A SECRET GIFT TO

MANKINDPart One

The Discovery

A Science Fiction story

Written and Edited by

JOHN BAXTER

PROLOGUE

As we are now well and truly into the twenty-first century, our understanding and acceptance that there are other worlds in our universe which can support life is far more acceptable to us as a race of beings on a planet ourselves. Recent calculations made using findings taken from data supplied by the Hubble Telescope, and others like it more recently launched and even more up to date have revealed countless millions of planets revolving around their countless trillions of stars. Various theories are used to calculate the possibility of life on quite a lot of them, and used again to calculate intelligent life on some. The number of possibilities of life at least equal or even superior in intellect to us, existing in the stars is not a matter for us to dismiss. Mathematically, it’s a certainty. We just haven’t seen any yet, or not that we know of, and not all of us would know what they would look like anyway. We are not talking about the alleged UFO sightings, but real hard evidence of any such race of aliens actually being here, and indeed living among us undetected. This is what is lacking. The hard evidence. To have the technology to be able to come the millions of light years from where they live just to see us, and then to start to probe our bodies, and cut us open, then harm and hurt us with ridiculous experiments, in the name of science? I don’t think so. If they have the technology to get themselves all the way here to Earth, they would also know all they needed to know about us without getting anywhere near us physically. I would think a low profile would be the way any movement among us would be done. Unseen and undetected.

The following narrative is set back in 1977, when people’s knowledge of these kinds of facts were not common knowledge, and people were not quite so open minded to these possibilities. They were also a lot less solid in their belief of beings from other worlds. This was the domain of the Science Fiction people, the storywriters. To own up to knowing anything even remotely connected to matters extraterrestrial, or the “little green men” as they were sometimes described, was taken as almost madness. It was the time for the men in their little white coats to arrive and take you to a private padded room. This meant that if you did happen to see anything remotely extraterrestrial, well, it was the government testing something. It was a conspiracy theory. It had to be. These things, and these beings just do not exist.

Or do they? Let me take you there.

1977/2006/2012/2015

CHAPTER ONE

I can remember when this new council housing estate was being built. There were two reasons brought up in the planning meetings as to why it was being built at this time, and also why it was built where it was sited. The first was to make up the large shortfall of places for the elderly in sheltered accommodation within the immediate area, and by creating housing designed for the more elderly tenants, giving them all state of the art ultra modern bungalows, designed to help them in their advancing age and the problems that in itself would bring. They would also have the luxury of a resident warder living within their little community, and not miles away, being actually on site to oversee the care and safety of the residents on the whole of this estate. The second reason was the land itself. The land which had been earmarked for this development had been at one time good arable farm land, a large level plot, with a small stream bordering it around the northern edge, the stream then running off at right angles into part of the small wooded area nearby, wending it’s way into the copse, passing under the trees which covered most of the adjacent hillside. This area had at one time been a favourite picnic spot, many years ago, for the same group of people who would now be moving into the houses when they were built. Most of them could remember doing some of their courting up there, bringing them together so to speak, and I suppose, a little ironic perhaps, that they would permanently part from each other from this same spot in the future too. This local beauty spot would still have been there today had not the old coal mine workings underneath subsided, almost overnight some twenty-five years ago, and taken the stream and it’s source, with it. Not long after that happening, the farmer who owned the field had given up trying to grow any crops of any kind in it, saying that he could easily grow mushrooms or toadstools, but very little else. The copse of trees on the bank side of the missing stream which for so long had been the hideaway of the many courting couples in the past, was also starting to thin out and die, their roots slowly decaying and their wood providing a feast for the many insects that lived there, leaving no trace of the real natural beauty that had once been on this spot. I suppose the council chose this site because the small nearby town had grown in size over the years, and now bordered the southern edge of this once fertile farmland. They

also knew they would be able to buy it quite cheaply from the farmer, as it was of no use to him, which they did, and they thought they had bagged a bargain. He, on the other hand, was overheard more than once in the local pub, not long after the sale, bragging that the council must be stupid to pay that sort of money for useless land like that, and he felt really sorry for all those ratepayers whose money he now possessed. He didn’t really. He just wanted to mouth off about his new wealth. Work began on building these new residences, the land being already quite level, the mini estate was marked out, and then the foundations were laid. The architect who had designed these new dwellings had done a really good job, making the walls and windows fully insulated; so as to keep the heating bills down, and in each house every single amenity was installed to assist both the elderly and infirm. In some, a special bath with a lifting mechanism had been installed so that the residents could raise or lower themselves into or out of it without the need of assistance by the spouse, which really went a long way in pleasing the residents as they could keep their independence. Lower sinks were fitted as well as standard ones, so either a wheelchair user, or an able bodied could use the bungalow without having to alter it again. For 1977, this was forward thinking. The electric sockets were all fitted around the walls at wheelchair height instead of low down to the floor. The council workers would turn up each spring, and every fortnight after that, till autumn, with their little sit-on mowers, and cut the grass which surrounded the pathways to the bungalows, the grass being installed on plots where the resident was either too old or infirm to work the land as a garden. Where the more active ones lived, they were making good use of their plots with any flower and vegetable patches they could create to brighten up their place a little, and eat fresh vegetables too. Make it more homely, so to speak. The residents who were physically able to work a garden still had problems though, as very little of what was planted would grow, exactly as the farmer himself had said, and more often than not, large pieces of turf had to be replaced regularly by the council to the grassed landscaped areas, to repair the dark brown areas of grass, dying from as yet an unknown cause. They thought at first it was perhaps a chemical contamination, but on having the soil analysed, the sample itself was found to be quite the opposite, rich in humus and nutrients. An ideal growing medium. It was one of these little puzzles that were going to be difficult to solve. No one had any answers. Not yet away. The local Electricity Board people were seen around the estate quite a lot too, testing this and that, looking at the meters, shaking their heads and walking away. I found out later they were checking all of the houses for meter rigging. They had found that from the billing that these pensioners were using very little electricity, and had to check that there was no fiddling going on here. Have they never heard of thrift? Do you know a pensioner who throws money away on waste? We were into the second winter of the existence of the estate when the final clue came to light, and it was a most unusual phenomenon. All of the houses, including that of the resident warden, remained at a constant temperature of about seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, even in the coldest of winters. Some of the residents had their outer doors open, even on frosty days if they were using their cookers, as the temperature inside became uncomfortable.

