Complete Short Fiction, page 166
There was no hint of a smile now on his fine, though rather sharp, features. His face was intent, almost tense; and the drawing was literally flung at the commander, so swiftly was it thrust.
It was a picture of a submarine tilted, and in the act of submerging. The two officers looked at each other. Kenlon said unsteadily:
“I think, sir, I’d better get up on deck to give Tedders a hand.”
No word of objection came from Jones-Gordon: and so Kenlon was at the door when the light blazed in his face. In his face, though in front of him was only the solid steel door. The light was pouring through the door, and seemed to originate at a distance.
Instantly, it blinked out, but the fantastic thought had come to Kenlon by the time he reached the hatch:
The tubes! The tubes had lighted; and their intense palpably neutronic glow had poured through four intervening steel walls. He hadn’t seen the second tube at the other end of the sub but—
It didn’t matter. Here was the crisis.
Outside, the darkness had lightened. The moon was a great, pale orb in a widening blue pond of sky. For miles now, the sea was visible, a black undulating field with streaks of light showing here and there through the intense velvet.
Against that black, and in that light, the submarine was a long shape of gleaming metal, making a foaming path in a sea that heaved and sank, and heaved and sank.
At the forward end of that shining, silvery shape, four men were engaged in setting up a three-pounder gun. Ack-Ack.
That was the facet of the whole vast scene upon which Kenlon’s strained senses fastened.
The gun, the vital gun, was almost ready.
Kenlon sent an uncertain glance back down the hatch. And felt a little shock of surprise that no one was following him up. He hesitated, his mind hard on the sketch the winged man had drawn.
Hesitation ended. “Quartermaster Reichert,” he commanded, “transfer steering to the control room.”
“Transfer steering to control. Aye, aye, sir.”
Kenlon lowered the hatch into place after Reichert had gone down, and manipulated the electrical locking mechanism. Then he was plunging down to the deck. He shouted:
“Lieutenant Tedders, fire the instant you are ready. Fire!”
The flash was red against the uneven sea; the explosion sharp and loud above the muffled thud of the Diesels.
The gun banged metallically as it recoiled and fell over on the steel deck. The men began to right it, while Tedders poked a flashlight at the “tube.”
“Missed!” he groaned.
Kenlon came up. “You didn’t miss. I saw the splash of the shell to starboard. It was deflected.”
He thought: Nothing could be that hard. Surely—
He whirled frantically. “Hurry with that gun. I’ll fire it this time; and let’s try to keep her going. You’re sure the shells are nonexploding?”
He didn’t wait for the answer. He almost felt the three shells he fired strike. He saw the three splashes, far to port. Then the gun fell over. He cried to the men:
“Again! Get it up again!”
To Tedders, he said: “At the very least we’ll knock its mechanism out of alignment by concussion. We—”
He had swung with Tedders behind the perspiring, laboring crewmen. And, just like that, they were skeletons, still working there, still standing there.
The light from the tube flowed through them.
But this time it didn’t blink off.
Through their bodies, through the gun they were loading, through the intervening projection of the deck, came the glare of the tube.
It was a white glow, so fierce it threatened to burn Kenlon’s eyes. Instinctively, he brought his hand up in a self-protecting gesture. He had time to see the bones of his arms and his fingers. And then—
Then he was struggling, choking, fighting in ail appalling depth of warm water.
Kenlon held his breath. His throat stung from the water he had swallowed. His whole body felt torn by the cataclysm of coughing that threatened to break out any instant, and break down the terrible resistance of his clenched muscles.
And all the time he could feel his body rushing upwards towards the surface. He began to swim frantically tip, up, up. Even then in the midst of that prolonged combination of agony and effort, the thought came, the deadly mind-wrenching thought:
What had happened? What could have happened?
Like a shot from the gun he broke the surface, fell back under, then came up clutching for air with his lungs and his hands. His body shook and ached with the wracking labor of his coughs; the water churned as he fought to keep his head above the leaping spray.
Vaguely he was aware of a mighty roaring of water somewhere in the near distance behind him.
The thunder subsided, but a series of giant waves smashed him with a sudden violence, swept him along at express pace, and almost engulfed him.
He survived; somehow he survived. The violent seas quietened. He disgorged the sickening water he had swallowed, shook the nausea out of his body, and looked palely around him.
A dozen feet away a man’s head was bobbing up and down in a rhythm with the choppy beat of the sea. Beyond, about a mile distant was a long, low, gray shore, the drab general effect colored here and there with the green of sparse vegetation.
The shore stretched on flat and unbroken under a cloud-filled sky to the horizon on either side.
The whole land scene was strangely, unnaturally repellant in some indescribable way.
Uneasy, Kenlon turned away from it, once more saw the man’s bobbing head—and his paralyzed brain came to life.
Tedders? And the men? And the Sea Serpent?
The thoughts were like a succession of special pains. With a gasp Kenlon whirled in the water.
“Dan!” he shrieked. “Dan Tedders!”
A faraway cry answered him. “Here I am, Bill. Here, with Davisson. We’re all right. How about you?”
He saw the two heads about three hundred feet to his left. Relieved, Kenlon shouted: “O.K.!”
