Beyond the Barrier

Chapter Eleven

Naismith’s first emotion was a consuming rage. Gathering himself, he kicked against the crossbar, flung his body upward

—and was hurled back again by a curved, elastic wall. He landed hard against the metal framework, which began to revolve slowly and dizzyingly around him. The falling sensation continued.

His one opportunity was gone: for a moment that was all he could think of. If he had been able to leap out of the machine’s field during the first second of its fall… but it was impossible to get out of the field without turning off the machine, as he had just discovered.

In fact, the opportunity had been illusory. He had been doomed from the moment he turned on the machine. Now he was falling, falling endlessly—to what fate?

The aliens had told him one truth and one lie; he had taken the lie for the truth, exactly as they had intended him to do.

Rage and despair all but choked him, as he clung to the metal frame work, falling, in darkness and silence. He wanted to live!

A faint hope came, as his fingers touched the control knobs on the crossbar. If the aliens had lied about this, too…

Cautiously he tried one knob after another, avoiding the lever which had turned the machine on. There was no perceptible result, except that, when he had turned the third knob, he felt a cool breath of air.

There was something he had not even considered: at least he would not smother on his way down…. But he did not succeed in arresting his fall, or changing its direction, so far as he could tell, by a hair’s breadth.

The thought of the gulf below him was hideous. What, actually, was happening to him at this moment? The answer came at once. He was acting out one of the oldest physics problems in the book, something that every freshman “was familiar with—the imaginary tunnel drilled through the Earth.

In fact, his body was a harmonic oscillator. Assuming a homogeneous Earth and a non-rotating frame, he would describe a long narrow ellipse around the Earth’s center. His grip on the crossbar tightened convulsively. Of course—and unless friction retarded him too much, he would rise at the antipodal point to exactly the same level he had started from!

Wait, now—he had fallen from the floor of an underground chamber perhaps a hundred feet or so under the surface…

Where was he going to come out?

The moment the question occurred to him, he realized that It was of vital importance. He had entered the Earth near Lake Michigan, probably not far from the site of Chicago. If he went straight through the planet, he should come out somewhere in the Indian Ocean… and Chicago, he was sure, was several hundred feet above sea level!

Wait a moment… he was neglecting the rotation of the Earth; that would bring him out some distance westward of the antipodal point. How far depended on the period of his motion…. Call the radius of the Earth four thousand miles

—about twenty million feet, for convenience. Gravity at the surface of the Earth, thirty-two feet per second per second. The square root of twenty million over thirty-two would be two hundred and fifty times the square root of ten… times pi…

about twenty-five hundred seconds. Call it forty-two minutes.

He ran through the calculation once more, found no error.

Very well, in forty-two minutes, if he was right, he would be emerging from the far side of the planet. In the meantime, the rotation of the Earth would have brought his exit point about ten or eleven degrees westward.… It was all right: that would still be in the ocean.

He took a deep breath. At least he would come out, not cycle inside the Earth until his momentum was used up. If his calculations were right—

How long had he been falling?

Cursing himself, he fumbled for his wristwatch. The dial was not luminous, but with a nail-file from his pocket he pried up the crystal, felt the hands with his fingertips. They indicated about ten minutes after nine. He had been falling for what seemed half an hour or more, but was probably less than five minutes. Assume, then, that he had begun his fall at 9:05 by this watch. The time it showed was local California time as of 1980 A.D.—curious to think of this mechanism still faithfully keeping track of the minutes now buried thousands of years in the past… but that did not matter.

At 9:47, he should emerge. If friction was a negligible factor, and he could not assume otherwise, then he would rise to a height of two or three hundred feet above the ocean… top high. He felt himself begin to sweat, as he realized that it would be necessary to chance falling back through the Earth

—all the way through to the Western hemisphere, then back again, hoping that in those two additional passages, friction would bring him out at a level from which he could hope to fall safely.

Luckily, there was plenty of room in the ocean. Two more passages would bring him westward only twenty-odd degrees.…

A feeling of discomfort drew his attention. He was uneasy: what had he been neglecting?

Friction: what if it were not negligible? For that matter, what about the interior heat of the Earth?

He was to pass near the center of the core, which was thought to be at about four thousand degrees centigrade…

Something was wrong. He reached out quickly, touched the hollow curve of the force-shell. It was neither warm nor cool to his senses. But he had already been falling… he felt the hands of the watch again… more than six minutes… t squared, call it a hundred thirty thousand, times one-half the acceleration—two million feet, or something close to four hundred miles.

While part of his mind to grasp that, another part went on coldly calculating.

Temperature of the Earth’s crust increased with depth, by about thirty degrees centigrade every kilometer. And the shell he was in was transparent to visible light. Therefore…

He was through the crust, falling through the mantle.

