Collected Short Fiction, page 24
Truly, the pointer stood still! As we watched it, it hung still a moment under my riveted gaze, and then crept back!
“It’s a turning point! The pressure is getting less!”
“It couldn’t be!” Sam said. “Unless we are rising!”
“No! See! The bouyancy tanks are still flooded!”
“The duplicate pressure gauge?”
“It turned back with the other!”
“Look! Yes, we are still sinking.” He pointed to the windows. “See! The fish are still flashing upward in the light!”
In speechless wonder, we stood and watched. Still we were evidently sinking. Still the dark waters rushed up about us. And still the needles crept back!
Suddenly Sam seized my shoulder in a hand of iron. “Look!” he whispered hoarsely, pointing out through the heavy lenses. “Can’t you see? A light! A red gleam beyond our searchlights!”
A switch clicked under the nervous fingers of his other hand, and our lights went out. In a moment, as soon as my eyes were accustomed to the darkness, I saw that he was right! The sea was not black! There was a pale, roseate glow suffused through it!
Steadily it grew stronger. We were coming into a region of light, and of decreased pressure, at the bottom of the sea! Of all wonders!
The red light grew stronger, until it seemed that we sank through a sea of molten ruby—through an ocean of blood. Intense red light poured in through the lenses until I had to hide my eyes. With shaded eyes, Sam bent over the manometer.
“Only two hundred feet!” he cried. “Fifty! Ten!”
Suddenly the floor fell away from beneath my feet. We seemed to have dropped from the sea into a lake of fire. A blindingly intense red glare poured in the windows. I was very sick. The ship reeled about me, the floor sank, dropped away! I grasped dizzily for the table, drew myself blindly toward it!
I remember hanging limply and helplessly to the table for a moment, remember Sam pushing me suddenly away. I have a dim memory of a crashing thunder of sound that reverberated deafeningly and seemed to roll away to infinite distances through the fiery mist. And with that strange, deep sound, my consciousness faded away!
CHAPTER XI
The Roof of Waters
THE next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, with a torrent of icy water falling on my face. I sat up, sputtering. Sam was bending over me with a relieved grin on his face.
“Care for any more?” he asked, emptying the pail. “That’s finite enough, thanks,” I sputtered. “Where are we?”
“Right here.”
“Talk sense,” I pleaded, trying to get up, and rubbing the bump in my head.
“Really, I hardly know,” he said, soberly. “It’s rather queer. We’re afloat on a smooth, warm sea! The sky is red!”
I stared at him stupidly.
“It’s a good thing we had the rockets! If we hadn’t used them, we’d have hit this water like a concrete pavement!”
“Queer, you say! My eye! We’re both crazy! It can’t be!”
“You might get up and see for yourself.”
“You say we’ve fallen through the Pacific and into another sea?”
“I only know what I can see.”
“We did seem to come out of the water into a red mist.”
“So it seemed.”
“But the Pacific Ocean overhead! We must have come through six miles of water! And water won’t float on air!”
“We have several interesting questions before us.”
I got uncertainly to my feet, walked past the calm old scientist, and climbed out on the narrow deck. Indeed it was a weird and incredible sight that met my eyes. Overhead arched a great dome of crimson fire. In all directions it reached down to the dark, warm sea on which we were floating. Nothing in sight but red sky and dark waves! There was a light, hot breeze, but the strange sea was very still. Its color was a blue-black, splashed weirdly with the reflected light of the crimson sky. It stretched out on every hand to where the red sky rose, utterly lifeless—lonely and dead.
We had fallen into an unsuspected and incredible world! Miles of water lay between us and our fellow men. Suddenly I felt an absurdly great loneliness, a vast homesickness for the world we had left—even if my fellow men had never meant very much to me! I felt an ineffably intense desire for the sunshine, for blue skies and green plains, and for the busy, cheerful cities of men! In fact, I almost burst into tears.
It was not so much that I was afraid. But the place seemed so strange, that even after I was dead my soul could not find a way out!