The council tried to explain that this was because of the superior design and build of the houses, which we all knew was a load of balderdash. Their superior design didn’t shovel away any snow that fell on the paths and lawns in the winter months, and when the snow did fall, it was all gone within an hour. They never had to salt and grit any the roads or pathways for the elderly in freezing weather. The ice and snow just went. The council assumed it was the active residents clearing it, and the residents thought it was the council work crews. No one believed in fairies. That’s where I came into the puzzle. My job was to sort out who did what, and what did it cost, and who paid. Purely as a consultant of course. I started by having a look at the general layout of the estate, and there were no clues there, so I tackled the residents, who were extremely defensive of their cheap heating, which meant I drew a blank there too. It was as I was leaving the Warden’s house, and turning to walk back through the estate to my car that it happened. I found the answer, or should I say, an answer. On the ground, just out of sight of the path was a large piece of wood, possibly put there by either a council worker, or maybe a vandal. That fact didn’t matter; it’s what happened that is relevant. As I turned to look up along the side of one of the bungalows, I failed to see this tree trunk size piece of wood, and tripped over it, coming down heavily onto the grass at the side of the path. In this grass was what appeared to be a small pool of water, and my hand went into the pool, and up to the wrist. It was small, but deep. Something else too though. It was warm. The stone at the bottom of this little pool was warm. The dirt all the way up my sleeve didn’t matter any more, as I thought I had got one answer as to why things didn’t grow, and why the pensioners didn’t use much electricity to heat the house. The whole rock bed, under the houses was being heated somehow, the foundations for the houses were actually resting on this bedrock. The gardens wouldn’t grow because the plants had no water at the roots, plenty at the surface, but evaporating before doing any good. Snow could lie, but only for a short while, till the melted water would hit the bedrock, the heat then turning the water into a warm steam, which would melt the snow from below. Unseen. As to the source of this heat, this took some time to work out. We looked at many possibilities, and after a great deal of research, there could be only one explanation we could agree on as a possible cause. The old mine working, unseen and unused for almost a hundred years, had seams that would run under the site of the new estate, and it was possible they must be burning in a sort of underground inferno. Once again, this also fell into my scope and field of work in Health and Safety, so, I had to gather up my team, do some map research at the library, and work out where to go from here. This could be tricky as well as dangerous, for all concerned.

CHAPTER TWO

I made my preliminary report of my findings to the local council meeting, and stated my theory about the possibility that these underground workings could be on fire, and would at some time in

the future, having destroyed any supports that had remained, cause the land to subside again, and this could become a major hazard to all of the people living in the area. My report was met with what seemed like almost total disinterest, though they did ask me to carry on my investigations, just in case, and as long as it didn’t cost them too much. They just didn’t want to know. I did manage to get an assurance that if we needed anything, and they could help, we only had to ask. They suggested that the old stream could now be a hot spring, and this was where the heat was coming from, and that it would do the residents no harm, and of course, didn’t cost them anything. I have to admit that by the end of the meeting, my patience was almost at an end, which is why, in a parting shot; I turned to the council treasurer and suggested that since the heat is coming from somewhere on council land, maybe the council should charge for it!! I got the satisfaction of seeing their faces change as I walked out of the door in disgust. The first place to visit as part of my research, was the local library, my idea being to study the plans of these old mine workings which I had been informed more or less ran underneath the whole of the town and surrounding area like a rabbit warren, although the workings themselves were being mined at different times in the history of the town, and at different seam levels. This meant that checking the plans was essential to find out the possible location, or actual position, of this visualised fire. I met up with my team captain at the library, a man by the name of Bob Taylor, a mature person in not just his age and knowledge, but in his weather-beaten features too. He would be important to this investigation as he had qualifications in underground work, having served as an NCB pit deputy earlier in his working life, before going into underground rescue work, and then to Health and Safety. We poured over as many of the plans that were available to us, bearing in mind that some of the earlier ones were not entirely accurate, and were not necessarily drawn to any scale either, and started looking for any of the workings that may have ran anywhere near the bedrock where the new estate now stood. There were none. Nothing shown on any of these maps went anywhere near to the estate site, at any seam level. All of the maps however bore the same indications as to why there were no workings there. The miners had hit what they had called Lodestone, which is a naturally occurring metal bearing ore, the iron pyrites of it’s day, and they could not mine through it, not back in those days with the equipment they had available, in fact it would be very difficult to mine today. This Lodestone deposit, when we over layered our copies of the many maps we had, it seemed to almost totally surround the workings, in the rough shape of a horseshoe, which was why the mine was finally abandoned in it’s later life. I told Bob my theory of the fire in the workings, and he laughed. Out loud, in a library. He reminded me about the stream, and the subsidence, over twenty-five years ago now, and the stream would still be pouring into the seams and filling up all of those workings for the whole of that period. He also reminded me of how deep the mines actually were, and that if there had been a fire in any or all of the seams, they were way too far under the ground to have that kind of effect on the surface. He had, single handedly, blown all of my theories out of the frame. Time to think it out again. Returning to these old, opened maps, I looked again, this time for anything that could give any clue to us of anything at all out of the ordinary. The earlier maps, drawn on old parchment with pigment ink, were faded, but still legible. There was nothing there. Even some of the later ones

gave no indication as to what we should be looking for. The only small anomaly we found was an inclusion added to one of the maps some time after it had been drawn, as the inks were different. The addendum looked like some kind of extension, and only appeared on one of the more recent maps. It featured what looked like a small shaft climbing a few metres upwards and then a new roadway branching out from it at right angles to the shaft, as if a new seam of coal was going to be opened. This new roadway stopped suddenly after a couple of hundred meters, in the middle of nowhere, at this familiar dotted lodestone line. It went nowhere, and as this appeared to have been a later addition to one of the general maps, it flagged up as something of interest. The miners knew that the Lodestone would be within the 200 metres or so of this shaft, so, what was the point of developing it? It wasn’t ventilation. It could have been the more modern miners trying to see if this lodestone could be breached. Other than that, there was nothing to be gleaned from studying the rest of it. We took copies of the maps we needed, just in case. In my mind, another plan was formulating. We would have to enter the old workings, and physically see this tunnel for ourselves, and then draw our conclusions from that. The legalities, and the formalities for this investigation would be very, very difficult to sort out, and there would be an awful lot to consider before even an entry could be made. Where was there an entrance? There were no shafts anymore. They had been filled in for safety a long time ago. Time to get my team together, and burn a little midnight oil, and eat a few takeaways. This should be quite interesting if we ever work out an answer.

CHAPTER THREE

Red tape, and more red tape. Whoever designed the concept of red tape should have put a patent on it. They would have made a fortune, just from the amount we now had to wade our way through. It started with the application to enter the old workings which we submitted to the local authority, and suddenly, it appeared that there was numerous other permits from numerous other bodies that had to be applied for, and paid for of course. While this mountain of official paperwork was being processed, we set ourselves the task of working out some of the practicalities that would be required. First of all, we had to be able to get into the actual mine itself, and as the original shafts had been filled in a long time ago to facilitate a road being built over it, albeit a minor one. I don’t think the highways people would take too kindly to us digging up their road, unless we were utility people. They can get away with it every time. The fact that there had only been one shaft for this mine did give us another idea of what to look for. Every working mine needs two or more entrances or exits so that, in the event of an accident, and one of the means of egress became blocked, the workforce could leave by the other. This meant other entrances or exits somewhere. Things were getting interesting. Pouring over the plans in the library yet again, though this time knowing a little more of what we were looking for, we found a drift roadway coming up from the workings and breaking surface in a small manmade valley some two miles from the housing estate. The old coal tubs were

