Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 40: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

was and in a panorama of the city. Apparently I had spent almost as much time in the library as he had later, after I told him of my find. The first scenes showed a city like that in which we were, but a larger one—nearly twenty miles across. It was the New York of Atlantis. Queer one-wheeled cars and a few four-wheeled ones ran here and there along the inclined roadways. Aerocars, much like our own, flitted back and. forth over the zones, rising and descending vertically to the house-tops. The view was a panorama, taken from an aero. We were able to distinguish the people on nearby cars, though we could not see clearly those that thronged the streets. They were tall, with fair complexion, probably due to continued underground life during several centuries. — : Then, even as we looked, the city was gone! In its place gaped an _ enormous pit, ten miles across, cutting up through the heart of the city. On one side the terraces were intact up to the third zone, where toppling | buildings were falling, crumbling, dropping down into the dust of the dis- “ integrated planet! On the other side the hole extended for over a mile out into the plain, where fields of grain lay flat under the force of the rising wind. Seen from above, it was curiously like an eclipse, a huge black shadow cut from the vari-colored disk of the city. Our aero dropped dizzily, sucked down by a great current of air that rushed madly down into the gigantic pit! Just in time it was checked, and hovered over a sphere on the intact side of the city. Everywhere people were scampering to and fro like frightened ants, some rushing to the gates, some toward the pit where the cyclonic wind was crumpling the marble palaces of the aristocrats into a battered chaos! I wondered what was holding the aero, but I could not tell. Perhaps it was some force from the sphere. Everywhere else, everything—aeros, cars, people were being sucked dewn into that great black maw by the irresist- ible wind! We moved nearer and higher, above a second sphere. From here we looked directly into the pit, saw how it cuts its way down through the ordered heart of the city, down through level after level of great, dim-lit caverns, where throbbing machines sounded above the frenzied scream of the wind and the piping shouts of the people, where huge branching tube- systems of pneumatic railways ran out in all directions, where the vitals of the city were laid bare. Our aero was weakening now, its broad planes and undercarriage swept away by the tempest. Again the force of the sphere weakened, and we hurtled forward—and down! The rear of machinery swelled to a shattering clamor, faded, disappeared. We were falling, ever faster and faster, between great encircling walls of the glossy black rock that seemed to make up almost all of this planet, falling in near silence, for the voice of the wind was but a droning, sobbing wail. The pit’s walls sloped slowly inward, forming a cone whose height or, rather, depth must have been many miles. It was as if someone thrust a stick through a snowbank 38 EComichooksrcom