“In Which Nathanial and Arnaud Descend into the Planet”
1.
“Under the river?” said Nathanial with some alarm as they paused again and Palfreyman explained the route ahead to the two scientists. “Is it safe? I mean, after the rockfall, you’re sure it’s not all going to come down on our heads?”
“Perfectly safe, sir, don’t you worry. The lads have been in there and shored up any sections that look dodgy. It’s only when we get to the cavern that we might need to be careful. Getting there, though, is a bit of a trek—don’t worry, we’re not going all the way to the other side of the river. The caverns start about three quarters of the way across and continue until well on the Bright Side. Normally, it’s only a half hour trip. But because you two gentlemen are along, and because we want to be sure it’s not going to fall in on us, I’d reckon an hour or so.”
Palfreyman went to have words with his men—a final pep talk. Nathanial assumed that most of the soldiers would have encountered grisly deaths before, but a couple of them looked too young to have done much military service. He was constantly amazed at how adaptable mankind was—one minute fighting on the fields of Europe and Africa, and then next transported to an alien world and encountering creatures out of its worst nightmares. He felt a little flush of pride—and instantly became a bit emotional.
“You okay?” asked Arnaud, sensing that Nathanial wasn’t quite with him.
“I’m fine—just thinking about how we’ve managed to take all of this—Mars, Luna, Venus, everything—in our stride. You forget what a big thing it is for ordinary men and then you see them here, acting like it’s just another day for them.” He turned to Arnaud as a thought struck him. “Do you think that perhaps we should have invited Annabelle?”
He felt a little shameful for not having considered whether Annabelle would have wanted to accompany them. He answered his own question before Arnaud had chance to: “I’m sure she has much more interesting things to be doing than crawling through tunnels and dragging bodies out. But all the same, I expect she’ll be livid that we didn’t ask her. What time is it, by the way?”
“Almost eight. And if it is not an impertinent question,” Arnaud added awkwardly, “and you know how we French are for the impertinence, are you and she…” He wiggled his fingers vaguely. “Romantically attached?”
“Me and Annabelle?” Nathanial laughed. “Oh no—we’re just very good friends, travelling companions. Her uncle, her real uncle of course, Doctor Cyrus Grant tasked me with keeping her safe, although I’m not entirely sure I am doing a sterling job at that… But no, she’s my ward, that’s all. Not,” he added hastily lest Arnaud misunderstand, “that I consider that inadequate. Not at all. Friendship is the most wonderful thing.”
Arnaud raised a sceptical eyebrow.
“What?” sputtered Nathanial, feeling his face redden.
“Nothing, Nathanial. If that is what you say then that is what must be true.”
“Annabelle is a perfectly respectable woman.”
“And you are a perfectly respectable gentleman. But the heart takes no heed of respectability, does it? It wants what it wants and it goes where it goes. And we are powerless but to follow where it takes us.”
Nathanial shook his head in exasperation. “You may believe that, but some of us have more self-control than to let our hearts be dragged by the scruff of the neck hither and thither.” The soldiers were setting off again. “Come on—they’ll go without us!”
And, happy to have brought that little conversation to a conclusion, Nathanial turned around and headed briskly towards where the last of the soldiers had just vanished into the cliff face.
The ceiling was uncomfortably low, but the floor was relatively flat, although wet and slippery, but Nathanial’s boots seemed to do a good enough job of preventing him from falling on his behind—and for that, he gave silent thanks. After about twenty yards, he noticed a colossal generator, sputtering and puttering to itself, in a niche in the tunnel wall, jetting out clouds of oily blue smoke, powering the electric lights strung up, from then on. The tunnel turned to the left and became steeper. Fortunately, it also became higher. A sombre silence had descended on the party—perhaps, thought Nathanial, the realisation of what they were actually going down there to do was sinking in….
2.
“Look at this!” exclaimed Arnaud suddenly, making Nathanial—and the nearest soldier, a Sikh called Khan—jump. The geologist rushed over to the wall of the tunnel and traced a metallic vein with the tips of his fingers. “If I am not mistaken, it looks like a very high quality vein of cassiterite. Tin oxide.”
“And that’s good, is it? But can’t they get all the pure tin they want from the Bright Side?”
“Mais oui, but I had no idea that there were such rich seams of it right beneath our feet. I wonder if Professor Fournier knew of this…” Arnaud gave a snort and a chuckle. “Of course she did—she was a geologist sans pareil…”
“Is that a great discovery, then?” Nathanial asked, indulging him in his excitement as they continued their passage.
“I have no idea,” Arnaud laughed. “Some small discoveries remain small until the day they are forgotten. And some small discoveries only become huge in hindsight.”
“But surely the effort of digging all the way down here and carting tons of rubble back up for processing wouldn’t be commercially viable, would it?”
“I am not so sure,” Arnaud said. “Getting it from the Bright Side is more difficult than people imagine—the temperatures there are formidable. Lead’s melting point,” Arnaud continued eagerly, clearly pleased to be on the firm ground of metals and melting points, “is a little over six hundred degrees; but tin is, I think, only about four hundred and fifty. I shall mention this to Colonel Shawbridge when we return. It may of no significance, but I will let him be the judge.”
They moved on, picking up pace a little until they reached the bottom of the sloping tunnel where it opened out a little into a small cavern.
“From here on, we’re going to be under the river, so you don’t be alarmed if you get a bit wet. Nothing to worry about but as you might imagine, a bit of water finds its way down here,” called Lieutenant Palfreyman, his voice echoing coldly from the rock walls.
The thought of not only being underneath the river, but being constantly reminded of the fact by the water dripping from the roof made Nathanial wonder why no one had thought of bringing umbrellas.
3.
The journey under the World River itself was, in reality, less unpleasant than Nathanial had feared; but Arnaud’s telling of a story about some potholers that he’d heard about—getting trapped in water-flooded caverns back on Earth—was a sorely misjudged attempt at levity. Nathanial had to tell him to shut up.
Very soon, the tunnel they were traversing opened out into a splendid cavern, approximately sixty feet in diameter. The electric lights strung around one side of it threw long, branch-like shadows up and across the ceiling from irregularities and jutting rocks. For a moment, Nathanial thought they’d reached the cavern where Professor Fournier had been killed, but there was no sign of anything that looked like a rockfall.
“Look up there!” Arnaud said, pointing two thirds of the way up the wall directly ahead.
Nathanial squinted in the general direction that Arnaud had indicated. “What am I looking at?” he asked eventually, and Arnaud tutted and pointed again
“Oh,” Nathanial said after a few seconds, wondering if he was still missing the point. “That reddish seam or vein or whatever you call it? That?”
“Yes. Have you ever seen anything like it before?”
“Red rocks? Mars is, apparently, covered with them. But they are still just rocks, or are your geologist’s eyes seeing something I’m not?”
Arnaud rushed over to Lieutenant Palfreyman who was about to move on into the next section of tunnels. “Lieutenant! I have a request to make, if you would humour me for a moment.”
Palfreyman regarded the animated Frenchman with a little suspicion. Understandably, thought Nathanial—he imagined that, to the soldiers here, the French were not exactly flavour of the month.
Arnaud quickly explained his idea and after Palfreyman had gotten the nod from Nathanial, he strode over to a junction in the lighting.
“What’s this about, then?” Nathanial asked.
“Everyone keep your eyes on the wall,” Arnaud said loudly, pointing. “Just up there.”
A couple of second later they were plunged into the most utter darkness Nathanial could recall experiencing. He forgot that he was supposed to be looking at the wall until Arnaud poked him in the back.
“Look!” he hissed.
For a moment, Nathanial could see nothing—but then, as if someone had turned a light on inside it, the red vein that Arnaud had pointed out glowed. And not evenly: patches of it flared brighter red and then faded, like dying embers, whilst other parts of it—parts further round the cavern wall that Nathanial had not noticed while the lights had been on—took up the glow before fading themselves. Even more peculiar, there were other, isolated patches of the same glow scattered around the walls, disconnected from the main one. And as the lights came back on, Nathanial could see that parts of the seam were still brighter than they had been before. Five seconds later, the rocks had all faded back to nothing.
“C’est incroyable!”whispered Arnaud, his eyes wide in wonder. “Did you see that?”
“I think we all did,” Nathanial replied dryly. “Luminous red rock, yes?”
Arnaud shook his head sadly, but his eyes were smiling. “Oh, mon ami, it is more than simply red luminous rock—did you not see how the light changed? How it grew and then faded?”
Nathanial caught the hint of a chuckle from one or two of Palfreyman’s men, which annoyed him more than he might have anticipated. “Well, yes, but I think I must be missing the significance of it, I’m afraid, Arnaud.”
Palfreyman started to move everyone on, clearly even less impressed with Arnaud’s little light show than Nathanial had been.
“Tch!” Arnaud said with a shake of the head. “The significance you miss is that I have never heard of minerals that absorb light and then hold it for so long before they release it again. And did you see the way in which the light appeared to be moving within the rock?”
Nathanial nodded, conceding Arnaud’s point. “You think that’s significant, then?”
Arnaud shrugged. “Significant, I cannot say. But unusual, yes—and most certainly fascinating.”
“Maybe they’d name it after you, then—‘Fontainite’. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Fame and fortune might yet be yours.”
Arnaud made a dismissive noise behind him as they moved into the next section of tunnel, their feet splashing in the shallow pools of water. “Fame and fortune be damned,” he said. “I do not think I have the passion for them—just for science and for the discovery of new things.” He paused, furrowed his brow, and then winked at Nathanial. “Although you are right: Fontainite does have the good ring to it, does it not?”