hauled to the surface up this inclined drift when full, unloaded, and sent back down. There must have been some sort of processing plant at this entrance at one time. The librarian was quick to point out that this little valley had been used as a rubbish landfill within the last fifteen years, and if the mine entrance still existed, it would have been boarded up before the landfill rubbish was deposited against it, and the whole area would most likely by now be completely overgrown. The whole topography of the landscape will have completely changed, so it would be extremely difficult to identify even the smallest of landmarks or features shown on these maps. What the librarian didn’t know was that we were going to identify the largest features first, and triangulate from there. Not easy, but not impossible. In the three months that followed, while waiting of the numerous permits to be issued, we organised our team, bringing together experts in underground workings, and the various safety measures we would have to undertake. We discussed anything and everything we could with the information we had, and formulated a plan, assuming that we would eventually have the permits, and that by then had found the entrance to the Valley Drift, somewhere in the valley. The plan was to enter the mine by the Valley Drift, make our way down to one of the main roadways of the mine, assuming it wasn’t under water, or the roof hadn’t collapsed down. Remember, it was subsidence that caused the stream to vanish in the first place. We would then, if all went well, make our way to this short shaft, and hopefully find some sort of a ladder, climb up to this unusual tunnel and take a look for ourselves. We expected that this could take a long time, as we would have to go very slowly, taking extreme care all of the way. We even worked out roughly how many little camps we would need on the way, and what to leave at each of these, for the return. The permits eventually arrived, though with the many little clauses that were included, it seemed, as we read and interpreted them, as though it was not going to be worth all of the effort. An example of one of these clauses was, and this is genuine, if in the event that we were to find mineral wealth, which I assume to be something like gold, silver, or something similar, it belongs to the issuer of the permit, and we would receive only the finder’s fee. Gold and coal never occur in the same seams, and silver would be too thin since silver seams rise vertically, not horizontally. The first real problem we had to solve, and the librarian had been correct in his assumption about the overgrown land, was to locate the Valley Drift entrance. It took almost the whole week for our team to eventually locate a small hole in the side of the hill, a really difficult find, made easier only because of moss growing around it, and a minute trickle of water appearing to be coming out from it. We slowly removed most of the landslip mud from around the hole, and found that the water was the run-off from above, channelled down through the mud till it reached the hole, and then dripped down to the bottom. This was a good sign. It meant that the drift itself may not be full of water as first expected, the water we had seen was not coming out of the drift, but from the bank above. The entrance hole was only about shoulder width at this point, possibly due to calcification from the water running down from above, making something like circular stalactites. This meant we could only crawl into it, and not walk in. Just inside the hole, the floor dropped away steeply, opening up into a large roadway, easily about seven feet high, and about twenty feet wide to start. This hole was what was left of the old entrance of the drift but was not at the floor level.

We decided to ship our gear into the area just inside the drift entrance, and use it as a base camp, saving the long treks to the Land Rovers every time we needed to collect anything. We were about ready, and the permits were about to start. We all felt a little excited. Into the unknown, but not totally unknown, if you know what I mean.

CHAPTER FOUR

Today was our first official day of investigation. We kitted ourselves up, then ran through the signals we were to use in communication, both visual and audible, beeping little horns, the sound of which would travel much further than a voice in the muted silence of the mine, and the flashing lights of various colours as warnings. Bob Taylor was to lead the party, all of us being roped together like mountain climbers, for safety, with Bob on a long lead line, checking well ahead, and then signalling the all clear to the rest of us. He has amazing body strength too, should he hit any little problems on the way. On our belts, we all carried an array of equipment, carbon monoxide detectors, methane sensors, and other naughty gas scent monitors. To think, the old miners had canaries, we have this lot. Canaries may have looked and sang better, but our equipment was a lot more sensitive. We started out, down the drift, expecting all manner of problems to be waiting around the next corner. There was neither of either. No problems, and no corners. The drift went in a straight line, tilting downwards at a steady angle, the track way sleepers still in their position, the rails well rusted, and flaking, but still there. The sides of the drift were of solid stone, and I wondered how many men had worked really hard to hew out this drift passage. A monument to the old miners. This must have taken them a long time to do. The sides of the passageway, though not perfectly even, were still quite smooth. I could imagine the ponies pulling the old mine cars full of coal up the incline of the drift. We were making very good progress. We had by now arrived at the first branch, which would lead us to the main trunk roadway of the old mine, and we were well ahead on time from the plan. From this point, Bob Taylor would go on ahead, testing and checking, and signal back when it was safe to proceed. This was, to us, our most vulnerable part of the mine. It seemed as though we had made really good progress along these roadways, and had arrived at the main trunk road well ahead of the time we had originally estimated. Time for a break, and a sandwich or two, then a discussion of what had gone so far. We had a full lunch instead, and it was very short discussion. There had not been any of the obstacles we had been prepared for. The expected flooding, the presence of any gas, and any collapsing of the roof of the workings had not transpired, While we rested, Bob Taylor went on ahead, scouting the next section of this mine area, then returned with some strange news. He had gone ahead, and found a sump hole, a place where the mine water would be channelled to and collected, ready to be pumped out to the surface. The sump was totally empty. Bone-dry in fact. Where was the stream water? According to the old maps, and the interpretation of events, the place where we were now sitting eating lunch should be under at least six feet of water. Things didn’t seem to add up here at all.

The walls were bone dry, the floors were covered in fine dust, inches thick, and it wasn’t heat that had dried them, as it was only a cool forty-two degrees Fahrenheit in the chambers. Using the old plans as reference, in theory the stream should have fallen through from the levels above, and flooded the roadway we were now in, but it hadn’t. Why? This was yet another topic of conversation while we ate our sandwiches. Bob Taylor decided to go and see what else he could find out, so he, with a couple of others, set out on a fact-finding mission. The rest of us sat and analysed at our progress so far. We were well ahead of our planned position, mainly due to the clear and safe roadways, which had made our progress so much easier and quicker. We were also quite pleased with our progress so far. That is, till Bob Taylor and the crew arrived back. He looked puzzled, and yet pleased. He started by explaining that he and the crew went looking for this stream, or any dampness betraying it’s whereabouts, in case it was behind a wall and could burst through at any time. They didn’t find it. They then went looking for the subsidence that caused the stream to disappear in the first place. They didn’t find that either. Every one of those wooden roof supports that were put in all those years ago, by those old miners, were almost all still in place, and some of them must be over 200 years old. The whole place was intact, as it had been for some 200 years. There had been no ground movement, either up or down, no sideways motion, no roof collapse, no floor heave, just, well, nothing. It was as if the whole place was being held in a giant retaining vice. Solid as a rock now took on a new meaning. We moved on, along the trunk roads, with greater speed now, feeling a lot more confident about the areas in which we were moving. In what seemed like no time at all, we arrived at the mystery shaft. We had reached our first goal.

CHAPTER FIVE

We all gathered together at the base of this shaft, the one we had so cleverly isolated from the rest on the maps while in the library. We all had had visions of what it would look like, how big it would be, and how high it went. In reality, it was dark, it was normal, it was exactly what it should be, a shaft. The one redeeming feature that lifted our spirits was there was a ladder attached to one of the walls, and, on close inspection, it seemed to be in good condition with no visible sign of rust or corrosion. Bob Taylor set out to climb up; checking that all of the fixings were securely attached to the walls, and slowly disappeared up the ladder into the roof space. The security rope tied to him only went a few more feet before it stopped playing out, and Bob was calling us to climb up, one at a time. He was in this mystery tunnel that went to nowhere, or came from nowhere depending on which direction you were travelling, I suppose. I scrambled up the ladder and into this really unusual tunnel. I say unusual because, unlike most of the others we’d seen or been in, this one was a perfect square, and really smooth sided too,

