The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series Read Online Free PDF Page A

of ordinary matter…where a particle of ordinary, or terrene, matter has a positive charge, a contraterrene particle contains a negative charge, and so on and vice-versa …”
    “Okay, I got that.”
    “Well, then…it has long been known, or at least theorized, that when the two forms of matter touch, a terrific explosion will result—an explosion of nuclear proportions.”
    “And how large was this meteor you’re talking about?”
    He looked owlishly solemn. “Perfectly immense; it is difficult, if not actually impossible, to estimate its full original size from the scanty evidence I have managed to accumulate.”
    “And when it hit the earth, there would have been a big bang, eh?”
    “As you say, my boy, a very big bang…equal to the blast force of literally dozens of hydrogen bombs.”
    The mental picture conjured up did not exactly make me feel comfortable. “Okay…what else?”
    His watery blue eyes agleam with enthusiasm, he launched into his spiel. The meteorite, he believed, had struck earth somewhere in the Ahaggar region of North Africa…and as far back as we have any records, geographers have reported the crater of an extinct and very ancient volcano in those mountains: Greek merchants and travelers, Roman soldiers and scholars, Victorian explorers and adventurers had all mentioned it, although few of them ever seemed to have actually gotten there, since that was Tuareg country, and the Tuareg tribesmen are not only the best horsemen in North Africa, but have a welldeserved reputation for inhospitality carried to the point of hostility.
    “My astronomer friend, Franklyn, at Hayden Institute, worked out the orbit,” he explained excitedly, “and calculated the angle at which the seetee meteorite entered the earth’s atmosphere—”
    “Seetee?”
    “A less-formal term for contraterrene matter…please, my boy, if you are not able to keep pace with my disquisition, save your questions until I am through explaining—!”
    “And you think it went straight down the cone of the dead volcano?” I hazarded. He blinked surprisedly, as he always did when I said something intelligent.
    “Precisely, my boy! And if my calculations are correct, it would have been some hundreds of miles below the earth’s crust before the meteor came into contact with normal matter. The explosion would have been of an unprecedented scale of magnitude. Hundreds of thousands of tons of solid rock would have instantly vaporized…forming a huge bubble of impacted molten rock far below the planet’s surface…”
    “How huge?” I asked. He shook his head.
    “No way of telling, I fear…we shall soon see for ourselves.”
    “That’s why you wanted a helicopter!” I said, suddenly putting two and two together and coming up with at least three and nine-tenths.
    “Exactly, my boy…I plan to descend into the crater of the volcano-let us christen it Mount Zanthodon, and employ the term hereafter as a verbal shortcut.”
    “Well…Babe can do it, I suppose,” I muttered dubiously. “Depending on the width of the crater, that is. What do we do if it narrows on us before we get down to the center of the earth?”
    “We get out and look about,” he said primly, hefting the shiny new geological pick he had purchased in the Cairo market. I groaned and tried to pretend I hadn’t heard.
    Actually, it wasn’t the center of the earth we were going to at all. That was just the Prof’s gift for dramatic hyperbole. This side of the fantastic novels of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, nobody is ever going to get that deep into the planet because of the heat of the magma core, if for no other reason. But even a hundred miles down, which was about as deep as Potter reckoned the Underground World to be, was deep enough.
    Deeper than any man has ever gone before.…
    * * * *
    Well, to make a long story just a wee bit shorter, it was there all right—the mountain, I mean. And only a little more than a thousand or so feet high: