Chapter Eleven
Naismith’s first emotion was a consuming rage. Gathering himself, he kicked against the crossbar, flung his body upward
—and was hurled back again by a curved, elastic wall. He landed hard against the metal framework, which began to revolve slowly and dizzyingly around him. The falling sensation continued.
His one opportunity was gone: for a moment that was all he could think of. If he had been able to leap out of the machine’s field during the first second of its fall… but it was impossible to get out of the field without turning off the machine, as he had just discovered.
In fact, the opportunity had been illusory. He had been doomed from the moment he turned on the machine. Now he was falling, falling endlessly—to what fate?
The aliens had told him one truth and one lie; he had taken the lie for the truth, exactly as they had intended him to do.
Rage and despair all but choked him, as he clung to the metal frame work, falling, in darkness and silence. He wanted to live!
A faint hope came, as his fingers touched the control knobs on the crossbar. If the aliens had lied about this, too…
Cautiously he tried one knob after another, avoiding the lever which had turned the machine on. There was no perceptible result, except that, when he had turned the third knob, he felt a cool breath of air.
There was something he had not even considered: at least he would not smother on his way down…. But he did not succeed in arresting his fall, or changing its direction, so far as he could tell, by a hair’s breadth.
The thought of the gulf below him was hideous. What, actually, was happening to him at this moment? The answer came at once. He was acting out one of the oldest physics problems in the book, something that every freshman “was familiar with—the imaginary tunnel drilled through the Earth.
In fact, his body was a harmonic oscillator. Assuming a homogeneous Earth and a non-rotating frame, he would describe a long narrow ellipse around the Earth’s center. His grip on the crossbar tightened convulsively. Of course—and unless friction retarded him too much, he would rise at the antipodal point to exactly the same level he had started from!
Wait, now—he had fallen from the floor of an underground chamber perhaps a hundred feet or so under the surface…
Where was he going to come out?
The moment the question occurred to him, he realized that It was of vital importance. He had entered the Earth near Lake Michigan, probably not far from the site of Chicago. If he went straight through the planet, he should come out somewhere in the Indian Ocean… and Chicago, he was sure, was several hundred feet above sea level!
Wait a moment… he was neglecting the rotation of the Earth; that would bring him out some distance westward of the antipodal point. How far depended on the period of his motion…. Call the radius of the Earth four thousand miles
—about twenty million feet, for convenience. Gravity at the surface of the Earth, thirty-two feet per second per second. The square root of twenty million over thirty-two would be two hundred and fifty times the square root of ten… times pi…
about twenty-five hundred seconds. Call it forty-two minutes.
He ran through the calculation once more, found no error.
Very well, in forty-two minutes, if he was right, he would be emerging from the far side of the planet. In the meantime, the rotation of the Earth would have brought his exit point about ten or eleven degrees westward.… It was all right: that would still be in the ocean.
He took a deep breath. At least he would come out, not cycle inside the Earth until his momentum was used up. If his calculations were right—
How long had he been falling?
Cursing himself, he fumbled for his wristwatch. The dial was not luminous, but with a nail-file from his pocket he pried up the crystal, felt the hands with his fingertips. They indicated about ten minutes after nine. He had been falling for what seemed half an hour or more, but was probably less than five minutes. Assume, then, that he had begun his fall at 9:05 by this watch. The time it showed was local California time as of 1980 A.D.—curious to think of this mechanism still faithfully keeping track of the minutes now buried thousands of years in the past… but that did not matter.
At 9:47, he should emerge. If friction was a negligible factor, and he could not assume otherwise, then he would rise to a height of two or three hundred feet above the ocean… top high. He felt himself begin to sweat, as he realized that it would be necessary to chance falling back through the Earth
—all the way through to the Western hemisphere, then back again, hoping that in those two additional passages, friction would bring him out at a level from which he could hope to fall safely.
Luckily, there was plenty of room in the ocean. Two more passages would bring him westward only twenty-odd degrees.…
A feeling of discomfort drew his attention. He was uneasy: what had he been neglecting?
Friction: what if it were not negligible? For that matter, what about the interior heat of the Earth?
He was to pass near the center of the core, which was thought to be at about four thousand degrees centigrade…
Something was wrong. He reached out quickly, touched the hollow curve of the force-shell. It was neither warm nor cool to his senses. But he had already been falling… he felt the hands of the watch again… more than six minutes… t squared, call it a hundred thirty thousand, times one-half the acceleration—two million feet, or something close to four hundred miles.
While part of his mind to grasp that, another part went on coldly calculating.
Temperature of the Earth’s crust increased with depth, by about thirty degrees centigrade every kilometer. And the shell he was in was transparent to visible light. Therefore…
He was through the crust, falling through the mantle.
He should have passed the red-heat stage long ago; by now he should be well into the white. And yet—
He touched the shell again. It was still neither hot nor cold.
The darkness was unbroken.
Doubt struck him. Was he really falling? Suppose he was simply hanging here, suspended, without gravity… drifting, like a disembodied spirit, forever under the Earth?
He gripped the crossbar fiercely. The Universe obeyed certain laws, among these were the mutual attraction of material bodies and the equivalence of gravity and inertia. His senses told him that he was falling, and in this case it happened to be true—he was falling.
He touched the hands of the watch once more. They seemed hardly to have moved. He held the watch to his ear to listen for the whirr of the motor, then swore at himself impatiently.
Of course the watch was running: it was his own perception of.
time that was at fault.
If he only had a light… He would be seeing what no man had ever seen, the rocks of the deep mantle. In a few minutes he would be passing through the rim of the outer core, into that curious region where nickel-iron was compressed into a liquid.…
The watch again. The minute hand had moved, just perceptibly. Falling into this dark emptiness, Naismith could not help thinking again of lost spirits, wandering forever under the Earth. The Greeks had imagined a Hell like that; the Egyptians, too. A phrase from some chance reading came back to him:
“the chthonic ourobouros.”
He shuddered, and gripped the crossbar hard. I am a man, not a ghost.
He wondered if what he was experiencing had ever happened before: if any other living soul had made this incredible plunge. Such a man, failing to reach the surface again, swinging back and forth, thousands of times… until eventually his lifeless body came to rest at the center of the Earth.