The sea girl

“. . . and he lived with her in a Golden Palace at the bottom of the sea . . .”

CHAPTER I.

HUMAN GIRL, OR SIREN?

The first of the mysterious sea disasters occurred in March, 1990. It did not seem important; it was given very little publicity. A small, old-fashioned freight vessel of some thirty thousand tons sank in mid-Pacific with the loss of all on board. The ship, which in its day must have been accounted a luxurious passenger liner, had, years ago, been converted to the freight trade, and its weirdly elaborate superstructure long since dismantled. Bound from San Francisco to the Island ports and Dutch East India with a cargo of manufactured foodstuffs for the eastern island markets, it had sunk unexpectedly, and for no apparent cause, at fifteen N degrees and one hundred and sixty-five degrees E, northwest of the Marshall Group.

As it happened, I was among the first to receive the call of distress. My name is Geoffry Grant. I was twenty-two years old, that spring of 1990. They say that ours is the generation of youthful achievement; even so, I think I had done fairly well, for I was chief officer then, second in command of the largest vessel of the Sub-Pacific Freighters. Our line was newly established to supersede the ancient surface vessels whose passengers were nearly all traveling by air.

We were in fourteen degrees N and one hundred and sixty-five degrees twenty minutes E, on the return voyage, with Honolulu our next port of call, running in the thirty fathom lane, when the distress signal from so near at hand reached us. It was very nearly midnight. The surface was wholly calm; the night darkly overcast with a pallid moon. We had been up at 9 p.m. answering an emergency call from one of the great passenger liners flying west. We had hung at the surface for nearly an hour, waiting for them to come along, and another hour pumping up to them the needed fuel. My superior was disgruntled. It put us late for our connections at the Hawaiians; and with our schedule demanding fifty knots there was little chance of us making it up.

I was sitting off duty, in my cabin that midnight, listening to young Arturo Plantet drooling on his violin. He was our only passenger. A queer character, this boy; wholly different, physically and temperamentally, from myself, and yet between us there existed a real affection. I am a blond, husky six-footer. Arturo, who at this time was just turned eighteen, was shorter, and almost girlishly frail.

I once heard his father, in a moment of exasperation, call him a neurotic. He was not that; he seemed indeed always perfectly healthy, with steady normal nerves. But in this world of youthful practicality, Arturo was miscast. Apparently he cared not at all for achievement. He was a dreamer by temperament, rather than a doer. Of sharpened, poetic sensibilities, he seemed content to live in a world of fancy of his own creating, watching our busy, bustling realities pass him by. A pale, romantic-looking boy, his face beautiful rather than handsome; dark, lustrous, expressive eyes, with heavy girlish lashes; a mouth large, with sensitive girlish lips, and a shock of raven-black, wavy hair.

Yet there was nothing effeminate about Arturo Plantet. His firm chin saved him from that. His voice was soft, yet strongly masculine. I have seen his big eyes fill up with unbidden tears at a jibe from his father; but he was never petulant, and when angered or hurt, a very manly dignity sat upon him.

Nor was he lacking in a manly physical courage. He cared nothing for athletics. He could have been, I am sure, a champion swimmer—he seemed to take to the water naturally, and swam and dived like a little dolphin; but he would not train, nor enter any contests; he disdained them. But I remember that when he was fifteen, his older sister, Polly, was once endangered in the rapids of a Canadian stream. Against all reason Arturo leaped into it and saved her, with a resulting broken leg and arm.

Such was Arturo Plantet, who now sat in my cabin with his interminable violin. He was always very silent; often I wondered what fancies were drifting behind those brooding dark eyes. This ineffectual dreamer!

Yet our busy, practical world of science—so far removed from dreams—was destined soon to be plunged into a turmoil with Arturo playing a leading, if unknown and unappreciated part. Strange commentary! And I think that I am not wholly without a strain of romance myself, for it affects me strongly to look back upon it.

“What? Oh, yes, I suppose so. Aren’t you going to bed, Arturo? That accursed liner—I don’t know why they can’t guard against things like that—puts us two hours late. We’ll be fully that long making Pearl Harbor. The old man’s furious.”

“Is he? I say, this is a fugue of my own invention, Jeff. Listen how I weave in the two voices.”

I rang up our chief engineer to see what he thought of the chances; it would be too bad, on this our third voyage, to be late. The London office would score us.

And then Randall came running down the passage outside. I caught his words: “The Malaysia’s sinking! We’re nearest to her—”

The old man rang my bell; I was ordered up to the control tower. Randall was telling some one in the passage: “That finishes our schedule, all right; we’ll be all night on this job.”

“Surface vessel,” Randall called after us. “An old roamer. She’s sinking, they don’t know why. Piled to the funnels with cargo; she’ll go down like a stone. They ought to keep those old traps in the rivers—”

He told us. Less than a degree and a half away, north by west, well off our course. Already we were swinging, and mounting to the surface.

Arturo stuck to my elbow. He was always unobtrusive. The old man allowed him the run of the ship, partly because he liked the boy, and also because of Dr. Plantet’s influence and the considerable investment he had made when our line was financed.

Arturo was excited and awed. The sea held for him a curious fascination. It did for me also, but in a wholly different way. To me the sea was primarily a world of mechanisms; of mathematical charts, schedules to be maintained; a scientific business to be handled with skillful exactitude.

To Arturo it seemed still to be a world of fairy romance, or a mighty monster in its anger. To his eyes its surface still held scudding ships of ancient fashion; argosies sailing hopefully over the storm-lashed waves toward unknown shining harbors. Or, again, his fancy saw a realm of monsters, hideous, fearsome things of the deeps, coming up to frighten the sturdy mariners of old; or oceanids disporting themselves on the beaches of desert islands; sirens with soft luring voices. Or sea horses, racing the Ægean waves with the car of Poseidon. A fairy world of dreams. To him our throbbing steel mechanisms were the unrealities, the anachronisms.

He was wildly excited now at the shipwreck call. But there was nothing to see; nothing to hear. The one hurried signal that Randall had picked up was the last.

We reached the scene and cruised the surface. A litter of wreckage floating in a wan moonlight on an oily sea. We dived as far as we dared. But even under our brilliant lights there was nothing significant to be seen. The Malaysia had gone on down. We were not far from the Marshall ridge here, but there were still several thousand fathoms down to this floor of the great Pacific basin. The Malaysia had gone, and we could not follow her.

This was the first of the many queer things that happened that spring and summer of 1990. I find them difficult to set down in any logical sequence, for at the time they seemed to have no logic. There were several other unaccountable sea disasters to surface vessels. A whaler, with its attendant searching wasp planes loaded on its landing stage, was cruising south of the Aleutians, coming back to Skagway. It never reached there—never was heard from again. As though in the old days, before any of the aërial or underwater communications were perfected, it merely vanished.

Again, there was another old roamer like the Malaysia. It was at fifteen degrees N, south of the Hawaiians. It sent out one startled call: “Sinking—no reason.” It was gone before help could reach it. And, like the Malaysia, none of its lifeboats were found, no life rafts; none of its safety devices put to any use; no single person found alive or dead upon the scene of its sinking.

There was at first little newspaper or radio comment. The public news organizations were engrossed with the “Yellow Peril” complications. The Yellow War, so recently passed, had its aftermath of bitterness, mingled with the cupidity which was rapidly forcing a renewal of commerce. The “mysterious sea disasters” passed with a cursory comment.

The air lines made more of them. In April, the great Trans-Pacific Aircraft Corporation began a broadcasted inquiry into the dangers of ocean travel. It was propaganda solely; and suddenly several of the world governments shut down upon it.

The subject, quite naturally, was of vital interest to our company. There were two vessels lost in March; two in April; and in May no less than six. All surface ships, slow, old-fashioned freighters, food-laden. And, what interested us most, all were lost in the Pacific, or its fringing seas.

By this time there would normally have been a very great world comment. I wondered why there was not, and did not dream until afterward that by April the whole subject was under strict government censorship, with all publicity forbidden.

By May, the surface lines were gradually withholding their Pacific sailings. Our line was rushed, overloaded with business. There was, with us, considerable official perturbation. I knew it, though we were strictly forbidden aboard ship to mention it. Our directors were frightened, especially when Lloyds and the Amalgamated Marine Underwriters raised our insurance, though as yet no submersible anywhere had met with disaster, or even with any unusual occurrence.

And then, in June, one of our largest vessels, sister ship of the one on which I had my post, left Guam and, apparently, headed into the Nero Deep and stayed there! It brought consternation to us all. I was ashore at the time, visiting Dr. Plantet with Arturo and Polly in their home on the Maine coast. A radio came to me from our New York office; my ship would sail once more, and then be laid up until further notice.

With these events from March to June, there were intermingled throughout the world a hundred others which afterward I was to realize as significant. But they did not seem so at the time.

An unusual volcanic activity was reported almost simultaneously from several different quarters. Etna burst forth with a cloud of steam; harmless; unexplained—a puzzle to the scientists. Fuji, so long dormant, began rumbling, threw Japan into a panic, flung up a cloud of smoke and gas which whitened into steam. The craters of the Hawaiians were everywhere steaming. The geysers of Western America were abnormally powerful in their action; the New Zealand hot springs were suddenly, unnaturally active.

An earthquake occurred under the mid-Atlantic; a wave of tidal proportions inundated the coasts of Africa and the Americas.

Scores of such reports following one upon the heels of the other from widely scattered localities indicated a general, unexplainable disturbance of nature. A wind storm out of season; rainfall in another quarter, unduly severe. Rivers were too high, or abnormally low. And the tides were wrong; countless small news dispatches, even back at the beginning of 1990, mentioned the surprising abnormality of local tides.

None of it was significant of anything; like a puzzle wherein one fits together odd pieces, with the key piece missing. The tides, they said—I quote the words of one popular newscaster of scientific matters: “The tides are all wrong. The moon must have become a lunatic. The astronomers had better look into the matter.”

The tides, if one cared to summarize all the various conflicting reports, were everywhere disturbed; too high a flow; too low an ebb. Everywhere they were growing steadily lower. Harbors and channels were losing depth. Reefs and bars and harbor shoals, which last year were covered at high water, this year were never covered. High tides everywhere were not quite high enough, while low tides, all over the world, were breaking all previous records.

By June there was much comment on this. Most of it, outside of shipping circles, was jocular. What of it? The age of air was upon us; who cared what the water was doing, except possibly the fishermen?

Had there been no censorship, authentic scientific analysis of conditions would very soon have stopped all levity. It did stop, on July 18, when Dr. Plantet prevailed upon the world governments to make the matter fully public.

That last voyage of mine in June was without incident, save one. It was witnessed only by myself and Arturo; one occurrence, most significant of all that had preceded it. Arturo had made half a dozen voyages with me. He loved the sea. He would have none of air travel, nor surface sailing; but the sub-sea seemed to hold a lure for him. Hours at a time he would sit by my elbow at the tower window, gazing forward into the glow of our headlight.

I wondered why Dr. Plantet let him go on this last voyage, which, at best, seemed hazardous. I was not present in their Maine coast home when Arturo parted from his father and Polly; but when he and I left the Continental Air-Liner at San Francisco and boarded my ship, Arturo made one comment:

“Father wants me to stay in the tower with you all I can, Jeff. He is fearfully interested in this thing—how much so, well you’ll know when we get back. He’s worried; so very busy!”

I too had seen a change in Dr. Plantet these last months; a harassed look, a gray, haggard aspect of worry, or perhaps overwork. Though what he, a retired surgeon of forty-five, a student of oceanography as his chosen hobby, would be working at, I could no more than guess.

Arturo knew, perhaps, but beyond that one comment he said nothing of it to me. He was more silent than ever, this voyage. A grim, intent eagerness seemed possessing him. A dark flush was on his usually pale cheeks. A trembling eagerness it was. It showed itself in his smoldering dark eyes; a quiver in his voice, so that any one who did not know, might have thought that fear was upon him.

He sat with me throughout every watch, peering into the white headlight beam. Green depths of water surged at us; a fish occasionally surprised by our light, darted away. So little to see, and nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing—until that night in Micronesia, west of the Marshalls. We were, I think, about ten degrees N., one hundred and fifty-eight degrees E.—it had been some hours since I had checked our exact position. Arturo and I were at the forward tower bull’s-eye. Nothing to see save green speeding water. And then, abruptly, it flashed at us—a dim, illumined something in the ocean far ahead, flashing forward as we sped seemingly directly at it.

The lookout’s voice in the bow-hood sounded simultaneously from the speaker beside us.

And a duplicate of the engine-room bells, and automatic warnings to the control operators sounded. In the mirror overhead I saw reflected the startled faces of the two men in the control tower; saw them throwing over the wheels.

We turned to port and slanted upward to the surface; so sudden a change that the ship listed perceptibly. An instant only. The whole thing was so swift at our fifty knot speed that in an instant the hovering thing had come—and passed. But we saw it, the vision of it distinctly registered upon our startled minds.

A dim, illumined something far ahead of us, glowing as the bow light picked it up. It grew, in seconds, to something round: a globe twenty feet in diameter perhaps. Metallic? I think so. It glowed darkly luminous and smooth in our light. A globular thing, with projections as though it might have been some monster sea-spider, risen from the deeps, resting up here near the surface with crooked, folded legs.

I recall my instant, fleeting impressions. A thing solid, metallic, mechanical. A lurking thing of a strange, sinister aspect—a thing diabolical. It flashed off sidewise and down as we turned, a darkly shining globe with a great round white spot on it like an eye!

Arturo showed unexpected presence of mind. He reached with one hand for the telescope range-finder; and with the other for a stern searchlight, and trained them both upon the fleeing object now passing under our keel.

The telescope image showed for an instant in the mirror on a shelf before us as Arturo flung on the current. An enlarged image of a convex window, like glass, transparent with a dim green light behind it. A face was there at the window. Human? I do not know. But it showed in that momentary impression the face of a young girl. Lurid, ghastly with the green glow upon it. Beautiful? Perhaps that. Or weird, unearthly. I recall the intent staring eyes, the parted lips, as though with labored, frightened breathing. A startled face, framed in a tangle of tresses. But it was more than just startled. Those staring green eyes! I met them full, in the mirror.

An instant. Then the face, the image in our mirror, was gone. I reached up and snapped off the current. My fingers were trembling.

He was sitting very still, staring blankly as though the vision of that face was still before him.

CHAPTER II.

“COMING UP, FROM UNDER THE SEA!”

The lookouts had seen the globe; even the old man, on his emergency mirrors in his cabin, had caught a brief glimpse of it. He stopped us at the surface. There was nothing up there; a calm, empty moonlit tropic sea, with nothing in sight except the lights of a distant passing liner ten thousand feet or so overhead.

We dived, and cruised around, from fifty fathoms to the surface. But there was nothing to be seen.

I think that none but Arturo and myself had caught the vision of that girl’s face. We did not mention it. Arturo pleaded earnestly:

“Don’t, Jeff. Father would rather you did not, I’m sure. We’ll tell him, let him inform the proper authorities.”

I was determined, in the interests of my superiors, that our director-general should know as soon as I reached New York. But that was no reason for spreading it aboard ship.

It was the only abnormal incident of that last voyage. Naturally it left me wondering, as if here were the key-piece to all these scattered happenings.

A thousand vague conjectures, romantic, fearsome, surged within me. Ships drawn under. Ships, always food-laden. And queerly hovering in my mind was the persisting crazy impression of that girl’s tangled tresses—like seaweed. I found myself waking up one night from a dream. A girl with glowing green eyes, and tangled flowing tresses like seaweed, was singing softly; and the song swept me with a trembling desire.

Arturo was more silent than ever for the rest of the voyage. I tried to discuss the thing with him. He shut me up sharply.

We were on time picking up the channel lights of our home port. Following close along the bottom, we cruised in between the two beacons of the twenty-fathom depth. The old man was beside me. He gestured toward our beacon chart.

“Those lights, Jeff, are at twenty fathoms, low tide. You and I know it as well as we know our names. But look at them!”

We were passing level with the caisson. Twenty fathoms! This was low tide now, and it did not need the special danger bulletins which had been flashed to us at every port all the way from Java, to warn us that something was wrong. Twenty fathoms? There were barely ten!

Arturo and I transshipped to the continental passenger liner; and again at New York we took the Rekjavik Local Mail, with first stop at Portland. Polly met us at the Portland landing stage.

“I’ve our plane here. Come on.” She kissed Arturo and gave me her hand. “You’re safe! We’ve been rather worried, until we got your landing message.”

Arturo’s sister was a year older than he—at this time, nineteen. As different from Arturo as a sister well could be. She was a practical little person; there was nothing of the ineffectual dreamer about Polly Plantet. They were distant relatives of mine, and I had known Polly since she was ten. We called her then, “Roly Poly”; a chunky little girl, with a round moon-face and long chestnut curls. I recall how she hated the nickname; but, instead of crying, she dashed at us boys, fighting us with flailing little fists.

At nineteen her “moon-face” had lengthened; but it was still solidly practical.

Her figure was not chunky now, but even the most lavish flatterer would never have called her willowy. A solidly wholesome, determined little thing this Polly Plantet. Quiet of demeanor, purposeful, yet withal tempered by a feminine softness. In stature she was something around five feet. Vigorously healthy, she seemed to me the very personification of healthy, normal young womanhood.

Dr. Plantet’s wife had died when Arturo still was in infancy. They had lived then in Martinique, where the children were born. A mixed heritage: Dr. Plantet Anglo-Saxon—his wife Latin, with both French and Spanish mingled in her. Polly was so like her father that one could never mistake them, while Arturo was romantically Latin.

Motherless, Arturo had found in Polly almost a mother. Dr. Plantet was by nature intolerant of human failings, or so at least it always seemed to me. He did not understand his son, and to Polly went, if not his greatest love, certainly all the understanding comradeship of their daily life.

But Polly understood her brother. The essential, womanly softness of the girl’s nature showed at its best with Arturo. Only a year older in age, she was vastly older in maturity. She was at once, to him, a sister and a mother; and a buffer between him and his father.

A little diplomat, Polly knew when to lead, rather than drive. No one could drive Dr. Plantet; nor Arturo either, for that matter—it was almost the only quality which he and his father had in common. Yet they loved each other deeply, of that I am sure.

Polly led us from the Portland landing stage, down the spider incline of moving pedestrian lanes to the lower stage where the private vehicles were stalled. Our luggage had preceded us in the chutes.

“We’ve been worried, Jeff. A hundred times father regretted letting Arturo go.”

“Yes, boy dear—you went. It was foolhardy; Jeff’s directors should never have taken the chance.”

We climbed into the small plane which Polly had brought; the guards shot us off. It was 1 a.m. of the night of July 15-16. A warm, flawless night of brilliant stars, with the last quarter moon not yet risen. We darted up from the clanking Portland terminal like a humming wasp, and headed northeast along the coast.

I went back to Polly’s last remark. “There seemed no danger, Polly; we saw nothing unusual. Except—”

“I’ll tell her,” he said. He told her. Simply, unemotionally—with so queer a lack of emotion that it seemed a mask. She made no comment. She, too, seemed abnormally restrained. And upon us all presently descended a silence; to me, an oppression—a sense of fear. Yet it was not exactly that either; rather the feeling of something strange crowding about us, something unknown.

These queer world events; this impending something—unnatural, uncanny—crowding us now, making us silent as though we feared to hear the voicing of our own thoughts. There were millions of people in the world these days who laughed and scoffed and thought it a jest that the tides were wrong, and vessels were disappearing; and who would have said, had we told them we had seen a girl’s face within a globe floating in the ocean depths, that we were drunk, or dreaming that Homer had come to life again with modern trimmings.

But there were others, I am sure, millions of them, who felt uneasy, with panic hovering at hand. Like the presage of a fearsome, unseen storm below the horizon, there was something in the air all over the world. Crowding at us—something very strange, perhaps diabolical.

And it had marked Dr. Plantet. I could see that at once, this night, far more clearly than the previous month, by his harassed, almost haggard look; the surprising and, in him, unnatural, warmth and tenderness of greeting as he put an arm about Arturo’s shoulders and welcomed him home; his solemn, almost grim manner as he listened to what we had seen, there under the water in Micronesia.

“I’ve something to tell you, Jeff. Arturo and Polly understand a good deal of it, but not all. It is clear now, this thing we’ve got to face. I’ve persuaded the authorities to make it public.

“The world must know—must face it. We cannot be ostriches with our heads buried in the sand. Polly, have Frantzen carry down the luggage and run in the plane; and then bring us out some lunch. We’ll sit out here. It’s too hot inside.”

We sat in a small stone bower on the shore front, with the stars over us, banks of flowers and ferns heaped around us; and, ahead, the open sea. The moon was just rising over the distant ocean horizon—a flattened, spoon-shaped crescent, hugely yellow. It flung a golden path toward us over the lazy, breathing sea. A strip of beach, golden in the moonlight, lay at our feet, with grim frowning rocks and headlands to the sides.

Nature as it used to be! There were no aërials in sight here, no landing stages; nothing of our modernity to remind one of a world mechanical with trees and grass and the moon almost forgotten. Yet even so, at our feet the disturbed world of 1990 obtruded. The strip of beach was naked of water; it sloped out and down to a rocky, slimy shelf, plunged steeply another twenty feet down to where the fallen ocean lapped at it. And in the moonlight the outer rocks and headlands stood queerly high, misshaped of aspect.

To me, with the oppression of spirit upon me, the sight was suddenly ugly—huge darkened teeth upstanding with gums receded to expose the spreading roots!

Dr. Plantet had been talking quietly. Now, indeed, I understood in a measure what he had been through these past weeks. A man, still vigorously young in his forties, though to-night one would have said he was fully fifty or more. He was a vigorous, stocky figure of a man; rather short, exceedingly muscular, with wide shoulders and a deep chest. A solid face, smooth-shaved, with deep-set gray eyes, and sparse brown hair graying at the temples. It was a kindly face. There was much to like in Dr. Plantet if one did not oppose him. But it was a stern face; harsh when stirred to anger.

At forty, wealthy by inheritance, he had given up his career of surgeon at the height of his national fame. He had always loved the sea; in his student twenties he had served as surgeon on one of the last of the old-fashioned passenger ships. Oceanography had always been his hobby; to explore the ocean depths was one of his dreams. Illogical in his intolerance of Arturo? I always thought so; indeed, I had once heard Polly tell him so, in Arturo’s absence. But she could not make him see it.

He told us now what he had been doing these past weeks. Consulting with the scientists of the world governments; analyzing the conflicting world reports.

Ah, so much had happened, kept from all publicity! A huge secret meeting of scientists from all the world governments had been held last week in London. Dr. Plantet had been there. This thing that had been growing upon them all for weeks, now was obvious. The world would have to be told, and preparations made to meet the new conditions—to fight!

Dr. Plantet, essentially the fighter, must have played a leading part in this final discussion, forcing them to his views. It was growing upon me gradually as he talked. The strangeness of it, the strange, weird fear of it.

