Collected Short Fiction, page 23
Quite abruptly two narrow beams of a thick, misty purple fire darted out of the silver core of the amazing thing, and, flashing over the ground, fixed themselves upon the cottage! They were like thin, unpleasant fingers of purple fog! There was something terrible in the swift sureness of their motions! They moved as if they were seeing eyes, or tentacles—feeling, searching!
Suddenly they were gone. In a moment I noted a change. The seething clouds of green were sucked down. They drew into a dense cyclonic vortex of flame about the old house, like a falling torrent of molten emerald. The building was half hidden in the thick, racing fog. I strained my ears, but not a sound did I hear, save the soft whisper of the sea. The cloak of green mist swirled about its core with a silence that was complete—and terrible!
Suddenly the ancient house burst into strange red incandescence. The chimney, gables and corners shone with a dull, lurid scarlet fire. There was no flame, just a dusky, crimson gleam! It grew brighter and deeper, until it was an intense, bloody glare. And then the climbing vines and trees about it, gleaming like ruby plants, began to melt away! The house began to dissolve into crimson light!
The green mist swirled lower. The silvery central moon waxed brighter. Once or twice thin fingers of purple mist were again thrust out exploringly. all in a silence of death. And the red gleam grew! The house glowed as though washed in a rain of blood. And swiftly it faded into that awful light!
The chimney tottered and came down in a shower of red sparks that faded into nothingness before they touched the ground. The roof fell, and the remnant of the walls collapsed upon it in a heap of crimson dust of fire that faded swiftly—dissolved—vanished!
The little hill was a bare red waste, gleaming with that terrible scarlet glare. The two purple tentacles of misty flame shot out again, and swept searchingly over the spot. Suddenly the green mist stopped its seething motion. Its fires died out. It grew dim, faded, was gone like a cloud of dissipating steam. The white glow of the silver globe waxed dull, and suddenly it, too. was no more.
Quickly the red glow faded from the weirdly denuded hilltop, and the night fell in a heavy mantle. I stood wrapt in a spell of amazement and terror.
CHAPTER VIII
Out of the Sea’s Abyss
“WEEL, how was the show?” Sam’s voice was a little weak and strained. Suddenly I was conscious of an unpleasant tremor of the knees. I went into the conning-tower and dropped myself weakly on a seat. I tried to speak, but my mouth was very dry. I swallowed twice.
“What was it?” I contrived to articulate at last. The old man stood erect in the opening, with a hand upon his thoughtful brow’. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t think they could come. They must have mastered secrets of time and space that we know nothing of. They have conquered our limitations of distance. They must be ages ahead of us!”
“But the house—it just melted away!”
“As for that, the emanations of the green cloud must have disrupted the atoms, allowing the electrons to fall together to make neutrons (formed of united protons and electrons) so small that they fell through the ground, toward the center of the earth. That is easy enough to understand—in fact, I could probably have developed a similar ray myself, as a result of my work on the hydrodyne. The strange thing is how they got here!”
“The thing just seemed to appear and vanish!”
“Possibly we could see it only when it was lit with the radiation of the green. It may have just slipped up and away in the darkness. But it is more likely—judging from the etheric disturbance it created—that it did not come through our space at all, but moved by the distortion of hyper-space—came through the fourth dimension, in effect!”
“And they seemed to know just where to strike!”
“Yes. They must have found that by triangulation on my interference waves I was doing the same trick for them when the apparatus warned me.”
“You were what?”
“I have been working a long time to get the direction of that mysterious force.”
“And you succeeded!”
“You remember the Mangar Deep?”
“What? Oh, yes. Discovered in the South Pacific by Mangar and Kane about 1945.”
“In 1946, I believe. The disturbance comes from there. It emanates from a point ten miles below the level of the Pacific!”
“What! Impossible!”
“Do I make mistakes?” Sam asked softly.
“No. But the discoverers reported only six miles of water. And anyhow-, men couldn’t live under there!”
“The exact spot is somewhat south of their soundings. But, Mel, don’t assume that we have to deal with rnen! We may be dealing with entities that developed in the sea, even with creatures of the rocks below the sea! I tell you, it’s outside the range of your old anthropomorphic fiction!”
I could say nothing more. I sat still, with rather unpleasant thoughts. Intelligences that could reach casually from a point ten miles below sea level, to wipe out a building ten thousand miles away! Such things are very good in amazing romances, but extremely hard to face squarely in real life!
For many minutes Sam was silent. He had pulled out his battered pipe and filled it absently with illegal tobacco. He stood puffing on it steadily, with the dim glow coming and going on his tanned face as he drew. Presently he spoke very softly:
“Mel, we can go in the, Omnimobile to see about it.”
“Dive into the Deep!”
“We could do it.”
“Ten miles of water! Good Lord! That would crush us like—like—”
“I think the machine would stand it.”
“But what could we do?”
“We don’t know until we know what needs to be done.”
“It means death!” I whispered hoarsely. “And the Green Girl! When I am dead I may dream of her no more! It may be that she lives only in my mind, and when I die—”
Sam said nothing. He merely waited, puffing away, with his pipe smoke drifting out into the night. In a moment I had considered, and realized my selfishness. I thrust out my hand, and he gripped it firmly.
