Yes, there was his eagle. With arrows in its claws, dim but huge on the side of this machine. Not like the other machines, which had minor insignia. He made out the letters: President of the United States. This was a special plane!
The historian answered his pointing finger. “Head of the country. Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.”
Jonnie was puzzled. Yes, possibly he had gotten here on that day of disaster a thousand or more years ago. But if so, where was he? There had been no such sign on the offices. He walked around the hangar. Ha! There was another elevator, a smaller one in a different place. He looked further and found a door to a stairwell that led upward. The door was hard to open, apparently air-sealed. He got through it and mounted upward. Behind him the hammer and clang of the group faded and died. There was only the soft pat of his feet on the stairs.
Another air-sealed door at the top, even harder to open.
This was an entirely different complex. It stood independent of the rest of the base. And due to dry air and seals and possibly something else, the bodies were not dust. They were mummified. Officers on the floor, slumped over desks. Only a few.
Communication and file rooms. A briefing room with few chairs. A bar with glasses and bottles intact. Very superior grade of furnishings. Carpets. All very well preserved. Then he saw the door symbol he was looking for and went in.
The sign was on the splendid polished desk. A huge eagle plaque on the wall. A flag, with some of its fabric still able to stir when he caused a faint breeze opening the door.
The man was slumped over the desk, mummified. Even his clothing still looked neat.
Jonnie looked under the parchment hand and without touching it slid out the sheaf of papers.
The top date and the hour were two days later than the ones that ended in the operations room in the other complex.
The only explanation Jonnie could think of was that the ventilation systems didn’t join: when gas hit the main base, the system was turned off here. And they had not dared turn it back on.
The president and his staff had died from lack of air.
Jonnie felt strangely courteous and respectful as he removed more papers from the desk and trays. He held in his hands the last hours of the world, report by report. Even pictures and something from high up called satellite pictures.
He hastily skimmed through the reports to make sure he had it all.
A strange object had appeared over London without any trace of where it came from.
Teleportation, filled in Jonnie.
It had been at an altitude of thirty thousand feet.
Important, thought Jonnie.
It had dropped a canister and within minutes the south of England was dead.
Psychlo gas. The myths and legends.
It had cruised eastward at 302.6 miles per hour.
Vital data, thought Jonnie.
It had been attacked by fighter planes from Norway; it had not fought back; it had been hit with everything they had without the slightest evidence of damage to it.
Armor, thought Jonnie.
An interchange on something called the hotline prevented a nuclear missile exchange between the United States and Russia.
The “Don’t fire. It isn’t the Russians” message on the desk in the other complex, thought Jonnie.
It was hit with nuclear weapons over Germany without the slightest apparent damage.
No pilots, thought Jonnie. It was a drone. No breathe-gas in it. Very heavy motors.
It had then toured the major population centers of the world, dropping canisters and wiping out populations.
And wiped out the other complex of this base without even knowing or caring that it was there, thought Jonnie. On the operations map of the other complex, they had plotted it only just to the east of this location.
It then went on to obliterate the eastern part of the United States. The reports had come in from DEW line stations in the Arctic and some parts of Canada. It continued on its almost leisurely way to wipe out all population centers in the Southern Hemisphere. But at this point something else began to happen. Isolated observers and satellites reported tanks of a strange design materializing one after the other in various parts of the world and mopping up fleeing hordes of human beings.
Stage two: teleportation, thought Jonnie.
Military reports, out of sequence and incomplete, were shuffled in with the reports of the tanks. All major military airfield installations, whether gassed out of existence or not, were being blown to bits by strange, very fast flying craft.
Battle planes teleported in at the same time as the tanks.
Reports of some tanks exploding, some battle planes exploding. Reasons not known.
Manned craft, thought Jonnie. Breathe-gas hitting areas of radiation caused by firing on the drone with nuclear weapons.
The drone spotted by satellite landing near Colorado City, Colorado. Causes most structures there to collapse.
Preset remote control, thought Jonnie. Even their central command minesite had been picked out. Whole area carefully plotted and observed by casting picto-recorders. Rough, uncontrolled landing of drone near preplanned command area.
Tank spotted by satellite shooting at pocket of cadets wearing flight oxygen masks at the Air Force Academy. Report by acting commander of corps of cadets. Then no further communication.
The last battle, thought Jonnie.
Efforts from the com room to contact somebody, anybody, anywhere, via a remote antenna located three hundred miles to the north. Antenna location bombed by enemy battle plane.
Radio tracking, thought Jonnie.
Unspotted, but with their air shut off, the president and his aides and staff had lasted two more hours until they died of asphyxiation.
Jonnie put the papers respectfully in a protecting mine bag.
Feeling a bit strange for speaking, he said to the corpse, “I’m sorry no help came. We’re something over a thousand years late.” He felt very bad.
His gloom would have followed him as he left the dreary, dark, cold quarters had not the barking, cheery voice of Dunneldeen sprung from the radio at his belt. Jonnie halted and acknowledged.