If there had been a rock, or an island to break the monotony of the ghostly, silent sea, it would not have been so bad. But there were none. The strange dark desert of waters stretched out as far as my eye could reach! The eerie, scarlet radiation of the sky beat down with intense heat, and the wind was damp and sultry.
Abruptly Sam stepped out beside me. There was almost a grin on his lean, tanned face, and he looked somehow very confident and resourceful. I felt a great wave of faith in him and in the wonderful machine beneath our feet, rocking silently in the strange, smooth sea. Impulsively I reached out my hand to him, and he took it with a smile.
“I know how you feel, Mel. But we’re still kicking!”
“But the ocean?” I asked again. “What could hold it up?”
“I’ve been doing some pretty stiff thinking along that line. I have a theory that might help you, even if I have missed the point. You know we came through the red gas that makes the curious sky we sec. The gas was just below the water. It’s evidently radioactive, or it wouldn’t be luminous. Its emanations might change the gravity of the water above!”
“Negative gravity or levitation?”
“Something of tire kind. You know that science has held for a long time that there is no reason, per se, to doubt the existence of substances that would repel instead of attracting one another. In fact, the mutual repulsion of the like poles of a magnet is, in a way, an illustration of that very thing. Even assuming the existence of substances of negative gravity, they would not be found on the surface of the earth, for they would escape into space as fast as liberated. The phlogiston of the old alchemists, by the way, was supposed to be such a substance.
“But suppose the gravity of the water is negatived by the gas. Water, you know, has the property of becoming radioactive after it has been exposed to radium emanations, and it is logical enough for it to assume the qualities of the gas. The water next to the gas may support that above.”
“But it looks as if the gas would bubble out, like air under water,” I said.
“That was the principal objection to the theory. But we know from our pressure readings that the water is not resting heavily on the gas. If it is supported by the negative gravity of its lower stratum, the equilibrium is very delicate, but it would be naturally maintained.
“Suppose the roof of water is lifted. The gas and atmosphere below, being given more room, would expand. Consequently the gas would be brought less intimately into contact with the water, the negativing effect would be reduced, and the balance would be restored. Conversely, a sinking would compress the gas, increase its effect, and bring back the balance. Even if the water sank in one place and was lifted in another, the difference in the density of the gas at various altitudes would maintain the equilibrium.”
“Yes. Yes, I believe I see. A thousand thanks! It makes me feel a lot better to see how it could be,” I said, admiring the wonderful readiness with which he had formulated his theory. “But can you say how the gas came to be here, and how there happens to be breathable air beneath it?”
“Both might have been manufactured by the intelligences we have come to investigate. More likely, however, the gas comes from the disintegration of the radium in the earth, and has been rising out of fissures in the ocean floor and collecting here for ages. The oxygen of the air may have come from the decomposition of rocks—the earth’s crust is nearly fifty per cent oxygen. This place may be as old as the sea. That alien power may have been growing up in here through all the ages that man has been developing outside!”
“You think there may be living things here?”
“No reason why not. In fact, this is the logical habitat for your Green Girl. Red and green are complementary colors. If there are people here, green would be the natural color for the protective pigmentation against this red light!”
CHAPTER XII
The Second Sea
LEAVING me to the visions and the flights of wild hope that his last words induced, Sam went below. In a few minutes he called me to eat. Suddenly I realized that I was very hungry. I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock.
“Why, is it just two hours since we left the surface?”
“No. It’s fourteen!”
Forgetting the intense red sky, the strange, smooth sea, and the damp, hot wind, I went below to meet Sam’s wonderful biscuit, with fresh steak and fruit from the refrigerator. A very mild and colorless beginning for adventurers newly fallen into an unknown world, but a very sensible one!
After the meal, each of us took a turn on guard in the conning-tower, while the other slept. Nothing happened. The soft hot wind blew steadily out of the south, the bloody glare of the weird sky was changeless, and the sea lay about in a motionless desert.