There were tears in his eyes, as he turned once more to the nearby head. Anxiously, he recognized the strained profile of the man.
“Black,” he said anxiously, “are you all right?”
The man turned dazedly. “Yes, sir,” he muttered.
Kenlon swam closer. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.” Then more wildly. “But my buddy. Johnston, sir! I haven’t seen him.”
“Johnston!” Kenlon bellowed the words over the water. He twisted, standing up as high as he could, shouted the name again.
There was no answer from that wide and restless sea. Tedders and Davisson were swimming closer. But there was no sign of Johnston.
Thinking back to the agony and the colossal surprise, the miracle was that any of them had survived. He thought four out of five alive! Men were surely strong and wonderful, terrible in their will to live.
But—where was the Sea Serpent?
He wasn’t really worried, he told himself shakily. That immense and roaring sound he had heard must have been the sub breaking surface. They must have started letting water into the tanks and so she had sunk again. Any second now she would—
There was a long flash of foam in the water two hundred yards seaward. Then a periscope broke surface—the Sea Serpent swam into size.
As soon as her deck was clear of water, she began to slow. In a few minutes she was riding lightly. Lieutenant commander Jones-Gordon was the first to appear. He was followed quickly by half a dozen crew members.
A minute later, Kenlon was being dragged aboard. He reported the loss of Johnston; then, having received permission, went below, and changed his clothes.
As he emerged from the hatch, dryly clothed and with hot coffee warming his insides, he was seen by Jones-Gordon. The commanding officer beckoned him, and said:
“Bill, where are we? What happened?”
It was, Kenlon realized grimly, a sixty-four hundred dollar problem.
He studied the shore through his glasses, and spent minutes on end peering out over the drab land.
It was an unwholesome vista that unrolled itself as the Sea Serpent held to a course parallel to the low-lying beach. The splotches of green showed themselves as nothing but seaweed; and, after an hour, the scene had not changed. After four hours the shore began to fall away sharply from their course.
It was impossible to be sure whether it was a bay or a permanent direction shift of the shore line. Kenlon, who had gone to his quarters for a short sleep, climbed up again, and watched as the Sea Serpent slowed till it was barely creeping along. He turned as Jones-Gordon joined him. The lieutenant commander said:
“I think we’d better lie to, and give our prisoner a going over. I was waiting for you to wake-up before interviewing him.”
On the way down, Jones-Gordon added frowningly: “I don’t know just what attitude to take towards him. His action is responsible for the death of Johnston; and yet, when you went on deck just before the crisis, he dived over our heads—and prevented us for the necessary few minutes from following you. That precaution on his part undoubtedly saved many lives.
“Similarly,” he went on in his precise voice, “in your first struggle with him, he could have knocked you into the sea. Instead, he swept you up and back onto the deck.”
“Is it possible,” the commander concluded, “we should assume that his intentions towards us as individuals are not murderous?” The questions were not of the kind that Kenlon felt qualified to answer; and, besides, knowing his superior, he had an idea that the queries were purely rhetorical. He tried for a moment to picture the other’s intensely practical brain tackling the problem of the winged man and attendant phenomena.
It was a strangely hard picture to evoke. He gave it up, conscious however that it was not an enviable position for such a man to be in. They found the winged man industriously sketching in Kenton’s notebook.
“He slept for a while,” the guard reported. “When he woke up, he kept pointing to the notebook, so I finally let him have it, sir.”
“You did quite right,” said the commander. “Just step back now, and keep a sharp watch on us while we’re with him.”
Kenlon saw, with a thrill of excitement, that the birdman was beckoning them. It was a strange sensation to step close to that alien form, and bend with—it—over the notebook.
The feeling faded. The notebook and the drawings in it grasped all his attention.
The first page showed an unmistakable sketch of Sol and its first three planets.
The winged man pointed at Earth, then indicated Kenlon and Jones-Gordon with a slender finger. He pointed at Earth again, and this time indicated himself.
Kenlon said after a silence: “I think he’s trying to say, sir, that he is of Earth origin like ourselves.” Jones-Gordon frowned irritably: “Of course he’s of Earth. Where else would he lie from?”
It struck Kenlon with a pang that this was the flaw he had analyzed in Jones-Gordon, without previously being able to put his mental finger on it.
Abruptly, the skipper’s earlier statement that, if he hadn’t seen the winged man himself, he wouldn’t have believed in him, acquired a new significance. Having seen the impossible, he had accepted it as fact. He had thus given the partial illusion of being cognizant of all the implications of the fantastic being who had come into their ken.
He wasn’t. His imagination was incapable of grasping the wilder possibilities, the utter normal improbability of such a winged man appearing out of nowhere in 1944.
Disappointed, and vaguely disturbed by the unpleasant potentialities, Kenlon did the only logical thing: He held his silence.
“What the devil,” said Jones-Gordon, “is this?”
Kenlon emerged from his reverie. His gaze fastened below the drawing of the solar system to a group of figures to which the winged man was pointing:
/
//
///
////
/////
//////
The creature man seemed to realize that he had their attention again, for he pointed at the lone symbol on the top line, then indicated Earth above it, and began slowly to move his finger around the Sun. One, two, three—nine times he made the circuit, and then pointed again at the solitary symbol in the first line of the figures.