almost polished, the height and width being an accurate square of about ten feet or so, and it carried on into the darkness in a perfectly straight line too. A machine, though not a circular tunnelling machine, had cut this. Normally, a tunnelling machine grinds out a circle, and it leaves scoring and scraping marks on the walls. This was a square, the sides almost like a mirror it was so smooth. In honour of the first member of the team to enter this tunnel, I named it Taylor’s Tunnel, a gesture that almost brought a smile to Bob Taylor’s face. Name a ship after him, he said, no problem, but no, what did we do? We used his name for a bloody hole in the ground! As the whole team were by now up and in Taylor’s Tunnel, we turned and followed it to whatever lay at the other end. When we got there, which was only a couple of hundred metres; we found, well, nothing. The roadway came to an abrupt end with a solid wall of metallic looking smooth, unmarked, kind of stopper. There is no other way to describe it. The roadway appeared to have been completely sealed off at some time in the past, though the maps we had made no reference to any sealing or plugging having been done at any time, and this type of seal would usually be used for ventilation purposes, so would have been noted. There was only this feint dotted line on the map, and the word LODE written on it. Now I could understand. Lode was an Olde English word for iron, and the old miners must have come across this wall while mining, and would have found it to be impossible for them to cut through. According to the map, this wall was here in 1855, and possibly before, since it was marked, though not in detail, on even earlier maps. Later mining may have tried to pass this wall, but they didn’t succeed either. I could now see why. The wall in front of us was not iron ore, but a highly refined metal, like aluminium or stainless steel, and when we had wiped off the coating of dust and grime left over time, it too polished to a high shine, reflecting our cap lights with a sort of light blue colour. Bob took out his hand axe and tapped it to see if the metal would ring. He was hitting quite hard, but no ringing, only a dull thud. This wall was thick, and extremely hard, as Bob’s axe didn’t even make a scratch on the metal. There were so many questions here that needed answers, and some answers that hadn’t had a question to put to them yet. We needed to sit down, in the warm light of our houses, or preferably the pub, or wherever, but not here, and discuss the many, many possibilities, and to plan out our next step. I have to admit, I was very curious as to why that wall was there, as it seemed so out of place, so modern in something akin to a museum. Every piece of equipment we had passed on the way in belonged to the time frame of, and the age of, the mine. This bit didn’t fit. The tunnel still had one more secret to reveal to us that day, and as we made our way out to the iron ladder ready to descend the short shaft leading down to the workings, I accidentally discovered it. We had been carrying all of our gear with us, on our backs in rucksacks, so as to be ready for whatever we encountered on our travels. For speed we decided that some of the team should go down the shaft ladder to the bottom, and then we would merely tie on and then lower all of the bags down on a rope to them, saving us time. As we made ready the bags for lowering, and the team below readied themselves to receive the bags, I wandered to the edge of the tunnel itself, and there discovered it’s hidden secret. The outer edges of the rock, where the tunnel met the shaft

were torn and uneven, unlike the walls we had just walked through, and bent out into the shaft itself. The uncut kerfs from the edges also jutted slightly out into the shaft. The realisation hit me hard, as did the implications. Taylors Tunnel had not been driven from this shaft along to the metal wall, but from the metal wall, back THIS WAY!!

CHAPTER SIX

The pub won. That’s where we all ended up. Sitting around a large table in the back room, out of earshot of the other patrons. The drink came in handy too. Taylor’s Tunnel was made by something; it was not a natural occurrence, which we had established. We had all seen it, we had all agreed. That was a fact. What we didn’t know was why it was there, what was its actual point of origin, and how it was possible to cut it in a perfect square. For the first time in this investigation, answers were not readily available. When we had surfaced from the Valley Drift earlier in the day, there had been a couple of local reporters hovering about, just in case there was a story to be had. As the leader of the current investigation, I told them that the roadways we had tried were impassable, and that we would try another route, using different roadways tomorrow. This would ensure that they would not bother us later when we met up later in the pub. We needed to know more about Taylor’s Tunnel before the press got involved, just in case it was a real major discovery, and we had no answers. That is why we all agreed to give ourselves time to think, and a good strong drink, though not necessarily in that order, in the back room of the Swan at seven tonight. We sat there, like the legendary wise monkeys, silent, just looking at each other. The only spoken word was to order the rounds of drinks. Bob started to explain what he made of the day, and how he interpreted it. To him, that blanked end of the tunnel was too perfect, too smooth. No-one spoke, everyone just nodded. We went back to square one of the investigation to see if we had missed something. The heat on the estate, we still had no answer. The supposed subsidence, which we now know from our visit, didn’t happen as all, as all of the roadways were still intact. The disappearance of the stream was still a mystery also, as once again as all of the roadways were dry, and finally, the tunnel, which appears to have been driven backwards into the workings. We looked again at the copies of the various maps, over and over, trying to find any mine workings in any timescale beyond where Taylor’s tunnel had been sealed. There were none. Not at any seam level within the mine. There were only these faded dotted lines with the word “lode” scrawled along it. I opened the map fully for a better overall view, and joined the other sections to it to form a much larger map, to see if there was some kind of pattern, trying to use the maps like a three dimensional plan. Almost straight away, having stripped back the view of the unneeded workings, we found something of interest.

This lodestone mark appeared to be in the shape of a horseshoe, not only around the old mine but the surrounding hills too, for about three to over six miles or so. It was common knowledge that the lodestone limit was the reason for the mine closing. The miners couldn’t mine through it. Reason, it was too hard! We spent the rest of the evening almost in silence, each to their own thoughts, and, at closing time, returned to our camp out at the Valley Drift, as we had all agreed that the way forward was to take another look at Taylor’s Tunnel, bright and early tomorrow. Sleep came and went all through the night, as it does when you are camping out, and at dawn I was the only one still awake. I had tossed and turned, trying to work out the many implications of the previous day, but decided to wait and see the results of the second visit, in the cold light of day, so to speak. I sat outside my tent, watching the shafts of sunlight from the rising sun illuminate the mouth of the Valley Drift. It seemed bigger somehow, more inviting. As the team awoke, we had a cooked breakfast, since we knew its all packed food from now on; I went over the basic plan for the day with Bob. He seemed quite happy with what we needed to see and do to get there a lot quicker than yesterday, because we now knew the condition of the roadways. The general mood of us all was, to get in as quickly as we could, and spend as much time as possible getting the answers we wanted. We also decided that we could cut down on the amount of gear we were carrying, as we would not need most of it, and fill up the empty space in the bags with things like batteries, food, and more essential longer stay stuff. By the time we were kitted up and ready to go, the sun had not climbed much higher in the sky than it was when I had got up. We were all quite keen to put this investigation to bed, so to speak, and return to our normal environment stuff. The curiosity was driving us all mad though.

CHAPTER SEVEN

As we entered the Valley Drift once again, and started to make our way down to the main roadways below, I remember thinking that the only thing missing was the song from Snow White, though I don’t think we could have sang “Heigh Ho” very well anyway. We still had to carry a lot of our safety equipment, as gas, or falling roofs do not know when to occur, they just do, whether we were there or not. We didn’t break into a sprint either, or anything silly like that; we just made very good steady progress. Our sandwich lunch was eaten at the bottom of the shaft to Taylor’s Tunnel, and it was an early lunch too, as it was long before midday. Bob started up the ladder, with me behind, and the rest of the crew following, one by one behind us. The sight that greeted me was exactly the same as yesterday only this time, it was what it was. A square tunnel with shiny sides. That’s all. As one of the last of the team climbed the ladder, because of the bulk of his backpack, he had to go slightly to his left in order to swing himself up into Taylor’s Tunnel, so he had to steady himself by putting his hand down on the floor of the tunnel entrance for balance while he started the swing. He felt a sharp pain in the palm of his hand. On the floor, under his hand, buried by layers of dust, was what appeared to be a jaggered lump of metal, the raised arrowhead shaped sections being sharp enough to hurt him when his hand pressed down on it. It looked like a crude letter “T”, with lots of raised and sharp bits, as this chap described it.