“Fight—what?” I ventured. I glanced at Arturo, a slim young figure in white, with flowing white sleeves. He sat, chin cupped in his hands, with knees hunched up; in his intent white face, his dark dreaming eyes were gazing off at the rising moon. He seemed not to be thinking of his father’s words, but dreaming dreams of his own.

“The newscaster from Melbourne has been on the air—I’ve been listening to him. Father, they keep on making a joke of it! They’ve seen a mermaid on a desert island beach in Micronesia!”

Arturo turned silently. Dr. Plantet said: “Did they give the position? What sort of mermaid? Who reported it?”

“Yes; they gave an island at nine degrees thirty minutes N, one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. I looked it up. There’s an unnamed island there, the tiniest of dots on the chart. Uninhabited—an atoll I imagine, of a few acres.”

Dr. Plantet took some of the food; but I noticed that his hand was unsteady. Arturo gestured the tray away and sat brooding.

Polly was saying: “A mermaid! A passing fishing roamer saw it at dawn a week ago. They didn’t speak of it officially on the air, but yesterday, when they got back to Suva, the sailors told of it. A mermaid, sitting on the coral beach before the dawn, braiding her seaweed hair! They saw her, from miles away with the glasses. The ship had no electric image-finders. But they saw her sitting there. And some of the sailors swear that in the silence of the dawn they could hear her singing, but that’s nonsense. I suppose the master had official instructions to avoid such a thing, so he kept on going and did not land. The sailors, some of them, were frightened. But others wanted to land and capture the mermaid. Can you imagine—superstitious ignorant men in this day and age!”

She was breathlessly excited. A mermaid, on a desert, south sea beach, sitting braiding her seaweed hair, singing to the sailors of a passing ship. The world was laughing at the tale.

Arturo said, very quietly: “You’d better tell us, father, what is going to be done. Jeff doesn’t understand fully yet.”

The tray of food stood neglected. Dr. Plantet lighted a cigarette and sat back apparently relaxed. He spoke quietly, at first precisely, as though carefully choosing his words to my understanding; but there was in his voice a grim sense of power, and his burning eyes clung steadily to my face.

“Jeff, this is no new thing to me. This culmination is, I grant; I had never thought of actually living to see it. But the possibility. Jeff, for years I have been studying what, in popular language, they call ‘our unknown earth.’ What lies within our globe. Beneath the surface of our seas, that we know. But deeper still—beyond, beneath the ocean bottom—then what? Some six miles it is, Jeff, from the summit of Mount Everest to the ocean level. And another six miles to the abyss of the Nero Deep. Twelve miles or so. What is that? Our globe has eight thousand miles of interior. We humans have brought a scant twelve miles within our ken. Twelve miles out of eight thousand. Infinitesimal. It sounds incredible—but it is true. And yet some of us think we know something about our world. We do not—for most of it is as unknown to us as the moon.

“These vast oceans, this hydrosphere of ours, embraces nearly three-quarters of the earth’s surface. You know its mean depth is not much over two miles. We think of these oceans as tremendous—this gigantic layer of water, so enormous of volume. It is not. On an orange it would represent an uneven skin thin as tissue paper. Compared to the wholly unknown interior volume of our earth, that’s all it is—a film-layer of water, like tissue paper on an orange. Insects, crawling on the tissue wrapping—what do they know of the orange?”

He gestured again. “You see what I’m getting at, Jeff? Our oceans are receding. The volume of water in them, compared to the volume of the earth, is very small. It is receding—vanishing. But where could it go? The last geodetic survey, Jeff, was startling. It helped to show enormous errors in several physical facts about the earth which for a century have been accepted as true. Yet, for twenty years now, astronomers and physicists have known that the calculated density of our earth does not check, within the limits of a tremendous probable error, with the earth’s volume, or its mass, or its gravitational force.

“Something is wrong. All the figures, when one set of calculations is checked against another, seem wrong. We know it. And, as I pointed out to them in London last week—with present-day facts to prove it—the Granthin-Morley theories of 1960, scoffed at as they were, hit the truth. If our earth were a wholly solid globe, or nearly so as we have chosen to consider it, with a liquid core of molten rock perhaps—if it were that, with the volume as we know it to be, its total mass would be far greater than our figures show. But the mass we know to be a true figure. The calculated total volume is correct. The gravitational force cannot be questioned. What then is wrong? The density! One-tenth of our globe’s volume, at the very least, must be empty space! A honeycomb perhaps.”

Dr. Plantet sat up abruptly. “Jeff, there is in Holland a fellow named De Boer. He is, I think, the most eminent geologist we have to-day. He stood up last week and told them that our outer core, from the surface of the earth to a depth of a hundred miles, must be honeycombed. And Dr. Jaeger, of the Hawaiian Research Bureau of Vulcanology, supported him. Ah, now you are beginning to understand, Jeff!”

I was, indeed! This thing, so strange! Yet so logical, inevitable, that I could wonder how in all these æons of our earth’s history it had never happened before.

“Yes. Not a question of tides—no tiny disturbed fluctuations. A general receding. There are nearly ten fathoms gone now—half of it within the last week. Pearl Harbor is nearly empty, since you left it! A narrow channel, nothing more. Did you get a look at New York harbor? And here at our feet—The whole world is wondering, Jeff. But they are keeping it off the air, and out of the newsprints. The people think—most of those who have the intelligence to think at all—that it must be local. These crazy tides!”

He waved away that angle of it with a gesture. “Where is the water going? We do not know, but we can imagine. This tissue paper layer of water is receding doubtless into the vast honeycombed interior of our hundred-mile core. They’ll say, ‘Why, this is very strange. It never happened before, why should it happen now?’”

His voice was edged with sarcasm. “How do we know it never happened before? Our little human knowledge embraces a few thousand years out of the hundreds of millions of our globe’s life history. Indeed, we do know that the ocean level has never stayed the same. Perhaps, over æons of time, the oceans rise and fall—empty and refill like a shallow cove with its tides. And this is only the same thing done suddenly. An earthquake, early this year perhaps, at the bottom of one of our ocean basins, opened a rift to let the water down. Dr. Jaeger thinks it may possibly have been that—the seismographic records show three such disturbances last winter. Whatever it is, the fact is here upon us. The public is going to be told, to-morrow or the next day. The oceans are emptying of water! It may stop any day. Or it may go on—completely to empty them! It may take years—centuries. Or it may continue quickly, more quickly than ever, until all the ocean beds are dry!”

He did not pause; he smiled his ironic smile. “The public will be thrilled! But not when they stop to think about it. The newscasters will picture the great new realm of land. Three times as much land as we already know. Geography suddenly expanded. A rolling desert of lowlands from New York to London! Mountains and valleys down there. Land, sloping down from the heights of New York—over the new desert regions we have called the North Atlantic, up again to the heights which were the British Isles. It will be so thrilling! What wonders may be exposed. Ah, but they won’t be so joyfully thrilled when the reality comes.

“I heard last week a score of meteorologists give an opinion—and not one of them could agree on what it will do to us! What change to our rainfall? Our springs? Our fresh-water supply? Dr. Jaeger stood on the rostrum; and we asked him what might happen. At this present moment the pit of Kilauea, Mauna Loa, Haleakala—all of them out there—are throwing up steam instead of lava and rock. The volcanic disturbance seems greatest in the Pacific—Etna is quiet to-day. We asked Jaeger if that would continue. Or grow worse. Would there be devastating earthquakes? He answered us very simply. The words of a truly great man, Jeff. He said: ‘I do not know.’”

There was a brief silence. Arturo had not moved; he still sat moodily staring over the moonlit, fallen ocean. Polly sat breathless, with parted lips, her eyes upon her father. Her hand touched his knee.

The questions had been trembling within me. The ships that disappeared; this thing we had seen in the ocean; this mermaid they said they had seen on a South Sea beach.

Dr. Plantet’s voice took a graver tone. “Ah, that!” He turned from Polly, to me. “Jeff, we humans, as we call ourselves, have been living for a few thousand years out of millions of centuries. We occupy and know only a tiny fraction of our globe. Yet we have the temerity to assume that what we do not see, does not exist. Other beings are here—human of form, like ourselves. They do exist! Doubtless in the last few thousand years since we came—from them perhaps—to inhabit the surface, they have forgotten us. But now they have remembered—discovered us.”

His voice took on a sudden vehemence. “This is theory, speculation—call it what you will. But they couldn’t face me down in London—there is too much evidence. It’s nothing new to me, Jeff; I’ve always been speculating on it. Do you suppose that all the legends of our primitive peoples are founded upon nothing? It is not reasonable. From whence sprang the idea of a world of gods? Supermen. Beautiful women. The oceanids? Sea-nymphs—mermaids—beautiful sea-maidens because that was our human sex instinct to picture them that way. The gods—Titans—the personification of beautiful, virile manhood—that, the picture of them, was a human instinct, too, the outlet of primitive fancies, half fearful, half poetic.

“But from whence came the basis of it? All legends of every one of our ancient peoples—all of them picture unknown beings, here with us upon our earth. Too universal to be a coincidence! Some of us say: ‘Why, those ignorant ancients saw the dugongs, with breasts like women, and called them women of the sea! Or saw seals, and thought them mermaids.’ It may be so—but it hardly explains so universal a similarity of legends.

“For myself, I prefer to think that throughout the ages, this other race, this other civilization, has made occasional contact with ours. Perhaps their own legends tell of a great ethereal world of brightness with strange men like gods. Occasional, inevitable contact. You and Arturo saw what? A mermaid? If you had lived a few thousand years ago you might have built a legend around her—and sung some immortal song in her praise. Ah, Jeff, we have not advanced very far! They saw a mermaid on a beach in Micronesia last week; and if we let them alone—though this is 1990, Jeff—the newscasters would presently blaze out with doggerel verse about her. Where is the difference?”

My head was whirling with it. Not his sarcastic gibes—but this thing, incredible, but proved by every detail of what had already happened. Facts not to be denied. Diversified happenings, so reasonless until the key piece was supplied! Ships drawn under. Ships, always food-laden.

Dr. Plantet was saying: “They’re coming out, Jeff, these people of our vague legends. I conceive possibly—and Jaeger and De Boer agreed with me—that this sudden subterranean outlet of our oceans is not necessarily from a natural disturbance. Perhaps these other humans—they must at least be human, our ancestors perhaps, and I think probably more advanced than ourselves—perhaps they have found the water a barrier and have planned to drain it away.

“There is a clear connection in every fact we have observed, Jeff. They are under the Pacific Ocean undoubtedly. Coming up to steal our ships for the food they contain! They have done that. But what worse will they do? Come up when the water is drained, and attack us? I think so. I think even now they may be coming, with what strange devices to conquer the ocean depths—and to conquer us—we can only guess. Coming up to conquer for their own uses the bright ethereal realm of their legends! I believe that is what is going on down there now! And we must prepare for it. I’ve told our governments so, and they see that it is a fact. The world public will know it by day after to-morrow. The strangest danger that ever has threatened us. No use trying to avoid it. No sense in trying to explain away facts which nothing else can explain. You can’t say ‘This is too strange, it cannot happen.’ That’s childish, because it is happening. The greatest menace in our history is upon us!”

CHAPTER III.

TWO THOUSAND FATHOMS!

I find it difficult to convey a picture of those following days. Upon so large a canvas as our great, diversified world surface, the few futile strokes I can give must leave most of all to the imagination. What fragments came within my limited knowledge I can tell as they recur to me. No one could grasp it as a whole, except those in authority, flanked with their busy scientific staffs, poring over endless reports, charts, summaries of world conditions and the myriad of diversified world happenings—abnormal, startling, fearful some of them; wide-flung events seemingly so unrelated, but each making up its tiny portion of the whole.

We got them there in Dr. Plantet’s home at Sea End hourly from the newscasters. Ten fathoms of water gone from the oceans, harbors dry, rivers tumbling down new waterfalls where once had been the river’s mouth. A hundred local items of emptied water fronts, fishing vessels stranded in the harbor mud, canals being closed everywhere to traffic.

A lurid, dramatic broadcasted advertisement by the Associated Bureau of World Air Commerce: “Schedules changed to meet new conditions. Air lines to the rescue! Stranded island and coast ports to be given air traffic. A thousand new local ships to be commissioned at once.” An ad by the great Dayton builders, requiring additional men for the night shifts.

Hundreds of such things. Newscasters by the hour recited dry statistics of harbor depths, local climate changes, routine weather reports, a learned, somewhat pessimistic summary of the world’s fresh water supplies. A company organized to drill, wholesale, for artesian wells. A panic in the hot spring area of New Zealand. A spouting geyser reported bursting into existence in the Soudan desert. Etna and Vesuvius quiet—the Pacific volcanoes all spouting steam.

The newscaster’s voice came day and night from our receiving grid. The tape clicked beside it, an endless stream of recorded events.

An exodus of people from the Gaspé fishing region; signs of a growing tendency to panic throughout all the South Seas; a Japanese mandate that none must travel from one island to another; an iceberg coming down far below the normal summer limit of drift in the North Pacific; ocean currents disturbed; a prognostication of what the new rainfall might be in various localities.

“Rot!” snorted Dr. Plantet. “They do not know—there is no one who knows anything about it!”

The British Isles were perturbed. There was much learned discussion concerning the Gulf Stream. Without it the cold of an almost Arctic winter would settle upon London. They had always been perturbed over the precious Gulf Stream, these Britishers. I recall reading that three-quarters of a century ago some of them had been bothered by the Yankee railroad from Florida to Key West. And when the additional road causeways were completed there was more British comment, claiming that the Gulf Stream was influenced adversely to effect the mild British winters. Nonsense, of course. But they had real cause now to be worried.

With my company giving me definite leave, I was free these days to remain with the Plantets. Dr. Plantet seemed to want me. He hinted that he would need me for some rôle in this world drama that I might play to advantage. He no more than hinted at it; but I waited, eagerly to welcome it.

We spent most of our time at the air speakers. Polly was excited, tense with it all. Arturo said almost nothing. I was too engrossed at the time to remark him closely. But I recall that queer aspect of brooding; an absorption in his own queer thoughts; a moodiness. He seemed, often, to want solitude.

I would miss him from the instrument room, finding him perhaps sitting on the shore front, where, far out on a slimy, descending slope, the ocean lapped a full seventy feet from where it should have been. A graceful, slim figure of a boy with gentility stamped in every line of him; a romantic little figure, like Raleigh, the boy, Sir Walter, sitting at the ocean’s edge, brooding, dreaming his own dreams with the lure of the sea upon him.

Looking back upon it the comparison strikes me. But at the time I recall I was annoyed with Arturo. He impressed me as rather sullen—a spoiled, sullen boy. Dr. Plantet had one evening said something with an edge to it—some trivial thing, unimportant; and Arturo had flushed with a deep, angry flush—and with quivering lip, had left the house. It was hours before he returned.

We had had numerous world reports that evening of vital interest—especially to any normal young man. But Arturo barely glanced at the printed tape lying in the basket; and wholly without interest sat in a shadowed corner of the room. It hurt Dr. Plantet—himself so actively plunged now into this coming crisis of the world’s history—hurt him that he should sire a son like this.

My picture seems confused. In that quality it approximates the reality, for these days of July, 1990, were indeed a confusion.

Dr. Plantet was away for a day several times. Always, while at home, for hours at a time he was shut up alone in the instrument room, talking to New York or London; consulting. A stream of incoming official calls demanded him. I heard him once when he had left the audible speaker connected—heard him being questioned regarding the progress of his ship; and he had replied that already the successful casting had been made in the Norfolk shops.

“He’ll tell you presently, Jeff. You—look here, Jeff, that reminds me.” She put her hands up to my shoulders, holding me to face her. Dear little Polly, so earnest! Her brown eyes were glowing with her earnestness. “Jeff, when father tells you, I want you to persuade him that I am in it, too. You will, won’t you?”

“He’ll tell you. He, and you of course, and Arturo—but also myself! There are to be four—I heard him say that. And I want to be the fourth.”

I answered her seriously, as I knew she desired. “I can’t promise that, Polly, until I know what it is.”

It was nearly the end of July before Dr. Plantet told me of his plans. During all these July days of confusion there had been no further sign of any human enemy menacing our world. Surface traffic by sea had everywhere been discontinued nor were any submersibles in service. The oceans were abandoned, while a tremendous activity on the part of all aircraft organizations was manifest everywhere.

No sign of an enemy. There had been minor panics among the publics of the Eastern Islands; but the fear there was gradually waning. And in the Western world, comparatively remote from the scene of the threat, the idea of a human enemy whom no one had ever seen, was derided. It was best perhaps. There is nothing more dangerous than panic.

But officially there was no derision. Official activities were more or less secret; rumors of them leaked out, of course, while bulletins distorted the facts to what officialdom considered was for the public good. But through Dr. Plantet’s activities I was made aware of much that was going on. The “Yellow Peril” was lost and forgotten. All the world’s governments were working together. The huge armored aircrafts were being recommissioned. Men were being drilled. The Yellow War, with all its main battles fought in the air, had given a tremendous stimulus to aviation, and all the devices which it had developed for dealing death were being made ready anew.

Underocean warfare was a thing of the distant past. But that, too, was being resuscitated. I heard that they were building armored submersibles. A Brazilian engineer, one Lopez, came suddenly into prominence with his claim for an underwater death-dealing ray.

They brought forth from the United States Navy Yard shops, new models of the ancient ocean bombs, called mines—things that could be electrically exploded. And tiny traveling bomb-ships called torpedoes.

One of these latter was tested off Hatteras. In Dr. Plantet’s instrument room we sat watching the test as it showed on one of his receiving mirrors. It was broadcasted over the world—I suppose fifty million or more people must have been watching it as we were. We had a good view; they had the finder on a small plane which circled back and forth. We saw the small submersible, awash at the surface, shoot out the torpedo. It came up like a child’s toy, and then dived a few feet. It traveled swiftly; we could follow its progress by the tiny aërial projecting up from it, cleaving the surface like the periscope of an old-fashioned sub-marine. It sped straight for its target—a small vessel they had towed out and left drifting. There was a dull, muffled report—we heard it plainly over the audiphone—and a heave of the water. The small ship presently sank.

It seemed rather a futile demonstration. But there were rumors of the Lopez ray—and diving bombs which aircraft could drop from a considerable height.

A multitude of official activities. Dr. Plantet was concerned with many of them—but mostly with this enterprise of his own at Norfolk. He was almost without sleep. Far into the night he would sit over charts, or blue prints—or casting up seemingly endless mathematic formulæ. And several times engineers came from Norfolk to see him, frequently taking him back with them.

“Come into the library, Jeff.” It was after midnight, and he had just returned from a swift visit to Norfolk. “Come into the library, you and Polly. Where is Arturo?”

The soft, plaintive notes of Arturo’s violin from his bedroom upstairs told us only too surely.

A shadow crossed Dr. Plantet’s tired face; but his muttered contemptuous oath was vigorous enough. He said brusquely:

“Arturo! Father is back—it’s successful—they’ve tried the hull under pressure! Boy, dear—”

The door closed upon her; but she came down presently with Arturo. I had not seen him all day.

“Hola, Jeff!” He smiled at me. “Good evening, father.” He kissed his father—I had not seen him do it for a year. “Polly says it is a success—I’m very glad, father, dear.”

I did not miss Dr. Plantet’s gesture as Arturo kissed him; nor mistake it. His powerful hands on Arturo’s slim shoulders seemed involuntarily to tighten; a caress—and it seemed a gesture of possession, as though this son, drifting away in spirit, were suddenly restored to him. A stern, vigorous man, cruel sometimes in his sternness; but I could see at that instant the love that he bore for his son—could see it in his convulsive, clinging gesture, as if he feared that Arturo, who had come to him now, might soon be snatched away.

“Yes, lad, a success. Come into the library—I’ll tell you all about it.”

We went in. I sat listening to Dr. Plantet. But for a time my gaze and half my thoughts were upon Arturo. He seemed this night abruptly older. He sat with what I fancied were wandering thoughts, striving to listen to his father, striving to nod, to smile, once or twice to question. But his mind was on something else—something eagerly frightening.

I could not miss the tenseness of him, and the new, older aspect of affection with which he regarded his father and Polly. Something within his mind absorbed him—burning eagerness for something frightening.

Polly saw it. She eyed me once significantly; she moved over and sat beside Arturo, with her arm around him. And he leaned down and kissed her.

Strange adventure, which Dr. Plantet now proposed us! Awe-inspiring; to me, adventurous by nature and with the lure of the sea upon me, it nevertheless came as a shock. And a great thrill.

I listened, and presently forgot Arturo, and had no eyes for anything but Dr. Plantet’s tired, intent face; I had no thought for anything but his words. He was brief, abrupt. The oceans were receding, but it might be months before they had fallen appreciably toward their greater hidden depths. Meanwhile, our governments were preparing to fight some unknown, unseen human enemy. No one knew the nature of this menace. If we were to be assailed, where would it be? In the Pacific, doubtless, but the Pacific is a wide-flung area.

“I believe,” said Dr. Plantet, “that if we could locate them, we would find this enemy preparing to attack us. We will be months getting ready. In the meantime, what? Are we to wait without trying to find out what our assailants are doing? The floor of the great Pacific basin—suppose somewhere down there—”

He paused. I stammered suddenly: “You’ve been building a ship—but the deeps? Why, it’s unthinkable!”

“But it is not, Jeff! Oh, the great deeps are beyond us with the water that now lies over them; they are safe from our prying eyes. But I can penetrate two thousand fathoms!”

I think I had never seen him so vehement; a triumph upon him, an excitement almost boyish with this enterprise the product of his genius and intrepidity.

“I’ve been working on it a long time, Jeff—from the very first reports of the abnormal tides. Polly will tell you how I’ve worked. If we can locate this enemy, even determine beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is such an enemy, what a stimulus to our own preparations for defense—the possibility perhaps of our nation making an attack and carrying the warfare down to them!”

Just to-day, he said, they had tested the hull of his tiny ship for that depth. Two thousand fathoms—twelve thousand feet! The craft was a tiny affair indeed! A crew of three or four. A little dolphin, flashing under the sea with a speed up to seventy knots.

“In barely two weeks we’ll be ready, Jeff. Oh, they haven’t stinted me; the government has stood ready with its funds and all its resources. I’ve had materials from a dozen countries rushed here by the fastest wasps we could commandeer. I’ve had the pick of all the technical men developing this new principle. Hydraulics—internal, reciprocating pressure, call it what you will, we haven’t named it yet—and I’m using the new Parodyne atomic engine.

“It’s nearly ready—the cleanest running little thing—Parodyne himself believes we’ll get seventy knots. The Australian Commonwealth Through Mail is planning to stop their flyer at Norfolk and carry us over the Pacific. Set us down where we like to begin our voyage. A diving range of two thousand fathoms, Jeff—we’ve tested it for that, with a fair margin of safety. And I can get another five hundred of littoral region with the Franklin searchlights.”

Two thousand fathoms! The great unknown oceans, with this little dolphin of a ship flashing down into them to such a depth! And I was to be on board! It set a thrill upon me. So might Columbus have felt when from the queen’s fair hand came the money that made his voyage possible. But it must have been a thrill both of eagerness and of fear.