“Jonnie, laddie!” said Dunneldeen. “You can stop worrying yourself about scraping uranium out of the dirt! There’s a full nuclear arsenal, complete with assorted bombs, intact, just thirty miles north of here! We found the map and a plane just checked it out! Now all we’ve got to worry about is blowing off our innocent little heads and exploding this whole planet in the bargain!”
5
Disaster struck in the form of an earthquake on Day 32 of the new year.
Shortly after midnight, the tremor awakened Jonnie. Equipment on his bureau in the London Palace Elite Hotel rattled together and he sat up in his bed. The prolonged throb of vibration was still occurring!
The old building groaned.
The rumble of the earthquake traveled on. It was followed by a second, lesser tremor a half-minute later, and then that was gone.
It was not too unusual in the Rockies. No damage seemed to be done in the old mining town.
Uneasy, but not really alarmed, Jonnie pulled on buckskin pants and moccasins and, throwing a puma skin over his shoulders, sprinted through the snow to the Empire Dauntless.
The duty sentry’s light was on. The young Scot was tapping a buzzer key that activated the communication system to the mine: it was a directional laser radio, limited to an exact width and undetectable beyond these mountains.
The Scot looked up. His face was a bit white. “They don’t answer.” He tapped the key again more rapidly as though his finger by itself could shoot the beam through. “Maybe the receiver pole got twisted in the quake.”
In minutes, Jonnie had a relief crew routed out, spare ropes and winches assembled, blankets and stimulants packaged and being loaded on the passenger plane. Strained faces turned repeatedly toward the mine even though it was far out of their line of sight. They were worried for th
e mine duty shift: Thor, a shift leader named Dwight and fifteen men.
The night was black as coal; even the stars were masked by high, invisible clouds. It was no mean stunt flying these mountains in the dark. The instruments of the mine plane glowed green as the ship vaulted upward. The image screen painted a blurred picture of the terrain ahead. Jonnie adjusted it to sharpness. Beside him a copilot made some console plane-weight corrections. Jonnie was depending on his eyes to avoid the first mountain slope. He flipped on the plane’s beam lights. They struck the snow slope and he eased the plane up over it.
He knew that things had been going too well.
They had been making real progress in their preparations. They were far from ready, but what they had accomplished had been miraculous.
He hunted ahead for the next mountainside, checking the viewscreen. Good Lord, it was dark! He checked his compass. The men in the back were tense and silent. He could almost feel what they were thinking.
The top knoll flipped by under them. A little too close. Where was the next one?
The assault rifles he had at first considered worthless were proving the very thing. With a great deal of ingenuity they had salvaged the ammunition. They had drawn out the bullets from the case and tapped out the primer. By careful experimentation they had found out how to substitute a blasting cap in the bottom of the shell case. At first they had thought they would also need powder and had blown up a rifle trying it—no casualties. It turned out that the blasting cap was enough to fire a bullet at high velocity.
Jonnie swerved the plane to avoid a suddenly looming cliff and went a little higher. If he went too high he could lose his way entirely if lights were out at the mine. His lights might also become visible at the compound. Stay low. Dangerous, but stay low.
Then they had taken the bullets and drilled a small hole in the nose and, wearing radiation suits, inserted a grain of radioactive material from a TNW. They had covered this with a thin bit of melted lead. In this way a man could carry the ammunition without danger of radiation hitting him.
But when it was fired—oh my! They tried it on breathe-gas in a glass bottle, and did that breathe-gas explode!
Too low, Jonnie had recognized a lone scrub on a ridge. He lifted the plane over it. They were on course. Hold down the speed. Don’t have another disaster flying in the dark.
The bullets were also armor-piercing to some degree and, when fired into a breathe-gas vial two hundred yards away, caused a violent reaction that brought concussion all the way back to them.
They put every available Scot onto an assembly line converting bullets and they had cases and cases of them now.
A hundred assault rifles and five hundred magazines had been cleaned to perfection. They fired without a stutter or dud.
No good against a tank or a thick, lead-glass compound dome, but those assault rifles would be deadly to individual Psychlos. With breathe-gas in their bloodstreams, they would literally explode.
He spotted the river that ran out of the gorge. He eased down, following it, the plane’s lights flashing on the uneven ice and snow.
They’d been so happy about the assault rifles that they had gone to work on the bazookas. They had found some nuclear artillery shells and had converted their noses over to the bazooka noses, and now they had armor-piercing, nuclear bazookas. There were still a number of those left to make.
Yes, it had been too smooth, too good to be true.
There were no lights on the mine pad ahead.
There was no one visible there at all.
He set the plane down on the pad.
The passengers boiled out of it.
Their lights darted this way and that.
One of them who had run to the chasm edge called back, his voice thin in the cold darkness: “Jonnie! The cliff face has gone!”
6
A light shone down from the present edge and confirmed it. The fissure, thirty feet back from the old edge, had simply opened in the earthquake and fallen into the gorge.
The cliff face was no longer overhanging but sloped up toward them.
In the light, the wide edge of the broken-off quartz lode was visible. It was pure white. No gold in the remaining vein. The pocket of gold was gone!
