding into it. The Flip was almost completely horizontal. The floor having rotated more than eighty degrees. It was a strange experience, standing level while the walls rotated but the floor remained level.
“Halley had no way to explain this,” Foreman continued. “He also found that variation-the lateral deflection that could be determined according to longitude-was slowly changing over time. For lack of a better explanation. Halley posited that there had to be more than one magnetic field causing these conflicting readings. And to produce more than one magnetic field, he suggested that the Earth had an inner twin. That the surface we walk on is just a shell, with another entire planet inside with its own axis and magnetic poles. This, combined with this inner world having its own rotation slightly off from our own world, could account for the data he had.
“When he found readings that couldn’t be accounted for by one inner world, he suggested there were several, one inside the other, like those Russian dolls where several are nestled inside each other.
“Then there. Was an American in the early 1800s.” Foreman continued, “who jumped on this concept. A man named Bouyer. He claimed that not only was there an interior world, but that he could get to it by traveling north into the Arctic and entering through a hole at the pole-he claimed there was an opening at each pole. To give you an idea of how seriously this was taken, President John Quincy Adams gave him support and even planned to mount an expedition to find this opening. However, when Andrew Jackson replaced him as president, the idea was squashed. But in 1836, Congress actually allocated three hundred thousand dollars for an expedition to the South Pole.
“The four-year Wilkes expedition didn’t find an opening, but then again it couldn’t penetrate the shoreline of Antarctica. In the same manner that later water-borne expeditions to try to fix the North Pole were stymied by ice. A surface vesse1 simply could not get there.”
“So you figured the first nuclear submarine would be the best way to check it out?” Dane interjected.
Foreman waved a hand, indicating that Dane had jumped too far ahead in his story. “Verne wasn’t the only one who wrote about a journey into the Earth. Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket about a ship getting sucked into a hole at the North Pole. He was crying out Bouyer’s name on his death bed.”
Poe. Dane found he was nodding. If Frost heard the voice of the gods, he had no doubt people like Poe and Verne heard them. Too. It seemed as if artists were the ones most open to visions, people whom society saw as being somewhat mad to start with, outside of the bell curve. Dane had never been, and,till wasn’t sure, that being outside the majority of society was a good thing or not.
“Which brings me back to Verne,” Foreman continued. “He wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. After reading the runes, the characters in his story head to Iceland, where they find a chimney deep inside an extinct volcano, which they follow deep into the Earth. There they discover a sea inside the planet.”
Dane glanced at Ahana. She had been inside the gate with him to the Space Between, a place that consisted of an inner sea surrounded by a ring of black sand leading up to a wall that curved in overhead. And Iceland, which the Shadow had destroyed not long ago, using nuclear missiles from an American submarine to split the tectonic plates on which the island had rested.
Foreman caught the look. “Yes. An inner sea. Just like what you’ve seen where all the portals seem to channel through. Maybe his fiction wasn’t so fictional. In his story, his characters sail on the inner sea and are attacked by monsters-again, sound familiar?”