Two thousand fathoms? Why, we could skim the sides of the Tonga and Marshall Ridges; follow the Marianne Trench to where it yawned into the Nero Deep. Two thousand fathoms? What gullies might we explore! What troughs and furrows could we traverse up the steep slopes to the island-bearing rises! Why, what a realm of the unknown to bring so suddenly to our ken!

Dr. Plantet was saying: “You’ll go, Jeff, of course. Ah, now you see why I’ve kept you here—to be my navigator. I could not find one I would sooner trust, for all your youth. If our world is to be assailed, we’ll locate the point of attack—”

And I was chosen for such a voyage as this! I suddenly saw Dr. Plantet to be a name immortal; and the man himself sat here planning his voyage into the great Pacific. And it seemed that something of Balboa and Magellan and Tasman must be here in the room with us now, hovering here—something of them, come here to inspire and to welcome this new maker of the history of the sea.

And I was chosen to be upon such a voyage as this! I think that the humble sailors of those ancient lurching ships were thrilled by the adventure of their enterprise, but thrilled even more by a fear as they fronted the unknown.

CHAPTER IV.

A MARVELOUS DEEP-SEA CRAFT.

The Dolphin was ready. We went down to Norfolk with Dr. Plantet upon his last inspection. At least, Polly and I went; Arturo did not go. He was ill, he said, and indeed he looked it. Flushed of face, with cheeks these last days gone thinner; brooding eyes, with an uneasy, restless gaze that seemed always to avoid us.

Sardonic words came from Dr. Plantet that morning when we left. Arturo did not answer them; he moved away in the library, as if suddenly threatened with childish tears. And Dr. Plantet, wounded to the core of him, I know turned his back upon his son and stalked grimly out.

I recall that as we ascended the incline to the air-stage runway I glanced over to the house. At the library window Arturo’s white face was staring after us.

Was he afraid? He had said he would go with us on the voyage, of course. Polly was going. We needed a cook; some one to care for our physical wants. Who could do that better than Polly? It was characteristic of Dr. Plantet that he should thus be willing to expose her to danger. A stoicism, a subversion of all his instinctive inner feelings of fear—and a warm pride in her that she should want to aid us and her world.

How much more keenly, then, did he feel shame for Arturo! Was the boy a physical coward? Arturo had said he wanted to go, of course. He was to record in detail our findings; cartographer upon this adventure to chart the unknown deeps. He had a skill with mathematical drawings; I could imagine such a task thrilling him.

Polly tried to hide for him his lame enthusiasm. His fear? We never discussed it. And I think now it was very strange that we so little comprehended this boy we all loved.

We stood in the Norfolk shops, where the artificial testing canal came up like a dark thread; stood gazing at the Dolphin as she hung in the cradle over the rectangle of water waiting to receive her. A little dolphin of a ship indeed, hanging there with her ralite hull smooth as burnished copper. A dolphin with trimmed tail and sharply pointed nose. Eighty-two feet of burnished hull, sleek as the body of a seal.

We walked around her; Dr. Plantet showed her points with a creator’s pride. Hardly a projection to mar this sleek exterior. The vertical and horizontal rudders might have been a tail; the lateral planes, flexible, sensitive as the wing-tips of a wasp-flyer, were folded in against the hull, so closely that the cracks of them were barely visible. A workman on board slid them out for us—fins opening out to barely a foot of width, trembling in the air like thin steel sheets.

There were tiny stern ports for the atomic exhausts; the man on board swung them to show us how in themselves they could guide the vessel. There were bull’s-eye windows, like freckled patches on the hull; and under the bow, like a mouth, a tiny port swung open to expose a torpedo tube, the craft’s single weapon, with the staring eyes of the Franklin searchlights above it.

We climbed over the spider-bridge and went on board. A small bull’s-eye turret came sliding up for surface cruising; a tiny door gave into it so that we might crouch through and descend the ladder.

The upper slope of the hull had ingeniously opened to form a small level deck upon which we might sit with the ship awash.

Even for the eighty-two-foot length and a bulge at the middle of some twenty-four-foot diameter, the interior of the Dolphin was surprisingly small. Dr. Plantet explained to me his principle of reciprocating pressures, as he called it.

But I could comprehend, this day, no more than its generalities—a mere glimpse of the fundamentals of what now is so famous; and it was many months before I grasped it in detail.

There was an inner hull, so that the interior space of the vessel was considerably reduced. Within these two ralite hulls, each of them reënforced with every modern device, was an intricate core of tiny passages and cells, with water circulating through them under pressure. A strange yet simple principle of hydraulics—so difficult mathematically to grasp that none before had ever imagined it.

It involved many of the intricate laws of modern hydrodynamics—yet in theory simple as all great things must be.

The outer hull, crowded by the immense pressures of the ocean’s depths, would give inward a trifle, to yield its pressure to the water flowing in the core. And that internal water, so swift of motion, converted the pressure we call latent into what now physicists are calling kinetic. Strange term—kinetic pressure. Strange absorption into harmless gurgling motion of this crushing ocean force which for so long had held the deeps impenetrable!

I stared at Dr. Plantet. “Kinetic pressure?” Yet we have accepted as simple enough the conversion of other energies to be lost in motion. Latent energy, kinetic energy—terms simple indeed.

Dr. Plantet started up the pumps. With my ear near the inner hull I could hear the water circulating. Bubbling, gurgling at first; and then, as its speed increased, humming with a sound almost electrical. And at the windows, which now I knew to be double bull’s-eyes, I could see the water circulating. A thick flat sheet of it flashing past with a queer, oscillating, wavelike swing so swift the eye could scarce remark it.

“These pumps operate automatically, Jeff. A faster flow, as our depth increases.” He moved the switch-lever over to another contact; the humming went up to a higher pitch. “Put your hand on the hull, Jeff.”

The burnished cold surface was gradually warming. He shut off the pumps. He added: “Curiously enough, Jeff, it gives us heat against the cold of the depths.” He smiled. “Rather too much heat, if we use the pumps for more than an hour. But I have a refrigeration coil to help cool it. I think we shall have no trouble, even when running deep for considerable periods of time.”

We were not long on board the Dolphin this morning; there was so much that Dr. Plantet had to do. A center passage like a narrow spider-bridge hung midway of the vessel’s interior.

Beneath it, in the center, the Parodyne engine lay in its terrace of burnished blocks, with coils and dials and intensifying tubes glowing dimly yellow in the gloom as Dr. Plantet started it at its lowest operating force. Almost silent—a vague burring sound as the electrons were tossed fluorescent in its storage globe—a green fountain of burring light, running into the outlets, through the pressure valves of the water-jacket, to plunge at last into the sea beneath our stern. Tiny electronic streams—there were six of them—reconverted by the water’s contact from negligible electric mass into ponderable gas of radiolite, striking the ocean and forcing the Dolphin forward as a rocket is thrust upward by the fire-stream from its tail.

We stood watching the Parodyne for a moment as it worked up its energy from the morsels of pitchblende it was breaking down into freed electrons. An ounce of fuel to run us for a day. So silent, so free-running, one could hardly hear it. A little jewel of a modern engine, so recently developed that there were only three, even of this small size, in existence.

We inspected the several tiny rooms which hung in frames to the sides of the passage, with the ballast and water tanks and pressure chambers beneath them. A tiny galley for Polly. Three rooms with bunks; a narrow space, by courtesy called the diner, with folding table and chairs.

Forward, beyond the end of the passage, the full conical interior was built as an instrument room, with the torpedo tube running under it to nearly amidship, where the torpedoes were stored. The Franklin projectors were here in the bull’s-eye windows, by which, gazing along the light, through the jacket of humming water, we could see into the ocean ahead. I noticed here a score of familiar instruments, and others strange to me. But Dr. Plantet did not stop now to explain them.

We went back to the stern. A similar room, rather larger, held charts and instruments of navigation. A table at which Arturo would work over the log and the diagrams. And here I saw the apparatus for air purification—cylinders of oxylithic powder, moisture coils, tubes for absorbing carbonic acid and all the waste products of our breathing.

We climbed back to the floor of the shop. By to-morrow our little vessel would be fully equipped, provisioned, and ready. The Australian Flyer, westward bound from London to Melbourne, leaving London at 5 p.m. to-morrow evening, would stop and pick us up. The magnetic cranes lowered the Dolphin into the dark rectangle of canal at our feet. She lay awash, quiescent, waiting. Polly, trembling with the thrill of it, christened her with proper ceremony, and the little group of engineers and workmen cheered.

We flew back home to “Sea End.” The servants had been given a holiday, and the house was silent as we entered. I recall a sudden pounding of my heart—the flash of a thought that Arturo might really be ill!

“Arturo! Arturo!” Polly’s voice held a quiver of anxiety. The lad should have been at the gateway to greet us, of course. “Arturo!” Her voice echoed as she ran upstairs. “Arturo—father, Jeff, come here!”

We rushed up. Arturo’s room was disordered. Some of his clothes and his luggage cases were gone. His small personal sending radio was gone from its accustomed table. In its place was a sheet of paper: a penciled radio code which evidently he had invented. And a note—a few brief words in his familiar scrawled handwriting.

CHAPTER V.

NEREID OF THE SEA.

The westward-bound Australian mail left its Hendon Airport at 5 p.m., Greenwich time, August 10. At 9 p.m., Washington time, in the luminous darkness of the late summer twilight, we saw its lights over Norfolk—the immense, quadruple banks of its lighted hull windows. It came down over the landing field where our little Dolphin, with three of us on board, was lying cradled and ready. It hovered; its electro-magnetic grapples caught us up; in ten minutes, with the great flyer on its westward way again, we were stored on its lower deck.

Three of us on board: Dr. Plantet, Polly, and myself. We had had no heart to try and find a last minute substitute for Arturo. We could handle the Dolphin, we two men. It was, indeed, a craft with every modern device operated by the levers in its forward instrument room, of one-man control.

We had found no trace of Arturo. Dr. Plantet had uttered one anxious, heartfelt cry: “Why did he not tell me? I would have understood and advised him.”

Ah, but there lay the trouble! He would have advised his son; but he could not, probably, have understood! Whatever Arturo contemplated, quite evidently he feared that his father would have disapproved of it. And, disapproving, would have forbidden him to do it, with a gruff command enforced against all possibility of argument. Arturo knew it; Polly and I, as we read his timorous, pleading little note, realized it was true. But Dr. Plantet did not think of that, and there was no one to tell him, and no use in telling him.

He had done what he could to trace Arturo. The lad’s own small Wasp was gone from its hangar. Arturo had gone alone, by air. For an hour that afternoon when we returned from Norfolk to find him gone, Dr. Plantet shut himself up with his instruments; notified the authorities; had every detective bureau at every transfer point and in all the traffic towers of the country on the watch. But Arturo had evidently planned carefully. No report of him came to us.

We were very busy those last hours. With all his worry over his son—shot through with anger also, I am sure—Dr. Plantet would not let it interfere with our voyage. That was not his way; though he was right in that, of course. We were not going on a mere experimental voyage to try and chart the great unknown deeps. That was a mere incidental. The oceans were still receding; the deeps might soon be dry, so that any one could see and explore them. By this August 10, another eight fathoms were gone from the oceans. Some eighteen fathoms in all—over a hundred feet. We heard a newscaster give the figures on the evening of August 9. The oceans down nearly a hundred feet below low tide levels, everywhere, and the world was seething with the confusion of it.

Our voyage might locate the cause. But, most important of all, we hoped to locate this unknown enemy race, somewhere down there, to whose existence so much evidence had pointed. An enemy, perhaps making ready to attack our world; we must determine that, one way or the other; locate the point of attack, if attack there were to be; estimate its nature, and the best methods of repulsing it. These were the main reasons for our voyage. The fate of our world might depend upon our success—and no disappearance of a wayward son could swerve Dr. Plantet from the least detail of his starting preparations. Within an hour the affair seemed to be wiped from his mind.

Flying southwest, the mailship carried us over Mexico during that evening. We passed to the Pacific at latitude twenty-two degrees N. At fifteen degrees N. and one hundred and twenty degrees W., some one thousand two hundred miles off the Mexican coast, Dr. Plantet told them that they could put us down. By local time for that longitude, it was then nearly midnight.

The cranes lowered us into a placid sea; we lay awash, the three of us standing on the tiny deck of the Dolphin, watching the lights of the great liner vanish among the southwest stars. The lights winked, red and green and purple, and presently were gone.

I must recount now the strange adventure to which Arturo had set himself alone. From what he afterward told Polly, and, to a lesser degree, his father and myself, I can construct a picture of it. A picture no doubt lacking much in detail, for none could fathom the emotions that beset him. Yet withal it may be fairly accurate, for I doubt if he himself could have analyzed his motives.

Guiding him, no doubt, was the clear vision that upon his own slender shoulders might rest the salvation of his world. That, perhaps, was his compelling urge. I have no doubt but that he thought so. But beneath it, mingled with it, was what may have been an even stronger urge—a strange lure.

He had planned it for a long time. He had fought against it, for there was a fear lurking in it, a strange instinctive dread, mingled with the urge that seemed rushing him on. He would have gone before, but he could not find opportunity. Our departure for Norfolk that morning gave him his chance.

There was a night—I think it was the evening of August 1—when he made up his mind definitely that he must act alone. It was that evening we heard the newscaster say that a fast air cruiser had been dispatched by the American Government from Guam to the uninhabited island upon which the mermaid had been reported. A formidable company of marines had landed with a flourish upon the outer shoals to which the ocean now had receded. They had scrambled up to the beach and searched the island to capture this mermaid. But nothing human or otherwise had been found to capture.

It came to Arturo evidently as at once a disappointment and a relief. And it spurred him to his decision. If his adventure had any rationality, any possibility of success, it must be undertaken alone. I think, too, that secretly in his heart he welcomed this.

He took his radio sender and a copy of his improvised radio code; in his Wasp, which he had provisioned and fueled, he started from “Sea End” within an hour after we had left. The Wasp, tiny as it was, could do a good three hundred. He flew north, and high, taking his chances with the traffic towers, who would have ordered him down below the five thousand foot lane upon any normal occasion. But this was not a normal occasion. The country was in confusion; the air directors were all more or less lax. Arturo was visible that morning to a score of their finders. But none, evidently, bothered to record his number; and when the air police, dutifully pursuing Dr. Plantet’s inquiry, sought to check the travel, there was no one to report his passage.

Arturo was no fool. He had guessed all this, and played upon it. He clung to the ten and twenty thousand foot through lanes. With his three hundred mile speed he swept north far into Quebec; turned west, passing over the Dominion, where he guessed they would be even more lax. He went west, crossed the middle of Vancouver Island. At Alberni he took a necessary chance and refueled. He had played skillfully for his favorable wind-drift, and made good time. By ten o’clock that evening he was over the Pacific.

He headed now southwest. It was a calm, clear night. The ten thousand foot lane was deserted. He lashed his controls, set his warning bells, and went to sleep.

The sun was rising when he awakened. The deserted sea beneath him was calm. No islands were in sight. The air was clear of craft.

He seemed poised, motionless and alone between the two matched domes of sea and sky. He was young enough to be thoroughly refreshed and hungry. He had slept very nearly nine hours; he ate a lavish breakfast.

Then he took his position. He found himself in thirty-two degrees twenty minutes N. and one hundred and fifty-five degrees six minutes W. Four hours of elapsed time afterward he swept over Gardner Island of the Hawaiians. The sun was still well in the east—he was gaining an hour of comparative local time for every fifteen degrees of longitude he traversed on his westward flight.

It was a long day of flight, but his eager thoughts possessed him. She might perhaps be there on her island. He wondered if it were the same girl he and I had seen in the globe beneath the surface. We had seen that face in the ocean not very far from this same island where the mermaid was reported.

Had she been on her way up from the abyss then? Coming up, perhaps alone? For what reason?

If she had still been upon the island, those marines, landing there with such a vainglorious, belligerent gesture, undoubtedly would have frightened her. She would have hidden, plunging into the lagoon perhaps, to await their departure. She might still be there. And Arturo, alone—he told himself that he would not frighten her. He found himself trembling. Ah, it would not be she who would be frightened; yet with every fiber of him he longed to encounter her.

The setting sun before him found Arturo and his little Wasp in the neighborhood of nine degrees thirty minutes N., one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. He had met a fresh, strong head-wind for most of the day. And his engine, over this long, continuous flight, had been giving him some trouble. He had cut down his speed. But he was here, at sunset; it was that same evening of August 10 during which our little Dolphin was being carried westward by the Australian mail.

In the late afternoon Arturo had passed over the Northern Marshalls—the tip of the Ratack Chain. He had seen several of the through Flyers during the day, passing to the sides far above him; but none had spoken him.

“Nereid’s Island.” He was already calling it that in his mind. He would call her Nereid.

He had not wanted to reach here before the sunset anyway. In the golden path of the setting sun he raised the island. At low speed his motor was quite silent. He might have been a softly humming wasp, circling over the lonely little island, coming gently down, circling.

It lay, a strangely augmented patch of land in the fallen ocean. All around it was a low, outside circular area of green-black and coral rocks, sloping steeply upward, strewn with shriveled, drying marine vegetation—at the bottom of which the sea was lapping. A sodden, upward rocky slope led to where, high up in the air, a fringe of white beach lay queerly dry. Above that, a crescent area of palms and vegetation. The inner lagoon was dry—an empty, sandy bowl, perched up there in the air on a spreading rocky base.

It seemed no earthly island; a small mountain top with a shallow crater in its center and a strange fringe of trees and meaningless beach.

There was no sign of moving object. With his heart pounding, Arturo gazed down. There were many caverns and pools in the lower slopes from which the ocean had fallen—she could hide there very easily.

And then he saw, or thought he saw, something unusual—the bulge of a metallic surface. It lay nearly submerged in a rift of rock far down the outer slope at the water’s edge. The globe we had seen in the ocean that night?

He fancied so. Lying in that position it would have been well covered by water when the marines were here.

In the glowing, glorious twilight of that tropic night, Arturo landed in the basin of the empty lagoon, then rolled his Wasp up the gentle slope of the inner beach.

He sat there that evening, silently waiting. Over him spread the blazing southern stars strewn on purple velvet. The arching palm fronds whispered about him as the night breeze stirred them. Ahead, down the slope of beach and lower slope of rocks, the sea lay quietly breathing. A quarter moon was following the vanished sun. It dropped a bright silver path on the water; it glorified the beach; it laid upon the brooding little island an amorous spell.

Arturo sat, edged with silver. Would she see him? Would she be too frightened? Was she, perhaps, not here at all?

The moon fell lower. He went, with sudden thought, back to his plane. He sat again under the palm, and the low voice of his violin throbbed into the somnolent night. He wondered if she would be as frightened, as emotion-swept as himself.

I think, as he sat there softly playing, that the world of 1990 was far away from Arturo. I think his mind must have been flung back, past all the counted centuries to those fabulous, magic times when the sea had no history, but only legend. One of the sailors of Ulysses, with his ears stuffed with wax against temptation, but being more courageous, or perhaps weaker than his fellows, might have slipped ashore—and waited thus, with the wax cast away, singing perhaps a soft song of his own to tell that he had yielded.

Arturo must have trembled, as the song of his violin was trembling. Was this a daughter of Amphitrite, mockingly cast in the fashion of a woman? Or was it a human girl?

And then he saw her. Partly behind him, among the long, slanting shadows of the palms. A dark figure edged in a silver patch. It stood motionless; then it moved toward him a trifle, and stood again.

Arturo laid his violin and bow beside him on the sand and very quietly got to his feet. He could see her better now, only a few yards away. A small, slim figure of a girl, white-limbed, but flushed like moonlit coral. A brief, dangling robe, which might have been green; smooth, lustrous green, as though a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.

He stood tense, unmoving. The moonlight was on him—his slight, boyish figure of long, slim black trousers, and white ruffled shirt; his black tousled hair thick in waves over his pale forehead.

He stood trembling. She moved again toward him. The moonlight struck her face. Ah, this must be a human girl! He saw her features—a face of strange, soft beauty; wide eyes, parted coral lips; a face, timorous, gentle, eagerly wondering. And framing her face, lying in waves upon her coral shoulders, a tangled mass of tawny hair.

No fabulous siren, this! A strange, but very human girl—and yet, for all that, a siren.

She stood frozen. But her lips parted with a smile. He said: “Nereid!” He moved slowly toward her.

CHAPTER VI.

THEIR LONELY, LOVELY LITTLE ISLAND.

The Dolphin lay, that midnight of August 10-11, awash on the surface of the Pacific some twelve hundred miles southwest of the Mexican coast. I had thought that for the time Arturo was far from Dr. Plantet’s mind. But not so. He made no move to start our voyage until for half an hour at least he had listened to the air. It was seething with world-activity—the silent echoes of our busy, modern life. But the sub-split wave-length which Arturo’s code specified, was dead.

Dr. Plantet turned at last away. “Nothing there.” He spoke in matter-of-fact tone, but I could guess at the emotion it was hiding. “Nothing there—well, we must remember to try again to-morrow night.”

There was in his manner what seemed to forbid discussion of Arturo. Indeed, we had much of our own concerns to busy us. We were to head, Dr. Plantet had planned, directly for the Micronesian islands. Most of the tangible evidence bearing upon the existence of a human menace, had seemed to come from that locality. The Malaysia had been lost in there, and several others of the surface freighters. And the submersible of my own line. Again, it was there that Arturo and I had seen the face in the sea; and the mermaid had been seen there.

“I think,” said Dr. Plantet, “that if we are to locate this hidden enemy at all, it will be upon some of the rises in sub-sea Micronesia.”

There was another factor that made him think so. For weeks he had been assembling world-data showing a disturbance of the ocean currents. With oceans receding, the water was seeping away somewhere. That the normal ocean currents were changing was unquestioned. The evidence was inconclusive, but there seemed to be an unmistakable drift toward the mid-Pacific. And Dr. Plantet thought that upon the ocean floor in Micronesia we might find evidence of the outlet.

“We can only try, Jeff,” he said at last. “But two thousand fathoms, even with our five hundred fathoms of additional vision, will show us no more than the mid-depth rises.”

The mountain ridges. Or the great submerged plateaus; domes; volcanic sub-sea cones. But if, in the lower basins, the great caldrons or the deeps, this enemy was lurking, we would have to wait until the water materially was lowered. And that might be months, or years.

We were starting from this point so comparatively near the continent because obviously it might not be in Micronesia at all that the menace lay. I had wanted to cruise the American continental shelf. Dr. Plantet would not take the time. He was convinced the danger lay farther west. But he had agreed that we should start here, and cruise across, searching as we went.

We closed up the Dolphin. The turret slid down after us. For all my hundred sub-sea trips in the Pacific, my heart was beating fast. Polly touched my hand, as we moved forward along the passage. Her fingers were cold; but in the dim light I caught her sturdy glance, and saw that her lips were smiling.

