The Undersea Tube
pipe and pulling a sheet of paper from the corner of his desk.
Rapidly, with all his old accuracy, he sketched the main plan and leaned
over as he handed it to me.
"You see," he explained, picking up his pipe again, "both pumps work at
one time--in fact, I should say all four, because this plan is
duplicated on the English side. On both ends then, a train is gently
pushed in by an electric locomotive. A car at a time goes through the
gate so that there is a cushion of air between each car. The same thing
happens at Liverpool. Now, when the due train comes out of the suction
tube, it goes on out the gate, but the air behind it travels right on
around and comes in behind the train that is leaving."
"But how are you assured that it will not stall somewhere?"
"It won't be likely to with pressure pumps going behind it and suction
pumps pulling from in front. We can always put extra power on if
necessary. Thus far the road has worked perfectly."
"How much power do you need to send it through, under normal
conditions?"
"Our trains have been averaging about fifty tons, and for that weight we
have found that a pound pressure is quite sufficient. Now, taking the
tunnel's length as four thousand miles (of course it is not that long,
but round figures are most convenient) and the tube width eleven and one
quarter feet each and working this out we have 3,020,000 cubic feet of
free air per minute or 2,904,000 cubic feet of compressed air, which
would use about 70,000 horse power on the air compressor."
"But isn't the speed rather dizzy?"
"Not any more dizzy, Bob, than those old fashioned money-carrying
machines that the department stores used to use--that is in comparison
to size. The average speed is about 360 feet a second. Of course, the
train is allowed to slow down toward the end of its run, even before it
hits the braking machinery beyond the gate."
"But how much pressure did you say would be put on the back of the
diaphragm--I remember that each car has a flat disc on the back that
fits fairly tightly to the tube ..."
"The pressure on the back is less than seven tons. However, the disc
does not fit tight. There are several leaks. For instance, the cars are
as you know, run on the principle of the monorail with a guiding rail on
each side. The grooves for the rails with their three rollers are in
each car. There is a slight leakage of air here."
"You used the turbo type of blower, didn't you?"
"Had to because of the noise. We put some silencing devices on that and
yet we could not kill all of the racket. However a new invention has
come up that we will make use of soon now."
* * * * *
"But I can't understand, Dutch, why you seemed so put out when I
announced my intention of going to Europe via the Tube. Why, I can
remember the day when that would have tickled you to death."
"You followed the digging of the Tube, didn't you?"
"Yes, of course."
"You remember the volcano and lava seams?"
"Yes."
"Well, I do not believe that the crack was a pressure crevice. If it had
been, we were far enough below the ocean floor to have partly relieved
the situation by the unusually solid building of the Tube. The
tremendous shell of this new type of specially hardened metal--"
"And the rich concrete that was used as filling! That was one job no one
slipped up on. I remember how you watched it--"
"Yet the crack has widened, Bob, since the Tube was completed."
"How can you be certain?"
"By the amount of water coming through the drain pipes."
"But you said that once more it was stationary."
"Yes, and that is the very thing that proves, I believe, the nature of
the crack."
"I don't follow you."
"Why it isn't a crack at all, Bob. It is an earthquake fault."
"Good heavens, you don't mean--"
"Yes, I do. I mean that the next time the land slips our little tube
will be twisted up like a piece of string, or crushed like an eggshell.
That always was a rocky bit of land. I thought in going that far north,
though, that we had missed the main line of activity; I mean the
disturbances that had once wiped out a whole nation, if your scientists
are correct."
"Then you mean that it is only a matter of time?"
"Yes, and I have been informed by one expert that the old volcanic
activity is not dead either."
"So that is what has stolen away your laugh?"
"Well I am one of the engineers--and they won't suspend the service."
"Fate has played an ugly trick on you, Dutch, and through your own
dreams too. However, you have made me decide to go by the Tube."
He took his pipe out of his mouth and stared at me.
"Sooner or later the Tube will be through, and I have never been across.
Nothing risked--a dull life. Mine has been altogether too dull. I am now
most certainly going by the Tube."
A bit of the old fire lit up his eyes.
"Same old Bob," he grunted as I rose, and then he grasped my hand with a
grin.
"Good luck, my boy, on your journey, and may old Vulcan be out on a
vacation when you pass his door."
Thus we said good-by. I did not know then that I would never see him
again--that he also took the train that night in order to make one last
plea to the International Committee, and so laid down his life with the
passengers for whom he had pleaded.
It was with many conflicting thoughts, however, that I hurried to the
great Terminus that fatal night, where after being ticketed,
photographed and tabulated by an efficient army of clerks, I found
myself in due time, being ushered to my car of the train.