He should have passed the red-heat stage long ago; by now he should be well into the white. And yet—

He touched the shell again. It was still neither hot nor cold.

The darkness was unbroken.

Doubt struck him. Was he really falling? Suppose he was simply hanging here, suspended, without gravity… drifting, like a disembodied spirit, forever under the Earth?

He gripped the crossbar fiercely. The Universe obeyed certain laws, among these were the mutual attraction of material bodies and the equivalence of gravity and inertia. His senses told him that he was falling, and in this case it happened to be true—he was falling.

He touched the hands of the watch once more. They seemed hardly to have moved. He held the watch to his ear to listen for the whirr of the motor, then swore at himself impatiently.

Of course the watch was running: it was his own perception of.

time that was at fault.

If he only had a light… He would be seeing what no man had ever seen, the rocks of the deep mantle. In a few minutes he would be passing through the rim of the outer core, into that curious region where nickel-iron was compressed into a liquid.…

The watch again. The minute hand had moved, just perceptibly. Falling into this dark emptiness, Naismith could not help thinking again of lost spirits, wandering forever under the Earth. The Greeks had imagined a Hell like that; the Egyptians, too. A phrase from some chance reading came back to him:

“the chthonic ourobouros.”

He shuddered, and gripped the crossbar hard. I am a man, not a ghost.

He wondered if what he was experiencing had ever happened before: if any other living soul had made this incredible plunge. Such a man, failing to reach the surface again, swinging back and forth, thousands of times… until eventually his lifeless body came to rest at the center of the Earth.

What would have happened then, when the machine’s power ran out? A gigantic explosion, probably violent enough to cause vulcanism all over the planet, perhaps even shift the balance of the continents…. Therefore it had probably never happened.

But suppose the power had never run out? Then what was left of the man must be still hanging there… or perhaps a cluster of corpses, each in his shell of force…

Time passed. In the darkness and silence, Naismith found himself becoming intensely aware of his physical substance—

his body’s attitude, the partly flexed limbs, the sense of half-perceived processes going on inside him. What a curious and almost incredible thing it was, after all, to be a living man!

For four years he had believed himself to be Gordon Naismith. Then he had been told that this identity was a mask, that in reality he was a member of a different race, from a world twenty thousand years in the future…. But this identity was no more real to him than the other.

What was the truth? Where had he really come from, and what was the goal to which he felt himself so irresistibly driven?

Blurred, illusory shapes swam before his eyes in the darkness.

He blinked irritably, then closed his eyes, but the shapes remained. He felt himself growing drowsy.

He came awake with a start, realizing that time had passed.

He felt the hands of the watch. It was nine-thirty. Twenty-five minutes had gone by. But—

Naismith clutched the crossbar hard, as the icy shock struck him. In twenty-two minutes, he should have reached the center of the Earth. Surely, at that depth, there would have been some rise in temperature in the capsule!

He reached out, touched the shell. It was just perceptibly warm.

He deliberately let five minutes go by, then touched the shell again. It was definitely warmer….

Was there a delay factor in the capsule’s transmission of heat? Or had he somehow taken longer than twenty-two minutes to reach the center? But that was impossible.

Again he waited five minutes before he touched the shell.

This time there was no mistake: it was hot.

After a moment, even the air in the capsule began to seem unpleasantly warm and heavy. Naismith found he was sweating; his clothes began to stick to him.

After five minutes more, it was not necessary to touch the wall again. It was glowing dull red.

Two minutes dragged by. The shell brightened through the red, into the orange, yellow, then white.

Naismith was in agony. Even with his eyes tight shut, the glare and heat were unendurable. He was being burnt alive.

He buried his face in his arms, sobbing for breath. The heat pressed in relentlessly upon him from all sides; he could feel it like a heavy weight on his clothing. Now he could smell his hair beginning to crisp and smolder.

The metal framework grew too hot to touch. Naismith retreated from it as far as he could, touching it only with the soles of his feet; but to do so was to draw nearer to the white-hot shell of the capsule.

He groaned aloud.

It seemed to him, after a moment, that the heat and glare had abated a little. He opened his eyes warily. It was true: the shell had turned from white to orange. As he watched, it faded slowly onto the red.

Naismith breathed in a great, tortured gasp of relief. The crisis was over—he was going to live!

Time—he must notice the time. Ignoring the pain of his blistered skin, he felt for the hands of the watch. It was exactly ten o’clock.

His passage through Inferno had taken about fifteen minutes.

Ten o’clock—fifty-five minutes from the beginning of his fall. By now, if his calculations had been correct, he should have emerged on the far side of the planet.

But he had just passed through a zone of heat that could only be the core!