We gathered, all three of us, in the bow instrument room. Dr. Plantet fingered the control levers. The Franklin lights sputtered and glowed with their steady white beams; through the circular windows, the light sprayed ahead of us in the green ocean just below the surface. The jacket-pumps were throbbing. The windows dimmed a trifle with the passing sheet of water; but when it flashed faster, they brightened. The Parodyne atomic engine was operating; the water tanks were filling under pressure; the lateral planes, like fins, were extended from the hull outside.

We had settled, barely to tip the surface. I flung the water-ballast to the bow; in the silence with only the burring of the Parodyne and the humming of the pumps, the water came forward with a swish. The bow dipped. I held the rudder-levers; and released the atomic streams.

We slid smoothly forward and downward. Little Dolphin, sliding, forcing its way into the depths, with green phosphorescent sprays of fire from its sides.

It is not my present purpose to describe in detail this voyage. Under other, less vital circumstances, it would have had a scientific interest beyond any enterprise of the sea which for centuries had been undertaken. But we were too engrossed in what we sought—too absorbed in the possibility that at any moment we, like those others, might be attacked. In what strange, unnatural fashion we could not guess. It kept us tense—an aspect of the voyage which we had hardly discussed, but of which we were very keenly aware, every moment.

We had only one weapon—the torpedo tube. Six small torpedoes, each loaded with some three hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene as its explosive charge. There were also a dozen of the more modern cylinder bombs of miscellaneous variety, to be dispatched through the same tube. A mere gesture of warfare! I could not feel that against this enemy it would be more than a gesture.

We slid down from the surface. Ah, that first plunge! At the beginning it was no more than running level, save that I could feel the Parodyne laboring a trifle and our forward thrust slackening. There was nothing to see but the dim green water rushing at our lights. Then I saw a fish of an unfamiliar type; it hung stupidly in the light and then moved away. We very nearly struck it.

Five hundred fathoms. A thousand. The red column in the pressure indicator was rising steadily. The ship was laboring, struggling. The Parodyne at its higher intensities, developed unexpected strength; the pressure pumps were humming with a shrill electrical whine.

Dr. Plantet said awkwardly: “I wouldn’t—I’d rather not take her below eighteen hundred, Jeff. Not at first.”

Seventeen hundred. The water seemed darker, more turgid, as though down here the sediment of dead organisms were settled in it like a fog.

I could imagine from the aspect of the water that we might be near the ocean floor. We slid ahead. Our chart showed in this region of the Pacific an estimated depth of two thousand five hundred to three thousand five hundred fathoms. But it was not so at this particular point. Even with all the patient thousands of soundings, how could they chart with any detailed accuracy the wide-spread ocean basins! We turned one of the Franklin lights downward.

A rising slope lay close beneath us, dark and cold, and seemingly black or dark-red ooze. The ocean floor! Smooth in its contours, almost level along here, with a gentle rise before us. Protected by the water from the rapid, sub-aërial erosion which sharpens the features of the land, piled by the regular accumulation of deposits, it stretched heavy-featured, morose, mysterious. I could imagine the cold waters from the frozen poles flowing in sluggish, heavy currents along this bottom.

But it was not all so uniform. We had of lighted region ahead of us barely half a mile. A rounded cliff came sweeping at us. I turned us aside; the cliff went up and backward to merge with a dome.

Then presently we found ourselves in a furrow, with elevations on both sides. We passed, when the furrow widened, over a great black caldron. The lip of it rose to a thousand fathoms. It was forty miles across—a pit of blackness, possibly four thousand fathoms or more in its depth, as though here were some giant crater, filled and immersed. We went to two thousand fathoms in it, and then rose and surmounted its opposite rim.

But there is no one now to whom the physical conformations of our ocean basins need be a mystery. And such details here are out of place.

We ran directly west on the fifteenth North Parallel. We made, each twenty-four hours, some twelve hundred to fourteen hundred miles. I give, not the nautical, but the statute measurements. The nautical now, is turning to be a thing of history. It was midnight of August 14-15 when our westward searching voyage was ended. Four days, during which we saw enough details to fill a weighty volume confirming or denying the groping research and speculations of science.

But to what purpose? The deep sea animals, the vegetation of the deeps—it will all find its place in the history of the sea. It has no place here, for I am concerned only with the little parts my friends and I played in this great world crisis. Of what use dogmatically to explain that the great Pacific Basin is not altogether what the charts picture it? Why describe the steeply narrow ridge winding like a thin mountain chain up to eight hundred fathoms at its highest elevations, crossing and recrossing the fifteen parallel? Or mention, as its discoverer, what now they call the “Country of the Moon”? Jagged pits and tumbled crags over that plateau a hundred miles in westward extent? We found that it stretched barely fourteen hundred fathoms deep.

We were south of Hawaii, the midnight of August 12-13. We listened, as we had listened the previous midnight, for Arturo. But his wave-length still was dead. We crossed into the Eastern Hemisphere about midnight of August 13-14. Again no signal from Arturo. Why should there be? I asked it to myself; I could not dare to voice it to the anxious Polly and her father. Arturo had said he might signal. But when, or from where? Perhaps he might not wish to. Or he might be desperately anxious to do so, and could not. Futile, meaningless speculation.

We had found that the Dolphin labored under the downward thrust; was difficult to hold level at the depths; and we slid up the incline when ascending with a speed too great for safety. I set down these random notes from my log.

No sign, either of an enemy attack upon us, or of an enemy’s very existence. No indication of a rift in the ocean floor. We sometimes wondered if either one existed. Yet that too, was a futile question! We had followed a narrow line, like a thread across this small section of the ocean. More than four-fifths of the time, with the depth too great for us to see anything, we had shot up to the surface and run at a few fathoms of depth for the greater safety. We had seen only an infinitesimal part even of this tiny portion of the area in which our enemy might be lurking. The futility of it struck us at last. It occurred to Dr. Plantet, that the sub-marine slopes of the great rise crowned by the Societies and Tahiti might be worth investigating. Or the upper reaches of the Japan trench. Or, in fact, any of the continental shelves. I did not remind him that this latter had been my original idea.

We were running north of the Marshalls at noon of August 14. At midnight, that night, again we listened for Arturo. And this time his signal came!

His call, given in the code, repeated at intervals. We answered it, on our own wave-length which Dr. Plantet was sure the lad knew, if only he would remember. He did remember, and flashed:

“Come at once—nine degrees thirty minutes N., one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. Hurry!”

I can picture Arturo, there with Nereid for those four days upon their lonely, lovely little island. But of necessity it must be a fragmentary picture with much that I can only guess; and built, too, somewhat from my own impressions of the girl as afterward I saw her for myself; and as Polly saw her, and tried to talk with her. The whole translated by my own poor fancy, into a picture of what Arturo’s emotions for her must have been.

She could, even at first, understand his words a trifle; a British sailor had been drawn under alive, and had lived long enough to teach her and others some of his language. She learned it with an unnatural facility. A few broken words that first night; she said them and no more. But she understood and she was learning; so eager to learn!

I try now to imagine them that first night of their meeting. There was a shy, wild fear about her, mingled with a very evident desire not to be afraid of him. He could not touch her, but he sat near her; so quietly, so gently. And as I think of his gentle, boyish, romantic figure, there in the moonlight, I can realize that none but himself could have approached her.

Perhaps, that first night, they conversed only in the universal language of youth. Their crossing glances, eager yet shy, their own thoughts of what the other must be, as they gazed. Perhaps they drew together with the universal language of music. Perhaps he again played his violin for her. Perhaps she sang for him. There is no one to say.

He found her human as himself. A young girl, barely yet matured, fashioned with almost a normal earthly beauty, and yet with a strange something about her, making her different. It was not her slim rounded limbs, white and flushed with the tint of coral. Nor the thick tawny tresses, framing her timorous, girlish face. Nor yet her fashion of dress—her shimmering robe, with moonbeams dancing on it like green sea water ripples in moonlight. None of these, though in truth they were all strange enough.

It was something greater. A wild shyness in her manner; she sat, half reclining by the palm-trunk; but it seemed that every nerve and muscle in the young body was tense, as though she would spring away if too suddenly he moved. A gentle animal, bred in the wilds, might be like that, mistrustful of the first human hand to approach it.

And other strange things about her. Her gestures, graceful, yet often meaningless. And her eyes, as she sat regarding Arturo. The sea was in her eyes, the changing sea, whipped with wind, dim with mist, wan with starlight. He gazed, over long silences, into her eyes. They held level, as she gazed with equal wonderment into his.

The mystery of the sea was in her eyes. Unfathomable green depths. Eyes that had seen things he had never seen; things queer, unnatural to him. But her youth was there; her human womanhood. It glowed eager, yet afraid; it met him, and it understood him, strange though he must have been to her.

I think also, that first night, she tried to talk with him. He understood at least, her desire to learn his words. And presently he began teaching her.

There are other fragmentary pictures I can give. The dawn flushed the east, and it seemed to frighten her. She moved away from Arturo. But he followed. She came to a sort of cave entrance; it lay part way down the rocky slope from which the ocean had so recently receded, and was still partly filled with water. She slipped into it. Ah, then he must have been struck with her strangeness anew! She lay in the water relaxed; a familiarity with it, as though she scarce had remarked that it was water and not the land. It was not very deep, a few feet, lying in a passage which seemed to run back into what perhaps was a dark cave here in the rocks.

Arturo waded in after her; and as she stood up, for the first time, she touched him. Her fingers were warm and human. Her touch pushed him away. She slid again into the water and with a silent swimming stroke, was gone back into the darkness.

The sunrise came full. Arturo was very tired. He ate, and slept. He went that midday, to the cave entrance. No sign of her. He wondered if he should go in, and at last he started. But there was a place where the passage ended. The water stood waist-deep and touched the lowering ceiling. She had evidently gone under it. Or had she left the island?

He returned outside. Down the slope he saw the rounded top of her globe. The high tide had brought the ocean pounding over it; the sea was rougher this day. But her globe was still there. She had not gone.

She came out again when night had fully fallen. He found then that it was the daylight which frightened her; blinded her.

She let him follow her into the cave that second night. She swam so humanly graceful and yet with a natural grace surpassing what we call human. It was only a few feet underwater, where the passage roof chanced to bend down. Arturo was by all our earthly standards, a good swimmer. He followed her.

She had in the small cave her own supply of food and fresh water, brought from her globe. She seemed able to see, in that degree of darkness. But Arturo had to go back to his plane and bring a small vacuum bulb; he kept it shaded from her. They ate together—food unknown to Arturo. They laughed together, tried to talk. He went out and brought his own food from the plane, and let her taste it.

They swam together in the deep little pool that covered half the cave-floor. He sat and watched her, later, while she disported herself alone, as a girl of our world might dance for her audience of one; a slim, green-and-coral-tinted nymph at play. He saw that she swam under the surface for several times the length he could manage; but she always came up breathless and very human. He saw her limbs flashing in the water with a silent, gliding grace; her tangled, tawny hair floating like seaweed. Her eyes were often laughing; dancing like the sea in the moonlight under a soft, fair night-breeze.

She lay in the shallow water at its edge, her hair tumbling over her back; her shoulders and head raised, elbows down with chin propped by her hands. Her eyes dancing at him—

“Flinging back a million moonbeams, the tropic sea reminds me of thine eyes.” He murmured it. “That’s the way you look, Nereid. Oh, if you could only understand me.”

She seemed to like it. “Say—that—” Her voice was soft, with liquid tones. “Say—that—” She thought for a space. “Say that—one time more—”

He said it again. She came up from the water, and sat beside him, abruptly serious. The water dripped from her green robe; her tawny hair dripped with it. She was abruptly serious. She understood far more than he realized; she could talk, with long spaces of thought between the words.

He stared into her eyes now when they were neither laughing, nor timorous, and saw there an intelligence as great as his own. Different, with all its knowledge different, and yet very much the same. He caught through those sea-green windows, a glimpse of the girl herself. Purposeful, anxious, apprehensive, not for herself, or himself, or anything of their own concerns, but something greater.

And that evening, or the next, or both, she began giving him fragments of strange and startling things.

He had been in his mind following the probable course of our Dolphin. He knew our plans; he could estimate that at midnight of August 14, we would very likely be at our closest point to him. And it was that night that he got out his sending instrument. With Nereid sitting beside him, he connected it. He saw anew, the real girl which was Nereid. Her glance, quickly intelligent, following all his strange movements; the solemn intentness with which she watched him carrying out their agreed-upon plans.

For there was between her and Arturo now a mutual, secret, absorbing purpose. And for all their youth they executed it unswervingly.

One picture more I can give. Polly had it from Arturo, when just for one brief moment on the Dolphin she reached him with her sisterly affection. There was a night, there on the island, when suddenly swept by longing, he held out his arms to Nereid. She came quite close to him, and gazed, with the tip of her hand holding him off. He saw, far in the tender moonlit sea of her eyes, the answer he sought. But her lips and her restraining hand denied him. He said, like a very manly, human boy:

And her tender eyes, dimmed suddenly by mist, were thanking him as he turned away.

CHAPTER VII.

THIS ENEMY INFERNAL!

In the pink and gold tropic dawn of the morning of August 15, we took them aboard the Dolphin. Arturo did not mention, then, the globe of metal lying there in the rocks at the ocean’s edge. We did not chance to notice it. We left Arturo’s plane—he said, with a quiet force which had come to him, that even if we could have taken it, we had no use for it.

They came out from the rocky slope, swimming to us as we lay near by. I saw the girl, like a nymph, swimming. She was nearly always under water. Each time as she came up, and waited for Arturo to overtake her, he seemed directing her.

We drew them aboard. I saw her then as a girl much smaller, more slim of figure than Arturo, standing drooping, with her face hidden in the tangle of her hair and her crooked arm. She was blinded by the light of the dawn. Frightened, perhaps, by our voices, by our clutching hands as we drew her up the Dolphin’s side.

Arturo carried her to one of the Dolphin’s tiny rooms. There in the dark, barring us, he left her.

A quiet force had come to Arturo. He met his father’s questions and turned them aside. It was this time not sullenness, not brooding, nor anything neurotic. A quiet force, rather, a purpose. There were things that he would tell us, and things that he would not. No fire from his father could shake him. No irony touched him. No pleading from Polly could soften him. Yet, with it all, he was tender, affectionate; and underneath, I think, sometimes a little wistful.

This was a new Arturo. It struck Dr. Plantet sharply. There was one brief passage in which Dr. Plantet was so obviously the loser, for he said much, and Arturo said almost nothing. And when it was ended, Arturo kissed his father.

“I want you to believe in me. You will have to trust me, father, there isn’t any other way; you’ll have to go it blind. I’m sorry—and I love you, all of you, very much—”

It was in these latter words that I caught the wistful note, a gentle sorrow, mingled with his purpose.

It was Arturo now who gave us orders. That Dr. Plantet obeyed them, with the knowledge that Arturo knew more than he, I think is a tribute to the man’s inherent bigness. Nor, after those first hours, were there any clashes or recriminations. We did what Arturo so gently but firmly suggested we should do. But he would give us very little explanation. Even without any compact he may have had with Nereid to enforce his reticence, he was right; had he told us his full purpose, we would have restrained him.

We ran northeast, close under the surface. The course would take us south and east of Wake Island, and then we were to head for the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. Beyond that—the mere laying down of our course and our depth—we knew very little.

In thirty-six hours we were near Ocean and Midway Islands. It was late afternoon of August 16.

For myself that day and a half, I scarcely saw Nereid. But to the picture of her through Arturo’s eyes which I have given, I can add the woman-impressions as Polly saw her; and glimpse her with Dr. Plantet’s prosaic, classifying viewpoint of the scientist.

She would not talk to Polly. But she seemed to understand Polly’s words quite well. A very gentle little girl, shy, but seeming readily to respond to human affection. She evidently took a great liking to Polly, and the feeling was mutual.

They sat once, in the gloom of the tiny room with their arms around each other; Nereid’s body was soft and warm and yielding; but there was a firmness to it, and apparently a considerable strength for all its frail aspect. Nereid seemed quickly affectionate toward this other girl; but it was the mistrustful affection of a creature of the wilds. She drew away sharply at one of Polly’s questions.

She was a creature of swift-springing moods. Polly admits she tried to win the girl, to gain her trust, to make her answer questions. Once, in that dim light of the tiny cabin, Polly caught the expression on Nereid’s face. A whimsical smile; an amusement that this girl of the great, bright, atmospheric world should think her so simple. It struck Polly with chagrin and humiliation. This Nereid was no fool.

Dr. Plantet, with Arturo standing watchfully in the doorway, had several opportunities of studying Nereid. Oh, the passionate obsession of science for classification! As though one could capture the moods of the sea and set them down in logical, descriptive sequence!

Dr. Plantet found that Nereid was really not her name. He made her say her name, but he could think of no sounds in our earthly languages to represent it fairly. He found her, in height four feet eleven inches. In weight, ninety-one pounds. Coarse, thick, unruly hair, apparently of human structure; in length nearly to her knees; in color, tawny.

Her skin was soft, smooth, and white, with coral pink and red flush to it. He found her eyes light green; but apparently changing in their shade. A trifle tinted very pale green over the white eyeball. The tiny capillaries on the eyeball were pale coral pink rather than red. The pupils, with a deep green light in them, were overlarge, but shrank suddenly at the slightest light, and suffused readily with moisture. Her eyelids were thin as a delicate coral veil, with curving lashes, long and thick and tawny.

He found her apparently intelligent, shy and gentle. Of human stock; but different from ourselves in a score of details which he set down. A slightly rounder skull-shape; broader hips and higher breasts. Fingers and toes slimmer and longer. The skin connecting the fingers and toes crossed nearly at the middle joint, suggesting a closer heritage to a time when a membrane might have been there, making the members webbed.

He found her chest high and deep, with a proportionately greater lung-capacity than ours. Her breath, he surmised, could without undue discomfort, be held for at least five minutes while under water.

A human specimen of wholly different stock from any of our known earthly races. A civilization advanced as far perhaps, as our own; but obviously in a different direction. It was, he wrote down, as though on the great family tree of mankind, this were a blossom on a different branch and a wholly different limb.

He felt, when the case were closely studied, that evidence would be found to show that this was the parent stock of earth-humanity. Itself risen directly from the creatures of the sea. That from this stock, it was we who branched off, to leave the depths, ascend to the air and the land and sunlight and rise through the primates into what now we were pleased to call Man.

Dr. Plantet was very enthusiastic over Nereid. With scientific zeal he looked eagerly forward to the moment when he would present her to the study of our world-scientists. I remarked Arturo’s strange expression as his father said that.

On the late afternoon of August 16, we were just south of Ocean and Midway Islands, those extreme northwestern outposts of the Hawaiians. It was then Arturo told us what little we were to know of those things he had learned from Nereid.

We gathered in the stern chart-room; the Dolphin lay awash on the surface of a placid sea. With sudden decision Arturo brought Nereid in to join us. He shaded the light carefully for her and in the gloom of a corner of the floor, she sat watching us.

It was one of the few times I had seen her. I noticed with what a quiet dignity she came in, following Arturo’s guiding hand; and with what intent, alert intelligence she sat watching and listening. She did not speak; but once or twice I saw her nod with confirmation of Arturo’s words.

“There is not much I can tell you, father. But enough. Please do not question me—for if you do, I will tell nothing.” He threatened it, quietly, but with a very firm, very convincing finality.

“Many of your theories, father, are correct. There is a race of people under the ocean beds—I think largely here under the Pacific. Nereid, as you see her here before you, is, I am sure, a representative of the higher portion of this other civilization. It menaces us—you were right about that, father! The conquest of our world is contemplated—and has already begun. Soon I—we, Nereid and I, will show you.”

Dr. Plantet sat very still. I knew that a score of questions were storming within him. He sat, regarding Arturo with keen, scientifically appraising glance. He saw Arturo striving now to talk with a precise, scientific exactness, but failing, for the lad was evidently laboring under a tense excitement. Dr. Plantet was enough of the physician to understand his son’s condition; he knew that very easily Arturo could fall into a stubborn silence which nothing could break through. And Dr. Plantet did not dare question.

But I was not so self-controlled. I burst out, “Arturo, look here—the water is leaving our oceans. Why? And why can’t you tell us everything you know? Why pick and choose? With the fate of our world at stake—”

He turned on me. “You’re childish, Jeff. I’m telling you as clearly as I can. I don’t know very much myself—do you think that Nereid has been able to give me a complete scientific report on all these questions which you would like answered? Our world is doubtless at stake, as you say. This enemy is ruthless—inhuman by all our standards of humanity. Oh, do not judge the enemy you will have to confront by what you see of gentle Nereid! Yes, the oceans will probably empty of water. The ‘Gians’ have contrived it. How long it will take, I do not know. Where the main rift is—or how many rifts there are—I do not know. I think there is one in sub-marine Micronesia—I don’t know just where—”

“Yes, Polly, you can call them that—this enemy. The word Nereid gives me sounds about like that. I don’t know what weapons they have. Nereid doesn’t know; she is neither a warrior nor a scientist—just a girl. If I knew the weapons with which they will attack, I’d describe them quickly enough!”

He spoke with a rising vehemence. “Our world will have to defend itself, father! You were right in your fears! The main attacks may not come until after the ocean beds are dry. It will be a land-fight then—in these new strange lands that we have never seen! Or there may be an attack very shortly. The Gians, an army of them, are coming up. Moving up an equipment of weapons. It may be merely an experiment preparatory to the main warfare. Nereid has heard it may be; I certainly hope so.” He paused, then suddenly added: “They are moving upon the Hawaiian group, not far from here—down near Maui. We’re going to show you!”

The Hawaiian group of mountain-tops were built long ages ago along a crack on the ocean floor by a string of volcanos; some are peaks, seven miles straight up from the surrounding depths. An island-bearing rise some seventeen hundred miles long, quite narrow, extends from Hawaii in the southeast, to Ocean Island at the northwest tip.

We circled Ocean Island, and running a hundred miles from the crest, near the bottom of the slope, we followed it southeast. Past the peak of Midway; past Gambia Shoal; Pearl and Hermes Reef; Lisiansky; Brooks and Bird; and came at last near Kauai.

We ran often near the surface, but sometimes deep. Everywhere, we saw the same sharp upward rise to this hog-back, razor ridge. A jagged, tumbled sub-marine region. Here, in some remote geological era of the past, nature had obviously been convulsed. Domes and peaks and crags; steep, sharp ridges; caldrons like black pits; tumbled, broken land, submerged now, but lying like some wild, naked mountain fastness. There were slopes of truly precipitous character; cliffs, eroded with great side holes; black ravines and gullies; bowlders of giant size, pitted and scarred, strewn where some volcano had flung them. A wild, naked region; rising in great serrated tiers from the ocean floor up this hundred-mile slope to the island peaks at its summit.

We came to the surface off the island of Kauai. More than a hundred feet of naked slope, had been exposed by the fallen ocean. But the green island stood serene up there on its peak. The comparatively shallow two-thousand-fathom depth extended out here in a great circular plateau to the north. Our charts showed it almost level for several hundred miles. We dived and followed over its shoreward, necklike width, and came again into deeper water.