The thermometer outside registered 115o, but on account of the automatic temperature control, the machine was comfortable enough, though the heat and humidity on deck were stifling.
When we had rested, we turned the bow of the Omnimobile toward the north and cruised along at a speed of four of five knots. I stood in the conning-tower at the wheel, while Sam busied himself with making an analysis of the air, and of a sample of water from the sea. Presently he came up out of the little laboratory, with his report.
“The air shows to be 31% oxygen,” he said, “and 64% helium, with the remainder a mixture of various other gases. The barometer pressure is only eleven pounds, which compensates for the excess of oxygen.
The helium is a good indication of the radioactivity which must have produced the gas overhead, since helium is one of the ultimate products of radium disintegration. The oxygen must have come largely from the breaking up of carbon dioxide by plant life.”
“Then there is life?”
“There were microscopic organisms, both animal and vegetable, in the sample of water I took. The water, by the way, carries only 1.23% solid matter, mostly sodium chloride. Less than half as much as the sea above, which has 2.7%.”
For several hours longer we moved slowly over the surface of that warm, silent sea. In all directions it lay flat as far as my eye could reach, its blue-black depths glancing with the unearthly crimson of the sky. Sam was still working in the laboratory and looking after the machinery.
And then I saw the first living thing!
My roving eye caught a tiny black speck against the gleam of the bloody sky. It was soaring, drifting slowly, like a vast bird—its motion was too irregular, I thought, to be that of a flying machine. I flung the little port open, and tried to get my binoculars upon it. It was very far away, but I made out that it was a vast, strange, winged thing. It seemed very large to be a bird. And its colors were bright—fantastic! It seemed—I was sure—that its wings were green! But it seemed to be moving faster than I had thought. I never got it clearly into focus, and suddenly it dived, and was lost beneath the horizon!
“Sam! Sam!” I called sharply. “I’ve seen something—something alive!
In a moment he was climbing up into the conning-tower, with a question on his lips. I described my confused impression of the thing as best I could, mentioning the strange colors.
“More than likely, Mel,” he said, “you wouldn’t have recognized it, even if you had seen it clearly. You could hardly expect to find life here like that we know. The chances are that evolution has taken a widely different course in here. Even the tiny things in the sea were strange to me. And in a world like this, of hot and endless day, we’re likely to find jungles with great insects and huge reptiles—a fauna and flora corresponding to that of the Carboniferous Era on the surface.”
“Then you think there is land here, trees, even men! You really think—the Green Girl?”
“That was just an idea, about the green tan. But there is sure to be land, of some sort, where the lips of this abyss curve up to meet the water above. And there is no reason why there might not be life upon it—highly developed life, at that. Life may be as old in this place as outside, perhaps older, for it has been protected from the cataclysms of one kind and another that may have swept life oil the surface again and again through the ages. And we know there is some kind of intelligence here—”
“No wonder they were willing to freeze the earth! They couldn’t tell the difference if the sea were frozen a mile thick!”
Still we held our course to the northward. Presently Sam went back below again. An hour later the horizon was broken by a line of dull blue in the north. A thin blue strip appeared between black sea and scarlet sky, and widened slowly. In another hour I could make out a wall of towering blue cliffs all across the north, rising from the sea as if to support the red sky. They were veiled in the mists of infinite distances.
When Sam had made his observations, computed his angles and completed his calculations, he announced that they were a hundred miles north of us, and met the red sky at a level four miles above us as we floated along!
That meant that we were nine miles below the level of the Pacific, according to Sam’s figures. The seat of the menace we thought to conquer was a mile below us yet!
As the hours went by, and we still went northward at our crawling pace (we went slowly because Sam thought that the use of the engines at full power would create an etheric disturbance that would reveal our position to our mysterious enemy). The jagged rim of the abyss rose steadily out of the sea. The cliffs, when I focused my powerful glasses upon them, seemed composed of sheer columns of blue rock, reaching up to meet the red roof of waters like gigantic prisms of blue basalt.