“I knew you would see it, Mel!” he cried with a glad ring in his voice. “Whoever, and whatever they are, they haven’t got us yet! We’re still kicking!”
“We start for the Mangar Deep—”
“—At sunrise in the morning.”
We climbed down into the machine, and went together into the galley to fix supper. Sam got out his old music box and played through his ancient favorite selections, and then we went to our miniature staterooms.
But I did not sleep soon that night. The Green Girl came to me in a fresh and vivid waking dream. She was, as ever, supremely, superbly beautiful, with dark curls, smiling red lips, and clear, sparkling violet eyes. I told her of the struggle I had had, and that I was resolved to set out upon the fateful cruise. And she seemed very happy, so I regretted my decision no longer. So, very happy, I fell asleep, and had dreams of the Green Girl that were dreams indeed.
At dawn I was awakened by the rattle of pots and pans in the galley. I sprang out of my bunk, took an icy shower, and ran into the dining room where Sam had breakfast ready. The stores had been well selected, and Sam was a prince among chefs. Whatever our fate, we would approach it feasting like kings.
He seemed as cheerful and confident as myself. Now that the issue was determined, the uncertainty of action was removed, and we both felt oddly relieved. After we had eaten, we started the engines and drove the machine back to the hilltop where the cottage had been. We got out and examined the surface of the ground that had been acted upon by the strange red dissolution.
The earth had evidently been eaten away to a depth of several feet, and the surface was left covered with a hard, greenish vitrified crust, smooth and hard as glass. It was unpleasant to think what would have happened if Sam had failed to intercept the warning of the approach of that amazing machine—if it had been a machine.
CHAPTER IX
Into the Mangar Deep
WE hurried back into the Omnimobile, climbed into the conning-tower, and started the engines again. Sam turned the bow toward the sea, and the great machine crawled slowly down to meet the lapping white waves. In a few moments they were slapping and splashing against her sides.
On we drove, down the sloping sand. The green water rose about the windows. In a moment the periscope screen showed that we were entirely under water. We crawled steadily over the bottom of the sea, deeper and deeper. All the wonders of the hidden sea-life lay about us, bright corals and strange shrubs, curious rocks, and beautiful dells between them, through which silvery fishes and stranger monsters of the deep were moving. It grew darker, and Sam turned on the powerful searchlights. We moved on down into stranger regions. But I must not take space for that, for we were hastening toward a world that was weirder by far!
In half an hour we closed the valves, which had been left open to let the water flood the tanks, and started the pumps. We were lifted above the ocean floor. We stopped the caterpillar tread, and set the screws into motion. In a few minutes the Omnimobile rose above the surface and splashed back into the blue waves like a gigantic dolphin of silver metal!
I climbed out on the deck. The Florida coast was a bright green line in the west. The serene blue vault of the heavens was illimitable above us, and the deeper blue expanse of waters lay about in a fiat, measureless plain. The machine throbbed almost imperceptibly with the motors, and the prow sent out two white wings of water. The plates were wet and slippery with the spray. I thrilled to feel again the motion of a powerful craft beneath me, to smell the salty tang of the air, and to feel the tingle of the salt mist upon my skin. We were making a good fifty knots, and I had to brace myself against the cool, damp wind of our progress. Thanks to her gyro-stabilizers, the vessel was perfectly steady.
I stood there a long time, gripping the low rail, and lost in the wonders of sea and sky. I felt very much a part of all that splendid, sunlit world. I felt a deep, poignant regret at leaving it. But I found myself feeling—with a little surprise—that I could be willing enough to give up my life to save it!
At last I went back into the conning-tower. Sam stood alert at the controls, with an odd, exultant light in his eyes, and with a smile of joy and confidence on his lean face. With his hands on the levers, he turned to me and said:
“The little old machine’s a wonder, Mel! She runs on sea, land, or air! It’s a great feeling to drive her! She’d go anywhere! You know, I wish we had time to make a trial for the moon!”
“There’s no hurry about that!” I assured him heartily. “The moon will keep!”
Presently I took the controls. Sam fixed dinner, and brought my meal in on a tray. Then he went to his stateroom. I enjoyed my spell at the controls. Indeed, as Sam had said, the handling of the machine gave one a strange sensation of power, of omnipotence, almost. It was the same feeling of unconquerable, careless power that a god might have enjoyed. I was almost sorry when Sam came to relieve me in the evening, and I had to go to my bunk.
When I got up to take his place again, it was night. The generators were beating steadily, and the Omnimobile was ploughing her way through heavy seas. The sky was black, and occasional brilliant flashes of lightning lit the sheets of falling rain that drummed on the metal deck. When he showed me our position, it was in the Pacific, off Central America. I knew that he had used the rocket tubes to carry us over the Isthmus.