North of Maui, the tumbled rise went up a regular, ascending slope, terminating at the peak which was the island. We lay, at twenty-one degrees, thirty-three minutes, ten seconds N., one hundred and fifty-six degrees, eight minutes W., in two thousand fathoms. The slope was another thousand beneath us; but we could see its higher crags down there, and as we moved slowly south, toward Maui, holding the two thousand depth, the crags came up to meet us. We went cautiously, with only one light preceding us. Winding now, down in the ravines and furrows of the steady upward grade.

Silent, mysterious passages! Sometimes they seemed about to close over us; or opened into valleys, with cliff-walls and jagged rims. Darkly, sinister depths! Our half-dimmed light showed us very little. Like a silent, cautious monster, surprising this other marine life which sometimes we saw fleeing before us, we slowly felt our way along.

We came to a sharp, winding gully, barely a hundred feet wide, with sides twice as high. Its jagged, uneven floor wound upward. Once, perhaps, lava had come down here. But now its side-walls were eroded with many cavelike openings larger than the Dolphin. Still more slowly, with our little light struggling ahead of us, we followed the gully.

We were all in the forward instrument room. I was at the controls, with the others around me. Nereid and Arturo stood together at my elbow with the port forward bull’s-eye before us. Occasionally he would whisper to her. With the tenseness of it, we all spoke instinctively in undertones.

We were in no more than three hundred and thirty fathoms now; the Dolphin handled steadily. Some two thousand feet over us was the surface of the sea. The gully was narrowing; rising steeply ahead to what seemed a crest.

Nereid whispered something. Arturo said suddenly: “Turn off the light, Jeff.”

I cut off the Franklin. Through the bull’s-eye a grim, sullen darkness leaped to enfold us. But in a moment, what Nereid had seen, we began to see. A dim, pale-green effulgence far ahead, a glow, a radiance. It seemed very distant, as though the source of it might be down behind this gully-crest—a radiance in the upper water which was our sky.

“Keep our light off, Jeff. Can you see to get us up there? Stop at the crest.”

We crept on up, holding close to the gully floor. The green radiance faintly painted the gully walls. At the crest we paused.

There lay before us a sharp declivity—a drop of perhaps five hundred feet to a broad oval caldron. It must have been ten miles or more in width. Beyond it, in a great steep rise the main slope ascended toward Maui.

The whole scene was painted dimly green with a diffused effulgence of light. We stared, all of us for a moment unbreathing. Mysterious, awesome, uncanny! A crest to the left with a dangling forest of marine vegetation, gently swaying. Occasional dark blobs of prowling marine life. All dark and dimly turgid. A scene with a quality almost infernal.

I could not grasp much of it at first. But it grew upon me—I think we may have been there an hour, staring. It grew upon me, like formless shadows slowly taking form in a pregnant darkness.

The green light suffused everything. But down in the caldron it was concentrated into many small points. Moving dots; blobs of light—and near the center a large luminous area which presently seemed almost bright.

Moving dots of light. Things moving, carrying with them the lights. Things that presently seemed cubes and oblongs of metal. I fancied they may have been, some of them, a hundred or two hundred feet in length; moving metal containers. With human occupants? My reason told me so.

They showed no details, only as distant blobs. But my fancy supplied details; I could imagine them being dragged very slowly up the slope toward Maui with giant chains. Or perhaps they went as our old-fashioned tractors used to move, with caterpillar tread. One moved, and stopped; and I did not see it move again. Then another; another—a little distance gained for each.

And the movement was always upward, toward Maui’s green mountaintop—toward that bright ethereal other world of land and sky!

It grew upon me, this scene so darkly, silently infernal. The slow patience of it!

But there was other, swifter movement. Smaller, individual, metallic vehicles moved more swiftly about as though commanding. Some darted like tiny sub-sea vessels, carrying lights. Others moved on the bottom. There were unlighted shapes that seemed not much larger than a human figure, moving among the rocks on the caldron floor.

The broad, circular, nearly-bright area seemed to have a great transparent dome over it, like an amphitheater suffused with illumination. I think the water was excluded from under it.

The encampment of this attacking army! It was distant from us, with image tiny to our sight. Human figures in there, moving about. Tiny dots of green light strung above them. Shapes of things that might have been houses; tiers of them, terraced like sections of a pyramid. An encampment, crowded with apparatus perhaps. I even fancied I could see some of it, which the figures were assembling.

Dr. Plantet was fumbling with our telescope. He turned on its tiny penetrating ray of light, but Arturo leaped at him. “Don’t, father!”

I reached and snapped off the light. But it had betrayed us. We did not know it then; for another interval we gazed down from this height where it seemed that in darkness the Dolphin lay secure on the crest of the gully-mouth.

But our light had betrayed us. I was first aware that though, with the Parodyne cut off, we had been poised motionless, we were not motionless! The gully had passed behind us! Slowly, silently, as though drifting, we were moving out over the caldron! The declivity with its sudden drop was now behind us; we were in open water, five hundred feet above the caldron floor.

I clutched at the Parodyne control, to start it. I think I must have stammered some startled, horrified words. There was no time to say or do anything. A light—it may have been a form of light, or something more tangible perhaps—shot suddenly upward at us. A narrow green beam with red fire woven through it, a darting thing like a dim narrow beam of light. It caught us. More tangible than light, for I could feel it strike us, grip us! As though caught in the magnetic grapples of a crane, I could feel the solid grip of it; holding the Dolphin, partly turning us over. And drawing us, sucking us—there are no words to describe it—pulling us downward!

There was an instant of horrified confusion. The shock had thrown all of us against the instrument room wall. I heard Dr. Plantet shout something. I must have been able to start the Parodyne; it was burring; the pressure pumps fortunately continued to work; I could hear their whine. The Dolphin was shuddering; shaken; stricken. And being pulled down—a great fish held struggling but helpless in the luminous tentacle of a monster.

Polly was clutching me. I caught a vision of Arturo, holding Nereid, his encircling arms trying to protect her. I did not see Dr. Plantet.

I flung the Parodyne to all its power. I could feel it futilely surge against this thing holding us.

I was thrown again. Through the bull’s-eye a slanted scene of movement was coming up at us as we went down.

And then there was a flash down there—a flash of blinding white, brief and silent. I know now that Dr. Plantet had been able to get to the torpedo tube—had taken swiftly what came to hand and launched it. A mere light-bomb, of the sort recently developed for sub-sea photography.

It may have been harmless or not, to this strange enemy. Perhaps it blinded whatever eyes were guiding this grappling thing. And for an instant, the clutching hold upon us loosened. The Dolphin righted, and as I turned on the ejecting pumps, we started upward, gathering speed. The Parodyne took hold and added its power. I turned our bow straight up.

The grappling light sprang upward, past us. It missed us, came back and missed again. Its source was very mobile—it seemed rising after us; it swept off to one side and the beam leaped again, and again did not strike.

We shot up the two thousand feet to the surface with the speed almost of a diving plane. I leveled us off and we raced at a fathom’s depth. The attacking light had vanished. The depths beneath us were dark. We sped away, shoreward. Presently we lay awash on a starlit glassy sea, with Maui’s green-brown heights staring down at us. And the blessed stars in a canopy above.

CHAPTER VIII.

MYSTERY OF THE SEA.

Dr. Plantet would have landed at once upon Maui, and warned them, but Arturo dissuaded him.

“It is not necessary, father. That has been going on down there for weeks. There is no hurry that way. Besides—” He checked himself suddenly.

But Arturo remained silent. He had conveyed the impression of having other vital knowledge; I think now, looking back upon it, that he did it knowingly, cleverly bending his father to his further purpose.

“Father, won’t you trust me? I brought you here and showed you what I could—”

I said: “Arturo, look here, you’re not telling us that you want us to keep this thing secret? That would be dastardly!”

He turned those solemn dark eyes upon me. He was only eighteen, this lad; but at that moment he seemed older than I.

“No, Jeff, of course not. When you—when we get back, father can discuss it fully with the authorities. If you like, father, you might try now to call Washington. Tell them, briefly, that with your own eyes you have confirmed your theories—your worst fears. Tell them that there may be warfare such as this world has never imagined. But I hardly think I would specifically name this threat against Maui. It might cause—if news of it leaked out—a panic in the Hawaiians. And from its remoteness to Europe it might make those people over there less earnest in preparing. No good in that, and besides—”

“Besides, I am not—we are not, Nereid and I—altogether sure that the main threat is against Maui. There may be other localities.”

He told us then, with a simple directness. Run the Dolphin to ten degrees one minute five seconds N., one hundred and fifty-eight degrees four minutes eighteen seconds E. I looked it up on the chart. Open sea. A point in Micronesia, not far from the island where Arturo had found Nereid—some fifty miles to the northeast of it. We had to go there, lie on the surface for a night, and wait.

Arturo, for all his quiet force, turned to sudden pleading. “Oh, father dear, won’t you trust me? Please believe Nereid and I are thinking only to do what is best!”

I am very glad—since fate seemed determined to give Arturo his way—that Dr. Plantet yielded in the fashion he did. He put his hands on Arturo’s slim shoulders; he gazed into the lad’s earnest, flushed face. There was a somber wistfulness there. I think Dr. Plantet must have seen it. He suddenly enfolded his son in his strong arms.

“Your world already owes you a great deal for what you have done, Arturo. I do believe in you.”

We ran the Dolphin to the position Arturo gave us. A depth was here evidently far beyond our reaching. But we did not try to investigate it. We lay awash, at sundown, idly waiting as Arturo directed.

A tenseness had fallen over all of us on the Dolphin. It showed clearly stamped on Arturo and Nereid. It communicated to us. Polly and Arturo were much together. Polly says that never had she felt him so gentle, so affectionate. Or so quietly obdurate in his secretiveness.

Dr. Plantet and I discussed the situation. There would be much to do when we got ashore.

But we both realized that our discussion was premature. Arturo still had something to show us. It might change everything—add new factors to make all our present plans useless.

We lay awash that night on the surface of the empty sea. There was a brilliant moon coming up near midnight in the east. It painted the sea with a running stream of silver.

Toward midnight it clouded over with a leaden sky, and the wind fell. A hush was on everything; an oppressive, ominous hush. The surface turned glassy, grimly brooding.

Arturo gave his orders. This was a rendezvous—something he said, some vague suggestion he dropped, made us realize it was that. He had for a day been puttering with something in his cabin. He brought it up at midnight—a small but brilliant hand-light which was part of the Dolphin’s equipment. He showed it to me.

“Look, Jeff—what I did!” He had pasted a yellow strip of mica with a queer design on it, across the flash light face. He smiled like a boy triumphant over a great boy-secret. “Don’t ask me, Jeff—you’ll see presently. To-night—or it may be we’ll have to wait, so don’t be disappointed.”

He sent us below, and sat on the dark deck alone with Nereid. Waiting. He said he would like to let us stay up there with him—but our presence there would interfere. There could be two on the deck, no more.

We three were in the instrument room. Dr. Plantet, unknown to Arturo, had the under-sea telescope ready; if anything appeared, he would snap it on. We had loaded the torpedo tube also. It was possible that Arturo might be tricked. This might be some enemy for whom we were thus trustfully waiting.

We were tense, ready as we could be, for what might come. Occasionally Dr. Plantet would send me on tiptoe in the darkness to the turret-top to observe in secret Arturo and Nereid upon the deck.

It was dark out there on the deck. The two figures sat some distance from me as I crouched in the turret doorway. But I could see their outlines fairly clearly—Arturo sitting close to her, sometimes whispering.

She stood up. She evidently saw something. My heart began pounding. Whatever it was, it was hidden from my position. Arturo was on his feet beside her. She gestured—I could see her slim white arm gesturing. I saw him raise the flash light, and send its narrow, penetrating yellow beam steadily out over the water. That device he had cut in the yellow face of it—something, some one out there must be seeing that—and recognizing it, as Nereid? I thought so.

There was a space, while Arturo held the light steadily level. Then Nereid said something to him. He snapped off the light. They stood waiting. A minute? Ten minutes? I do not know. I heard nothing; saw nothing save those two motionless, tense figures standing there by the Dolphin’s low rail. Boy and girl, so slim, so frail, so youthful, both of them. They stood, so close together that her long wild tresses seemed almost enfolding him.

I recall that I was about to go below and tell Dr. Plantet and Polly of this signal I had seen. A movement of Nereid stiffened me. She drew apart from Arturo. The Dolphin’s rail was lower than her waist. She seemed poised; her arms went up; she went in a graceful arc, over and head downward into the sea.

I was stiffened for just an instant. Why, what was this? Arturo moved. He put his foot upon the rail. For a breath, he seemed to hesitate. Was he executing his compact with Nereid? I think so. But perhaps, there at the last as he hesitated, he was fighting with the lure. His foot was on the rail. He plunged. There was a little splash as he struck the water!

I waited. One has not long to wait for a swimmer to come up. I called: “Arturo! Arturo!” I crossed the narrow deck, rushed to the bow—to the stern. I called frantically: “Arturo!”

My running footsteps, my frantic voice brought Dr. Plantet and Polly. She called wildly: “Arturo! Arturo dear—”

But there was nothing. Down to our limit of two thousand fathoms there was nothing but the dark, turgid mystery of the sea.

I come now to that curiously inactive year during which, had we not seen what with our own eyes we saw, all the strange events I have so far described might have been the figment of our imagination. The public knew nothing of the details, of course. And even the governments and scientists before whom we laid our report were dubious of our veracity.

But there were solid facts. Ships had been lost. The oceans did recede some twenty fathoms. Solid facts, not to be denied. And a mermaid had been seen. But that, as a matter of science, was a jest; and there was almost nothing left save what we said we saw. And with the going of Arturo, the solid facts seemed to come to an end.

The year passed, and the winter and spring of 1991 slid by. The oceans were down twenty fathoms, but no more. The disturbance of nature seemed at an end. There was earthquake and volcanic activity, but nothing unduly severe—nothing more than many other years of the past had shown.

Twenty fathoms of water were gone, it seemed permanently, from the oceans. The confusion in the world’s affairs which it created was quickly clearing; we humans adjust ourselves so readily to new conditions! Ships soon were again sailing the surface, and none were attacked.

There was no attack upon Maui, or elsewhere. In November, 1990, we took the Dolphin back to Maui. The delay was because Dr. Plantet had been stricken ill. I would not have thought that an emotion, even for a son, could have stricken him. But it did. He denied it was that; but it was.

They had sent armed surface vessels to the Maui area, while Dr. Plantet lay ill. They bombed the depths; they searched with lights; they bombed with hovering planes. There was no response from below.

Then at last, with other scientists, we took the Dolphin cautiously down there. We were a long time finding that exact caldron depression to which Arturo and Nereid had led us. But we found it—and as though to deny us all credibility, nothing was there. This enemy had withdrawn. I recalled that Arturo had said several things which hinted something of the kind.

We fruitlessly searched with a long, deep voyage of the Dolphin. And we thought of Nereid’s island—Arturo’s plane, and Nereid’s globe which had been left there. We found the plane untouched, lying there, mute, pathetic witness to the fact that there ever had been an Arturo. But Nereid’s globe was gone.

We found the little cave with its pool where they swam together, and laughed together, and planned this thing which had taken him from us. A few little trinkets of his were lying there; his violin was there—and a strangely fashioned shell comb which undoubtedly was hers. That was all.

Dr. Plantet seldom mentioned Arturo. But often, with Polly, I pondered the past; and there was much that my idle fancy could conjure. I saw Arturo as a gentle hero, sacrificing himself for his world. I read into the memories of those days the idea that Arturo went away with Nereid because he knew he might be able to check these dire, threatening things. Often I would say to Polly, “It’s a fact that the oceans have stopped falling—and the menace has withdrawn—”

The public so quickly forgets! No one seemed greatly worried now over the mysterious things that had occurred in 1990. No one ever seemed to think that they might occur again. Yet to me, the menace always hung over us.

Arturo had said, “This may only be an experimental attack—the main warfare may be fought on land.” Those wild desert lands which now we were calling the sea. They were so soon to be added to our habitable world, with our enemy infernal lurking in them!

My ship was put back on its regular run in January, 1991. It was, to me, an eerie thing to be traversing again these waters of the Pacific, flowing through them on our prosaic commercial rounds as if nothing strange had ever happened down here. For the first few voyages my nerves were taut; I found myself with sharpened fancy and straining vision watching the passing green depths, as though every moment I might see a globe with Nereid’s face. Or Arturo, in some strange guise, waiting somewhere down here to meet our passing. I sometimes feared that a beam of light which was not light, but something else might leap up from beneath and seize us, as the Dolphin that time had been seized.

The feeling after a few voyages wore off. Nothing happened; I began to tell myself that nothing ever would happen.

I was doing well financially. Our line was prospering. In March, 1991, the directors voluntarily raised my pay. I began to think then of Polly as my wife. I had never spoke definitely of love to her, yet there was between us an understanding—unvoiced, but I am sure that she felt as I did.

Much of my shore leave was spent with Polly and her father. He was planning a long voyage of the Dolphin, to chart the ocean deeps in the interest of science. I wondered if it could be that there was still in his mind some thought of finding a trace of Arturo. I think so; but he disguised it.

He planned to have me navigate the Dolphin. It necessitated my giving up my post; and I hesitated. I wanted to marry Polly; and to be working for her father, dependent upon him for my income, was not wholly to my liking.

The dreams and nightmares which were to have so strange an influence upon my future, began about this time and for five months they troubled me. I had always been, or at least I thought so, a person above the influence of idle dreams. There was nothing morbid about me. Dreams might sway a fanciful lad like Arturo, but not me.

But I was mistaken. These dreams—I had them, fragments of them nearly every time I slept—gradually laid their mark upon me. I did not speak of love to Polly; I avoided decision with Dr. Plantet over the voyage of the Dolphin. I was scarcely aware of it at first, but I became moody, silent, almost morose.

Polly noticed it. Once, with a very gentle tenderness which I was in no mood to appreciate, she tried to question me. I recall that I checked her sharply.

The dreams began unobtrusively. I remember the first one: I awoke with the feeling that I had been somewhere beneath the sea. The memory of a turgid vision of a watery waste, with things floating. The feeling of it oppressed me all day.

There was another. Young Tad Megan, a friend of Arturo’s and mine who had been lost on a surface freighter in one of the disasters of April, 1990, stood in the dream before me. His face was very white; his slowly waving arms seemed floating in water; there was green-black water all around him.

Fragments like these. Recurring dreams, always of water—until, as my morbidness grew, I began to hate my calling that took me under the sea—almost grew to fear it.

There were dreams of music. Sometimes I thought that I had heard Arturo playing. Often, as I awoke, I fancied I had seen his face, smiling at me with a gentle wistfulness. Again, I saw myself, bloated, drifting in a turgid liquid darkness.

It is fearful to be obsessed throughout all one’s waking hours, with the lingering memory of nightmares. I began to fear them—fearing the time when I would have to go to sleep and dream them again. I became nervous; my digestion suffered.

In June, when a grave blunder of mine nearly brought disaster upon us, my superior told me bluntly that my work was unsatisfactory, getting more so all the time. He did not know why, and I did not tell him. But I fought with the dreams—fought to thrust them as nonsense out of my waking thoughts.

I could not—did not dare—propose marriage to Polly. A sense of personal disaster was upon me. I mistrusted everything. My health—I feared I would lose it, and lose my post. And there was another reason why now I began to avoid Polly. A recurring fragment of dream: A dim cathedral vault of green water with chimes ringing through it. A girl, like Nereid, with tawny floating hair and eyes with the sea in them, calling me, luring me—and always I would try to answer, and would wake up, calling my answer to her.

An obsession. I began to feel, even when awake and about my daily duties, the presence of the girl—her eyes upon me, her white arm and hand, flushed with the tint of coral, reaching out to touch me. And against all the reason of my sober waking senses, I knew that in my heart I longed for her. A disloyalty to Polly? I felt it so, and it made me increasingly morbid.

Of such threads was woven the fabric of those last days of Arturo. I know it now. The lure was on me then, as it had been then upon him. But though I did not realize it, there was a strange but solid basis of science to all this. More than mere dreams; more than mere disturbed fancy.

I said nothing to Polly, or to Dr. Plantet, or any one. Like Arturo, I carried it alone. Tad Megan, drowned over a year now, was more and more in my thoughts—as though something were forcing him there. Even more than the alluring girl, the vision of him often came to me as I slept.

I had liked him tremendously. A short stocky fellow with a shock of upstanding red hair. A laughing freckled face usually red with sunburn. A jolly companion, who saw a joke in everything—all of life with its grim struggle to be taken as a joke. And now he was dead, lost in one of those disasters last year which it seemed now would never be explained.

There was a dream in which I saw Tad very clearly. He was laughing; he seemed alive and healthy and laughing, and beckoning me to come and join him. Then water came rushing at us; his face went solemn; it went white and solemn and faded away as I struggled to get to him.

Thus I was, in August ’91, nothing of the Jeff Grant I had been the year before. A moody fellow now, churlish and sullen, almost estranged from Polly and her father. I liked best to be alone. And so the momentous night of August 15 found me, with my shore leave beginning, seeking solitary diversion in New York City. I had been to a theater. I was returning to my hotel along one of the upper pedestrian levels.

Broadway was thronged. It was just about midnight. Down on the street level the vehicles went by in a stream; above them, to the sides, the moving sidewalks swung past with all their seats packed. The green-white trellised vacuums cast their glare upon the busy scene—half a million people hurrying off to their homes, or to eating and dancing places for further midnight diversion.

Gay scenes of shifting, scurrying movement and tumultuous sound. At the crossings the directors roared their orders with electrical voices; loud speakers shouted their advertisements from every point of vantage; huge news-mirrors showed images of the current world-happenings, flashing on and off with advertisements interspersed.

A gay scene; but I was in no mood to join with it. That sense of inward depression, chronic with me now, sat heavily upon my spirit. I walked the crowded upper level alone, following its outer balcony rail. It was a rainy, blustery night. The street-roof overhead was wet with the falling sheets of rain; I could see the water through the glassite, running off in rivulets. At a crossing, where in the side streets there was no roof, the rain beat down in a torrent upon glistening pavements.

The valley of the Hudson was off there, only a few blocks away—frowning Palisades; an empty cañon where last year the stately river had been. The muddy slope down to its center was caking solid now under the sun of these hot summer days. With the tide-water gone, there was only a narrow, swift-flowing fresh-water stream down there at the bottom. The side-slopes were already being built upon.

I stood there for a moment gazing moodily. And suddenly it seemed that Tad Megan was there with me; something of him—standing at my elbow. Plucking at me? I turned swiftly. A man and woman had brushed against me as they passed.

It was eerie, nerve-racking. I tried to shake it off—this something, following me always. Ahead, another half block up Broadway, there was a sudden, tumultuous movement in the crowd. Something unusual. I could see the people rushing along one of the middle levels; voices rose in shouts. The excitement communicated everywhere.