As he finally got his feet set inside Taylor’s Tunnel, he took a vicious kick at this lump of scrap metal, which skidded along the floor of the tunnel, and, as a sort of revenge for the pain it had caused him in his hand, he walking up to where it now lay, he kicked it again. This time, it went airborne, and stopped only when it hit the blank wall ahead of them, in the section that both Bob and I were now looking at. It hit the wall, and STUCK. After a moment or two, and after reminding this team member about safety and bad tempers don’t mix, I removed this metal artefact from the wall, had a quick look at it, and put it back. It stuck again. It didn’t appear to be magnetic, or even electronic, it had been cast in some very light metal alloy in the shape of the letter “T”, that’s about it. Nothing spectacular The fact that it was not magnetic, and extremely lightweight, like very light aluminium in its appearance and constitution, and the fact it sticking to a non-magnetic wall, also seeming to be of this aluminium kind of makeup. This was something different. I only wish I knew exactly how different. I turned to speak to Bob at the same time as he moved over to join me to get a better look at this object, and in this confined space we physically collided. I hate to say this in disrespect, but Bob is considerably rounder and heavier than I am, so I sort of bounced off him. He’s going to hate me for saying that. I bounced against the blank wall, and slid down to the floor, catching my arm on this object stuck to the wall on my way down, rotating it to more or less an upside down position from where it had been. We looked at each other waiting to see if something was going to happen. Something definitely happened. It most certainly did! Silently, a centre square section of the wall moved forward towards the mouth of the tunnel, and we were suddenly flooded in light, and quite a bit of heat too. As the wall came forward, a platform unfolded down behind it, and some steps unfolding at 90 degrees on either side of the platform, all of this structure unfolding from within. It came to a halt, silently, and we could see the walkway disappearing into the gap in this metallic structure, the two steps completely unfolded either side of the centre platform which had moved forward to enable us, or whoever, to enter. We were a little shocked, in fact a lot shocked at this. Our first thoughts were of being caught trying to break in to some secret government institution, and after getting caught, being charged with treason, or something like that. I gripped this T piece again, turning it into the original upright again, and this door silently closed, with not so much as a crack showing where it had come from. The wall was totally whole and polished again, as it had been before. This was something different. This was not what we expected. This was fascinating. This could also be very dangerous. I inverted the metal piece again, obviously now knowing that this must be some sort of key, and the wall slid forwards towards us again, silently. No alarm bells, no sirens, nothing but silence and lots of light flooding out from within. We stood for a short while, basically a little apprehensive, taking this all in, In front of us was a wall which became a door by sliding forward, with steps that unfolded down the sides as it went. It was well lit, well heated, and well, inviting. The platform at the top of these steps disappeared into the structure. I had to look, I had to. Walking up the two steps on the right hand side of the platform while the others watched, I looked to my right, along this brightly lit corridor, which now lay in front of me. I knew this was a

bit of a risk. The platform seemed to lead to a long corridor, which went on inside this structure for quite a distance, bending slowly around to the right. Only a section before me was lit up from above, and I could only see up to the point where it was too dark. This had to be some sort of entrance. To what, or where, I didn’t know. Not yet anyway. I made my decision there and then though. We had come too far in this investigation, and we needed to get some answers, and I felt those answers were along this corridor. We all entered.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Once inside this very brightly lit corridor, we could feel the heat on our faces, and see the enormous length of the corridor itself fading into the darkness ahead. It was about the same height as Taylor’s Tunnel, but a lot wider. It was lit from above by diffused lighting of a sort of blue white colour, the light itself diffusing throughout the whole of the upper half of the corridor. Circular in shape, the walkway I now stood on was flat and level, the bottom of the circular passage disappearing under the walkway. All around was silence. This is when the doubts started to appear. Had we tripped some silent alarm, and the CIA/KGB or MI5 would come rushing along the corridors, guns drawn, shouting for us to lie face down on the floor. Or maybe this was a top-secret science station, working on major top-secret projects. Either way, we could fall foul of the security. As a sort of a test, we decided to sit down on the floor, and wait for them to come to us, after all, if we appeared passive, and didn’t try to see or do anything that would break any rules, we may stand a better chance of getting out. They didn’t come. Almost an hour passed. No one came. We decided, as a group, that we should move slowly along the corridors, so that if the security cameras were working, they could see us. Still no one came. Just inside the doorway, more or less behind us, a small panel in the wall was flashing red, so I carefully removed this “T” key from the outside, and placed it on the flashing panel inside, turning it the opposite way. The door closed. Just to make sure, I inverted it again, and the door opened. At least we were not trapped. This was not rocket science. These doors were meant to be operated. The door itself, from the outside, when closed, felt cold to the touch, even though inside here was quite warm. Not warm enough to heat the estate, which was still a good two miles away above us, but hot enough to bring us all out in a sweat. Whether that was with the actual heat, or fear, I don’t know. It certainly was not hot enough to keep the old mine dry. This door would have had to remain open constantly, and it still would not have been enough. We spent our time while waiting for the appearance of the security, which didn’t come, examining this T shaped key. It appeared to have been made from brass, yet was incredibly light in weight, and quite decorative. On it’s face side, the designs, taken at first to be arrowheads, so painful to our young team member at the tunnel entrance, were designs which were a lot more intricate than we first thought. Some of the designs were known to have been used by mankind back in pre-history to early Stone Age, though the real origin or meanings were never discovered. They appeared on lots of articles and monoliths, even cave paintings but were never taken as anything other than tribal markings. We now knew, here in this place, that this was not so.

These markings actually meant something. Some symbolic meaning lost to us over time. Up to now, we don’t know what they are saying, but that will have to wait till another time to decipher, as we have enough for us to be going on with. The key itself looked brand new, even though we knew it wasn’t. As Bob mentioned many times, this lack of age of just about everything seemed to be a connection on this investigation. Nothing was getting any older, nothing deteriorating or moving. As this chamber and the walkway were very well lit, we were able to turn off our cap lamps to conserve the batteries. We could also leave a lot of our safety gear here too, so, we did. My shoulders said thank you many times for that. Taking this key with us, in case we needed it, we very slowly advanced along this corridor, our torches at the ready as we left the illuminated section. As we approached, another section would light up, and the first would go out. This was power conservation before power conservation was ever thought of. The first barrier we met, a pair of doors, slid silently into recesses in the walls as we approached, as did the second, the sets of doors being some two hundred metres apart, and all of which opened automatically as we approached, silently sliding into their cavities made for them in the sidewalls. The passageway after the second set of automatic doors now became a sort of large corridor, with lots of doors leading off either side from it, some of which had the red key plate seen earlier at the outer doorway. I tested the T key on a couple, as we had on a hunch it might unlock doors. Yes, it worked, the doors opened, to reveal some very large storerooms. The rooms were still full of stores too, but trying to read the labels on the huge boxes and crates, or the very large tanks, was a total impossibility. It resembled a Chinese or Japanese symbolic style of writing. Numerous huge drums of whatever the label said were stacked right to the ceiling, and there were rows and rows of these. This place was massive. This one storeroom was bigger than an aircraft hanger, and full right from floor to ceiling, with, well, stuff. What stuff, I don’t know. You tell me. We could not understand the labels. The thoughts of the Russian KGB came back into my mind, and the possibility that we would be captured, and never heard of in our world again. We left this storeroom, locking it with this “key”, and moved on. Bob Taylor was muttering about Mr Spock, Mr Sulu, and all the Star Trek people, and I asked him why “Scottie” hadn’t beamed him up yet. This broke the tension, and we all laughed, for the first time since finding the blank wall in Taylor’s Tunnel.

