lunged forward, Campbell dragging both the girl and the exhausted Ennis, and emerged a moment later into the great water-cavern. It was now lit only by the searchlight of their waiting cutter.
As they emerged into the cavern, they were thrown flat on the rock ledge by a violent movement of it under them. An awful detonation and thunderous crashing of falling rock smote their ears.
Following that first tremendous crash, giant rumbling of collapsing rock shook the water-cavern.
“To the cutter!” Campbell cried. “That watch of mine was filled with the most concentrated high-explosive known, and it’s blown up the tunnels. Now it’s touched off more collapses and all these caverns and passages will fall in on us at any moment!”
The awful rumbling and crashing of collapsing rock masses was deafening in their ears as they lurched toward the cutter. Great chunks of rock were falling from the cavern roof into the water.
* * * *
Sturt, white-faced but asking no questions, had the motor of the cutter running, and helped them pull the unconscious girl aboard.
“Out of the tunnel at once!” Campbell ordered. “Full speed!”
They roared down the water-tunnel at crazy velocity, the searchlight beam stabbing ahead. The tide had reached flood and turned, increasing the speed with which they dashed through the tunnel.
Masses of rock fell with loud splashes behind them, and all around them was still the ominous grinding of mighty weights of rock. The walls of the tunnel quivered repeatedly.
Sturt suddenly reversed the propellers, but in spite of his action the cutter smashed a moment later into a solid rock wall. It was a mass of rock forming an unbroken barrier across the water-tunnel, extending beneath the surface of the water.
“We’re trapped!” cried Sturt. “A mass of the rock has settled here and blocked the tunnel.”
“It can’t be completely blocked!” Campbell exclaimed. “See, the tide still runs out beneath it. Our one chance is to swim out under the blocking mass of rock, before the whole cliff gives way!”
“But there’s no telling how far the block may extend—” Sturt cried.
Then as Campbell and Ennis stripped off their coats and shoes, he followed their example. The rumble of grinding rock around them was now continuous and nerve-shattering.
Campbell helped Ennis lower Ruth’s unconscious form into the water.
“Keep your hand over her nose and mouth!” cried the inspector. “Come on, now!”
Sturt went first, his face pale in the searchlight beam as he dived under the rock mass. The tidal current carried him out of sight in a moment.
Then, holding the girl between them, and with Ennis’ hand covering her mouth and nostrils, the other two dived. Down through the cold waters they shot, and then the swift current was carrying them forward like a mill-race, their bodies bumping and scraping against the rock mass overhead.
Ennis’ lungs began to burn, his brain to reel, as they rushed on in the waters, still holding the girl tightly. They struck solid rock, a wall across their way. The current sucked them downward, to a small opening at the bottom. They wedged in it, struggled fiercely, then tore through it. They rose on the other side of it into pure air. They were in the darkness, floating in the tunnel beyond the block, the current carrying them swiftly onward.
The walls were shaking and roaring frightfully about them as they were borne round the turns of the tunnel. Then they saw ahead of them a circle of dim light, pricked with white stars.
The current bore them out into that starlight, into the open sea. Before them in the water floated Sturt, and they swam with him out from the shaking, grinding cliffs.
The girl stirred a little in Ennis’ grasp, and he saw in the starlight that her face was no longer dazed.
“Paul—” she muttered, clinging close to Ennis in the water.
“She’s coming back to consciousness—the water must have revived her from that drug!” he cried.
But he was cut short by Campbell’s cry. “Look! Look!” cried the inspector, pointing back at the black cliffs.
In the starlight the whole cliff was collapsing, with a prolonged, terrible roar as of grinding planets, its face breaking and buckling. The waters around them boiled furiously, whirling them this way and that.
Then the waters quieted. They found they had been flung near a sandy spit beyond the shattered cliffs, and they swam toward it.
“The whole underground honeycomb of caverns and tunnels gave way and the sea poured in!” Campbell cried. “The Door, and the Brotherhood of the Door, are ended for ever!”
THE LEGION OF LAZARUS
It isn’t the dying itself. It’s what comes before. The waiting, alone in a room without windows, trying to think. The opening of the door, the voices of the men who are going with you but not all the way, the walk down the corridor to the airlock room, the faces of the men, closed and impersonal. They do not enjoy this. Neither do they shrink from it. It’s their job.
This is the room. It is small and it has a window. Outside there is no friendly sky, no clouds. There is space, and there is the huge red circle of Mars filling the sky, looking down like an enormous eye upon this tiny moon. But you do not look up. You look out.
There are men out there. They are quite naked. They sleep upon the barren plain, drowsing in a timeless ocean. Their bodies are white as ivory and their hair is loose across their faces. Some of them seem to smile. They lie, and sleep, and the great red eye looks at them forever as they are borne around it.
“It isn’t so bad,” says one of the men who are with you inside this ultimate room. “Fifty years from now, the rest of us will all be old, or dead.”
It is small comfort.
The one garment you have worn is taken from you and the lock door opens, and the fear that cannot possibly become greater does become greater, and then suddenly that terrible crescendo is past. There is no longer any hope, and you learn that without hope there is little to be afraid of. You want now only to get it over with.
You step forward into the lock.
The door behind you shuts. You sense that the one before you is opening, but there is not much time. The burst of air carries you forward. Perhaps you scream, but you are now beyond sound, beyond sight, beyond everything. You do not even feel that it is cold.
CHAPTER I
There is a time for sleep, and a time for waking. But Hyrst had slept heavily, and the waking was hard. He had slept long, and the waking was slow. Fifty years, said the dim voice of remembrance. But another part of his mind said, No, it is only tomorrow morning.
Another part of his mind. That was strange. There seemed to be more parts to his mind than he remembered having had before, but they were all confused and hidden behind a veil of mist. Perhaps they were not really there at all. Perhaps—
Fifty years. I have been