In one of the moving pavement halts a thousand people suddenly leaped off to join the running throng. The stream of vehicles down at the bottom of the street was disorganized; the director down there was frantically roaring, but his orders were lost—the vehicles, fully half of them, were turning into the inclines to come up.

“Park Circle 80. Government mirror there. Let go of me, you grounder! What’s the matter with you?”

I had been clinging to him; unreasoningly trembling. What, indeed, was the matter with me? I did not know. I tried to steady myself. I smiled. “I’ll go with—”

But the man jerked from me and hurried away. Park Circle 80 was only a few blocks north. The crowd was all converging there. I followed, mingling with it. There must have been ten thousand people thronging that upper circle. They jammed all its tiers; around its outer diameter the vehicles stood parked in rows. I was a few minutes late. The overhead lights had dimmed. A silence had fallen.

The fifty-foot pyramid mirror, with its hexagon sides to face every portion of the circle, was luminous. Moving black letters were on it, for all to read.

I stood gaping, reading. Tide bulletins! A series of statements of the low tides of the day at different points along the North American sea coasts.

The crowd grew restless; a director’s broadcasted voice roared: “Silence! It means that the oceans are going down—faster than last year.”

The crowd swayed, shouted, and then grew still; awed, frightened into silence. All over the city, at all the circles, I knew that scenes like this were transpiring.

CHAPTER IX.

OUT OF THE SEA.

There must have been a dozen near panics in New York that night, and in all the other great cities. Throughout all the rural districts, on every distant farm, the agriculturists were being aroused from sleep by the call of the official newscasters. It may have been a rational policy—I am not one to judge.

I stood there in the throng at Park Circle 80, watching, listening, with pounding heart. It had, this news, so much greater meaning to me! I knew what the menace could be; of all these people, I had actually seen the enemy.

Diagonally across from me, a hundred feet over the circle, close under the roof, was a strip of the huge luminous call board. I chanced to be gazing at the G segment—a column of the Gr names. They flashed past in moving letters: Gran, George; Grad, Francis M.; Grammer, Ruth—people, who might be in the crowd, for whom there was a message. And then, Grant, Geoffry. My name! Some one calling me.

The girl clicked me into a distant connection; on the tiny mirror I saw the image of Dr. Plantet’s solemn face, with Polly behind him.

“I’ve tried everywhere for you, for an hour. They said at your office you might have gone to New York.”

“It’s come again, Jeff. Tide-water fell to-day—they figure now it’s falling more than twice as fast as it ever did before. Good luck, Jeff—”

“I’ve been swamped with calls, but I wanted to get hold of you. Oh, they’re not so incredulous of us now! I’ve had twenty of them calling me, to see what I thought ought to be done.”

“Yes.” An inexplicable constraint was on me. I knew I should join with vigor whatever Dr. Plantet might plan. But I felt an outcast; something was pulling at me, away from him; making me silent, cautious of committing myself to anything.

His tense voice went on; his keen eyes showed in the mirror; I knew he was searching my face; behind him I could see Polly, reaching over his shoulder to catch sight of me.

“Jeff, they want me to-morrow or the next day in Washington. Great London will want us also. I suppose the Dolphin will be used. I don’t know why they are convinced just by to-day’s reports, but they are. This is the real menace, Jeff. They all say so, and I feel it myself.”

“The oceans are falling—this time they will keep on, faster; it has come, at last. Jeff, I want you up here—”

“—want you to catch the 2 a.m. mail. Polly and I will meet you at Portland—”

“Yes—no! No, Dr. Plantet!” I felt as though I had suddenly found my wits. I could not go to Maine—I was wanted, needed, elsewhere.

How could I explain to him? There seemed nothing to explain. I swept my hand over my cold, wet forehead. I felt like a traitor.

It seemed as though, pressing around me in the breathless little cubby, were something of Arturo, and Nereid, and the face of young Tad Megan—here—like pressing ghosts, importuning me.

“Jeff, see here!” His voice was sharp. “What is this nonsense? What’s the matter with you? Speak out, lad.”

I clicked off the mirror connection so he could not see me. And then, with a sudden impulse that I could not check, I hung up the instrument and staggered out of the cubby. The crowd thronging the circle was in tumultuous movement now, every one struggling to get away. A surge of people and vehicles. I shoved into them, aimless, trembling. I had been a cad with Dr. Plantet. What was the matter with me? I did not know.

I stood for a moment against a direction post, trying to collect my wits. The crowd surged around me. The platforms for the near-by Yonkers District were loading up; the Jersey local flyer lay on its stage off on a side street, where the roof ended; I could see the lights through the rain, people crowding onto it.

Thoughts pressed at my aching head. Thoughts that I could not interpret. Soundless words thumping at my brain—I could almost hear them, but not quite.

Then a realization steadied me. I was not going mad. These pressing ghosts of thoughts—why, I had once heard a lecturer on telepathy describe the thing in some such fashion as this. It steadied me. Was this telepathy? Was something, some one’s thoughts trying to get through to me? I clung to the direction post, trying to fathom my feelings. Arturo? Nereid? Or was it a ghost of Tad Megan, here with me? What was he saying—

“Geoffry Grant.” I showed him my signature, pricked officially in the flesh of my arm.

He glanced up at the call board. “There you are—guess they want you at home. Get along now.”

I hurried away, glad to escape him. My name was again on the call board; Dr. Plantet, trying to get me to come back and talk.

I found myself in the rain, on a lower street with only one level. The rain seemed to clear my confusion. And suddenly I heard, soundlessly in my head, the thought:

I stood against a dark shop window, with the rain drenching me. I thought intensely: “Where? Come where?” I murmured it, half aloud. “Come where?”

“Arturo needs you. Nereid’s island—you remember? Come alone—come—come—”

I think, in that instant, all my morbidity dropped away. The need for action spurred me. This at least seemed something tangible. Something to do. Normality came to me, I was the old Jeff Grant, not a sniveling, trembling coward, afraid of his own thoughts. And I believe I understood, in part, what had been the matter with me all these months.

“I’m sorry I shut off on you, Dr. Plantet. Don’t ask me—I cannot come.”

Something said to me: “Keep your own counsel,” but I added: “I’ll trust you, Dr. Plantet. It’s about Arturo.”

I told him briefly I might be able to communicate with Arturo. Oh, I could not blame him for his prompt, vigorous questions! And his command:

“Jeff, you come up here to me, at once—I want to know what you mean by that!”

I shut him off finally. Then I called my office; told them brusquely that if I did not report within a week they could consider my post vacant; to fill it as they wished, and to notify Dr. Plantet what they had done.

And then I boarded a vacuum cylinder in the tube for mid-Long Island, to the field where aëros could be engaged.

I showed him my flying license; and my name on my arm, and I wrote my signature to verify it.

He put my signature into the telautograph on his desk; it clicked off into the air. My heart leaped. Had Dr. Plantet sent out a call to apprehend me? Would he dare?

“General orders. We’re taking no chances to-night. You may be who you say you are—I’m no expert at signatures.”

The Washington Archives verified me, and the release came back in a moment. I breathed easier.

I gave him my draft to cover the cost of the plane. He sent it off to be certified and in a moment had it back. Within half an hour I was in the air, flying west by south. I could do a fair three hundred in this machine.

Noon of the next day found me over the Pacific. I stopped at Guadalupe Island off the coast of Lower California, to refuel and take on my final provisions. And upon sudden impulse I called Polly. The mirror presently showed me her intent little face. I was relieved to see that the room behind her was empty.

Her face brightened. Dear little Polly! I felt like my old self now—no longer estranged.

“Yes, Jeff.” She did not question; she sat there, regarding me gravely, waiting.

I had had no news, save the fragments the mechanics were gossiping over, here at the Guadalupe station.

I swore her then to secrecy. “I’m at Guadalupe Island, Polly. I’m going well, you can guess where. I can’t talk plainly—too easy for any eavesdropper. Polly, listen, it’s about Arturo, I’ve had—I think I’ve had a message from him—”

“Oh!” Her face went very grave; but her eyes were shining, “Father said last night—”

“I mean—not for awhile. This isn’t the sort of thing you can let the government meddle in—they’d send an expedition after me to investigate, you know they would.” I added suddenly: “Polly, I’m sorry about the last few months—I’ve acted badly—I’ve been—it’s hard to explain.”

“Yes, I imagine like that. Only, it’s Arturo calling me, Polly. Not—not any one like Nereid. Oh, Polly dear, you understand, don’t you? It was—or I thought it was—something like that, but I’m all right now. Polly, see here—I called you for this. Later, some time I may, if I can, send you a message from—from down there. You see? If I do—don’t be frightened. If you get to dreaming—nightmares, anything like that, don’t be frightened. Whatever you think the message says—don’t you attempt to come alone!”

“Tell your father. If you are sure we are calling you—come with him, you see? We may be able to reach you, and not him. Oh, I may be talking nonsense! I don’t know. But if you do get a call from me, or any one, don’t come alone—don’t try it, Polly.”

“Yes. Do the best you can. There may be bad times ahead of us all. Good luck.”

I was reluctant to cut off. But the operator checked at me for overtime. To be conspicuous was the last thing I wanted.

“Good-by, Jeff. The best of luck—and love to Arturo. Oh, if he is only safe! I’ll be praying for you.” Her fingers touched her lips for the gesture of a kiss. Dear little Polly!

I cut off. In ten minutes more I was away, with six thousand miles of ocean ahead of me to Nereid’s island.

It was mid-morning when I raised the tiny island. It seemed deserted, upstanding with its naked spreading base in the fallen ocean. I landed in the empty bowl which once was the lagoon. All through the hot glaring day I waited. Night came, and the half moon was high overhead. I left my Wasp and sat on a little promontory under the palms, above the naked beach.

The low ocean was rippled with moonlight. A breeze stirred the palms. Upon such a night as this, just about a year before, Arturo had sat here, waiting. I found my heart beating fast. Who would come? Some girl, like Nereid?

And doubts assailed me. Was this all, this message I thought I had received, a trick of my fancy? Why should I think it a rational telepathy? Was I a fool, to be sitting here waiting? For what?

Yet there was upon me a strong feeling which seemed growing into a definite knowledge: Arturo was nearing me. As though physically he were here, standing out of sight behind me—the accents of his familiar voice ringing in my head as though he had just spoken.

My watch showed 1 a.m. I had slept a good part of the previous night, and dozed all day. I was keenly alert, sitting tense, searching the moonlit ocean. I saw at last, a mile or so away, something black bobbing at the surface. And then a tiny beam of light, waving like a signal. I got to my feet. I had pasted a device across my flash, crudely cut from memory of the one Arturo had used. I stood and held it level, shining it out over the water.

The light out there presently was gone; the bobbing thing vanished. But after a time it showed again. Close inshore. A shadow of the rocks was there; I could not see it plainly. It landed. And then I saw figures clambering up the rocks in the moonlight. Three of them—and another stayed back by the round thing from which they had come. Three figures, coming up toward me. Two men, and a girl, white-limbed, with tossing hair.

I stood in a patch of moonlight. There was just an instant when the thought swept me that I was a fool—this was an enemy come to trap me. But I called, quaveringly, “Arturo! Arturo, is that you?”

There was a brief silence. The climbing figures stopped, gazed up and saw me. And a voice called up—a familiar voice. It was Tad Megan—not dead, nothing weird or eerie. A great relief swept me.

Tad Megan, and Arturo and Nereid. I could recognize them now. The relief of it! If I had not realized what a strain I had been under. But there was nothing uncanny about this. I shouted:

They came running up. Nereid, familiar as I remembered her; Arturo, strangely garbed, grown strangely older. Tad wrung my hand.

“No—of course I’m not dead! You, Jeff—by the little gods of the airways, it’s good to see you again.”

CHAPTER X.

INTO THE ABYSS.

It was a round, gleaming metallic globe some thirty feet in diameter. We entered its tiny doorway; a thick, complicated affair, it reminded me of the door to some great round safe in a bank vault. Tad swung it closed. The click and queer whir of it, in spite of these friends around me, struck at me with awe. We were going down into the unknown.

They were very businesslike, Arturo and Tad. And Nereid, with her timorous, flashing smile at me, stood aside and watched them. Ah, never before had I so fully realized Nereid’s beauty! It so queerly stirred me; against all reason of friendship I could not treat her casually. Tad noticed it. He grinned at me, and whispered:

They had had little to say to me; the business of getting us embarked and started occupied them.

“We thought you’d never come, Jeff. Nereid has been calling you for months. We need you. You, of every one, we’ve wanted. We only got your answer a short time ago. Nereid had almost given up trying to reach you.”

“So it was Nereid—” I told them of the dreams. Nereid said shyly, “I would not care—I mean, it was not what I desired, to frighten you.”

She spoke slowly, carefully as one who deals with an unfamiliar language. And very softly, with an accent, not to be described and a tone curiously limpid.

Arturo smiled. “We could not help that; we had to get the call through. You’re not very receptive, Jeff.”

They told me then that it was Tad, down there with Nereid, who had made her call to Arturo. There was so much that I would ask, but Arturo cut us short.

“Not now. Later, when we arrive. We’ve been gone too long now, Tad—you know it.”

A different Arturo. He was dressed in short black trunks and a black sleeveless jacket that clung to him like a swimming suit. It shone, with light on it, like a thin woven metal. His black hair was closely clipped. His face was paler now than ever, but it seemed only the pallor of darkness. A leaner, rather longer face than I remembered. And stranger, and older. His jaw was more firmly set; his lips thinner and firmer. And his eyes were different. A flashing, dominant glance. More than that, they seemed larger, as though from living in the dark. And I noticed that here within the globe, the light was very dim, and carefully shaded.

There were similar changes in Tad. His short, stocky figure showed muscular in the brief black suit. His red hair was close-clipped; his freckles gone, with pallor supplanting them. He, too, seemed older; his face in repose, very solemn. But his manner showed he was the same old Tad—irrepressible; like Mercutio, he would make a joke of his own death, I am sure.

We sat on a horizontal platform which hung midway of the globe, spanning its diameter. A similar disk, of necessity smaller, was ten feet over our head like a ceiling. It made a sort of room, with a small metallic post upright in its center—a vertical axis to the globe. A queer, circular room. Seats stood about it; there seemed a buffet, wherein food was stored. And to one side, a table and shelves of instruments. A metal ladder led upward, through the ceiling, to the globe’s upper segment; and a trap door in the floor gave access to a ladder downward.

The whole metallic interior was dim with its shaded lights. I saw that the room was hung upon this central axis. There were windows at intervals in the curving wall of the globe. Through them, with lights whose source I could not determine, a vista of the sea showed plainly. We were pivoted, as though sitting upon the plane of a huge top. But it was not our disk that began spinning. The globe’s mechanisms went into operation with a slow throbbing; the disks of the room held steady, and apparently almost level. But already the central axis was turning; the globe was turning; the windows began passing in steady procession around us.

I asked no questions. Tad and Arturo were busy. I sat, with pounding heart, watching, listening, wondering. Nereid sat near me; I could feel the gaze of her solemn eyes. We had slid from the rocks; we were under the water. Sinking—rolling forward, or downward, I could not tell which.

Arturo stood for a moment before me. “We’ll be throwing on the pressure presently. Hold steady, Jeff; it will be strange at first.”

He smiled. “It’s difficult, making sure of our direction. Nereid, you know the way—will you watch with us?”

She nodded, rose, and stood across the disk by the instrument table. Tad was there, and the figure of another man. I had not yet seen him closely. A slim fellow dressed in the brief black suit. His arms and legs gleamed pink-white; he sat now by the instruments, his hands roving them, his gaze intent on a bank of dials illumined with a vague purple sheen.

He rose and Tad quickly took his place. He stood before me a delicate-looking, almost girlish fellow. He might have weighed a hundred pounds. A trifle taller than Nereid, slim and straight and smooth pink-white of skin. He stood smiling—a hand shading his wide blue eyes from the light. A handsome fellow; twenty years old perhaps.

He held out his hand. “I am glad.” He spoke like Nereid; he had indeed her strange look.

His face was smooth as though no razor had ever touched it. His brown hair was clipped close. I liked him at once, this Entt. Gentle, deprecating, but there was a strength to him. The muscles of his arms and shoulders rippled under the satin of his skin.

Arturo said, “He’s been a real friend—there is so much we have to tell you, Jeff. But not now. When we get there.”

Into the abyss. Strange, fearsome descent! A confusion of impressions. We had left the island. How far we went I could not say. An hour perhaps. The globe turned slowly; the illumined circles of windows with the green water outside them, rotated slowly around me.

And then the descent began. The globe had been throbbing, not only with vibration; with sound. The sound intensified. The globe gradually began whirling faster. I heard Tad say:

“We’re located right, aren’t we, Entt? By the little auk at the pole, I don’t want to go down at the wrong place!”

“There’s the marker we flung out,” said Arturo, and Entt nodded. “See it—off there?”

I could see very little through the whirling windows. They flashed faster. Presently they were all merged in a band of light—a horizontal, circular band like a slot of continuous window. The light had intensified; it showed the water, rushing upward now.

And then the pressure went on. I saw Entt swing the lever; I heard the beat of some new mechanism. It was presently as though within the globe this air I was breathing went under increasing pressure. Yet I knew now it was not exactly that. A changing of the air. A mechanism taking out, absorbing the air of my world, and substituting something else, a new, a different air. The atmosphere of this other realm to which we were going. A greater pressure, undoubtedly, but the change was far more than that. I cannot describe it scientifically. There was no one ever to tell me the technical difference. But I recall now how I felt, there in that globe as we descended.

An oppression. It seemed as though a band were compressing my chest. I could not breathe properly; I began panting. My head soon was roaring, my forehead cold with dank moisture.

There was a queer odor—the odor of wet, clammy earth, a smell like a wet cave far underground. I struggled for breath; a nausea was upon me. Once I thought my senses were fading and called, “Arturo!”

He came running. I was gripping the latticed metal seat. He touched me; appraised me with his gaze. “You’re all right, Jeff. Fearful at first, isn’t it? You’ll be all right after awhile.”

Above the roaring in my ears it seemed that my voice, and Arturo’s, had a different sound. A heavy, muffled sound.

“You’re all right, Jeff, we’ve got it on full now. You’ll feel better presently.”

He left me. I sat gasping, but after a time the nausea passed; my head cleared a trifle; the roaring in my ears began to abate. I found I could still breathe, but it was an effort. The muscles of my diaphragm were tired now with the strain of it. There was a fluid quality to this air, I took it into my lungs and flung it out with a panting, gasping exhalation. It burned me inside, and my skin was burning; tingling, prickling, as though with a thousand tiny needles.

But I grew used to it—or perhaps all the sensations were passing. Another long interval. I got to my feet, with a strange sense of lightness. I moved my arm with a gesture; I could feel the air pressing it. Upon sudden impulse I swung my arm with a swimming stroke; it slewed me around and I nearly fell.

I sat staring at the slot which was the whirling windows. I saw presently a slanting vista of the dim turgid floor of the sea come up, swing over and go level as we settled upon it. I noticed then that the sense of lightness of my body was gone. I felt, on my feet, almost a normal weight; and I knew that most of the lightness was caused by our rapid descent—one feels it, descending in a swiftly-dropping elevator car.

Arturo, Tad and Entt, over at the instrument table, were actively busy. Their low voices reached me, but the interior of the globe was buzzing with sound; and from outside our walls there came the noise of a violent swishing. Here on the dark, soundless floor of the sea, was the sound of tumbling, thrashing water!

I stood swaying, straining to see through the blurred slot of the revolving globe-windows. The dark ocean floor; then I caught a glimpse of what seemed an abyss; a tumbling white area of swirling water; a pit, near at hand where the water was lashed white with a huge circular swirl like a giant whirlpool. We were sucked into it.

Arturo’s voice: “Sit down, Jeff. Hang tight. You fool, don’t stand up like that!”

The globe, took a violent plunge. There was a brief, dizzying interval of chaos. We seemed almost falling free, turning end over end. I clung to my seat. I could see the others clinging, too. A few moments, then we steadied.

We were, as far as I could determine, in the center of a circular whirlpool. The water held level; but now we were descending—our rapid turning motion screwing us downward. Another mile down. Or five miles. I thought it that; and Arturo believed it that far.

He came over, after another interval, and sat beside me. “Strange, Jeff? We’re almost at the bottom. How do you feel?”

He laughed briefly. “It will pass. We’ll be at the first of the locks shortly.”

He sat, seeming not anxious to talk. Nor was I, for every breath I drew was still an effort. We were dropping down like an elevator car, the walls of the globe whirling on the upright axis. Tad and Entt were scanning the dials. Entt spoke; Tad reached for a lever.

Our descent seemed slackening. The whirlpool of water was stilled; through the window slot I could see the water, black, with a turgid, inky blackness. There was a perceptible jarring vibration; we settled upon some bottom surface and stood like a top, spinning.

The light in the water outside abruptly vanished, as Entt switched it off. A blank blackness out there. And then I saw a radiance; far away, it seemed, along a vaulted tunnel in which we lay. A radiance that congealed into a beam of light. It darted at us; gripped us. The globe shivered. My memory leaped back to the Dolphin, caught in the clutch of a similar beam. This one held us; drew us forward into the tunnel. The black tunnel walls went flashing past.

Oh, I was not the only one who had been perturbed at this descent into the abyss! Arturo was utterly relieved.

He said: “Ten miles or so. I don’t know. They’ve got us safely.” He called: “Tad, they waited. Suppose—they had deserted us—”

“The exterior pressure. Our rotation absorbs it—like the Dolphin’s water-jacket—give father credit, he struck the principle—it’s well known down here.”

He laughed at that. “Do you think—I don’t feel the pressure change? I do. Take it easy, Jeff—you’ll understand in good time. Ah, there’s the lock.”

Our globe stopped. In a dull glow outside I could see us wait an instant, then drift downward through a huge metallic door. It yawned open to receive us; it closed above us as we floated down through it.

“The first lock,” said Arturo. “They’ll change the water pressure; then we’ll go down into the next one. Ten altogether. We’ll be ten or fifteen minutes in each.”

A new realm beneath us. My thoughts struggled to encompass it all. A mile, ten miles over my head, the ocean floor. Already it seemed so remote. The abyss of our Pacific Ocean. Above its depths, our great atmospheric realm.

Down here a new world, unknown; throughout all the uncounted centuries of the past, unknown save where our legends had glimpsed it. Another realm. A civilization, a science here; things mechanical; the rational thought of rational humans. These locks, gateways, changing pressures were all planned and built by skillful human effort.

The lock was dimly lighted. In the silence I could hear the throb of outside pumps, the gurgle of air bubbles, and the hiss of air and water. Against the side wall of the lock room, there was a small, transparent dome. A dull light was in it. The water was excluded. The figure of a man showed in there, bent over a table of instruments, it was the lockkeeper, attending the pumps for our downward passage.

Tad came over. “I say, Arturo, no twenty-hour watchman ever got as hungry as I am. How you feeling, Jeff?”

“You’ll ease up. We’re rotating slower now. In the fifth lock, we stop.”