At last my searching eyes glimpsed a patch of green below the blue. A vast slope of green hills drew up out of the red-black sea. They gleamed with the pure verdant emerald of well-watered grasslands. Here and there they were marked with huge, strange splotches of purple. I was ever amazed anew at the vastness of the weird world about us.
Steadily the green and purple slopes lifted themselves out of the dark sea before us, and stretched up, through vast plains and low hills, to the sheer wall of rough blue cliffs that lay all about the north, cut off so sharply at the top by the red sky.
At last we came in view of the shore—fringed with a jungle of green and lofty forest. Huge those strange plants were, with long thick leaves, grotesque forms, and fantastic flaming blossoms! I stared at them through the binoculars. They were like nothing that is or has ever been above the sea—like nothing that I had ever seen or imagined! They were strange wild trees of another earth! Their green was weirdly tinted with purple, or with queer metallic tints of silver and bronze! Their incredibly great blooms were prolifically borne and infinitely varied, making the weird jungle an alien fairyland of bright and multicolored flame!
A fit habitat, indeed, for the monstrous things we found there!
CHAPTER XIII
The Flying Flowers
IT was several miles back of the shore to where the green grassland rose from the jungle to slope up to the cliffs of gleaming blue. I had ceaselessly searched the plains and the jungles for a sign of life or intelligence; but, so far, I had seen nothing save the weird flying monster of which I had caught a glimpse.
But suddenly a huge winged thing arose from the jungle strip! In a moment two more had joined it from the shore! In a few minutes a score of vast weird monsters were circling over the beach ahead! They were strange things, incredible, almost. I might have doubted my eyes but for Sam’s warning of the strange things we might encounter. Their colors were bright. The wings were plainly green and of a spread of many yards! They flew with slow and regular wing-beats.
It was some time before I got one focused clearly in the glasses and then I gasped in astonishment and terror at the weird creature that seemed to spring at me from the lenses. It was neither bird nor winged reptile! It was not an animal at all!
It was a winged plant!
The great flapping wings were broad and green, braced with white veins like the leaf of a plant. The long body was plated with coarse brown scales, and tapered to a green-fringed tail. Eight long blood-red tentacles dangled in pairs below the body. They were thick, and the coils of each must have measured many yards in length. Each bore at the end a single terrible claw. And instead of a head, the thing carried on the forward end—a flower! It was huge, of many petals, brightly colored! Out of the calyx were thrust three dead-black, knobbed appendages that must have been organs of sense!
It was a vast thing—unbelievable! It was as large as an airplane! It was terrible—a nightmare monster! I could scarcely believe my sight, though, after what Sam had said, I might have expected such a thing.
I do not remember calling Sam. I was too much amazed. But suddenly he climbed up beside me, and took the binoculars from my unconscious hand. With a fearful gaze, I watched him raise and focus the instrument, trying to read in his lean, tanned face the meaning of the astounding things.
I saw keen interest reflected there, surprise, intense concentration, but nothing of the strange terror I felt. A sensation of immense relief came over me, and I made a half-hearted effort to smile as he lowered the glasses and looked at me, grinning.
“Don’t let it get you, Mel,” he said. “I was expecting something of the sort—or more so. They are no more terrible than the old winged saurians, probably. At any rate, the Omnimobile can take care of herself. We’re likely to meet something worse before we’re through.”
“I hope not!” I said, piously. “But the things are plants!”
“Possibly. But the idea of animated plants is nothing new to science. The line of division between the plant and animal kingdoms is rather vague, and it seems that both developed from a common ancestor. Even today there are living things that can be classified neither as plant nor animal. Take, for instance, Euglena Viridis, the microscopic organism that colors green scum on fresh-water ponds. It is a plant, because it contains chlorophyl, and utilizes sunlight in the manufacture of food from carbon dioxide and it absorbs salts dissolved in the water. It is an animal because it can swim about very actively, and because it can absorb particles of food that it finds in the water. Carry the evolution of such a thing to the nth degree, and you have the flying things before us!”
