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Roy Glashan's Library
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Amazing Stories, April 1929, with "Buried Treasure"
THE present story by our well-knwn author will probably go down in publishing annals as a particularly interesting piece of scientifiction literature.
In it, he has presented a secret code which, to our knowledge, is entirety new, and which we believe, has never been presented before. Outside of this, the story gave rise to an entirely novel situation, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been tried in a magazine before.
When Dr. Breuer's manuscript arrived, the symbol-chart, which unit be found printed elsewhere, was drawn upon a piece of transparent tracing cloth. The editors had little trouble to place this chart over the key of the symbol, which is printed on page 41 and thus deciphered the code easily.
But how to present the story to our readers? It was impossible to print the symbol-chart on a separate piece of transparent paper, due to the high expense involved, so a brand new method had to be invented by the editor of this publication, and it was finally solved in a satisfactory manner. If the directions are followed carefully, no trouble will be had in deciphering the code. Nor does it mutilate the magazine, because even after the sheet on page 41 has been cut out with a penknife, it can always be re-inserted in the magazine for keeping. It will, indeed, keep indefinitely in this manner.
Outside of the new code presented in it, the narration makes excellent reading and would be a fine story even without the novelty feature.
THEY were talking. A group of students of the year 3008 A.D. had sat down together in the shadow of what was obviously the ruin of an ancient power-house. Within the crumbling concrete walls and beneath naked steel girders of the roof were rusty wrecks of engines and generators that appeared unspeakably crude and clumsy to these young men.
There were six of them. Though they were physically robust and well developed, their faces were surprisingly round and smooth and young looking. There were other curiously contrasting things about them. Although their eyes were quick and keen and alert, yet their bodies were very quiet; they rarely made a useless movement. The absence of the usual and expected student boisterousness is amazing to me as I write of it. Although their appearance, their faces and hands and clothes showed much culture and grooming, as though both boys and clothes had been produced at the expense of much painstaking care, yet they apparently had no conscious thought of either themselves or of their clothes. They were all dressed alike, except in minor details of tint and border, in light, close-fitting undergarments, and a cloak over the shoulders. Their six faces were almost as nearly alike as their clothes.
They sat and talked with a quiet and graceful sort of dignity. They were from a University history class, and were studying the First World War Period, from which these ruins dated. They had looked over the crumbling remains thoroughly, and were now discussing the people that built them—which meant us.
"It was a terribly turbulent age emotionally," one of them remarked. "Fear and anxiety ruled the lives of these people. Fear for food and shelter, fear of disease, fear of storms and floods, fear of each other—they had no peace from birth until death. Each individual had to hoard his little store of the world's goods to feed and shelter himself and his family, and it was no unusual thing for one of them to lose it and find himself and family in want, with death from cold or starvation staring them in the face. No one knew when a foreign nation would descend on his home to kill and plunder; no one knew when his neighbor would sue him in court and deprive him of his living; no one knew when a disease might overtake him, and cause him to die, prematurely, unexpectedly—just imagine how their emotions must have been harrowed!"
"And yet they wrote of themselves as a highly civilized people." The one who spoke was Mkmstr (I think I had best render at least their names in the phonetic spelling of that day). Though these young men all looked very much alike, if you looked closely you would have found that Mkmstr was taller and heavier than the rest, and that his eyes had a little more blue, and a little less of the universal brown.
"Yet they were a happy people," observed one Tamsn; "probably happier than we are. I've been reading some of their novels. They used to 'fall in love'; that was the emotional accompaniment of choosing a partner in marriage, a curious emotional phenomenon. Often they seemed to experience some degree of unhappiness on account of it, but on the other hand it gave them an intensity of happiness that I doubt if we can comprehend."
"You ought to," Mkmstr implied slyly.
"I wish I could," Tamsn continued. "My approaching marriage has only made me study the subject more thoroughly. They supposed 'love' resided in the hear—"
"No, not during the First World War period," corrected 'Al whose memory for facts and dates made him the living reference-work of the party. 'Al was somewhat smaller than the rest of them, and his features were finer, so that he looked very much like a child with great, grown body. "That idea was discarded two generations earlier."
"Anyway," Tamsn went on, "young people got a consuming thrill out of finding each other and deciding to live together for life. Today, marriages are made in the Vital Statistics Office. Emotions do not count. Only your medical history and your social reactions, and this gene and that gene. Why! We no longer have emotions."