But Jonnie was thinking right now of the crew. They had not reached the fissure, for the avalanche had exposed no tunnel.
They were somehow trapped under them, if they were still alive.
Jonnie raced back to the shaft edge. It yawned blackly, a large circle of emptiness, silent. The shaft was about a hundred feet deep.
He looked around, flashing his light. “The hoist! Where is the hoist?”
The entire apparatus used to take out ore and lower and raise men was missing.
Lights played down the mountain. It was not on the slope.
Jonnie approached the hole more closely. Then he saw the slide marks of the cross timbers that had supported the hoist cage over the hole.
The hoist was down there in the shaft.
“Be very quiet, everyone,” said Jonnie. Then he bent over and cupped his hands and shouted down, “Down there! Is anyone alive?”
They listened.
“I thought I heard something,” said the parson, who had come along.
Jonnie tried again. They listened. They could not be sure. Jonnie turned on his belt radio and spoke into it. No answer. He saw Angus in the rescue team. “Angus! Drop an intercom on a cable down into that hole.”
While Angus and two others were doing that, Jonnie pulled a picto-recorder out of the rescue gear. He found more cable and extended its leads.
Angus had rigged and lowered the intercom. Jonnie signaled to the parson. The place was broadly lit now with lamps the relief crew had put on poles. The parson’s hand was shaking as he held the intercom mike.
“Hello the mine!” said the parson.
The intercom mike down there should pick up voices if there was any reply. There wasn’t.
“Keep trying,” said Jonnie. He paid out the line of the picto-recorder and lowered it into the hole. Robert the Fox stepped forward from the relief group and took charge of the portable screen.
At first there was just the shaft wall sliding by as the picto-recorder went down. Then a piece of timber, then a tangle of cable. Then the hoist!
Jonnie rotated the cable and shifted the remote control to wide-angle.
The hoist was empty.
A sigh of relief joined the night wind as the tense group saw that no one had been killed in the hoist.
Jonnie worked the remote to look over the hoist. It was hard to tell, but it did not appear there was anybody crushed under the fallen hoist.
The picto-recorder swung idly on its cable ninety feet below them. Eyes strained at the viewscreen, begging it for data.
“No drift hole!” said Jonnie. “The drift hole isn’t visible! When the hoist fell it caved in the entrance to the drift down there!”
Pressing a flying platform into service, they flew a three-man crew down to the bottom of the drift. Robert the Fox wouldn’t let Jonnie go down on it.
One of the men dropped down from the platform and fixed lifting hooks into the cage cable and they pulled it back up to the top of the hole.
They rigged a crane, pulleys and a winch, and thirty-three minutes later—clocked by the historian who also had sneaked aboard the relief plane—they had the hoist out of the shaft and sitting off to the side.
Jonnie put the picto-recorder back down and it confirmed his guess. The shaft end of the level drift down there was blocked, knocked shut when the hoist fell.
They rigged buckets to crane cable and very shortly they had four men down at the bottom. Jonnie ignored Robert and went this time.
They tore at the rocks with their hands, filling up buckets that shot aloft to be replaced by empty ones. More tools and welcome sledges came down.
Two hours went by. They changed three of the men twice. Jonnie stayed down there.
They worked in
a blur of speed. The rattle of rocks and thud of sledges freeing them resounded in the dusty hole bottom. The rockfall was thicker than they had hoped.
Two feet into the drift. Three feet. Four feet. Five feet. Maybe the whole drift had collapsed!
They changed crews. Jonnie stayed down there.
Three hours and sixteen minutes after their arrival at the bottom, Jonnie heard a distant whisper of sound. He held up his hand for silence. “In the mine!” he shouted.
Very faintly it came back: “. . . air hole . . .”
“Repeat!” shouted Jonnie.
It came back, “. . . make . . .”
Jonnie grabbed a long mine drill. He looked for the thinnest place he could imagine in the white rock wall before him, socked the rock drill point into it, and signaled the man on the drill motor. “Let her spin!”
They bucked the drill into it with the pressure handles. The others would hear it in there and get out of the way.
With a high scream the drill went through.
They dragged it out.
“Air hose!” yelled Jonnie. And they fed the hose through the drill hole and turned the air compressor on. Air from the drift squealed back past the sides of the hose and into the rescue crew’s faces.
Twenty-one minutes later they had the top of the rockfall cleared and could drag men out.
They had to drop the gap farther to get the last one. It was Dunneldeen and he had a broken ankle and broken ribs.
Seventeen men, only one with a serious injury.
They passed them to the top silently in the hoist buckets.
A dust- and sweat-covered Jonnie was the last one up. The parson threw a blanket around him. The salvaged crew were bundled up, sitting in the snow, most of them drinking something hot that one of the old women had sent in a huge jug. The parson had finished setting the ankle of Dunneldeen and, helped by Robert the Fox, was taping up the ribs.
Finally Thor said, “We lost the lode.”
Nobody said anything.
7
With dawn making a faint, pale line in the east, Jonnie looked down into the abyss.
The pure white lode showed not the slightest trace of gold. It was in plain sight.