The air in the capsule was growing cooler by the moment.

The shell faded from dull red into hot darkness again. A few minutes later, Naismith dared to touch it cautiously; it was hot, but bearable.

Naismith felt totally bewildered. The period of his transit through the Earth had to be approximately forty-two minutes, no matter from what height he began his fall. Could his watch be running too slowly? Was time in the capsule moving at a rate different from that of time outside?

As the fall continued in darkness, Naismith grew aware of both hunger and thirst. He had been penned up here for only about an hour, and that ought to be well within his tolerance; but how long was this going on? How long could he last?

Once more, by an effort of will, he calmed his mind. The shell steadily cooled; otherwise no change was perceptible.

If he assumed a lag in the capsule’s absorption and re-radiation of heat, Naismith drowsily thought, then it could be supposed that he had reached the mid-point of his orbit in just about twice the predicted time. That would imply that there was a difference of time-rate inside the capsule, or else that some other factor had been reduced for unknown reasons….

For a moment he allowed himself to speculate on what he would do to the two aliens, if by some incredible chance he came out of this alive and met them again; but he cut off the thought. He felt himself drifting again into sleep, and abandoned himself to it willingly.

He snapped back to awareness with a start. How long had he been dozing?

He felt the watch. It was 10:17. He had been in free fall for seventy-two minutes.

Tension began to build in him again. Unless his understanding of the situation was simply, grossly wrong, then the zone of heat he had passed must have been the core of the Earth; and his period must be about twice what he had originally calculated. But why?

Time dragged. It was 10:19; then 10:23; then 10:27. Naismith waited tensely. Ten-nineteen. Now, if ever—

One moment he was still in utter blackness. The next, stars bloomed out beneath him, a galaxy of them, blindingly brilliant in their half-globe of night. Above him was a dark orb that occluded the other half of the sky; it was drifting away as he watched.

Naismith blinked up at it in uncomprehending wonder for a moment, until he realized that it was the night side of the Earth—that he had burst out of it feet-foremost.

His breath caught, and tears came to his eyes. He was out, out in the fresh air at last! He made an instinctive attempt to squirm around right-side-to, but gave it up immediately; that did not matter.

What did matter, he realized with sudden alarm, was that he was rising too high! The wrinkled, starlight face of the water was drawing away overhead—five hundred feet, a thousand, with no sign of slowing down.

The time had been top long; his speed was too great.

Coming down, Naismith realized with horror, he would be going much too fast to dare turn off the machine…

He would have to go all the way through, past that inferno of heat—at least once, perhaps twice. He was grimly sure that he could not survive even one more passage.

The globe above him continued to recede. Now it was con-cave, a gigantic silver-lit bowl: now it turned convex. The sky beneath changed from blue-black to purple, to ebony. The stars shone with a crueler sharpness.

Veils of cloud whisked by and receded, dwindling. How was it possible that he should be rising so far? He must be nearly into the stratosphere.

Now his speed was diminishing. He hung fixed in space for an instant, then saw the Earth creeping nearer again.

On the whole broad, overhanging curve of the ocean, there was not one light, not a ship. His ascent had taken perhaps a minute and a half; in the same length of time he must plunge back into the sea.

Naismith stared at the immense globe as it swelled toward him. There must be some explanation! It was out of the question for a falling body to come up ten or fifteen miles higher than the point it had started from… Unless—

Suddenly Naismith remembered the instant of his fall, and the seeming nightmare slowness of it, while he fought to escape the shell of the force-field he was in.

Make this assumption: that the relation of the machine to the normal physical universe was such that its gravitational interactions were reduced… that it fell, say, with half or a quarter the normal velocity.

He ran through the calculations quickly, with growing excitement. Substituting one-quarter g gave him a figure of eighty-five minutes, which was almost exactly right.

There was an apparent violation here either of the conserva-tion of energy or the principle of equivalence, but never mind that now… The consequence was that during his fall, he would tend to swing out away from the Sun, being less attracted to that body than the Earth was. The center of his orbit would be displaced a few miles, just enough to account for this rise….

The globe of the Earth was rushing toward him. Naismith watched it grimly, thinking that the next time he approached the surface it would be somewhere in the Pacific, about forty-two degrees west of Lake Michigan. Then eighty-four minutes back again; this time he would come out somewhere near the 63rd meridians, still in the Indian Ocean.

Now the dark surface was hurtling down at express-train speed. Naismith involuntarily braced himself, even though he knew there would be no sense of contact. He saw a whorl of bluish light just above him, expanding, rushing down. His eyes widened; he had just time to gasp, then something struck him a murderous blow.

The universe wheeled majectically around him; there was pain deep in his head. The stars slowly darkened and went out.