They regarded Tamsn in silence, never having thought of such things before. Tamsn continued:
" 'Love' wasn't all. People of that day had a capacity for excitement, for depths of feeling and heights of joy, that we have practically lost. The elimination of war has lost us the emotion of patriotism, perhaps the noblest feeling the world has ever known. State rearing of children has cost us parental love; scientific mating has deprived us of romantic love; intellectual pursuits have supplanted all the ancient, high-flung emotional amusements. Yes, we have worked hard to eliminate fear, anxiety, despair, hate, and we think we are blessed and happy. Well, our happiness never fails; but it never rises. Sometimes I think we're a bunch of vegetables, living colorless lives!"
A SUDDEN ripping, cracking rent the air above their heads and disturbed the peaceful quiet of the deserted hilltop. These highly trained and cultivated people had themselves so well in hand that they did not even start. They had lost all emotional reaction to fear; only the intellectual reaction was left. They rose calmly and walked out of the way. Then they stood and looked around. A great block of concrete above the place where they had sat was tottering. Age and changing weather had weakened a critical portion of its support. They walked still further away, displaying not the least physical signs of uneasiness. When the ton of stone crashed down on the spot where they had sat, splitting into a hundred fragments and throwing up a cloud of dust, not a muscle twitched in the group.
"It's fortunate for us that it sounded a warning," Pirsn observed. Until we get better acquainted with him, it will be difficult to distinguish him from the rest. These people of 3008 A.D. look very much alike.
They wandered over to the rubbish heap, from which a fine dust still rose, keeping a wary eye on the ruined wall above them; and in a moment their keen eyes had spied the rusty iron cylinder among the crumbled concrete. It was somewhat smaller than a forearm, and was still half encased in fragments of ancient concrete.
Pirsn picked it up and finished knocking off the adherent concrete. He turned it over and around. He shook it and listened. He tapped it against the concrete wall and it sounded hollow.
"Evidently a receptacle," Tamsn concluded. "Let us get it open and see what they took such pains to conceal."
"What if it is one of those ancient war projectiles?" Pirsn suggested. "They exploded and killed people. There would be no particular advantage arising out of our getting killed."
The learned little 'Al came to the rescue:
"We can say definitely that this is not a shell. A shell was pointed at the nose and had a flat base; this is rounded at both ends. A shell was accurately machined steel for true fit and flight; this is rough cast-iron. It is improbable that a shell would be encased in the middle of a block of concrete."
They studied it with a view to opening it. They discovered a faint groove around it near one end. This suggested that it must have a screw cap. They did their valiant best to unscrew it, but it was rusted too firmly in place.
"If we concentrate all our detractors on one spot, we can get power enough to melt one end off." This suggestion came from Hz, the mechanical genius of the party. They all grasped the truth of it, once someone had suggested it.
They all took their detractors from their pockets. A detractor looked very much like a pocket flashlight. Everybody carried one, for the purpose of helping himself to the unlimited stores of power constantly being broadcast into the air for public use. It could be used to run a car or an airplane, warm a room, light up a dark place; in short, for anything that required power.
They tapped the rusty cylinder, holding it in a vertical position, in order to shake its contents down into one end. Then they concentrated their detractors on the other end. The metal first glowed red and then glared white; and bright drops of molten metal fell on the ground and caused smoke. Shortly one end was open, and so quick and intense had been the heat, that the metal was heated no further than an eighth of an inch away from the melted edge. Yet, to prevent the burning of the outcoming contents, they waited for this to cool; they waited with a calm and quiet patience that was uncanny. By all rights they should have been wildly eager to see what was inside. If they were, it did not show.
Finally they shook the cylinder with the open end down. They got only one thing, a roll of light bluish, smooth, transparent material, which might have been paper or might have been linen. One side was covered with strange characters.
"It's some sort of writing," Tamsn said. "A message. Don't touch it till we photograph it. It's a thousand years old and might fall to pieces."
Three of them took turns photographing it with neat little cameras against a graduated scale. In the meanwhile, Mkmstr talked to pass away the time.
"Just think!" he exclaimed; "at that time, people in general were unable to do their own writing or photographing. They depended upon professionals, upon whom they looked down as menials."
Mkmstr did not envy the past and its romance as Tamsn did; he exulted in the glory of the present.
"A slight correction, please," put in the omniscient 'Al; "at the First World War period almost everyone could write, though relatively few were able to handle other recording processes routinely as we do. A thousand years before that, however, even the highest and most prominent people could not write, but had skilled menials do it for them."