CHAPTER NINE

After we’d travelled along a number of these corridors, and examined a couple of the storerooms along the way for a while, we stopped and had a break, complete with flasks and sandwiches. One of the team suggested that we shouldn’t drink too much as it would be almost impossible to find a toilet if we needed one. Still no security staff appearing, or a challenge, of any kind. We let ourselves relax a little, and look in more detail at what we could learn from what we could see.

This place used electricity, though there were no wires or switches visible and, as we left a section of the corridors behind us, the lights in that section would go out, so we all assumed that the lights were coming on in the next section ahead of us just before we got there. We were almost praying that the whole place was automatic. It was the final door we came to that made us think. This one had a porthole type of window in the central top part of it, and it appeared to us that it was dark on the other side, though not totally black. It’s when it slid back silently we got a shock. This, we had never expected, or could never have even dreamed of. The walkway on the other side of this door carried on out into nowhere, or so it felt. The treads we had been walking on were now replaced with a mesh type of metal floor which extending forward from the door position for about eight feet or so, to a handrail, and then nothing. The light there was appeared to be coming from below this gantry, so when we stood on the platform we could look down into what we saw as an enormous cavern, lit from powerful focussed spotlights high above in the dark, domed massive ceiling, looking almost like stars, making the things below appear to be floodlit, similar to how a billiard table would be lit from a canopy, shining down on what lay below. We stared, in total disbelief at what we saw. Below us was what could only be described as a small town or city! Lots of little houses, lots of little roads, and lots of disbelief from all of us. Who on earth would put something like this down here? Was this some sort of experimental station, for quarantine or segregation purposes, or something like the use of a controlled environment to bring up super babies? This list was endless, as were all of the questions this threw up to us. Looking round, we saw the steps that would take us down what looked like a black cliff face, and as we made our way down, the steps stopping and turning on a small landing at the next level. There were many levels. If there was a lift, we never found it. We were this far, why stop now? Time to start and get some answers to the multitude of questions, and right now.

CHAPTER TEN

I think it was more the excitement than the actual wanting to get to the bottom of the steps as soon as we could that made us really get a move on. In no time at all, we were on one of the pathways that crisscrossed the land in front of this city like structure. The grass, which neatly bordered the paths, was in fact artificial, as were all of the small trees in the small park we passed through on the way in. They were copies, and extremely good ones too. It was about then we all began to notice the absence of both wind, and sound. All we could hear was our own footsteps, sounding very dull on the roads, without the expected echo in somewhere as huge as this. We even reverted to almost

whispering to each other. The fountains in the various park squares were working, made nowhere near as much noise as they should either. We were in this huge metropolis of what looked like concrete and greenery, without a single thing moving, or making much of a sound. This was a near perfect copy of life in a modest town or city above ground, though without the noise, or the pollution. On looking more closely at the fountains, they were showering out not water, but something more like water glass. The pavements were of metallic origin, but made to look like paving stones. In the larger central area, neon signs advertised some product to anyone who could read and understand the language glyphs. The windows were not glass or Perspex, or any other plastic, or transparent substance we had seen before. It was transparent enough though. This place had been designed as a futuristic sort of city, where the plant life had to be false otherwise water vapour would have caused major problems within this enclosed environment, and would also need irrigation and sunlight too. No, this place was a COPY of a large town; though we didn’t know which town it was a copy of. We paused at one of the dwellings, a sort of bungalow, and found the rooms to be similar in layout to any style we had seen almost anywhere in the world, living rooms with the posh settees and chairs, dining room with table and chairs, and even a very well equipped modern kitchen. Thick carpeting covered the floor, and luxury was evident in all of the fittings too. The house next door was similar, though with slight changes to the décor, it was a luxury pad for a larger family. One of our party, one of the younger ones called Eddie, was having a look at the gadgets in the kitchen, opened the waste disposal, and dropped in an apple core from the apple he had just eaten. What happened was different. The core disappeared, completely, before his eyes. No whirring, no grinding, just a small bluish flash, and gone. An amazing disappearing act. I tried with something a little harder than a core of an apple. I used a coin. The same thing happened when it just vanished. I looked under the machine. No waste pipe, no bag, and no drain. Curious. We turned our attention to some of the other gadgets about the place, for pure research of course, and nothing to do with grown men playing with toys. I examined the handset of what looked like a telephone, but without either an earpiece, or a mouthpiece, I found more of those symbols underneath on a keypad. Popping into next door, I memorised the symbols on that handset, returned to the original house, picked up that handset, and pressed the keys for those symbols. The whole wall in front of me suddenly became a screen, and I was looking at Bob Taylor’s back, as he talked to the other team members I had just left next door. I must have been just as visible, and audible to them, judging by the colour of Bob’s face when he turned around, and saw me on the whole wall in front of him. This, together with other things we felt we could operate safely we tried out, proved to us that this was a city of the future, but we knew it had a long past. We managed to find out a few things about this place, but sometimes we had to let some of the things ride, as trial and error could have been dangerous. I thought that if this was a copy city, then there should be a copy library, where we could maybe glean some additional information. The team agreed with my reasoning, and, as libraries tend to be in the centre of a town of city, that’s where we headed, more into the centre. We passed lots of town houses, bungalows, shops, but nothing that even resembled offices or workplaces, pausing only long enough to record where we were, so we would be able to reverse our way back out if we hit any problems. We also noticed the lack of transport, even though the streets were wide enough, there were no parked vehicles anywhere, of any description. We had to

