A Soft Barren Aftershock

  “Do you have an extra gas sack we might use?”

  “We’re working on it now—for Dinosaur IV. Why?”

  “We’re going to the Dead World.”

  VI

  A while back, Perry had capped a well that had been spewing millions of cubic feet of natural gas into the air of Pellucidar for ages. He’d employed Sarian women to stretch, dry, and rub dinosaur peritonea until thoroughly cured, then stitch them into sheets and seal the seams with a cement Perry had found to be impervious to the gas. From these sheets he made his balloons.

  I wanted two balloons attached to the basket this time, for we were aiming higher than either Dinosaur I or II had ever traveled.

  “I’m going with you, of course,” Perry announced.

  I shook my head. “I think you should stay here. You’re second in command, and we need someone to hold the fort.”

  “Nonsense! You’re not going to deprive me of exploring a new world. And besides, Dian is your Empress. As a native Sarian, she’s fully capable of ‘holding the fort.’ Better than you, I might say,” he muttered under his breath.

  I ignored that. “Yes, but—”

  “I’m going, too,” Koort said.

  This was too much. “Now wait a minute—”

  “The Dead World attacked Thuria and put my people to sleep—my father and brother among them. I demand satisfaction. And besides, they owe me a lidi.”

  Not that again.

  Suddenly Goork and Kolk were there, wanting to go, too. I had to put my foot down.

  “We have weight restrictions,” I said. “And Goork and Kolk, you’ve been in suspended animation. You need to rest here. Since I agree that Thuria must be represented, Koort shall accompany Perry and me.”

  We loaded the basket with food and water, along with muskets and pistols. I had no idea what sort of reception we would receive and wanted to be prepared for anything. We also included three of Perry’s gas masks—just in case.

  The prevailing winds of Pellucidar are subject to the seasons of the outer-Earthly year, blowing north to south or south to north depending upon which pole is experiencing winter at the time. Fortunately, the wind was blowing away from Sari toward the southwest, carrying us—just as it had Dian when her balloon’s tether came loose—toward the Land of Awful Shadow and the floating source of that shadow. With our extra balloon tugging us toward the eternal noon sun, we quickly reached unprecedented altitudes.

  I marveled as Pellucidar spread out below us. Still its horizons curved upward to be lost in haze, but I was seeing more of it than I’d ever imagined. Its total surface area is smaller than that of the outer world, but since its oceans correspond with the outside land masses, and the internal land corresponds to outer seas, Pellucidar has more than twice the habitable area as the world where Perry and I were born.

  “Emperor,” I muttered. “What a joke.”

  “Eh?” Perry said.

  “I just realized how laughable it is to call myself Emperor of Pellucidar. Who am I kidding? The Federation of Kingdoms occupies such a pathetically small fraction of the inner world. My empire is a joke. And so, I’m thinking, am I.”

  “Nonsense! Your intervention and initiative freed countless human slaves and banished the Mahars to the northern reaches.”

  “Which makes me a local celebrity, not an emperor.”

  I realized I’d sorely needed this perspective, and decided to make a few changes when I returned—starting with my “Emperor” title.

  I glanced at Perry to tell him but found him staring upward instead of down, toward the looming so-called Dead World whose living forests and grassy plains looked greener than ever. I noted his pensive expression.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  He sighed. “You know, you get so lost in your day-to-day activities that you stop noticing the big picture.”

  I could see my words must have had an effect on him. “You mean how ridiculous it is?”

  He turned to me, eyes wide. “Exactly! You see it, too!”

  “Yes, I believe I was just saying—”

  “Pellucidar is impossible! Completely, utterly impossible!”

  That wasn’t at all what I’d been saying, but I sensed his point.

  “How can it be impossible? It exists and we exist in it, so obviously it’s possible. Unless we’re sharing a dream.”

  “We’re not dreaming. But this—” He spread his arms. “Remember when we first arrived how I rattled off an explanation as to how an environment as odd as Pellucidar could develop?”