By that time the photographing was done. This is what the document contained:
"THAT is no known writing of any age or people," pronounced 'Al. He turned to Pirsn. Pirsn was the abstract reasoner, the Sherlock Holmes of the bunch. "What do you say ?" asked 'Al.
"It has a crudely artificial appearance," suggested Pirsn, "as though made by an individual for a purpose or an occasion."
"A secret code!" exclaimed Tamsn. Tamsn's atavistic spark of romance, though barely perceptible, seemed out of place in this blasé and self-controlled world.
"A cryptogram, no doubt," Mkmstr assented, his mind always on something practical. "It must be an important message, with all those elaborate efforts to conceal it."
I am glad that these young fellows found a cryptogram. It gives us an opportunity to see how brains worked in those days, when their capabilities were really developed. None of them had ever seen a cryptogram before, nor even taken the slightest interest in the subject of secret writing. Yet, they set about solving this one, in an assured, matter-of-fact way, and they solved it promptly. In fact they elected one of their number to solve it. They assigned the job to Pirsn and calmly forgot about it until he had it finished, in the same light-hearted way that the gang would have assigned me the job of procuring hot dogs and buns when a picnic was planned in my student days.
A few hundred years earlier than this day, something the world had never seen before, an Index of the World's Knowledge had been brought to completion. Therefore, everything known to mankind on any subject was instantly available to the seeker. Pirsn's first step toward solving the cipher was to go to the building housing this Index, to learn all about cryptography. In all the cities, these buildings were alike, a huge central dome with twenty radiating wings of huge marble colonnades. It took him all the afternoon to read up his subject and solve the message. The gang met the next afternoon at Mkmstr's apartment.
I continue to marvel at these college students of the year 3008. All students that I have ever known would have descended on the place with a bang. There would have been several scuffles, some of them approaching the point of being dangerous to the life and limb alike of participant and bystander; then they would have all draped themselves over walls and furniture in fantastic and contorted attitudes. These young men, however, filed in and sat down quietly and decorously, like a group of deans entering a convocation. Without impatient exclamations or rustlings, they waited, with alert eyes and silent bodies, until Pirsn produced the bluish manuscript and several sheets of notes.
"It was disappointingly easy and simple," Pirsn began. "However, I found cryptography an interesting subject, not at all difficult. Some day I wish to look further into the psychology that made people wish to conceal their thoughts by such means. It confirms our ideas that during those times there was much friction and antagonism between individuals, and but little cooperation. However, I was also quite interested in the quaint and curious English that was spoken at that time; I had to learn some of it in order to decipher the document. Now I'll repeat the steps by which I read it:
"First, the message is on a transparent medium,[ (1)] and has a definite geometrical arrangement. That suggests that it belongs among those ciphers that are read by being placed over some sort of a guide-diagram or 'frill' or 'key table.' This is a most convenient discovery, because it rules out of consideration a vast mass of possibilities in substitution ciphers, and saves us much time.
"Second: There are fifty-six characters. If the characters stood for letters, it would mean that the message contained somewhere between nine and fourteen words; certainly an inadequate number for conveying very much information. However, if each character stood for a word, fifty-six words would be a reasonable length for a message. Again, if there were fifty-six letters, there should be six or seven of them representing 'e'; i. e., that many repetitions of the same sign. The sign occurring in the 8th space is repeated in the 31st, 41st, and 45th spaces. It might be an 'e'. However, here the trail ends. For, there ought also to be four or five each of 't,' 's,' and 'o,' and there are not. No other sign is repeated save the one mentioned. Although the spaces 10 and 38 each contain a single circle, I am already going on the hypothesis that it is the position of the dots that counts, and therefore 10 and 38 are different symbols. We have then, fifty-three signs, only one of which occurs more than once. This is strong evidence that the symbols stand for words, not for letters.
"Third: The number of dots connected by lines, in different signs, varies from one to ten; just the right proportion to suggest that the dots represent letters. Remember that in the old English, more letters were used than nowadays. The circle would mean the beginning of the word; quite natural. There must, then, be a key to lay under each square; each dot will then lie over the letter for which it stands. Now to find that key. We have three clues:
"The four-times repeated sign contains three letters. In the English language of that period, the chances are a thousand to one that it is the word 'the.' I made a square of the proper size and put the letters 't,' 'h,' and 'e' into the places indicated by their position in this word. The next thing would have been to study each symbol with my diagram of known letters. Sooner or later I would have decided another letter from contiguity and contest. Putting this in its place, I would have repeated the process. Thus, letter by letter, I could have built up the message. However, I stumbled on a short-cut."