use our legs to get about, but it meant we could take our time to check out things if we were unsure. In a short while, we were at our destination. The place where we humans store our knowledge. The books, the charts, the records, just about everything. The humble library. To be on the safe side, we checked out all of the rooms or annexes when we first entered, and then started with the inspection, room by room, the first of which having maps on the walls, some of the world, and others in a much larger scale, of our local area, all of them having these strange white lines drawn across them, and all of these lines converging on roughly where we all now were. From there we were able to look at the topography of the land, as there were no houses on these maps, or roads, cart tracks, anything. The stream was the only landmark, and was shown as still there, with the wood on the side of the hill a lot larger than it is now, the contours showing the hill with the copse to be much higher than it is today too. This map must be quite old. The stream ran into the Valley Drift, and probably cut it out or the rock over the millennia by erosion, and then turned, the course now running below where the new estate stood. This helped us understand more, but still didn’t give any answers. Moving into the next room, which seemed to resemble a classroom, the seats arranged in orderly rows, each having it’s own little monitor screen built into the desk, with headphones placed on the arms of each of the seats. This place was almost regimental in its perfection, which set off our alarms in our heads that we may be in some top-secret military establishment. In each desk was a small box, with a small slot in the front of it, where a sort of videocassette would go in, but this slot was way too slim for a video. The controls, like play, and fast forward were the same as I had seen on any cassette machine, so I pressed the eject button. A small silver coloured disc came out of the slot above. Much thinner than a videocassette, and definitely not a floppy disk used in computers, and not even a DVD. I pushed it back in. It started to run. Was this one of Captain Kirk’s Data Crystal Discs? The screen illuminated, and the soundtrack totally confused me. It was a language I have never heard before, the only way I could describe it, not taking the clicking sounds into account, was like a Scandinavian talking backwards. The pictorial images on the screen were a bit of science fiction, with volcanoes spewing out the lava, and the voiceover now sounding like condensed Chinese. There was a sudden flash of white light, and the camera pulled backwards, showing darkness around this ball of lava. It pulled further back, revealing more balls of hot something or another. It then zoomed onto a very small piece, over in one corner of the set, which seemed to split into a large piece and a small piece, the soundtrack babbling on, totally incomprehensible, until the two rocks cooled, and took shape, the larger starting to show green and blue. I was watching a pictorial history of the planet Earth. I sat there, transfixed, watching. The special effects were brilliant, as I watched the Earth form to what it is today, or near to today. It cooled and the oceans formed from asteroids of ice from space, the oxygen atmosphere, the landmasses, everything. This was one brilliant lesson in natural history, and I felt a tinge of jealousy towards the people who came here to watch this amazing stuff, every day. This, on effects alone, could be used in schools, colleges, and even universities, as an educational tool. It was very well made, even though some of these theories shown were as yet unproven. As I watched, spellbound, the picture changed again, and indicated on one of the maps I had seen next door, the continent of South America, and actually showed the Inca civilisation, in worship of their gods, with a really cruel joke film spliced into the original. A complete spacesuit, hanging by the door to the temple.

The picture changed to Egypt, and the pyramid builders, who were seen using cranes to lift the blocks of stone. This must be part of the spoof film, I thought, as I let it run its course. I had no idea what the narrator was babbling on about, but I kept watching. Something wasn’t right, but it was totally correct. Quandary time. The whole team were, by now, watching this show, which was being projected somehow onto the wall, and, some of the subject matter being dealt with were only basic theories at this point in time, and had not been proven. On this film they appeared as if they were already fact. While we mused at the accuracy of what we could actually see, the camera started to pull back, and back, and further back. We left our solar system, the retreat ever accelerating, out to the galaxy, and away to somewhere else I have no idea where. This film I had watched was so accurate about the evolution of life here on Earth, and about the civilisations that followed. It had been accurate about the birth of the Earth, so why did it go off at a tangent, and leave, or appear to leave the solar system, and then the galaxy, because by doing so, it had forsaken it’s reality and accuracy. While I sat, I realised what we had actually seen. We were not watching a simulation, but the real thing, recorded by some unknown race. The evidence was overwhelming. The metal the outer walls were made of, the strange key, the dwellings, the vegetation, the auto lighting, and the unreadable glyphs. This was not Chinese or Japanese. It was not even Russian. It was extra-terrestrial. Since entering Taylor’s Tunnel, all of what we have seen, or done, pointed to something not of Earth’s natural origin. This was not the answer I had expected, but it was the only one that fit. We had stumbled upon some headquarters, or outpost, of a race of beings that had been visiting us for at least 5000 years that we knew of, and possibly a lot longer than that. These visitors, who, judging by their equipment we had found and it’s use must have been similar in appearance and stature to the indigenous people of our planet, documenting our history as a sort of study. There was a small afterthought came to my mind at this point, and that was, if they had monitored us then, are they not monitoring us now. This could be done remotely from a great distance. Or, are they here, now?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I suppose we felt like those great explorers you read about in history books, similar to that Carter bloke who discovered Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, with the tombs, complete with the mummies, and all of the history held intact within them. There was one major difference between them then and us now. They knew their occupants were dead. Even with that fact at the forefront of our minds, and it had never been far from the front, we still felt quite comfortable here, and we didn’t feel that we were in any way threatened. We were carrying plenty of food and water, though the dwellings had real water on tap, and we also had heat and light in any shelter of our choosing. My curiosity was still in overdrive though. I wanted to know more, a lot more about this place. How does it all work? It must be under some automatic control computer, which must also be huge, and yet there is no sign of it here. Maybe there were control rooms along passages, similar

to the ones we had seen used as storerooms, but at the other side of the small city, along the other paths we had seen leading away into the surrounding darkness. Grabbing our backpacks, we made our way to the outer areas of the small metropolis, looking both outward and upward for any sign of a monitoring structure, or room. It took a while, but eventually we saw what appeared to be sloping darkened windows jutting out from the rock face above us, and a number of doors in the cliff at ground level. These were getting difficult to see as we were now outside of the “billiard table” lighting effect. This was looking good to get some more answers, after all, we had a key, and we could literally blunder on through the place, not knowing if we were doing any harm. No, we had to take our time with this, small steps again. We could see the doors, and we knew we could open them, but what if our “mummies” were laid out in there? We had to be ready for every eventuality. We reached the first of these doors, opened it, to find a large room, full of what appeared to be supplies, but other than that, it went nowhere. We found a few more rooms like that, until we approached one of those sliding type of doors, the type not needing the key, which opened as we approached, and the heat which came from inside hit us like a wave on the ocean. It was really hot air this time. Not scalding hot, but uncomfortably hot. As we made our way through the maze of corridors, and rooms, we eventually found one absolutely huge room, packed with some kind of electronic machinery, all ticking and working away, a myriad of little lights on the numerous consoles flashing away to no one in particular. This appeared to be a control room. There were huge layers of discs inside what looked like upright filing cabinets, the discs one on top of the other, with each rotating at different times and speeds, with no apparent sequence that we could understand. It would have been a real find, if any of us could actually understand what we had really found. This room would have to be explored later, when we had more time. During our little cursory inspection, we noticed one of the dials was a little out of sequence with the others. Possibly a malfunction. We carried on, following in the direction of where this hot air was coming from, and soon found it. We found the answer to the heat on the estate at the surface too. This was not what we expected. We opened the last door and entered a brightly lit, and absolutely enormous chamber. In front of us were huge white industrial size pumps, with coils of piping perhaps two feet across, rising out of them, and up towards the ceiling, way up out of sight it was so far away, then coming back down about two hundred yards away, circling back to a sort of huge central tank. There must have been at least a hundred of these, all lined up in two neat rows, for as far as the eye could see, their sound almost silent for being so many of them in the same room. At the very top of the coil from the fifth pump along on the left, we could see, and hear, the reason for the heat on the estate. Superheated steam was escaping from this pipe at enormous pressure, and being forced into the ground above. A rough estimate of the height of these pipes would put them very close to the surface above, though we could not see any physical support for the roof of this cavernous room, so there must have been something supporting the upper level, otherwise the ground above would have collapsed into here years ago. Was this the subsidence from all those years ago? Where was the stream? We stood, in awe of this feat of engineering. Even though we didn’t understand what everything was for, or even it’s function, we could follow the basic laws of physics behind it, and that was where the problem lay. We had a choice. Leave as it is, go out of the place, forget we’d ever been here, and tell no-one, which could eventually mean that at some future date, these machines would run out of steam or water or

