A Voice From the Inner World

A Voice From the Inner World by A. Hyatt Verrill

A Voice From the Inner World, by A. Hyatt Verrill, opens with New York newspaper reports of a green meteor seen in mid-Pacific on the eighteenth of October. The steamship Chiriqui radioed that a huge green sphere, with two smaller red spheres below it, was bearing down on her, and then her wireless went silent. Other ships saw the meteor continue on its way. Scientists suggested an optical illusion, and a destroyer sent from Balboa found no trace of the ship. Ten days later the meteor, or its twin, appeared again, and the U.S.S. McCracken, which had been searching for the Chiriqui, reported it before her own wireless also went dead. With both ships presumed destroyed, the public soon lost interest. About three months after the first report, on January fifteenth, the narrator is visiting his daughter in Peru. His son-in-law Frank is a radio enthusiast in Miraflores, whose homemade set has often picked up faint English signals from an unknown station at the same hour each night. That evening a clear voice comes through. The speaker identifies himself as James Berry, a mining engineer from Butte, Montana, and a passenger on the Chiriqui. The narrator takes the story to the American Minister in Lima. They cable it to Washington in cipher, but the officials treat it as a hoax. The narrator believes it is true. Berry describes the meteor growing to the size of the moon and exploding in a flash. A suffocating gas then struck down everyone aboard. Because of a mine-rescue gas-mask in his cabin, he alone stayed conscious. On deck he found the ship floating in space, slung beneath an enormous rotating green sphere that was held up by vibrating rods. Two smaller red spheres hung from it on cables above the bow and stern. He concluded it was a machine, not a meteor. The captain and others were alive but unconscious. The machine flew over the Andes and dropped through the crater of an extinct volcano into a vast underground land lit by greenish light. Its landscape was jagged and brightly coloured, and its air was heavy with sulphur fumes. There stood a city of hollowed basalt columns. The inhabitants are scarlet-skinned female giants about thirty feet tall. Each wears a membranous frill on her head and arms that works as a gill. Berry watched one tear apart and eat a living sailor, and the others fought over the body until their chieftainess ended it. The women dreaded Berry, apparently because of his gas-mask and his immunity to their gas. He locked himself in the captain's cabin with a rifle and revolver, and he found food in the pantry. He learned that the airship can leave the underground land only when a great jet of steam from a rock pinnacle hurls it upward. Walking through a jungle of giant lichens, he found the dismantled wreck of the U.S.S. Cyclops. Later the machine brought in the McCracken, and the women cut her apart with jets of flame while carrying her crew to the city. Berry then found the Chiriqui's radio transmitter still working, and he began broadcasting his story nightly. In a final message he explains that the women are cannibals who have eaten every other source of meat. Only a few males are allowed to live, and these are enslaved and killed in middle age. The women capture ships to take the metal for building a fleet of the machines, and to take the gassed crews, who stay paralysed but alive and are stored as food. Berry gives the world a plan to destroy the machines. They must be shelled as they emerge from the crater, or attacked from above by aircraft with bombs and machine guns, since their gas and magnetic force work only downward. They show their green light whenever they move. A male who had taken refuge with Berry is caught and killed, and the women rush toward Berry's deck. The transmission ends with the report of a pistol.

By A. Hyatt Verrill · First published 1927 · Genre: Science Fiction, Hollow Earth Fiction, Speculative Fiction · 11,485 words

First lines

On the eighteenth of October, the New York papers reported the appearance of a remarkable meteor which had been seen in mid-Pacific, and the far more startling announcement that it was feared that the amazing celestial visitor had struck and destroyed a steamship.

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science fiction · hollow earth · lost world · underground civilization · giant women · cannibalism · matriarchy · spherical airship · poison gas · gas mask · radio broadcast · shortwave radio

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A Voice From the Inner World is listed on Textopian as a short story by A. Hyatt Verrill, dated 1927 CE.

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