"'The'? did you say?" interrupted Hz. "We spell that with two letters, not three."
"You must remember," reminded 'Al, "that the word we now spell '#-e' was at that time spelled 't-h-e'."
"As I said, I found a short-cut," Pirsn continued. "In looking over the various 'grill' and diagram ciphers, I noticed a number of times the keyboard of the typewriting machine of that period—this strangely illogical and inconvenient arrangement of letters:
"It suddenly occurred to me that the positions of the dots standing for 't,' 'h,' and 'e,' correspond relatively to their positions on this keyboard. I made out a table of letters of the proper size and arrangement, and tried out a few of the signs, laying each section of the message over the keyboard diagram.
"The puzzle was solved; here you are:
"Got your warning in time to hide the stuff, a hundred thousand dollars' worth. Built air-tight concrete vault, will keep forever, below corner stone of new power house, outside the foundation, 20 feet under ground. Dig three feet square; the ring for pulling the door open is directly below figures 1924 on corner stone. Bart. March 28 1924."
SILENCE reigned for many minutes, and was then softly interrupted by the passing of papers from hand to hand.
"Pirates' treasure!" Tamsn finally breathed, subduing his excitement as one subdues a cough in church. Whatever matter came up, Tamsn traveled straight to the thrill.
"Couldn't be!" said the matter-of-fact 'Al, "In 1924, pirates had been extinct for a hundred years."
"What was pirates' treasure? What good could it do?" Mkmstr never deserted the straight and practical path. And 'Al never failed when historical information was required.
"Chiefly gold and silver," he replied. "Sometimes mineral crystals, jewels; they were worn on the person for adornment. Watches, utensils; valuable things stolen from their owners. You ask what good would it do us? Natural jewels are not as large and perfect as synthetic ones, and have practically no value either in industry or in scientific work. The watches and utensils might make a gift to a museum. Gold and silver are our most efficient sources of atomic power, and a hundred thousand dollars' worth—" he figured for a moment—"each of his share would be relieved of about a year's work in the labor divisions."
"I wouldn't give up my shift," Tamsn exclaimed. "The only real fun I ever had in my life was my turn in a labor platoon."
"The question is, shall we dig it up, or report it?" Mkmstr propounded the question impersonally, but he was aching for action; he wanted to dig it up.
They agreed that it must be dug up, not because gold and silver meant anything to them, but because it was a most interesting antiquarian find, from the very period they were studying in their history classes. It was the nearest thing to excitement that life provided.
The one thing that gives us an idea of the independence and stability reached by the society of that epoch, is the fact that these young men, at the age when life tastes sweetest and contains the most thrills, could not conceive of finding anything that would be of any value to them. What could they possibly want? They had everything already. Buried treasure meant no extra pleasure, no extra happiness, no excitement, not a thrill. It meant merely the intellectual satisfaction of finding some interesting historical material.
"The world holds no more buried treasure," Tamsn concluded mournfully when 'Al concluded his explanation.
These boys had been together for several years; they knew each other thoroughly. Their "gang" was well organized in an informal way. According to the unwritten law the digging would fall to Hz, the mechanically inclined member. Hz talked it over with them:
"Since we want to keep it a secret for the present, a regular excavator would be too conspicuous to secure and to handle. I'll make a small, slow-speed excavator that we can operate with our pocket detractors. It will take me twenty-four hours, and I'll build it in sections, so that we can carry it ourselves."
EARLY in the morning on the second day after the cipher was solved, the six of them met at Mkmstr's room. Hz distributed among them the pieces of his machine in a matter of fact way, as though it were nothing to have invented and constructed a totally new piece of apparatus in twenty-four hours. Tamsn showed traces of suppressed (very thoroughly suppressed) excitement. The others might have been engaged in the preparation of one of their daily college tasks for all the effect produced upon them by the proposed unearthing of a treasure over a thousand years old.
They climbed into a couple of roomy airplanes with their burdens, allowing space for what they might have to bring back home. Mkmstr worked at the instrument-board of the machine; he set pointers on dials; he wound keys and pushed plugs into holes; he turned letter knobs and dials. He was working out the problem of the plane's coming flight. When he was through, he moved a lever and sank back comfortably in his seat. The plane started off, rose, turned, gathered speed, and chose its own way, without any further human guidance or attention.