4.
They reached their destination sooner than Nathanial had expected—he’d lost track of how long they’d already been underground and unlike Arnaud, who seemed to find something fascinating or noteworthy every few dozen yards, the allure of rock for him had vanished long, long ago.
The cavern was even bigger than the previous one—Nathanial estimated it at over two hundred feet in diameter, making it twice the size of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was, indeed, an impressive natural phenomenon. Although not perfectly hemispherical, it came close, and for a moment, Nathanial felt quite awed. The symmetry of it was only spoiled by what, indeed, looked like “boils”—inward eruptions of sparkling crystalline deposits, blooming from the walls. At a quick estimate, there were about twenty five of them, some larger than others, some poking out into the cavern, others barely intruding into the vast space at all.
Unlike the remarkable uniformity of the cavern itself—the boils notwithstanding—the ground beneath his feet was simply a chaotic mess. Piles of rock and rubble were everywhere, making it hard to distinguish where the floor ended and the walls began. At the far side of the cavern, Palfreyman’s men were assembling around a particularly large pile of debris. Above it in the wall there was a shallow, fractured concavity, glittering fragments protruding from the edges. This was clearly the outcropping that had killed Professor Fournier—or, at least, its remains.
At his side, Arnaud gave a little sigh. “Of all the places that Professor Fournier could have died,” he whispered, as if reading Nathanial’s mind, “I think she would have been pleased that it was here. Although obviously,” he added, “I am sure she would have preferred not to have died at all.”
“It comes to us all,” Nathanial said quietly, watching the soldiers scampering around the rocks under which the professor’s body lay, like insects or rats. “What do we do?” he asked Arnaud. “I feel a little superfluous here, but I’m not sure that we wouldn’t simply be getting in their way. And it would seem a little disrespectful to, well…to do anything.”
They stood in awkward silence for a few moments as Palfreyman directed his men. But it quickly became clear that something unexpected had been discovered. There was much gesticulating and scratching of heads, and eventually the lieutenant beckoned them over.
“Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”
“You might say that, sir, yes. Doctor Fontaine—you’re the expert on rocks and all that business, aren’t you?”
“Yes—why?”
“Come and have a look at this.”
Arnaud followed him back to the rest of the men, Nathanial bringing up the rear. The crowd of men parted as they arrived and Palfreyman indicated for Arnaud to take a look.
“I am afraid I do not understand,” he said, kneeling down. It was only when he tried to move a piece of rock that Nathanial realised the problem. “It is stuck,” Arnaud said simply, tugging at the fist-sized stone. He tried another. And another.
“It’s like they’ve been cemented into place,” Palfreyman said to Nathanial. “We managed to shift a lot of the outer stuff, but…” He shook his head.
Arnaud asked for a lamp and held it close to Professor Fournier’s burial mound. He poked and prodded for a few seconds as everyone stood in silent expectation, before asking for a small hammer.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Nathanial asked.
If Arnaud even heard him, he gave no sign of it, and began to delicately chip away at the rock until it came free in his hand. He held it out for them to see. “As the lieutenant says, it is as though they’ve been cemented together. But not with any cement I have ever seen before.” He turned the rock over in his hands, its surface scabbily encrusted with glittering, glassy shards.
“You know,” said Nathanial, “I might be wrong, but doesn’t that remind you of—”
“The crystal plates!” Arnaud finished triumphantly. “Yes, yes! Of course!”
“The what, sir?” asked Palfreyman
“The crystal plates that Professor Fournier had been investigating.” Arnaud gestured up at the domed ceiling of the cavern, pointing out the boils that Nathanial had noticed before. “Those.”
“That’s hardly surprising though, sir, if you don’t mind my saying. The professor was hacking at one of them when it came down on her head.”
“Of course, of course—but in that case, surely this should simply be a pile of loose rocks and crystals.”
Nathanial was ahead of Palfreyman. “You’re saying that the crystals have somehow become glued together?”
Arnaud reached out with the tip of his boot and poked at the mound. “One might expect metamorphic rocks to do such a thing, yes, but only with immense pressures and temperatures, and over periods of time much longer than the few weeks that we are seeing here.”
Palfreyman took a breath. “Well, that’s as maybe, sir. But the professor’s body is still under all of that, and Colonel Shawbridge will have my liver on a plate if we don’t take it back above ground.” He gestured to his men. “Looks like we’re going to need the hammers and picks after all, lads.”
Arnaud and Nathanial stood back as the soldiers set about chipping away at the rocky cocoon in which Professor Fournier’s body lay.
“Sorry about this,” Palfreyman said to the two scientists. “Hope you didn’t have any plans for lunch. Looks like we might be here longer than we expected.”
5.
