What would have happened then, when the machine’s power ran out? A gigantic explosion, probably violent enough to cause vulcanism all over the planet, perhaps even shift the balance of the continents…. Therefore it had probably never happened.
But suppose the power had never run out? Then what was left of the man must be still hanging there… or perhaps a cluster of corpses, each in his shell of force…
Time passed. In the darkness and silence, Naismith found himself becoming intensely aware of his physical substance—
his body’s attitude, the partly flexed limbs, the sense of half-perceived processes going on inside him. What a curious and almost incredible thing it was, after all, to be a living man!
For four years he had believed himself to be Gordon Naismith. Then he had been told that this identity was a mask, that in reality he was a member of a different race, from a world twenty thousand years in the future…. But this identity was no more real to him than the other.
What was the truth? Where had he really come from, and what was the goal to which he felt himself so irresistibly driven?
Blurred, illusory shapes swam before his eyes in the darkness.
He blinked irritably, then closed his eyes, but the shapes remained. He felt himself growing drowsy.
He came awake with a start, realizing that time had passed.
He felt the hands of the watch. It was nine-thirty. Twenty-five minutes had gone by. But—
Naismith clutched the crossbar hard, as the icy shock struck him. In twenty-two minutes, he should have reached the center of the Earth. Surely, at that depth, there would have been some rise in temperature in the capsule!
He reached out, touched the shell. It was just perceptibly warm.
He deliberately let five minutes go by, then touched the shell again. It was definitely warmer….
Was there a delay factor in the capsule’s transmission of heat? Or had he somehow taken longer than twenty-two minutes to reach the center? But that was impossible.
Again he waited five minutes before he touched the shell.
This time there was no mistake: it was hot.
After a moment, even the air in the capsule began to seem unpleasantly warm and heavy. Naismith found he was sweating; his clothes began to stick to him.
After five minutes more, it was not necessary to touch the wall again. It was glowing dull red.
Two minutes dragged by. The shell brightened through the red, into the orange, yellow, then white.
Naismith was in agony. Even with his eyes tight shut, the glare and heat were unendurable. He was being burnt alive.
He buried his face in his arms, sobbing for breath. The heat pressed in relentlessly upon him from all sides; he could feel it like a heavy weight on his clothing. Now he could smell his hair beginning to crisp and smolder.
The metal framework grew too hot to touch. Naismith retreated from it as far as he could, touching it only with the soles of his feet; but to do so was to draw nearer to the white-hot shell of the capsule.
He groaned aloud.
It seemed to him, after a moment, that the heat and glare had abated a little. He opened his eyes warily. It was true: the shell had turned from white to orange. As he watched, it faded slowly onto the red.
Naismith breathed in a great, tortured gasp of relief. The crisis was over—he was going to live!
Time—he must notice the time. Ignoring the pain of his blistered skin, he felt for the hands of the watch. It was exactly ten o’clock.
His passage through Inferno had taken about fifteen minutes.
Ten o’clock—fifty-five minutes from the beginning of his fall. By now, if his calculations had been correct, he should have emerged on the far side of the planet.
But he had just passed through a zone of heat that could only be the core!
The air in the capsule was growing cooler by the moment.
The shell faded from dull red into hot darkness again. A few minutes later, Naismith dared to touch it cautiously; it was hot, but bearable.
Naismith felt totally bewildered. The period of his transit through the Earth had to be approximately forty-two minutes, no matter from what height he began his fall. Could his watch be running too slowly? Was time in the capsule moving at a rate different from that of time outside?
As the fall continued in darkness, Naismith grew aware of both hunger and thirst. He had been penned up here for only about an hour, and that ought to be well within his tolerance; but how long was this going on? How long could he last?
Once more, by an effort of will, he calmed his mind. The shell steadily cooled; otherwise no change was perceptible.
If he assumed a lag in the capsule’s absorption and re-radiation of heat, Naismith drowsily thought, then it could be supposed that he had reached the mid-point of his orbit in just about twice the predicted time. That would imply that there was a difference of time-rate inside the capsule, or else that some other factor had been reduced for unknown reasons….
For a moment he allowed himself to speculate on what he would do to the two aliens, if by some incredible chance he came out of this alive and met them again; but he cut off the thought. He felt himself drifting again into sleep, and abandoned himself to it willingly.
He snapped back to awareness with a start. How long had he been dozing?
He felt the watch. It was 10:17. He had been in free fall for seventy-two minutes.
Tension began to build in him again. Unless his understanding of the situation was simply, grossly wrong, then the zone of heat he had passed must have been the core of the Earth; and his period must be about twice what he had originally calculated. But why?
Time dragged. It was 10:19; then 10:23; then 10:27. Naismith waited tensely. Ten-nineteen. Now, if ever—
One moment he was still in utter blackness. The next, stars bloomed out beneath him, a galaxy of them, blindingly brilliant in their half-globe of night. Above him was a dark orb that occluded the other half of the sky; it was drifting away as he watched.
Naismith blinked up at it in uncomprehending wonder for a moment, until he realized that it was the night side of the Earth—that he had burst out of it feet-foremost.
His breath caught, and tears came to his eyes. He was out, out in the fresh air at last! He made an instinctive attempt to squirm around right-side-to, but gave it up immediately; that did not matter.
What did matter, he realized with sudden alarm, was that he was rising too high! The wrinkled, starlight face of the water was drawing away overhead—five hundred feet, a thousand, with no sign of slowing down.
The time had been top long; his speed was too great.
Coming down, Naismith realized with horror, he would be going much too fast to dare turn off the machine…
He would have to go all the way through, past that inferno of heat—at least once, perhaps twice. He was grimly sure that he could not survive even one more passage.
The globe above him continued to recede. Now it was con-cave, a gigantic silver-lit bowclass="underline" now it turned convex. The sky beneath changed from blue-black to purple, to ebony. The stars shone with a crueler sharpness.
Veils of cloud whisked by and receded, dwindling. How was it possible that he should be rising so far? He must be nearly into the stratosphere.
Now his speed was diminishing. He hung fixed in space for an instant, then saw the Earth creeping nearer again.
On the whole broad, overhanging curve of the ocean, there was not one light, not a ship. His ascent had taken perhaps a minute and a half; in the same length of time he must plunge back into the sea.
Naismith stared at the immense globe as it swelled toward him. There must be some explanation! It was out of the question for a falling body to come up ten or fifteen miles higher than the point it had started from… Unless—
Suddenly Naismith remembered the instant of his fall, and the seeming nightmare slowness of it, while he fought to escape the shell of the force-field he was in.