Page 131 - The Perpetrations of Captain Kaga

Reforming the World of Bolix

When Kaga nodded, he went on. “All those physical peculiarities,
and nobody put two and two together. They just went on merrily
drilling away. And I had to be the one in charge when it happened!”
“Well, what did happen?” asked Kaga, although a glance at the
papers on the desk had already given him a good idea.
Lugo replied, beginning in a tightly controlled voice. “The drilling
reached 320 kilometers last week. Suddenly all resistance to the drill
bits vanished and nothing came up through the bore but a foul sort of
gas, similar though not identical to the atmosphere up here on
the…outer surface. The engineers did not know what to make of it;
we retracted the drill and I decided to investigate. The shaft has a two-
meter diameter and we had on hand a one-man inspection module
that hadn’t ever been used. I got in it and was lowered on a cable at a
rapid rate. Before I was even halfway down my progress began to get
slower and slower, until I came to virtually a dead stop, gently
bobbing up and down. Gravity had ceased to exist, somewhere in the
middle of the planet’s crust. I was stuck!”
At this point Lieutenant Lugo took out a large orange handkerchief
from his tunic and mopped his face. “I radioed back to the surface
and was hauled up. It was scary but I was determined to get to the
bottom of that shaft. I had the engineers rig up an attachment to the
drill so the capsule could be pushed past the gravity barrier. This time
I took along more equipment and provisions, and I was prepared for
anything—except, of course, for what I actually did encounter.”
“The capsule went quickly through the passageway. I felt up and
down reversing after I passed the zero gravity mark. Finally I reached
the 320-kilometer point and halted. When I looked out through the
observation port, to my astonishment I saw a vast upward-curving
landscape, lit faintly by glowing outcrops of rock. I put on my
breathing apparatus, gathered up my instruments, and stepped out of
the capsule. The gravity was about the same as it is here, and I set up
some cameras and other equipment on tripods in order to record
everything I could of that incredible panorama.”
Lugo waved his hands at the piles of paper before him. “There it is,
Captain Kaga. A hollow planet. Weak gravity on the outer surface
resulting from the mass of a crust of very dense rock; weak gravity on
the inner surface resulting from the acceleration of polar spin. There
must have been an epoch of terribly violent chemical and physical

129