In the rays of the rising sun the city shone dazzling and resplendent beyond anything you and I have ever seen. From the height at which the plane flew, one could see a comfortable world. The countryside was dotted with cozy dwellings in brilliant horticultural settings, between which stretched broad acres of things growing for the needs of men. It seemed that some men dwelt in the city and some in the country, but both in equally comfortable, orderly, beautiful ways. If you have dreamed of the future as a crowded, teeming place, this was not it; it was leisurely and cordial.
There were many other planes abroad, in which drivers leaned back and enjoyed themselves with no concern for the management of the vehicle. Machines were at work on the broad, green, level fields. The morning air was keen and pleasant, and the young fellows felt glad to be alive.
When they reached the top of the ruin-covered hill, came the amazing thing of the morning's program. Hz put together the seven pieces of trussed metal, clamped in four of the pocket detractors, and the thing began to dig. The youngsters regarded it as a rather commonplace affair and never gave it a second look as soon as they were sure it was working.
Hz's "slow-speed" excavator required about an hour to dig down twenty feet. They made their hole five feet square instead of three, to allow the machine space to work in. Hz watched it intently, and indeed, at twenty feet depth, he heard the scrape of the blades on a hard surface. He shut the machine off, and three of them were silently accorded the privilege of descending, Tamsn the romantic adventurer, Hz who had made the machine, and Pirsn who had solved the cryptogram. They were physically active and clambered down the arm of the machine like monkeys.
They scraped the dirt off the concrete floor and sent it up the machine; they found a big iron ring and a groove showing where the edge of the door was. So Hz hooked a blade into the ring, and after they had climbed out, started the chain. The machine lifted out a slab of concrete and set it on the ground. Below them yawned a black hole, in which were visible the upper two or three steps of a flight.
So they unclamped their detractors in order to use them as flashlights and climbed down into the opening. They found themselves standing in a cramped and musty chamber. It was cramped because it was full of wooden cases piled around the walls and stacked in the middle. There was a half inch of impalpable dust over everything, which, stirred by their movements, soon had them all coughing and sneezing. The cases were light and clinked as they were moved.
Rather promptly they decided that it was too crowded and too dusty to do anything down there; the only possibility of learning more, lay in taking some of the boxes-up to the surface with them to examine. They carried one to the top of the stairs, propped it between two excavator blades, and had the machine hoist it out of the hole.
They undid the simple zinc hasp and raised the lid on its ancient hinges. There were twenty-four green bottles, each full of some liquid.
"Pirates' treasure," remarked Mkmstr to Tamsn's blank look of disappointment.
Nacht had out a bottle and was turning it over, peering through it and smelling of it.
"A beverage or a medicine," he remarked. "What else could it be?"
"In bottles?" suggested 'Al. "Oh, they used to put up cleaning solutions, skin lotions, writing fluids—endless things. At the University Museum is an ancient bottle labeled 'Embalming Fluid'."
"We can tell by the color," Nacht said, fingering the tinfoil seal over the cork. "What would they be apt to conceal a hundred thousand dollars' worth of?"
"Not medicine," 'Al felt sure. "At that time, the use of medicines had already begun to decline. Alcoholic beverages were also suddenly stopped a few years before the date on this paper. We know little or nothing about the post-alcoholic beverages, but this seems to be one of them."
Nacht took off the tinfoil and pried at the cork. He finally got half of it out and half of it in. A delicious aroma spread among the circle reclining on the grass.
"Smells too good to be alcoholic," said Mkmstr.
"No harm to taste it," Tamsn said, making a gesture that asked Nacht for the bottle. Nacht motioned toward the case. Tamsn quickly took one, opened it, and tasted the liquid. His face took on a rapturous expression.
"It's an enchanting material," he announced. "Cannot possibly be alcoholic."
Two other bottles were opened and tasted at once; and Tamsn's was sampled again. The reports were enthusiastic:
"Delicate!"
"Highly accomplished!"
"I always knew the ancients possessed arts that we had lost." This last profound remark was from Tamsn, the archaeophile.
Pirsn tried it.
"Who would have thought that the sense of taste could convey so much emotion?" was his comment. Pirsn's ideas always tended toward the abstract.
BY this time 'Al and Hz had their second portions, and Tamsn his third; and each of the others was opening and tasting a bottle and remarking on its wonders. Tamsn was a little flushed as he stood up to take a drink, and to join him five other bottles were pointed bottomwards toward the sky.
