The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

are not able to keep pace with my disquisition, save your questions until I am through explaining—!”

      “And you think it went straight down the cone of the dead volcano?” I hazarded. He blinked surprisedly, as he always did when I said something intelligent.

      “Precisely, my boy! And if my calculations are correct, it would have been some hundreds of miles below the earth’s crust before the meteor came into contact with normal matter. The explosion would have been of an unprecedented scale of magnitude. Hundreds of thousands of tons of solid rock would have instantly vaporized…forming a huge bubble of impacted molten rock far below the planet’s surface…”

      “How huge?” I asked. He shook his head.

      “No way of telling, I fear…we shall soon see for ourselves.”

      “That’s why you wanted a helicopter!” I said, suddenly putting two and two together and coming up with at least three and nine-tenths.

      “Exactly, my boy…I plan to descend into the crater of the volcano-let us christen it Mount Zanthodon, and employ the term hereafter as a verbal shortcut.”

      “Well…Babe can do it, I suppose,” I muttered dubiously. “Depending on the width of the crater, that is. What do we do if it narrows on us before we get down to the center of the earth?”

      “We get out and look about,” he said primly, hefting the shiny new geological pick he had purchased in the Cairo market. I groaned and tried to pretend I hadn’t heard.

      Actually, it wasn’t the center of the earth we were going to at all. That was just the Prof’s gift for dramatic hyperbole. This side of the fantastic novels of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, nobody is ever going to get that deep into the planet because of the heat of the magma core, if for no other reason. But even a hundred miles down, which was about as deep as Potter reckoned the Underground World to be, was deep enough.

      Deeper than any man has ever gone before.…

      * * * *

      Well, to make a long story just a wee bit shorter, it was there all right—the mountain, I mean. And only a little more than a thousand or so feet high: I hadn’t needed to worry about it being anywhere like the height of Mount Tahat, after all.

      We made camp on the shoulder of the extinct volcano which the Professor had christened Mount Zanthodon. That put us up above the brush and—theoretically—out of the reach of whatever predators might be roaming around this part of the country. I wrestled with putting up the tent while the Professor twiddled with his instruments, taking measurements and pinpointing the latitude and longitude on his charts with his customary precision.

      Then we unloaded everything from the chopper except enough gasoline to get us down to the bottom of the crater’s shaft, stashing away our reserve fuel for the return trip to Agadar. Just in case the stories were full of bunk about how the Tuareg tribesmen shunned this area, and to prevent our fuel from being stolen, I hid it by the simple expedient of burying it under the loose, flaky soil which clothed the flanks of the mountain.

      With dawn the next day we were to make our first attempt at the descent.

      Needless to say, neither of us got much sleep.

      We were up early the next morning, for the Professor was hot to get started. My fears about the width of the crater proved groundless, for from lip to lip the crater was more than wide enough to accommodate Babe. Of course, there was no way of knowing in advance how swiftly the shaft might narrow, once we began our descent, and from the top it was impossible to guess.

      The Professor puttered about the lip of the crater with something resembling a Geiger. He returned jubilant, reporting that the residual amount of background radiation suggested that his theory was absolutely correct, for the radioactivity was about that which he would expect to find left over from such an underground explosion as he had postulated.

      “How dangerous is it?”

      “Oh, nothing to worry about at all,” he burbled. “In fact, only a special instrument as sensitive as mine could detect it at all…no hazard to our health whatsoever!”

      I guess I had to be satisfied with that.

      * * * *

      And so we started down. At the lip of the crater the width of the central shaft measured about two hundred feet in diameter and roughly six hundred feet in circumference. The great shaft yawned beneath us, seeming to go down and down forever, dwindling into inky darkness. It was a fantastic sight, I must admit; also, a frightening one. But we had not come all this way to sightsee; so I kicked Babe about, centered her above the shaft, and we began the descent.

      The sides of the shaft were almost perpendicular, like the sides of a well; but there were jagged outcroppings and protuberances to watch out for, so I guided Babe down carefully, and very slowly, using the special spotlights we had ordered to be installed back at Cairo to illuminate the crater walls.

      The sides of the shaft were thickly coated with lava, very porous and crumbling; in the enclosed space, Babe’s engine made a deafening racket. Bits and chunks of lava, jarred loose by the noise, went bouncing and ricocheting down. But the Professor reassured me that the dangers of creating a landslide were minute.

      Well, he’d been right about everything so far; I would trust him to be right about this fact.

      Jaws grimly set, I coaxed Babe down yard by yard. When we were about two hundred feet below the mouth of the crater, darkness closed in, thick and impenetrable, and I was very glad we had thought about installing those spots. Because now we really needed them.

      If we so much as nudged against the side of the crater, or hit one of those projecting shelves or spurs of lava which jutted crazily out from the walls, seemingly at random, Babe could snap her rotors. We would still descend, of course, in that case, but a lot more quickly than we wanted to, and our landing would be a bad one.

      The Professor was peering with fascination at the rock strata as we sank past the four-hundred-foot point. I suppose any geologist would have been fascinated by what he saw—he yelled, over the roar of the engine, stuff about “combustible carbons,” “silurians,” and “primordial soil,” but I was too busy gritting my teeth to bother listening.

      Above our heads the circular opening framed a disc of day, which dwindled to the size of a dime. Now we were entered into the regions of Eternal Night, where light of the sun has but seldom penetrated since the planet was formed. It was an eerie experience, even a thrilling one, to have gone where no human foot had ever gone before us.

      I would have traded the thrill for my favorite table at the Cafe Umbala and a good stiff martini and a glimpse of Tabiz’s grin.

      * * * *

      The glow of a flashlight lit the cabin and broke the gloomy pattern of my thoughts. By its glare, the Professor peered intently at his instruments.

      “Two thousand five hundred feet, my boy,” he whispered hoarsely. “We are below the very base of Mount Zanthodon at this point…in fact, we are beneath the earth’s crust!”

      I felt a momentary qualm of uneasiness go through me. Then I stiffened my spine and set my jaw firmly.

      “How’s the radiation count?”

      “Still the same amount of background radiation,” he murmured. “I do not anticipate that it shall rise to a level even remotely dangerous…the radioactivity released by the Jurassic explosion would have fallen to harmless levels many millions of years ago…but what of the width of the shaft?”

      “Still about the same,” I said tersely, estimating with my eye. “Doesn’t look as if it’s ever gonna narrow!”

      Nor did it when we reached the depth of a mile, then five miles, then ten.

      And so we continued our descent into the regions of Eternal Night and our journey to the Underground World.

      CHAPTER 4

      BENEATH