The Face of the Deep by Edmond Hamilton

Author:Edmond Hamilton [Hamilton, Edmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9781610818438
Publisher: Radio Archives
Published: 2012-09-05T07:00:00+00:00

MYSTIFIED and intrigued, Otho started out across the lava-beds after the Cubics. He picked his way as they had done, across the hot expanses of solidified lava.

Swirling smoke made him cough and gasp for breath. But he pressed on until he reached the rim of the Canyon of Chaos at the point where the Cubics had entered it. He peered down into the abyss.

The Canyon was a fearsome spectacle. Many miles long, a mile in width, and almost that in depth, its gloomy rock walls sank downward almost vertically everywhere. Far below, a glowing, narrow river of crimson lava crawled along the floor of the titan gorge.

Sulphurous smoke and blasts of superheated air screamed up from its depths. The lava river at its floor, Otho perceived, bubbled up from fiery springs at the north end of the canyon and flowed down its length and away through an underground chasm at the southern end.

“But where did the Cubics go?” he muttered, trying to peer down through the rushing smokes.

Then Otho perceived that a precarious pathway led downward from where he crouched, along the steep wall below him. The creatures he had followed had obviously descended by that path.

He was on the point of starting down after them, when he glimpsed them returning up the pathway. At once Otho ducked behind a mass of rocks for concealment.

The Cubics, still joined in groups to form the centipede-like figures, emerged laboriously from the abyss. But now each of these cooperative figures carried with it a chunk of rock shot with gray metal.

“That rock is lead-bearing,” Otho thought swiftly. “That’s good-we need lead. But what are they going to do with it?”

There was no apparent answer to that riddle.

The Cubics started marching back across the lava-beds toward the jungle with their burdens.

Otho remembered now that when they had first encountered the Cubics the little cooperative creatures had been carrying similar chunks of rock with them.

“Why, they come to this canyon for lead-bearing rock!” he thought astonishedly. “They must be more intelligent even than we figured. Wonder what they do with it?”

He decided at once to enter the abyss and locate the source of the lead ores.

Lead was one of the needed materials they had not yet located. And there might well be other required substances down there.

Yet even the hardy Otho hesitated a few moments before entering that fearsome abyss. The smoke and scorching air threatened to asphyxiate even his tough lungs. His own respiratory system was much more resistant to fumes and gases than the ordinary human’s. Still, he took care to make himself a rude respirator from strips of cloth which he tore from his jacket and bound across his nose and mouth.

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