For two more days we kept the bow southwest, in the direction of the Mangar Deep. Sam and I alternated at the controls, and he took time to prepare our meals when he was off duty. The cabin was fixed up most comfortably with bookcases, table, and upholstered divan. During the second long afternoon I looked over my old stories of science, and read again Verne’s immortal story, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was somewhat amused at the thought that I was aboard a stranger and more wonderful machine than that of the fantastic tale, and that our adventures had already been far more amazing than those of the great romance at which so many practical people had scoffed. If I had known what was to come—well, I suppose I could not have composed myself enough to read at all!
At evening on the third day, the sea lay cold and blue about us, and the northern sun was crawling along the horizon to sink cold and bright in the clear northwestern sky, turning the westward waves into a glittering sea of frozen fire, and gleaming with prismatic whiteness on the snow caps of a few vast icebergs that dotted that far southern sea: Sam stopped the engines. We floated in that wintry, lonely ocean, infinitely removed from the busy world of man, over the Mangar Deep—over the lair of the hidden menace!
I stood on the gleaming wet metal deck, shivering slightly from the chill of the keen south wind, breathing deep of the fresh salty air, and lost in the never-aging wonders of the sea and sky. I felt even a distant kinship with the blue, white-capped mountains of ice that lifted their massive frozen spires to meet the cold sunshine. How often, in the incredible adventure to come, was I to fear that I was never again to see the blue of the sky, or to feel the ancient spell of a limitless surging sea!
I took a last deep breath, and went below. I was a little surprised to see that Sam was closing the ventilators, opening the oxygen apparatus and air purifiers, inspecting the pumps and valves, getting ready to dive.
“Surely we can’t start till morning?”
“Why not? At two hundred fathoms night is the same as day.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Then—”
“Before we see the sky again, we shall know—”
With a queer tightening in my throat, I saw the manhole closed for the last time upon the fresh, cold air of the sea. In ten minutes more we had let the water into the bouyancy tanks. Green water and gleaming monsters of the sea rushed upward in the steady glare of the searchlights beyond the windows.
I stood at the valve and pump controls, while Sam busied himself in seeing to the torpedo tube and the machine gun. and in adjusting his electric arc weapon. Then he brought out a grotesque suit of steel submarine armor he had had made, with oxygen tanks and electric searchlight, etc., attached.
Swiftly we were dropping into the Mangar Deep!
CHAPTER X
The Depths of Fear
IN the deep sea the temperature is just above freezing; the darkness is absolute; the pressure is many tons to the square inch. But still, life has been found, even in the greatest depths. It is strange life, to be sure, for the organisms must be developed to withstand the great pressure, and to generate their own light. It is an odd truth of nature that there is some form of life adapted for each locality. There are the mosses and reindeer of the frigid north, the cactus and lizards of the burning deserts, the blind creatures of the Mammoth Cave, the stranger things of the deepest seas! May it not be that there are entities living out in space, or in the earth’s interior, of which we may never know? Such were my thoughts as we dropped to meet the menace that had risen from under the sea!
We sank swiftly, and steadily the manometer climbed. The water was dark but for the bright beams of the searchlights, and very cold, though, with the insulation and the electric heaters, we felt no discomfort. The pressure on the plates must have been terrific beyond conception. It seemed impossible that metal—even our cleverly braced plates of the wonderful beryllium bronze—could withstand so much, when even the rocks of the ocean floor “creep” and bend beneath the water’s weight!
Thousands upon thousands of feet we sank, and still the sea was dark and cold! In our wild plunge downward I caught fleeting glimpses of many of the weirdly grotesque creatures of the deep, flashing past in the gleam of our lights.
At last Sam had completed his preparations for the emergency that might arise when we reached our goal. He came into the conning-tower. I looked at the manometer—in fact, I had been looking at it most of the time.
“Pressure four thousand pounds!” I read. “That means we are nearly eight thousand feet down! I wonder how much longer—”
“Remember,” Sam said softly. “Remember that we have to go ten miles down—fifty thousand feet!”
“Fifty thousand feet! Every cubic foot of water weighs sixty-five pounds. Fifty thousand times sixty-five, divided over one hundred and forty-four square inches. That is—about twenty-two thousand pounds to the square inch! Eleven tons!”
“Somewhat more, I fancy, say 23,800 pounds,” Sam observed calmly.
“What’s the difference? Nothing could live or move under such a weight!”
“The thing we have come to investigate lives there, if it is a living thing at all.”
I said nothing more. Somehow, I did not feel inclined to conversation. I could think only of the terrific weight of water so near, pressing so mercilessly upon the thin plates, think only of how cruelly it would crush and tear us when it found its way in! I gazed at the little needle with a sort of fascination. It crept slowly around the dial, counting up the pounds of the irresistible pressure that surrounded us.
The minutes dragged by. The little needle showed a depth of fifteen thousand feet, almost three miles. The height of a good mountain, and still it crept up! And yet we were not a third of the way! Suddenly I heard a splintering crackle that grated roughly on my strained nerves. I looked down. The unconscious grip of my hand had splintered the top panel of the back of a chair by my side!
Sam was looking at me, grinning. “I’m glad you didn’t have your hand on me, Mel.”
I glanced back at the needle, and shouted in surprised relief.
“It has stopped!”