Jones-Gordon said curiously: “Is he trying to say that it represents nine years?”
Kenlon said steadily: “I think so, sir.”
“Funny way of figuring, if you ask me,” the lieutenant commander grunted. “Why doesn’t he make it ten, and simplify the whole problem. What is he doing now?”
The winged man was pointing at the top symbol again. He tapped it with his finger as if he was counting. Kenlon counted with him. one, two, three—eleven. Then the creature man pointed at line two.
“I get it,” said Kenlon. “Eleven times nine is ninety-nine. The two symbols stand for ninety-nine years.”
A quaver of pure excitement ran through him. He motioned at the third line.
“If the first two groups are 9 and 99, then the third one must be 11 times 99 or 1089, and so on until—”
He stopped, for the winged man was pointing again at the first figure. He began to tap with his finger. It took a long time this time. A minute passed; and still Kenlon counted on, following the tapping of the finger . . . 90 . . . 100, 101, 102 . . . 111.
The counting ended on 111. Once more the birdman indicated the single symbol, then pointed at the third line.
“111 times 9,” Kenlon said aloud, “equal 999. Which must mean that the fourth line is 1111 times 9 or 9999 years, and so on till the bottom line comes to 999,999 years. It is an odd way of figuring, but it must have some sound mathematical principle behind it.”
He intended to add a comment, but the winged man was rotating his finger rapidly around and around the Sun. Finally he pointed at the bottom line of figures, then at himself.
Kenlon’s brain reeled. What was he saying? What was he trying to say?
“A million years,” he heard his own voice muttering flatly. “I think he’s trying to tell us that we’ve been brought about a million years into the future.”
After a dazed moment, Kenlon saw that there was an exasperated look on Jones-Gordon’s face. The lieutenant commander made an irritating gesture with his body.
“It’s evident,” he shrugged, “that we’re getting nowhere in this attempt at communication. What’s on the next page?”
Kenlon turned to it without a word. The sheet revealed a sketch of a submarine heading for an object floating in the sky above the sea. He stared at it, puzzled. After an even blanker moment, he decided it was a mountain rising up out of the sea.
The only thing was that it was definitely drawn as being above the sea, unattached in any way.
Kenlon decided to ignore that. He concentrated on the mountain. It rose sheer on every visible side; and the crown was capped by an enormous building. Dozens of winged men were flying around the massive structure. Others were standing in openings carved high in the towering building. Still others were hovering just above the water, fighting something that was trying to come up from the sea.
It was strange, that sense of them fighting something. But it was unmistakable. Yet there seemed only to be men in the water.
With a deliberate effort, Kenlon drew his mind from the examination. He caught the keen, hawklike eyes of the winged man, pointed at the mountain, then indicated various directions. He hoped that there would be no question about what he was asking.
There wasn’t. The sharp face grew excited, smiling, eager. A wing fluttered, and half pointed with one arm away from the land and from the course the Sea Serpent had been pursuing.
Jones-Gordon’s voice broke the silence. “Now that,” he said, “is impossible. How can he tell from inside the boat here what direction we should follow? He can’t possibly know whether or not we changed course while he was sleeping.”
Kenlon hesitated. It struck him that his own imagination might be considered irresponsible for the way he had jumped at conclusion after conclusion on the basis of flimsy evidence. A suggestion that the winged man’s sense of direction was possibly related to the instincts of a homing pigeon might be the straw that would break the camel’s back.
Nevertheless, he had always felt that an officer should express his opinions when asked. That should apply particularly under unusual circumstances.
Still he hesitated. And finally it seemed to him that Lieutenant commander Jones-Gordon’s mind had been strained enough for the moment. He grew aware that the skipper was speaking:
“You’re the linguist in our outfit, lieutenant. I want you in your spare time to learn his language and teach him ours. But first—come on deck.”
Kenlon followed reluctantly. His whole being palpitated with the desire to begin established communication. But he waited quietly, as Jones-Gordon stood for several minutes staring at the shore. The man said abruptly:
“We can’t go blindly on along this strange shore in shallow and unknown waters. Besides, we must think of our oil.
“Since the clouds haven’t cleared for a moment, it’s impossible to tell what time of day it is; so I’ve decided that we’ll stay here overnight and”—he turned to Kenlon, finished briskly—“in the morning you will head an expedition into the interior, remaining several days if necessary, but try to find out everything possible.”
Kenlon began to feel excited. It wasn’t the shore of itself. Gray and flat it spread before him, nearer and nearer as the motorboat sputtered towards it.
He could see inland about a mile. Beyond that the gray of the sky and the gray of the land blurred further vision.
It didn’t matter. In an hour they would have penetrated out of sight of the sea, unless this was a long narrow island, in which event the water would be there on the other side, restlessly awaiting them.
Jones-Gordon had offered the theory that it was an island, adding with an uneasy attempt at logic:
“The Pacific is probably the only body of water that has never been thoroughly explored. There are possibly scores of small atolls that have never been recorded on any map.”