* * * * *
For the benefit of those who have never ridden upon the famous "Flier,"
I could describe the cars no better than to say that coming upon them by
night as I did, they looked like a gigantic, shiny worm, of strange
shape, through whose tiny port-holes of heavy glass in the sides, glowed
its luminous vitals.
I was pompously shown to the front car, which very much resembled a
tremendous cartridge--as did all of the other segments of this great
glow-worm.
Having dismissed the porter with a tip and the suspicion that my having
the front car was the work of my friend, who was willing to give me my
money's worth of thrill, and that the porter was aware of this, I stowed
away my bags and started to get ready for bed. I had no sooner taken off
my coat than the door was opened and an old fellow with a mass of silver
hair peered in at me.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I understand you have engaged this car
alone?"
"Yes."
"I can get no other accommodations tonight. You have an extra berth
here and I must get to Paris tomorrow. I will pay you well--"
I smiled.
"Take it. I was beginning to feel lonesome, anyway."
He bowed gravely and ordered the porter to bring in his things. I
decided he was a musician. Only artists go in for such lovely hair. But
he undressed in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance
in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when,
looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to
move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself
heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the
entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver
hair had already turned off the light, and now I knew by the darkness
that we had entered the Tube. For some time I lay awake thinking of
"Dutch" and the ultimate failure of his life's dream, as he had outlined
it to me, and then I sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I was awakened by a terrible shock that hurled me up against the side of
the compartment. A dull, red glow poured through the port-hole, lighting
up the interior with a weird, bloody reflection. I crept painfully up to
the port-hole and looked out. The strangest sight that man has ever
looked upon met my eyes. The side of the wall had blown out into a
gigantic cavern, and with it the rest of the cars had rolled down the
bluff a tangled, twisted mass of steel. My car had almost passed by, and
now it still stuck in the tube, even though the last port-hole through
which I peered seemed to be suspended in air. But it was not the wrecked
cars from which rose such wails of despair and agony that held my
attention, but the cavern itself. For it was not really a cave, but a
vast underground city whose wide, marble streets stretched away to an
inferno of flame and lava. By the terrible light was lit up a great
white palace with its gold-tipped scrolls, and closer to me, the golden
temple of the Sun, with its tiers of lustrous yellow stairs--stairs worn
by the feet of many generations.
Above the stairs towered the great statue of a man on horseback. He was
dressed in a sort of tunic, and in his uplifted arm he carried a scroll
as if for the people to read. His face was turned toward me, and I
marveled even in that wild moment that the unknown sculptor could have
caught such an expression of appeal. I can see the high intellectual
brow as if it were before me at this moment--the level, sympathetic eyes
and the firm chin.
* * * * *
Then something moving caught my eyes, and I swear I saw a child--a
living child coming from the burning city--running madly, breathlessly
from a wave of glowing lava that threatened to engulf him at any moment.
In spite of all the ridicule that has been showered upon me, I still
declare that the child did not come from the wreckage and that he wore a
tunic similar to the one of the statue and not the torn bit of a
nightgown or sheet.
He was some distance from me, but I could plainly see his expression of
wild distraction as he began to climb those gleaming stairs. Strangely
lustrous in the weird light, was that worn stairway of gold--gold, the
ancient metal of the Sun. With the slowness of one about to faint he
dragged himself up, while his breath seemed to be torn from his throat
in agonizing gasps. Behind him, the glowing liquid splashed against the
steps and the yellow metal of the Sun began to drip into its fiery
cauldron.
The child reached the leg of the horse and clung there.
... Then suddenly the whole scene began to shake as if I had been
looking at a mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse
in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark
sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon
my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into
unconsciousness, I seemed to hear again the hopeless note in the voice
of my friend as he said:
"--an earthquake fault."
After what seemed to me aeons of strange, buzzing noises and peculiar
lights, I at last made out the objects around me as those of a hospital.
Men with serious faces were watching me. I have since been told that I
babbled incoherently about "saving the little fellow" and other equally
incomprehensible murmurings. From them I learned that the train the
other way was washed out, a tangled mass of wreckage just like my car,
both terminus stations wrecked utterly, and no one found alive except
myself. So, although I am to be a hopeless cripple, yet I am not sorry
that the skill and untiring patience of the great English surgeon, Dr.
Thompson, managed to nurse back the feeble spark of my life through all
those weeks that I hung on the borderland; for if he had not, the world
never would have known.
As it is, I wonder over the events of that night as if it had not been
an experience at all--but a wild weird dream. Even the gentleman with
the mass of silver hair is a mystery, for he was never identified, and
yet in my mind's recesses I can still hear his cultured voice asking