I noticed that the globe seemed spinning not quite so fast. Tad insisted: “Can’t we eat, Arturo? Let’s have Nereid fix it up.”

We passed down into the second lock. The spinning of the globe slowed another notch. The second lock was a room like the first. The overhead door swung closed. The pumps outside throbbed. I could see the water changing; a thinner quality, its turgidness leaving it, a limpid aspect coming to it.

Nereid opened a table and set food before us. They all ate save myself; I could no more than taste it—queer looking food which all of them appeared to relish.

We passed down into the third lock; and the fourth and fifth. In each, Entt slowed our rotation. The slot separated into the spinning windows; in the fifth lock they halted. Our globe lay inert, vibrationless at least, I felt immediately less oppressed, but it was largely psychological, for the air we were breathing was unchanged.

“Yes,” said Arturo, “it will be always like that. But you’ll get used to it. They’re thinning the water outside—presently we’ll be out into air just like this.” He added, abruptly: “Jeff, it’s a relief to have you here. We are engaged in a desperate thing, Jeff. The welfare of our world up there depends on it—and more than that, Nereid’s people—”

I interrupted: “Day before yesterday, when the public was given the news—” I said it casually, then stopped. Day before yesterday! Was it only that? It seemed so long ago—so far away, so like a vague dream, that bright other world up there which was mine. “When the public was given the news, there was almost a panic—”

“Why,” I said, “the news that the oceans are receding again. A real drop this time. We couldn’t mistake it, because—”

My voice trailed away. I gazed in surprise. My words seemed a bombshell. Arturo went visibly whiter; Tad’s jaw dropped. Nereid exchanged a glance of sudden fear with Entt. They all sat confounded.

They sat confounded. They did not know that the menace had come to our world! I had assumed, of course, that they did, that they had sent for me, in some crisis now that the danger had come again.

Arturo gasped. “It has come! Tad, my God, after all we’ve planned! Done it now—why, what she has dared to do—why, it’s irrevocable! We can’t stop it now, Tad!”

A fear, a horror lay upon them all, and I saw that this was something more than the menace of the draining of our oceans, and a war with these people of the abyss. Something, to Nereid and Entt, more personal—more horrifying. And to Tad and Arturo, the defeat of all their plans.

“Seventh lock,” said Tad. He had recovered his poise; he gestured vehemently. “Sit down, Arturo—can’t do anything yet.”

He shook me off, turned on me sharply. “Let me alone! We’ve got to get down to the City of the Mound, I tell you! To Nereid’s father. He probably knows about it now.”

The water in the seventh lock was thin and limpid clear. I could see the attendant in the dome-shaped cubby. He met Arturo’s gaze; he smiled and gestured a greeting. Arturo tried to call him.

“Don’t be a loon!” said Tad sharply. “He can’t hear you. If he did, he couldn’t understand your language. You know that. Wait till we get to the tenth. Then we can get the car and hurry.”

I put my hand on Arturo’s arm. “This is something more than we thought it was before? Our oceans draining. A war—”

He swung on me. “It’s all that, yes. And more—Nereid’s world is to be annihilated, Jeff! A million people, her people, drowned like rats in a trap unless they can escape upward in time! That’s what we’ve been fearing—and it’s come!”

CHAPTER XI.

WHAT THE WHITE GLARE SHOWED.

The ninth lock was filled with a white, swirling mist, air now; water no longer, yet I had not remarked when the change came. I stood with Arturo at the window; the room outside was gray with dank, wet fog. As we rested in the lock, the pumps outside were hissing with the changing air. The fog dissolved; the air seemed clear, with only a dim haze. The door to the lock under us swung slowly open. We were lowered, our weight handled now by mechanical device. We came to rest in the tenth lock. The air became wholly clear, the moisture gone from it.

“Very good,” said Tad. They were preparing to leave. “Shall I open the door, Entt?”

The tenth lock was a room like the others, a square, solid, metallic room, with girders of metal reënforcing its rock walls. It was dully illumined by an indirect light, whose source I could not see. The keeper sat with his instruments in a cubby; there was no dome over him. Figures moved on the lock floor about our globe—figures of men, down under the bulge of our walls; I could not see them clearly. They were clamping some mechanism upon us; the globe was swung aside, into an alcove evidently to store it.

A metallic, railed balcony ran midway of the room. Arturo gestured. I saw standing up there the figure of a woman. A brawny, powerful figure, gray-white of limb, with hair dead black. She stood on the balcony, gesturing down at the workmen, evidently commanding. A tall, gray figure, five feet ten, at the least. I could see her only dimly; a white shield like thin, flexible metal bound her torso; black coils of her long hair crossed her breast.

Our globe was drawn aside; the woman gestured vehemently at us. Entt called. “She said, ready now.”

We swung open the globe’s heavy door. There was a gentle inrush of air; it seemed purer, fresher; but it brought an intensified smell of earthly dankness. Our voices in it were heavy, muffled.

I gathered up my few possessions, and we were ready. Entt extinguished the soft lights of the globe. Our round doorway showed with the dull radiance outside; voices in a strange tongue floated in to us; the clanking sounds of mechanisms; the last hiss of rushing air. The woman’s voice sounded sharp, vehemently commanding. With pounding heart I went down the swaying incline which they had put up. I stood on the damp metallic floor.

Black-garbed figures crowded around us. Entt scattered them. The gray woman on the balcony stood gazing down at us.

“See here,” said Arturo, “Entt, you tell her we must have the fastest car. Tell her we’re in a hurry.”

Entt called up. His words echoed dully through the heavy air. The woman answered—a brief, sharp, rasping retort. Her gray-white arm waved us away.

Arturo spurred us with fevered haste. We went through a small, heavy door. Down a ladder, out into an open space.

A sense of great open distance lay around me. It was wholly dark; a pregnant darkness wherein I felt that many strange things might be seen. A heavy, slow-moving breeze, coming from far off, stirred against my hot, tingling cheeks.

I gazed into what seemed an ocean of black space. I tried to focus my straining eyes upon something. Ah, there were stars! But I knew it was incredible. Not stars; points of twinkling light. They gleamed overhead, straight before me, to the sides, and even below—far ahead, but on a lower level than we were walking, so that I stopped suddenly, clutching at Arturo with the feeling that an abyss must yawn at my feet.

Tiny, distant points of light, like stars. I gazed at them across what was immeasurable blank distance.

But near at hand there were things vaguely to be seen. The dull blob of a passing man’s figure. A hundred feet away, perhaps, the vaguest of yellow radiance. Figures there; and a long, gleaming white thing lying in an upraised framework.

Entt headed us toward it. I walked, swaying as though alcoholite had befuddled me. A different gravity here. I felt lighter; yet it was not so much that. A difference. There have since been many learned discussions on this subject; I am not one to attempt it in technical detail. I felt as though all my weight were not pressing upon my feet with a downward pull in normal fashion. There was a side thrust—first one side and then the other as I chanced to be moving.

As though by inertia, my movement tended abnormally to persist. A different application of the gravitational force. And I believe, too, that the quality of this air had its effect. It seemed an atmosphere almost ponderable as I plowed through it. There was a sensible pressing of it upon me; the weight of the breeze was tangibly heavy.

“Here!” cried Arturo. “Get away, you!” He moved with irritable aggression at a man who crowded us, gaping curiously.

A flight into the void, by air! This was an aërocar, waiting here for us. A white structure of thin, flexible metal, some twenty feet long by four feet wide—open and flat like a long toboggan. There were seats on it, two abreast. A low railing, with bulging pontoons glowing dimly yellow. A streamlike thing; its forward end held a V-shaped windshield six feet high. Behind it a group of controls. Like a bowsprit of some ancient sailing vessel, a metallic tube projected out front. It glowed with a greenish phosphorescence.

We climbed on board. None of the attendants came with us; a group of them stood staring, whispering among themselves. Entt spoke to them briefly. The car trembled. The bowsprit tube in advance of us grew more intensely luminous, like a wire electrically heated in the darkness. The air around the tube snapped with a myriad tiny sparks.

Arturo said: “That air out front is dissolving—we’ll move forward into the vacuum.”

The glowing pontoons along our sides hissed with a downward thrust of gas. We lifted. The metallic stage with its staring group of figures dropped away. Entt tilted the luminous tube a trifle upward. We slid forward into the vacuum.

Faster. The wind went rushing past us. We slid out and upward into the blackness of the void, with its tiny points of light twinkling like stars in the distance.

I have flown, off and on, all my life. But this flight in the void of the abyss had an eerie unreality. Unreal, like the magic fancy of a child. Witches on a broomstick, with the rushing night around them, slanting up into the stars. Or a magic strip of carpet, this white thing upon which we crouched. Rushing through the wind; flexible, bending, undulating throughout its length beneath us.

We spoke very little; the noise of the wind tore at our words. I pulled at Arturo’s arm.

My eyes seemed growing accustomed to the darkness; I strained them into the black space dotted with stars. Not many; occasional groups of them, above us, and as I gazed down over the low rail, I could see them twinkling underneath. The immensity of celestial space, as though we were rushing through it, out among the stars.

The sensation was suddenly dispelled. These were not stars, gigantic, infinitely far away, but points of man-made light, comparatively close. Gazing down, with vision expanding now in the darkness, I made out a vague black surface sliding under us. It lay, not horizontal, but sloping at a sharp angle, and I knew then that we were flying tilted partly sidewise. And while I stared, it swung level as we righted.

A dark surface of land; and the stars were lights down there. I saw them now as different colors, and in groups which might serve as landmarks.

We were descending now. I had guessed the surface to be some ten thousand feet beneath us. We dropped lower. I could make out a rocky, undulating landscape. Occasional patches of what might have been soil. Shining, narrow ribbons of roads. Areas of vegetation.

We passed over a village. Dull spots of light, merged into a glow. I saw the dark shapes of houses; on a hillside, tiers of them. There was movement down there, in city streets. Off to one side, beyond the settlement, a great flat structure was bathed in a red blast of light. It seemed a factory. A pit in the rocks beside it glowed red.

We swept on. The settlement vanished behind us. I saw a point of light, like a beacon, set on the summit of a rocky cliff. It changed color at intervals. Entt remarked it, with a gesture to Tad. He swung the controls; we went into a sharp, upward climb.

There were points of light always showing in the black void over our heads. As we had descended toward the rocky landscape, the lights overhead had grown very dim. I gazed up at them. They twinkled up there, very faint and dim now. I wondered what they could be. Not aërial beacons, poised over us? As we climbed, they began to brighten.

My imagination struggled to cope with this I was seeing. This silent realm down here—I had the sense of a great celestial spaciousness, but I knew that it was not so. This was within our earth, underground; a great, black void here, like a titanic cave. Yet it must be of finite area; comparatively small. Over my head now—up there where the points of light blazed like stars—must be some great rocky ceiling. And above that, miles above it, no doubt, my imagination saw the floor of our Pacific Ocean!

We ascended in a steep slant. The upper stars brightened. The lights beneath dimmed with distance. Then I saw overhead the outlines of what indeed was a rocky ceiling. It spread horizontally over us; eight or ten thousand feet still up there, at the least. I saw the lights set in this rocky ceiling.

And then I gasped. With sudden, changing viewpoint, I saw what was the truth. There were ribbons of roads on the rocky ceiling. Patches of open space that might have been soil. An open area glowing with light; houses in it—a settlement! It hung up there, the distant, small image of it—a settlement of houses and streets, upside down, perilously clinging to our ceiling!

It was then that my viewpoint changed. I envisaged, very suddenly, that our aëro was flying overturned. This land was beneath us, not above! Hanging head downward, as I have often done in a Wasp, I was staring down at this dark surface over which we were speeding. And as though to verify the fancy, I heard Entt speak, and saw him swing us. The void began slowly turning over. The dim stars came slowly swinging overhead; the rocky ceiling went down and steadied horizontally beneath us. Normality came again.

I grasped it now. This void, this titanic cave, was peopled on all its inner surface. Floor and ceiling, no difference. So strange! And yet was it? My fancy held that just a moment ago, this void had swung completely over. Our whole great earth lying outside it, had turned. This ceiling, which now was beneath us, was not a ceiling, but a floor. But in reality it was only our aëro which had turned.

So strange a thing, this inner surface peopled both top and bottom; up and down. But was it so strange? On the surface of our earth, we in the Americas visualize ourselves always as upright. Our heads are to the stars; our feet to the great earth which always lies bulging under us. And we can fancy China, down there with all its people hanging head downward. Yet we know that in twelve hours, they must be on top, and ourselves hanging down.

Up and down! Meaningless terms when used to try and denote anything of the Absolute! There is, indeed, in all our universe, no term of time or space, or motion that means anything, when taken by itself alone.

The gravity here in this void? The new textbooks explain it in most learned fashion. They talk of different air quality, different pressure down here. The great bulk of our earth, encompassing this inner void to give rise to whole new sets of mathematical formulæ. They say that our scientists had never before encountered an underground area which had its own atmosphere, subject to its own pressures and laws. Let them have their say; I tell only what I saw and felt.

We were dropping suddenly downward in a swift spiral. Arturo touched me. “The City of the Mound. See it there?”

A low, rocky mound-shaped hill lay beneath us, a mile or so off to one side. It was dotted with lights, covered with houses—low, circular houses, seemingly of a gray-black stone. We dropped lower. The mound was perhaps three hundred feet high. The houses were set on its slopes, in tiers. Streets were between them, in orderly array—horizontal streets, like circular bands around the hill; and there were other streets running down the slope. One side was a gentle declivity; the other, a steep, almost precipitous descent. The street there went down a broad, metallic ladder.

Arturo gestured. “Her house is there—the Great Woman. At the top of the mound.”

“Nonsense. She was a subordinate. The Empress—I call her that. Ruler of this realm, I mean; you’ll see her. We had intended to have you—”

He broke off. He was highly nervous—high-pitched, overwrought, I could not mistake it; abstracted, deep in his own thoughts, with little time yet for me. And he was never one to brook questions.

I turned away from him, absorbing myself in the scene of our landing. At the very peak of the mound was the house Arturo had indicated. A squat spreading building of dark frowning ramparts like some ancient moldy fortress. It stood there with a faint sheen of light upon it, grim and forbidding. Around it was an open space—a garden, with paths and low shrubs; beyond that, encircling it, a low palisade like a fence, with the city houses crowding it.

We were still at a high enough altitude for me to get a distant view. The houses covered the mound, and at its foot, thinner down on the level, they spread out into suburbs over the near-by rocky landscape. At the outer city fringes I saw a distant field with things growing.

It was everywhere a squat, solid landscape. The houses, all of one low story, sat squat upon the ground. There were trees, a dark forest over which we passed. The trees spread thick and wide, but low to the ground like shrubs. There was little height to anything.

I had seen no water. But now, on the edge of the city, I made out a dull-white, winding ribbon that I thought might be a river.

We swung down to within a thousand feet of the frowning palace fortress. On its flat roof in a sheen of light I could make out the tiny dark blobs of figures standing in a group by a parapet-wall. From the roof a point of fire suddenly mounted. It came up toward us, mounting slowly. My heart leaped; for an instant I thought it was a missile, sent up to strike and destroy us. But it rose no more than a hundred feet; then it opened into a great ball of white light. For perhaps a minute it hung poised, burning.

Entt gave a cry of fear. He and Nereid sat with hands to their eyes, blinded by the white glare. I felt our aëro wavering; Arturo leaped from my side; he and Tad, themselves shading their eyes, clung to the controls. We wavered, but they held us steady after a moment, circling over the fortress-roof, spiraling slowly down.

On the roof-top, the figures stood with what seemed dark glasses over their eyes. We had dropped still lower; I made them out plainly. Twenty of them at least; most of them tall, gray-limbed women. They stood gazing, not at us, but down at the city, regarding with shaded eyes the scene revealed by the white glare of light they had sent up.

A crowd of people pressed against the garden palisade. Some of them had evidently climbed it and were in the fortress garden. Men, and women with flowing tawny hair. All of them like Nereid and Entt. A different race from these gray giantess Amazons on the roof-top. They thronged against the garden palisade. Crowds of them surged in all the upper city streets. Crude weapons were in their hands—implements, perhaps, of agriculture.

An attack upon the fortress. It seemed so. It had evidently been done quietly—now which was doubtless the quiet time of sleep. But it had been discovered. In the white revealing glare the mob was stricken. The blinded figures in the garden were trying to run back—in a panic trying to escape. They stumbled, fell. Rose and blindly staggered away. I saw one run headlong against a tree trunk.

The quiet of the scene—it had been wholly quiet in the darkness a moment before—was broken by their cries of panic. At the palisade the milling throng was struggling to force its way backward against the press of those behind. The city was in a turmoil.

A minute of that white glare; then the flare burned out and blank darkness came again. For a time I could see nothing. I heard Arturo’s and Tad’s voices:

“It’s come—the revolt! But, Tad, we’re not ready. Nothing is ready—”

From beneath us, on the dark fortress-roof we were nearing, a cry floated up. A strident, woman’s voice, laughing ironically.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SATANIC EMPRESS.

“Tad! Raise us up! Are you going to land on the fortress? Get us away from here!”

We skimmed over the fortress. The gray figures gazed up at us. We swung down the slope of the mound, close over the city streets and roofs. The houses seemed, most of them, from six to ten feet high. I saw, on the level area just beyond the foot of the mound slope, the house upon which Arturo and Tad intended to land—a broad, flat roof. There was a dim light on it; in the glow, a figure of a man stood waiting to receive us.

We settled down and came to rest. The roof was oval, fully fifty feet across. It had small flowering shrubs, paths, and a sort of lawn on which we landed—a moldy brown turf. Off at one end, bathed in the dim light, was a pergola with seats and banks of blossoms. The man stood off there. He came hastening forward as we settled.

“Fen!” Arturo called to him. “Here we are, Fen! We got him. Did you know they tried to attack the Castle? It was discovered. She saw them—in the white glare.”

It was Nereid’s father. He came and held Nereid in a close embrace, then shook hands with the rest of us. He was an old man, sixty, or eighty, I could not have said which. White of skin, with tawny hair long to his shoulders—a wavy mass of hair, grown dull and dead looking with his age. But he was a sturdy vigorous old fellow, no taller than Entt, slight of build, erect and straight for all his years. And dignified; his loose, dark robe fell to his knees; a girdle bound his slim waist; on his chest was an ornament in beaten white metal of strange device. I recognized it—the device Arturo, and later myself, had used on our flash lights as a signal.

He stood me off and regarded me. “So this—you call ‘Jeff’?” He gestured to me apologetically. “I cannot talk the language of yours—the young learn—I am old.” His gaze swept me from head to foot. “Strange dress—he is so big, Arturo, as you said it.”

“But it’s too late for that,” Arturo rejoined swiftly. He added to me: “They worship size, these Gian women. I had planned, Jeff, to send you to the Empress Rhana—you are so tall and strong—taller than any man here. She would have liked you.”

So that was it. I began vaguely to understand. But only vaguely; it was still all so strange.

They were all talking at once. Partly in my own language; partly in this other, which was wholly unintelligible. Fen, like them all, was plainly agitated. I grasped a few details, mostly from Tad’s swift explanations. There were two races—one small, white-skinned; the other larger—the gray women and their men, who were the ruling class. They were called the Gians. Tad explained: “They have a word dgie—it means large. Nereid’s people are the Mdj. You can’t pronounce it, but it suggests Middge—we call them that.”

The Middge were the workers—oppressed, downtrodden. They had been for months upon the verge of a revolt. Fen was helping its secret organization; weapons secretly were being manufactured in the underground fire caverns where the Middge worked. But the news of the oncoming water had suddenly stirred the Middge public here to panic; this abortive mob attack on the fortress was the result. The whole City of the Mound was in a turmoil. It could do nothing but harm to the Middge cause.

Such fragments I gleaned. Fen knew that the Gians had opened the great gates to drain our upper oceans. He knew of the demonstration against the Castle, but was powerless to stop it. He had stayed at home to await our coming. His eyes were not affected; he had been indoors, and had escaped the light.

But Entt and Nereid, even now, were almost blinded. They sat together for the few moments while this swift talk proceeded. Our roof was so low that in a bound I could have leaped its parapet and vaulted to the ground. The city lay upward on the slope of the mound near at hand; in the gloom its dull winking lights were visible. The cries of the mob still sounded loudly.

It was decided that we should make our way on foot to the summit and see what was transpiring. Fen was afraid that the thoughtless leaders of the mob might make threats which would warn the Gians and divulge that an intelligent, armed revolution was being organized. He wanted to stop that if he could, and pacify the mob; quell this disturbance.

They took me down into the house. Its oval stone rooms were furnished in strange but obviously luxurious fashion; each had a tiny hooded light. The ceilings were so low that I had to stoop a trifle. They gave me a black suit, like those of Arturo and Tad. Abroad in the city I would thus attract less attention. For my feet there were flexible hide sandals, with thongs to bind them on.

We gathered in a room with an outer doorway. It had all been done swiftly; not more than ten minutes had passed since we landed on the roof.

We were ready to start. There was a sound of swift padding feet in the near-by corridor, and a man burst into the room. He seemed a family servant. He came running in, babbling with fear; and clung to Fen.

I could understand nothing that was said as they gathered for a moment around him. He seemed wholly terrorized. He was a Gian—there was no mistaking the gray look to his skin; his black hair was shaved close on a bullet head—but he was small, certainly not over five feet in height. Dressed like the rest of us in the brief black garment, his figure had a flabby, pudgy look. A fellow, I thought, outcast by his race and come now to be a servant in Fen’s household.

A broad, brown girdle bound his waist; it suggested an apron. Under his arm he had a conical hat, with a bushy animal tail like a plume on it. He clapped it on his head; it was grotesquely ornamental to the rest of him. His whining voice seemed pleading with Fen.

Tad came over to where I was standing apart. “Their servant, Bhool. He’s afraid to be left here—he says the Middge will break in and murder him.”

I could not blame him for that. But he seemed a sniveling, craven fellow. Tad was contemptuous. “He’s always been like that—afraid of everything. And a listener in doorways—curious to know everything everybody’s doing and then go into a panic over it. By the code, I’d have had him thrown out of here long ago!”

We took Bhool with us. Nereid, able to see a little now, fumbled for a dark cloak of her own. She flung it over Bhool, so that in the street he might pass unnoticed as a Gian. He was still sniveling. But he eyed me curiously, amazed evidently at my size. In my own world I could never have been termed excessively tall, though in the six-foot class—to be exact, I stood just at six feet two inches. At this time I weighed about a hundred and ninety. With my breadth of shoulder, I was still lean at this weight. The sniveling fellow Bhool gazed up at me awed, and edged away, fearful of me.

We started. The streets at the foot of the Mound were deserted; narrow, rocky streets, hemmed in by the stone walls of the low houses. It was dim; there were apparently no public lights, only the occasional glow from a house window, doorway or roof-top. We walked swiftly, Fen leading with his vigorous stride.

The air in the streets was hot, moist and oppressive. I felt that queer, different thrust of gravity upon me, but I was getting used to it now. I walked like the others, with a solid, plowing tread.