  “Vaguely. Something about things hollowing out with centrifugal force leaving a flaming gaseous remnant at its core—I confess I forget.”

  “Good thing, too. Because I see now that it was all nonsense. Look at this! There’s a sun up there—a sun! What fuels it? Fusion? Hydrogen being converted to helium? If so, where’s the ionizing radiation? Every living thing here should be mutated into unrecognizable forms. Yet we’ve got species here like the lidi from the late Jurassic period—that’s at least 150 million years—that remain unchanged. And this Pendant Moon we’re heading for, this Dead World—what is it doing here, hovering over the same patch of land? What holds it there? It’s not in orbit, it’s . . . I don’t know what it’s doing.”

  I couldn’t help him. The locals’ creation myths were no help. The island folk thought Pellucidar existed in a bowl floating on a sea of fire; Dian’s people, the Sarians, had the bizarre notion that Pellucidar was the only hollow pocket in a rock-solid universe.

  The angular diameter of Sol, the outer world’s sun, is approximately half a degree in the sky there. Pellucidar’s sun, though only a tiny fraction of Sol’s size, appears larger, slightly more than a degree and a half because of its proximity. But as to what was firing its furnace, I hadn’t a clue.

  Looking down, I estimated our altitude at around 2500 feet—about halfway to the Dead World. As I returned my gaze upward, I had a thought.

  “What if the wind takes us right past?”

  “We may have to do some maneuvering, but I don’t think that will be a problem if we get close enough.”

  “Why not?”

  “Gravity.”

  “Gravity? You can’t believe such a little sphere can have enough gravity to matter.”

  He gave me one of his withering looks. “Do you see lakes and rivers up there?”

  I immediately regretted my outburst. “Oh, of course.” How else would the water stay there unless the Dead World had its own gravity? “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You were right the first time—it’s not big enough to have that sort of gravitational field.” He shook his head in disgust. “Another impossibility.”

  I gripped his shoulder. My old friend hated unanswered questions.

  “Buck up. Perhaps we’ll find answers there.”

  He grunted. “If I know Pellucidar, we’ll only find more questions.”

  “Look!” Koort said, pointing directly below. “Thuria!”

  “Great heavens!” Perry cried.

  I had already visited vine-entangled Thuria; Perry was getting his first look. But even I was shocked by the extent of the growth. As usual, Thuria lay in the shadow of the Dead World. But that was all that was usual. The jungle there had never been thick or even that green, but now it lay hidden beneath a tightly woven meshwork of red vines.

  “Interesting,” Perry said.

  “Interesting? It’s catastrophic!”

  “Yes-yes, of course it is. But look at the vines. Look where they grow and where they don’t.”

  I looked, and it was so obvious, I marveled that I hadn’t seen it for myself: the vines engulfed all of Thuria in a perfect circle.

  “They don’t extend beyond the shadow,” I said.

  “Exactly. Which probably explains why your specimen, despite watering and an adequate root ball, died by the time it reached me: sunlight is toxic to the vine. And that means we have a way to kill it!”

  “Do we? How?”


  “Mirrors! We’ll fashion giant mirrors and reflect sunlight into Thuria.”

  As usual, Abner Perry’s inventiveness had soared beyond practicality. We had no way of fashioning mirrors of adequate size even to dent that huge growth of vines. I was about to tell him so when I noticed something that made my heart quail in my chest.

  “The mist! Look at the mist. The vines may be confined to the shadow but their poison gas isn’t.” A green tint was spreading in all directions from the Land of Awful Shadow. “When I set sail from Thuria, the mist had reached the observatory at the edge of the shadow. Now it’s miles beyond it. Those vines are working overtime pumping out their gas.”

  Perry looked at me, fear in his eyes. “If we don’t find a way to kill that vine, all of Pellucidar will eventually fall under the spell of its gas.” He looked up at the looming Dead World. “Is everything battened down? Make sure nothing is lying around loose.”