"Isn't it a wonderful day, fellows!" Tamsn exclaimed. Never in all his life had his voice rung so enthusiastically; never in all their lives had the others heard so much emotion expressed in a mere voice. However, you and I would only have considered him the least cold and reserved, the most nearly human one in the bunch now.
"Remarkable day," 'Al agreed. "Remarkable beverage of the post-alcoholic age."
"Beautiful blue sky, fleecy clouds, billowy forests, spires and towers of a fairy city in the distance—" Tamsn sighed deeply.
"Sounds beautiful," Nacht said critically. "That is the way the poets wrote a thousand years ago: Why don't folks talk that way now?"
"This is really living, isn't it?" Pirsn said, his voice rich with emotion. "Relax. Unburden your soul. Been cramped too much."
"I've never really lived before," Nacht remarked thoughtfully.
"Buried treasure anyhow." Tamsn said with much satisfaction. "We thought it wasn't possible."
"Real buried treasure," assented 'Al happily.
A song welled up from their midst, one of the soft harmonies of that petted and comfortable age. But in a few moments the gentle melody had rolled itself into a rollicking lilt that rang lustily out of six boisterous throats and re-echoed among the ruins and down the hill-side. Something was happening to these accurately balanced, rigidly controlled people of a perfect age.
The sound of it pleased them and they sang it again. The third time they danced to their singing. Not for hundreds of years had this blossoming earth witnessed such a sight as six young men dancing among ruins and singing at the tops of their lungs; not since man's emotions had been leveled by the establishment of universal safety and comfort by the abolition of fear and anger, so that they now ran as a deep but placid and well-controlled stream, with no more turbulent rapids, no more turbulent spray reflecting rainbows in the sunshine.
Nacht slapped Tamsn a resounding thwack between the shoulders.
"Here's to your Minerva, your bride to be!" he shouted heartily and drank down the toast.
Tamsn looked as though he would like to leave the group at once in search of his Minerva. He stood awhile in indecision with shining eyes and parted lips, but finally decided to stay.
"Minerva!" he murmured, and gazed rapturously toward a white statue on a gatepost which had an arm and a nose missing. But never before had he felt thus about his Minerva. Something new had wakened within him.
Whatever the stuff was that they had found—and it is clear that this must have been a good quality light wine—it had not been strong enough to make them silly or unsteady. It had merely removed the thinnest layer of neo-cortical inhibition, and made them only carefree and boisterous. Before long they were broad-jumping, and after that, climbing all over the crumbling buildings. Two of them tried out a wrestling match, and the rest stood by and applauded, enjoying it immensely. They explored ruins, not in their usual fashion of spending an hour on a square inch with scientific accuracy, but like children, racing here and there, poking into all the adventurous corners, shouting with glee at each new discovery.
"I've never known before what it means to be happy," Mkmstr panted, sitting down to rest near an airplane.
"Our buried treasure brought us more joy than all the gold and mineral crystals of the pirate days could have secured," 'Al remarked, sitting down beside him.
"Got to conceal it carefully," Hz contributed.
"I'm intensely tired and sleepy now," yawned Nacht. In fact, the same was true of all of them. Like a group of babies after strenuous play, they were being overcome by the pleasant lassitude of fatigue. They all lay down in the shelter of the planes.
"Careful!" warned Pirsn. "The ground is cold and damp and we're not used to it. Might mean disease. We don't know much about disease any more, because we've learned to be careful." He was mumbling along chiefly to himself. "Why can't we be careful now—!" he demanded, noting that no one was paying attention to him; and then trailed off weakly.
It was in vain. The others lay still and some were beginning to snore. Not even a snore had been heard in this world for ages. So Pirsn went about taking detractors out of pockets, laying them on rocks, and focusing their warmth upon the sleeping figures. He got the sixth one set by desperate effort, and rolled into the middle of the circle where there was a comfortable glow of warmth, asleep before he hit the ground. He rolled against Tamsn, who murmured in his sleep:
"We thought there couldn't be any buried treasure!"
THEIR digging around the foundations of the powerhouse, augmented by their subsequent antics, must have weakened the supports of that corner of the wall. While they slept a rain of rocks descended into their excavation, smashing their excavating machine to a flat pile of twisted metal. Crashing of glass and aromatic odors came from below.
Then a huge section of foundation caved in, and the entire corner of the ruined building gave way. The underground chamber collapsed completely. I doubt if a single bottle was left intact.
Over by their airplanes the young fellows slept so soundly and innocently, that their dreams were not in the least disturbed by the crashing and the quaking of the earth.
Roy Glashan's Library
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