whatever, and could blow up, laying everything in a large area above to waste. Looking at the size and scale in front of us, about 300 miles in all directions. Could we bear this responsibility of knowing that this could go at any time, killing millions of unsuspecting people, without any warning. We had to do something, so, we reverted to our “small steps” plan again. We knew where the leak was. What we didn’t know was how to get up there, and how to actually fix it. First things first, time for a scout about to see what we could find. We found a working cradle, which we could use to get us up there, and so we moved it along to a point below the problem pipe. We examined the metal of the pipes themselves, which were at room temperature to the touch on the outside, even though we knew they contained superheated material, so, we had to assume it was not a metal we had ever come across before. The next row of pipe work along from our interest was showing signs of having been repaired at some time in the past, because the metal patch, of a slightly different colour and texture to the pipe itself had been stuck to it and must therefore have been stuck on with some kind of adhesive, as there were no visible bolts or fixings holding it in place. The repair was a tiny bit untidy, with the edges of the repair strip not quite flush with the pipe itself, and when I pushed them down flat, flush to the pipe, an amazing thing happened. The bandage became the pipe. It sort of welded itself to it, leaving no sign of a join, other than the slight difference in colour. We now knew what to look for. This metal bandage, about 18 inches wide. We found it, and there were rolls and rolls of it, in a rack over to one side of the room. We had what we needed to affect a repair, but we had to decide who was going to actually do it, to really stand next to superheated something assumed to be steam, and stick some thin metal plate from a roll over the top without getting burned or scalded. The younger ones volunteered. We older ones didn’t object. The gantry was loaded with a couple of rolls of the patch metal, large, but extremely light in weight, and two of the mechanical people from the team started the ascent. We remained below, as a sort of a backup. They got there, and then almost immediately after, they were on their way back down. We thought there must be a problem. Bit of an anticlimax here because, as they got there, they fixed down one edge of the tape at the opposite side of the hole, then by keeping this pressing to the pipe, threw the reel over the top where the hole itself was, and down the other side, grabbing and pulling the tape down and bound it round the pipe itself, and it repaired itself, instantly. No drama, no fuss, just, well, repaired. They used about a couple of square metres of this stuff, and they said it just did it. Don’t know how, but it just did it. Calling back into the control room on our way out, the machinery was still ticking away, discs turning, but the dials were now all showing the same. A sort of organised calm this time. We made our way down towards the little city area, planning to overnight there, noticing that the lighting had dimmed from earlier, and the street lighting had come on. I mused, why have street lighting when the whole complex is lit artificially from above anyway. Must have something to do with the copying of the environment on the surface. Once settled, and a meal later, we discussed the events of the day. We had found out where the heat on the estate was coming from, and repaired the cause so as not to risk a huge explosion at some future date. How would we explain this to the outside world. Should we explain it? How could we tell the outside world what we had seen, and what we had done?

I tried a few more discs in the library machines, but learned nothing. None of us could truthfully say what we were actually inside of, or to whom it belonged. It could still be an advanced military training centre. Making our way out of Taylor’s Tunnel the next day, closing the door in the wall with the key, climbing down the short shaft, we were all a little down sad, a sort of anticlimax. The walk up the Valley Drift seemed almost boring, till as we emerged from the hole where we met by the one remaining reporter at the top, who we informed for his exclusive story for his newspaper, that we found only slurry, water, and lots of roof falls. We had all decided, before we our way out, to keep the existence of the city a secret for the time being. Just in case. In the wrong hands, who knows?

CHAPTER TWELVE

As we sat in that back room of the Swan, we had time to reflect on the discoveries and the actions we had taken over the last few days. First of all, we had found the cause of the heat on the estate, which we had now rectified. No doubt the pensioners will not like it, but it’s better than them, and a few million other people in the area, to have gone into space without a rocket. We also now knew that Taylor’s Tunnel was some kind of emergency exit from the complex, and, when it was cut, it met the ventilation shaft from the mine workings below, it had halted at that point as it could use what was already there. The debris must have fallen into the roadway below, and the miners treated it as a roof fall, and cleared away the debris. It was a number of years later before Taylor’s Tunnel appeared on any of the old mines maps. The dryness of the mine workings is a little more scientific, the heat created in the upper levels near the surface would evaporate the water from there, and a capillary action could draw the water up through the soil from the lower levels to replace it. Try putting the corner of a towel into the bathwater, and watch the water “climb” up the towel to the top and over to the outside, before soaking your floor. The old workings remained intact because of the outer shell of the city complex, which went around the area in a sort of horseshoe shape, the mine being sunk in the middle of it. This would have the effect of clamping the old workings against any ground movement inside the area. The old miners didn’t know it at the time, but they were working in the safest mine in the world. The small town/city itself was the subject that had the most unanswered questions. We understood why the foliage was false, a sort of plastic. This was because real ones would have needed sunlight, of which, down there, there was none, and also water, which would have evaporated through the leaves, and created havoc with the city, both in condensation and corrosion. The dwellings were built for beings similar to ourselves, the door sizes being about the same, and the operation controls using some sort of digits or fingers. They sat upright, as the furniture indicated, and could hear and see the same as we do, as the discs in the library demonstrated. It all pointed to the normal occupants being humanoid, or something near to humanoid. Why was the city here? That question will have to go unanswered for the time being. We know it has not been used for a long time, otherwise the repair we carried out would have been done, and we would still be totally unaware of its existence.

Why was it still switched on? Did the owners expect to return at some time? It certainly appeared so, as everything was kept working. The major question now. Taylor’s Tunnel was a sort of emergency exit, so where is the main entrance? The mine maps were of little or no help in answering that, as there was no record beyond about three miles from the outer rim. If it were beyond that, the only way to find it would be from the inside. We suspected that it would most likely be at the ends of the horseshoe shapes, but with totally new landscapes from when it was built, these, from the outside, would be very difficult to find.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

There are many times when I think about returning to this city complex, to try to understand a little more about the owners of this complex, but to do so could betray it’s existence to possibly the wrong people, and the unknown power contained within, perhaps in the wrong hands, could have serious consequences. I shudder to think what kind of armament or defence a place like that could have, though in reality we didn’t see anything of that type of thing, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any. We wouldn’t know what to look for anyway, but other military powers would. The key, found in Taylor’s Tunnel is, at the moment, safely deposited in a bank deposit box, in an insignificant branch of an equally insignificant high street bank. Any other boxes would make a better target for thieves. Someone once said, hide valuables in plain sight. I have gone over, many times in my head, what I think would be the questions asked of me should this place ever be discovered, and proved that I knew of it being there. I think it would be to ask me why I thought we should not share it’s many secrets, for the good of mankind. I have only one reply to this. If masses of people were to enter the underground city, I feel sure that the owners would be aware of it, from however million light years away this may be. Some alarm, or record would be made. There could even be hidden CCTV cameras on every corridor and level. If, however, on the off chance that they didn’t receive any signal from the complex, and returned to visit it, bearing in mind that the complex is only empty, still running, and is not switched off, this could create either a failure to make first contact, because they would see the trespass and withdraw, unseen. We would have learned nothing and they may anger, and start some sort of war, a war we have no way of winning. We decided, as we were leaving Taylor’s Tunnel, that all twelve of us would swear ourselves to secrecy, to allow the real occupants to return on their terms, and to make their presence known to mankind when they were ready to, or if they even wanted to. If they had meant to harm us, they would have done so all those years ago, when they built the place. All we have to do now is wait.

1977/1991/2006/2010/2015

Quote from the writer: “If you can prove, beyond any doubt that this city does not exist, then I will prove it does”