  “Expecting a storm?”

  I was joking, of course. Storms on Pellucidar were as rare as talking lidi.

  “Remember what happened in the ice strata during our initial trip when we bored the five-hundred miles from the surface?”

  I remembered encountering a thick layer of ice at around the halfway point but—

  My stomach lurched, and suddenly I felt as if I was falling. Koort cried out in alarm, and his eyes bulged as he clutched the edges of the basket with white-knuckled intensity.

  I looked up at the balloons and they appeared fully inflated, but the ropes that attached them to the basket were . . . slack! They were falling toward us—no, we were falling toward them—falling up!

  VII

  It took a moment before it occurred to my addled brain what Perry had meant by his reference to the ice field—gravity had reversed there as we left the influence of the surface world’s gravity and encountered Pellucidar’s. Which of course did not make a lick of sense. Another impossibility.

  Perry did not appear the least bit surprised. “We’ve reached a null-gravity zone—where the Dead World’s local gravitational field neutralizes Pellucidar’s prevailing field.”

  Just as he said that, one of the muskets began to float out of the basket. I snatched it from the air.

  “Now I know why you wanted everything battened down.”

  The balloons had stopped moving, but the weightier basket’s momentum carried it up to their level, then past, turning on its side in the process. Koort was plainly terrified by the odd, weightless sensation; he moaned as he clung to the edge of the basket like a drowning sailor to a piece of flotsam. I must confess to a certain level of disconcertment, though I hope I hid it better than he. Perry, however, seemed to be taking it all in stride.

  “While we’re here,” he said, “let’s release one of the balloons. We no longer need the extra buoyancy.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “Well, I’m very sure that the double buoyancy will make it impossible for us to land. Now help me with these cleats.”

  By then the basket had turned upside down, though it didn’t feel that way. Koort crouched in a corner with his hands clasped over his scalp and his eyes squeezed shut. I couldn’t say I blamed him, what with Pellucidar spread out above our heads and the Dead World hanging below our feet.

  The basket continued to float toward the Dead World, and we’d released the extra balloon by the time the rope to the remaining sac grew taut. We began to descend, leaving the basket hanging in gravitational limbo.

  I peered over the edge, struck by something odd.

  “Perry . . . take a look.” He joined me at the edge. “Doesn’t the terrain look . . . odd?”

  He squinted below. “It looks hazy, doesn’t it? Almost as if it isn’t real.” He stiffened. “Great heavens! It isn’t! It looks like a hologram!”

  “What’s a hologram?”

  “A three-dimensional projected image. Various scientific journals were discussing the possibility of such a thing before we left, but it was more in the realm of scientifiction. And now, here it is . . .” He turned to me with wonder-filled eyes. “In Pellucidar!”

  I had an uneasy feeling as I stared down at a landscape becoming progressively less real the closer we approached.

  “No,” I said. “Not quite Pellucidar. Rather, the mysterious thing that hangs in Pellucidar’s sky.”

  A three-dimensional projected image? What was it hiding?

  Our descent slowed above a fuzzy-looking mountain. Perry released gas via the safety valve and our descent picked up more speed—

  —and passed straight through the top of the mountain!

  For an instant, light blazed around us and we could see nothing else. Then it faded to reveal a smooth, featureless curved plane below.

  “Is that steel?” I said. “It can’t be.”

  “It looks like the same unidentifiable alloy that comprised that seed sphere you brought from Thuria.”

  “Then I guess there can no longer be any doubt as to where the seeds came from.”

  Perry looked at me. “It means something else, David. It means the Dead Word is artificial—it’s not a moon, it’s an artifact!”

  I was speechless for a moment. The portent was staggering. Finally I found my voice. “Made by whom?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid to even hazard a guess.”

  Koort had risen from his ball of terror and joined us at the edge. He cried out and pointed below.

  “The rivers and trees! Where have they gone?”