Despite the apparently gargantuan task, the soldiers worked surprisingly quickly to chip away the matrix of rock and crystal. Nathanial began to feel hungry, and wished he’d had breakfast. “What time is it?” he asked Arnaud as he picked up and dusted off a few samples of rock—no doubt to take back with him.
“A quarter before nine.”
Nathanial’s heart sank a little: he felt sure it was closer to lunchtime than that. Perhaps the light—or lack of it—was somehow confusing his body about what time it actually was. His mind was taken off the grumbling of his stomach by the slightly macabre discovery of the toe of a stout walking boot, protruding from the rubble.
“We’ve found her, sir,” a soldier said to Palfreyman.
“Good man—now remember, no one expects this to be pretty. But if the old girl’s as cemented in as I reckon she’s going to be…be as careful as you can, but we’re taking her back, whatever state she’s in.”
Nathanial and Arnaud watched in silence as the men chipped away at the rock and crystal that encased her, revealing first of all the leg to which the boot belonged.
Not quite sure what he’d been expecting, Nathanial was fascinated to see that not only had the crystals grown around her body, but also, it seemed to him, into it. Fortunately for the men charged with excavating her body, what Nathanial thought of as intrusions were fairly delicate and brittle, and broke away cleanly. He hated to imagine the outcome if they hadn’t done.
“Does she have family?” Nathanial asked Arnaud.
“I believe she has a sister, somewhere in the south of France. She didn’t speak much of her. She was my lecturer for two years,” Arnaud said, turning away from watching her body being chiselled out. “We became friends. She would throw dinner parties…” He smiled somewhat sadly at the memory. “Such dinner parties! She knew a most remarkable range of people—most of them were totally crazy, wild people. What is the word you English have? Bohemian?”
Nathanial nodded.
“She loved poetry and was always finding some new poem to read out to us. We sat around on the floor of her apartment, drinking and smoking and listening.” Arnaud gave a sigh. “We lost touch a little when I left, but she used to send me copies of her research papers and cards at Christmas. I had no idea she was here until I received a telegram asking me to go to the British Consulate in Paris.”
“And that’s when they invited you to come to Mercury?”
Arnaud nodded. “And of course, I could not turn down such an opportunity, could I? To explore the geology of a whole new world!”
“And what about your employers? I can’t imagine they took kindly to you having to break off whatever studies you were engaged in.”
“Oh, they were fine,” Arnaud said dismissively. “Waiters are easy to find.”
“Waiters? You were a waiter?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing, Nathanial. I loved being a waiter—you meet the most interesting people, you know. And the free drinks, of course.”
“But I thought you were a geologist.”
“And so I am, but after the war, there were not so much in the funds for the research, you know. Oh, things are getting better, yes—and with this under my trousers, as you say, I think I may be more in demand when I return than when I left.”
“I should say!” agreed Nathanial, finding Arnaud’s mistake funny enough to let it go uncorrected. “There aren’t a lot of people that have explored the bowels of alien worlds—and even fewer that had explored this particular one. You’ll be turning down offers left, right and centre when you get back, you know. Perhaps they’ll keep you on here for a while. I’m sure there’s a lot more to be examined and discovered—Fontainite, for starters.”
Arnaud lifted a hefty chunk of rock from the floor in which were embedded several hexagonal crystals, smaller versions of the plates that Professor Fournier had been collecting. “Indeed,” he agreed. “The more we discover about them, the stranger they become. As with everything.”
“Surely you have that the wrong way around,” Nathanial said. “The more we discover about things, the less strange they become.”
“But the more we discover,” said Arnaud with a cryptically raised eyebrow, “the more we learn how little we truly know, non?”
“You really have missed your calling, you know,” laughed Nathanial. “If you don’t make it as a geologist, I’m sure you’d make an excellent philosopher!”
Arnaud shrugged. “I am French. It is in the blood.” He nodded towards where the soldiers were removing the last fragments of rock and crystal from Professor Fournier’s body. “She would have understood.”
There was a tremor in his voice that, unaccountably, made Nathanial want to comfort him; but he didn’t have the words. Annabelle would have known what to say, what to do. He just stood there feeling inadequate and awkward—before reaching out and squeezing Arnaud’s shoulder. The Frenchman placed his hand on the top of Nathanial’s.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
6.
Professor Fournier’s body was in better condition than Nathanial had expected. Most of her right hand side had been crushed almost beyond recognition, and her thorax bore the indentations of the rocks that had killed her. The stretcher was unfurled and the corpse gently placed on it and covered with a blanket.
“Sorry that took so long,” said Lieutenant Palfreyman, wiping his sweaty face with a handkerchief.
“Not at all,” Nathanial insisted. “I just wish we could have been of more practical assistance.”
“Don’t you worry about it, sir. That’s what we’re paid for. We’ll be getting back now, if that’s all right.”
In subdued silence, they began the journey back up to the surface.