  How to explain a three-dimensional projection to a Pellucidarian . . . I didn’t even try.

  “It was a painting,” I said, pointing up. “An air painting.”

  In the sky above us, faint traces of the fake landscape were visible, like afterimages. Through it we could see shadowed Thuria and the sparkling waves of Sojar Az. But when I turned, I could also see the sunlit Lidi Plain. With a pang I noted the green mist seeping across it like a plague.

  And then, wonder of wonders, a crescent glow began to grow along the Dead World’s curved surface.

  I pointed. “Look!”

  As we watched, Pellucidar’s miniature sun began to creep above the artificial horizon.

  “Sunrise!” Perry said softly.

  “The only place in Pellucidar where it occurs.”

  Dinosaur III was moving with the Dead World’s rotation, and soon we were basking in the noonday light of Pellucidar’s sun. Its glare completely washed out the hologram and etched the Dead World’s bald surface in sharp detail. I picked out seams here and there, most running like latitude lines, although not evenly spaced.

  “Where are the little men?” Koort said. “Who is going to replace my lidi?”

  “No lidi up here, Koort. I’m afraid you’ll—”

  “Look!” he cried, pointing. “A cave. That is where the little men live!”

  I saw what he meant—a dark pocket in the surface. I wouldn’t have called it a “cave” by any stretch. But if the Dead World were populated by “little men”—which I was sure it wasn’t—they could possibly move in and out of an opening that size.

  Perry was looking, too, squinting in the harsh light. “It appears about the right size to fit that seed sphere you brought me.” He glanced my way. “You don’t think . . .?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Take me down!” Koort said. “I must talk to the little men.”

  “About a new lidi?” I said.

  He seemed surprised. “Yes! How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Yes. Very lucky.”

  Sarcasm was lost on Thurians.

  I turned to Perry. “Should we release a little more gas?”

  “If we land, how do we get back up?”

  “We took on extra ballast with the second balloon. We simply have to jettison it when we want to leave.”

  “But will we have enough lift? I very much doubt we?
??ll find a source of natural gas down there. I don’t want to be stranded a mile above Thuria for the rest of my days. If we were down on the inner surface, we could find another way home. But here . . . if we can’t float away, we die of starvation down there.”

  I couldn’t argue. “Yes, they don’t call it the Dead World for nothing.” Then I remembered. “We do have an anchor. We can release enough gas to bring the surface within reach of it and hope we snag something.”

  Perry was nodding vigorously. “That way Dinosaur III will stay afloat. And once we dump the ballast we’ll sail home.” He cocked his head toward Koort. “Well, his home at least.”

  VIII

  Like so many things, it worked better in theory than in execution.

  We released some gas, Dinosaur III drifted lower; we dropped the admiralty-style anchor on its extra-long rope and let it drag along the surface. However, its flukes caught on nothing, because the surface offered no purchase.

  Perry was muttering in frustration every time the anchor slipped over a seam without catching. I felt pretty frustrated myself, but not as much as Koort, apparently. With an almost feral growl he slipped over the side and began shimmying down the rope.

  We watched in amazement as he reached the surface and took hold of the anchor’s shank. Using his prodigious strength, he began carrying it—all the while dragging Dinosaur III along behind—toward the “cave” he had spotted earlier.

  Once there, he must have found a lip or an outcropping of some sort to secure one of its flukes. He let it go, straightened, and waved.

  “Come down! I go to see the little men!”

  With that, he dove into the cave despite shouted warnings from both Perry and myself.

  “Whatever he finds in there,” I said after he had disappeared, “I doubt very much it will be little men.”

  Perry nodded. “As do I. Whoever fashioned that seed pod and ejected it into Thuria must also have fashioned this moon. That puts them technologically beyond anything we’ve seen here in Pellucidar or the outer world.”

  I was having a nightmare while awake. “I’m imagining some far-evolved subspecies of Mahar.”