We turned a corner and were soon upon the upward slope. I had expected to find it different, walking uphill in this oppressive air. It was not; I noticed, indeed, very little difference from walking on the level ground.

We were still some half mile from the Castle. Cries sounded, occasional screams ringing clear; and the low, blended murmur of the mob.

But the street here was empty and soundless. In our sandals we padded over its stones. There were street corners, yawning, empty and dark. Black shadows where low archways opened like tunnel mouths into the house. A woman with a baby in her arms came to a window and gazed at us. Her white face, caught by an inner light was close to me as we passed. Her eyes were stark black with fear.

At a corner a group of men went running past and swung up the hill. They were small, white-skinned folk, and they shouted at Fen. We followed.

As we advanced, the murmur of the mob up ahead sounded clearer. The streets soon were filled. We passed a man, blind and seemingly in a frenzy of fear. He staggered through the crowd. Some one caught him, fought him, led him away.

There were white forms lying in the street. The mob had evidently surged down this far in its first blind panic and many were crushed. We passed the slim white figure of a man whom some one had carried to his own doorstep and dropped. A wailing woman knelt over him; a little girl, curious, half frightened, stood beside the woman, plucking at her robe.

The servant, Bhool, kept close beside me now. His touch strangely angered me; once, I thrust him away.

We forced ourselves into the crowd. No one seemed to notice us. When we came to the palisade, Fen saw an opening in the jam.

“All of us keep together.” He forced his way forward. We found a place to climb. It was a metallic fence some six feet high. Upon impulse I put my hands on its top and tried to vault. I sailed over it with astonishing ease, and landed lightly on the other side.

The garden was crowded with people, but there was more room here than in the upper street. Small, upright shrubs stood about, some vaguely white with blossoms. In the gloom it was hard to tell them from the human forms.

We followed a gray stone path. The Castle loomed ahead, with walls some thirty feet high. They stretched out seemingly for several hundred feet—a squat, but widely spreading structure; its walls were turreted at the angles; the windows all seemed guarded with interlaced metal bars. A frowning prison of a building. A black vegetation clung to the walls. There were small doorways along the ground at intervals—black, barred openings with tiny lights in canopies over them.

We tried to keep together. Arturo stayed always close by Nereid, fending her off from the milling crowd. It was a threatening mob, here in the garden. Aimless, apparently without a leader. It milled and struggled, men and women brandishing implements of the field, or huge sticks, and shouting aimless threats. There were many, recovered of the blindness, who fought to press forward. There were others, still blind and in terror, who strove to run away, or sat upon the ground in huddled fright. And still others, lying inert, wholly unnoticed by their fellows.

We faced a broad front entrance to the Castle. A low flight of stone steps led ten feet up to it. Gray figures of women stood in the shadows up there, like guards. There seemed no more than four or five of them. They stood in the entrance way; vaguely to be seen in its shadows—stood silent and motionless. There was about them, these motionless figures, something queerly sinister, as though they held a power that made them impregnable to all this threatening crowd. The Castle itself had that sinister aspect. Its grim silence; its inactivity. It stood, here in the gloom, silently confident. I felt, too, as I gazed at it, an inward sense of fear. A revulsion. As though within these darkly brooding walls fearsome things must have transpired.

The more courageous of the mob had surged toward the entrance steps which now we were facing. They stood in a ring near the bottom of the steps. But there seemed a deadline beyond which none dared pass; the ground twenty feet out from the front of the steps was all clear. The mob stood calling imprecations and brandishing weapons, but not advancing. Waiting for a leader, perhaps. Occasionally some one would rush forward, or be thrust forward by those behind. But after a step or two, the would-be leader always retreated. And up in the entrance way the gray Gian women never moved.

Fen—with Bhool urging him sidewise—led us toward the steps; the crowd was so dense we were soon struggling to advance. I was literally wading through these little people; their bodies felt frail and slight as I roughly thrust them aside. I called: “Arturo, let me over there.” I joined him, to guard Nereid in the jam.

Around us a man’s cry arose—a cry of triumph. Others took it up. There was a surge of people toward me; behind me I saw them following like a wave. Calling at me in friendly triumph. My height, head and shoulders above them all; my white skin, clear to them in the darkness—they suddenly saw in me their needed leader. They surged triumphantly around me.

But Fen, with vehement words, scattered them. We forced our way to the open space, beyond which was the Castle entrance. We were at one side, not far from the side edge of the steps. I felt hands clinging to me. That accursed, sniveling Bhool; I cast him off.

I had been aware all this time, of a radiance on the castle roof-top. Women’s figures were up there in a dull purple glow. We stopped and gathered around Fen. I gazed upward. The gray figure of a man stood prominent on the parapet. He was standing like a grim silent statue. He suddenly whirled, leaped down, and in a moment reappeared. A woman was with him. A group of men came running on the roof with a small bank of steps. The man helped the woman mount them. She came up with a slow regal majesty, the men deferentially helping her. She stood on the broad parapet top, and the man crouched at her feet.

A wave of it went over the crowd, followed by a sudden hushed murmur of awe. Then the hush broke; there was a screaming of threats; a violent surging on the mob. But I noticed that no one advanced; and the cries presently died away again into a fear-struck silence.

The woman on the parapet waited serene and motionless. She was no more than fifty feet from me; the purple sheen of light etched her vividly. A woman six feet tall; full-breasted, slim of hip. A flexible heart-shaped shield bound her torso; her gray limbs were free. The shield gleamed purple in the light like smooth polished metal, thin-beaten to mold itself like a sheath about her body.

She stood with figure drawn to its full height. Her head, poised upon a slim neck, was crowned with black hair wound in coils, with a black metallic headdress. Against the night, her profile showed; slim neck and upheld chin—a nose high-bridged, hawklike.

She raised her arms as the mob in the garden fell silent. Broad bracelets of metal were on her wrists, and from them heavy gleaming white chains dangled. Abruptly she struck with her arm; the white chain swished and lashed upon the naked gray back of the man crouching at her feet. He cringed, slid off the parapet and vanished to the roof-top. She stood smiling.

It was a gesture wholly cruel, unnecessary. A blow deliberate, without anger, without reason save that it pandered to the feminine vanity of her, thus to demonstrate her power. I gazed at that hawklike profile. Almost beautiful; the slim gray throat rising from that full bosom; the firm, but delicate chin; the mouth, firm-lipped, cruelly smiling now.

This woman, Satanic. Ah, there were refinements of cruelty that none but a woman—and a woman like this—could devise! The thought flashed to me, and it was not long before I had cause to remember it!

She slowly raised her arms, with the silver chains dangling. And in a moment, when the silence was complete, she began to speak. Her voice was low-pitched at first—a calm, confident voice. But there was a harsh rasp to it.

The crowd listened to that carrying voice, with the driving sense of power behind it. To every corner of the garden and to the streets beyond it rolled clear. A moment, then she was speaking faster. Fluently; the words tumbling, rising to a climax. She stopped abruptly. She was raised on tiptoe, every line of her tense. Her arms were up, palms toward the faces gazing up at her—a gesture half benign, half menacing. In her pause a faint quavering cheer arose; but under it there was the murmur of threats. She began again, quietly talking above the noise.

Entt, with his blurred sight, had stayed close by Fen. But he seemed fully recovered now. Nereid stood with her father’s arm protectingly around her. Tad was there; Arturo and I were a few feet farther away. The black edge of the fortress steps was near us; and beyond the black blob of an upstanding shrub the dark wall bulged out in a sort of turret. I whispered to Arturo:

He told us. She was assuring the Middge people there was no cause to be frightened. “She says, ‘I am going up to conquer the world of light. A beautiful region—my Gian army will conquer it. I will rule everything—prepare it up there for you to come and live so happily.’”

Arturo burst out: “But, my God, Entt—the abyss here will be flooded. You know that. If the gates break—they will break, she expects them to—we’ll all have to get out of here soon, a million or two of the Middge people. How can they get out?”

“Wait! She says now she will prepare a way of escape—soon, but just at this present time all is water up there. When the—what you call ocean—is partly down, she knows where the Middge can go and wait in safety.”

“She lies!” Arturo exclaimed. “She does not care where the people go, or how they escape!”

Again I felt a soft, insistent plucking at me; Bhool cringed at my feet. “Master, look there!”

In the gloom I could see his shaking gray arm; his hand pointing toward the shrub and the bulge of the castle wall.

We saw nothing. Bhool stood up; he was trembling. He took a step toward the shrub. “What is it, masters?”

Arturo strode to the shrub. He poked about it. We three were alone in this small shadowed area.

“Nothing,” whispered Arturo contemptuously. “Bhool, you’re an accursed whining—”

“Masters, not there.” We were standing at the shrub. “Over there, at the wall—a Middge man lying. He is not dead. I saw him move.”

We took another step or two. The ground sharply descended; six feet away there seemed a black opening—in the wall—and a faint movement there. It seemed, not as though some one were lying there, but more like light. I recall that I was tensed to leap backward with the premonition of danger. Arturo’s hand gripped me.

We stood tense in the darkness at the brink of the small declivity. Bhool was behind us. He suddenly pushed us violently with a heave of his body. We sprawled forward. I fell to my hands and knees; Arturo was thrown partly upon me. A light was gripping us. It stung; my flesh smarted in its grip—a tangible force of something holding me. I fought with it. Arturo was fighting.

“Jeff—” His voice died in a gurgle. We were being lifted, were sliding into a yawning doorway.

I could not shout; my throat was taut, and closing. With Arturo struggling, half gripping me, we were drawn, sucked inward.

The darkness closed; the light was phosphorescent, holding us. With fading senses I slid into a blank, black silence.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE UNDERGROUND CELL.

I recovered consciousness to find myself lying on a soft bed. I seemed comfortable, luxurious, with a feeling of well-being and pleasure. I opened my eyes; shuddering memory leaped to me. I sat up.

I was on a low couch of soft, furry skins. In a dim, vaulted stone room. On the bed beside me sat Arturo.

“Well, Jeff!” He smiled at me; relief in his smile. He seemed uninjured, sitting there waiting anxiously for me to recover consciousness.

My skin was smarting as though it had been burned; but in a moment my head steadied. Strength came to me. I sat up vigorously beside Arturo.

Memory of Bhool came to me. He had betrayed us. A spy, that Gian. I recalled now, how he had eyed me. How in the garden he had kept edging me away. All under cover of that sniveling cowardice. An actor, that fellow!

Arturo laughed wryly. “I guess so, but I imagine he’s a coward just the same. It’s a wonder Fen never suspected him. They want you, Jeff, evidently. She—”

“I don’t know. I’ve been sitting here watching you, six or eight hours.”

“Yes. For how long, I don’t know. I found myself lying here with you. Then a woman came in, gave me something to drink. She said you’d be all right—that the stronger person always suffered most from the light. I imagine she’ll be back—”

He acquiesced in that. But quite evidently he had already examined our cell—it was no less than that; and he seemed not very hopeful. We were in a stone room some twenty feet square. The rough stone walls had a gleaming black metallic look to them; the floor was smooth burnished metal. The low, flat ceiling barely cleared my head by an inch; it was gray, smooth as polished steel. There was the couch; a metal table, shaped like a huge cup; and a metal chair.

Arturo followed me about the room. “Not much chance, Jeff. I’ve been trying to plan something, but I haven’t yet decided.”

There were two small orifices in the ceiling. From one came the faint purple glow of light; its tiny shade was pushed aside; it spread downward like an electrolier and cast a six-foot circle on the floor. The other hole seemed to be admitting a current of fresh air. The room was queerly dank; beads of moisture were sweating on the ceiling.

There was a small door, convex like the round door to a bank vault. It had a pane the size of my face; I stood and peered through it—a substance as transparent as glassite, brittle evidently, and solid as ancient glass. It seemed fully two feet thick, like a bull’s-eye. Beyond it there was the dim vision of a vaulted metal corridor.

The opposite wall, up against the ceiling, held a similar small pane like a window. It was level with my eyes; I could see a barred grating beyond the bull’s-eye; and outside that, not the garden as I had hoped, but seemingly another corridor.

I fancied we might wrench a piece of metal from this bed, or table. The walls were of stone; they crumbled a trifle as I scratched at them with my nails. They might not be very thick—if we could dig our way out—

“And find ourselves—where?” Arturo objected. “That isn’t an outer wall. I tell you there’s no use trying. Give me time; I’m planning something.”

“I know it isn’t an outer wall. This woman who brought you the drink—did she come alone?”

Nor did he know the inner lay-out of the castle, or whether we were at its top, or bottom. He thought there were two floors.

“I’ve never been in here before. Tad has, before I came—before we got this revolution under way. She knows about that, Jeff; it’s open hostility now. God, we’re prisoners here—she’ll be coming down to see us. What she’ll do to us eventually! That woman, Jeff—” He shuddered. “You don’t know—”

“You’re not very coherent, Arturo. But you’re right enough; it seems to me I know almost nothing about all this.”

He seemed suddenly breaking. This pale, slender boy of nineteen was trembling. He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

“You overrode your father. Easy, lad, I want to talk plainly to you. You told your father nothing. Nor Polly—nor me. You’ve got me down here into this—”

“Of course you have. But I’m trying to show you. You take too much on yourself.”

“I know. But I’m trying now, Arturo, to show you—I’m older than you are—maybe I’ve got more sense and more judgment than you have—”

He looked up and smiled. “Of course you have. I haven’t been reticent, or I don’t want to be—”

“You haven’t made much effort to take any one into your confidence, Arturo.”

“You’re wrong, Jeff. Old Fen, and Tad—they wouldn’t say I’ve tried to run them, or force my ideas—”

“I’m talking about myself. And your father and Polly, up there in the Dolphin when this thing began. We may be in a desperate position now, Arturo.”

“I know you’re trying to help our world up there, Nereid, and these Middge people as you call them—you’re not afraid for yourself. But, Arturo, we may never get out of here alive. The help we could have given—don’t you see? You may be wrong. I want to start now, if it isn’t too late. I want a chance to use my own judgment, not yours, Arturo. Nor Nereid’s, nor Fen’s—nobody’s but my own, understand?”

The rasp of the cell door opening brought us to our feet. It swung slowly outward.

She stooped and came quietly in. At the doorway, which remained open, a gray woman stood guard. Rhana advanced to the center of the cell. The light from above slanted down on her, and her metal headdress gleamed—a white banded thing of carved metal. Tiny chains with flashing jewels hung from it; at her forehead, a metal image, hideous as a gargoyle, raised its beak—a grotesque bird screaming defiance, a red gem for its single eye. The thing was so hideous, it gave her face beneath it a greater beauty.

She had come in with a barefoot tread; her body, incased in the gray heart-shaped sheath, was catlike. A giant feline.

Barbaric creature! But there was a strange aspect of civilized modernity about her also. Her gray limbs were bare; the chains hung from her arms. Barbaric. The headdress; the heavy metal anklets, with pendent gems tinkling on them as she moved. But mingled with the barbarism was that look of modernity; a narrow black band like soft velvet encircled her throat; across the back of her shoulders, a black cloak hung in folds to her waist; a black ribbon around her neck held what seemed a pair of eyeglasses, with darkened lenses.

She stood for a moment calmly surveying us as we moved instinctively away. Her long gray fingers, with a bank of jewels covering the back of her hand, toyed idly with the hanging eyeglasses.

She spoke. “So you are the big man from the world of light?” Her gaze ignored Arturo; it was fastened on me. Calm, dark-eyed gaze. I felt the power of her then. There is an aura surrounding greatness. It cannot be mistaken. This woman had it, the aura of genius. An aura of evil, a fascination—evil but compelling. She gestured calmly. “Come over here. Stand up—here, near me.”

I obeyed. I was alert, tense. I stood before her, taller than she by an inch or two.

“So? They are right—you stand higher.” Her voice, with the most perfect use of my language I had heard from any of these people, had a purring, musing quality. She frowned a little.

“What do you want of me?” It was an effort to hold my voice quietly level, but I managed it.

This darkling gaze. Not like Nereid’s, these eyes. Black pools, with a black fire down in them. Her lips curled with a faint irony.

Her jeweled hands came up. For an instant I thought she would strike me. But her hands dropped to my shoulders and rested lightly. One of the chains clanked against me.

“He questions—he stares at me—he is not afraid, this man. What is your name?”

She snapped it out with a rasp, so sudden a change it startled me. I jerked away from her involuntarily; but with a leap, feline, incredibly swift, she caught at my shoulders again and twisted me around. I stood docile.

“He is strong, solid.” Her appraising fingers bit into my shoulders. She added, calmly, this time:

It seemed to amuse her. “So? You have your plans? That is wrong—men should have no plans. Men and children with plans are annoying.”

A sound from the doorway made her drop my shoulders and swing around. Bhool came slinking in. He cringed.

He answered her in his own language, but she checked him imperiously. “We do not talk that here.”

“He is tall as I said, great Rhana?” He whined ingratiatingly. He cast a sidelong glance of triumph at me.

Arturo had been standing back against the wall. He took a sudden step. “You cowardly little hangar-rat!”

Bhool, fortified by Rhana’s presence, retorted. “Not so cowardly—I did capture you.”

Arturo avoided me; he took another step at Bhool, who retreated. I shoved Arturo away.

Rhana exclaimed, “You quarrel? Stop it—” She swished a chain, idly as though at disobedient quarreling dogs. It caught around Bhool’s legs; he groveled.

She said frowningly, “You annoy me, Bhool, to want praise. I gave you reward. You forget you have duties not done yet.” He slunk through the doorway at her gesture. She added abruptly, “You are interesting, Geoffry Grant—I will come again—”

She smiled. “You shall be fed. I would have no man hungry unless he has done wrong.”

I added impulsively, “I want to get out of here!” I watched to see how she would take it.

She smiled further. “We all want many things. You are interesting. I will not come again—I will send for you.” Her gaze barely touched Arturo. She added to me, “He will die here pleasantly enough. We will leave him when we go.”

“But see here, Arturo, what was it you planned for me, when you sent for me, brought me down here?”

He was suddenly meek. My words had had effect. “You’re right, Jeff. What is it you wanted to know?”

“I thought,” he said, “we could send you to her. Pretend you might help her with the coming war. And you might capture her, perhaps, or kill her. Without a leader these women would go to pieces. The Gian men are worse—you see?”

“Well, she would like you. Easy for you to get into her confidence. She does like you, Jeff; that’s obvious. There’s nobody would dare speak to her the way you did. It just made her smile—you could handle her.”

We had decided that all we could do now was wait quietly for the woman to come with food, and be on the alert then to see if we might escape.

We sat for a time, there on the couch. Arturo talked freely. He knew a great deal of the situation, here, and the geography of this strange dark realm. He talked swiftly, at first with no comments.

This main abyss, through which we had flown, was lens-shaped—some forty or fifty miles between the surfaces at its greatest diameter, and in length perhaps three hundred miles. He thought that it lay, not as I had visualized, flat beneath the floor of our Pacific Ocean, but tilted diagonally edgewise.

We had entered near its upper end, where it reached within a few miles of the ocean bed. We had flown down its length. The City of the Mound, then, must lie two hundred miles or more underground.

There was, at the upper end, no exit except the system of locks down which we had come.

“There’s no escape that way, Jeff. The Gians have a few hundred of those sub-sea vehicles. A few are large ones—as large as the locks will take. The locks were built, a generation ago, for this purpose. The Gians have been planning this thing for that long. Rhana is about ready now. Her army—and all the Gians—will escape upward that way.”

“Not many. I suppose forty or fifty thousand. They’re all here in the City of the Mound, and in two other cities across on the other surface. They’ll be starting soon. But what about the Middge? A million of them, I imagine. They can’t get through the locks. No vehicles to spare—no room, no time.”

From this main lens-shaped abyss, caverns, tunnels and passageways everywhere opened off, especially at this lower end. It was a vast honeycomb. Tunnels led to caverns and pits glowing with molten fire. There were vast passages, black and unexplored; no one could guess where they led, in this vast honeycomb, the sub-surface shell of our earth—the porous, thick skin of an orange.

It plunged steeply downward. Erroneous term! Who could say, downward, or upward? It led, within a few hours on foot, to another great abyss. A black oily sea lay on one of its surfaces. The black space facing it—floor or ceiling as you will—had never been explored.

This watery abyss they called the realm of the monsters. No human lived there. Fearsome monsters of the deep, and flying things, and things that crawled, were there. Sometimes they would wander through the tunnel passage out into the abyss here where humans had their cities. The passage now was always guarded with flood lights. The monsters feared the light; its faintest glow blinded them; it turned them back. For generations now none of them had come through.

I said, “These people seem very advanced with their science, Arturo. Engineering achievements—why didn’t they wall up this connecting passage completely? You say it’s only a mile or two wide.”

“They doubtless would have,” he said. “But access to the monsters’ realm is necessary. Centuries ago—how long ago no one now can say—a downward pressure of water menaced all this realm. Water from up above—from our Pacific doubtless—must have started breaking through. The rift was on the other side—that black sea of the monsters’ realm. This civilization is far older than ours, Jeff. I’m talking now of some remote past time when we might have been struggling in the Stone Age. Or before that. A rift came, and water menaced all this honeycombed region. The ancient people living here then must have been far advanced in science. And human life was very plentiful and held cheaply.

“There is a system of dams and locks and watergates out there now, Jeff. I’ve never seen them, but I’ve heard them described. Like the dykes and canal gates, and dams of Holland, built gradually over centuries. It must have been a constant battle down here with the pressing water. They fought it. Out there now is a gigantic man-made barrier, with flood-gates, which if the pressure got too great, they could cautiously open to relieve it. Inconceivable to construct, but there it is. Like the pyramids, Jeff; patient toiling of millions of workers for generations. And they had science with them. The gates and wall must be hundreds of miles long, at the least. The gates are all controlled by one small mechanism—in a little fortress gate-house at this end of the dam. They are opened wide now—water is rushing through—”

His voice rose. “The Middge can’t close them. The revolution isn’t ready, the weapons aren’t assembled. We have no weapons ready at all. Nobody is armed, or trained for fighting. A mob attack on the gate-house—she’d see it coming, and laugh at it.”

“But Arturo, there in that other cavern, it must be two hundred miles beneath our Pacific.”

He quieted. “I think so. There is some abyss in the ocean floor which we never have yet discovered. That is it, undoubtedly. And from it some gigantic, water-filled passage. That passage, leading downward, ending down here—”

I tried to grasp the mathematics of it. But there was so little upon which to base a calculation. Water descending a passage, even hundreds of miles wide—passing down here through gates equally wide—it might take years to drain all our oceans. The gates were open full now. I recalled the newscasters of New York reporting the tides down a fathom in a day. Ten years, and there would still be water in the Nero Deep. I tried to estimate this abyss here across which we had flown. Fifty—a hundred like it might drain our Pacific.

But this abyss was comparatively small; the realm of the monsters was far larger. Both of them, for the Pacific Ocean is not much over two miles in average depth, would drain it. And what other vast subterranean realms might be down here! Passages a thousand miles in length. Other caverns, under the Americas—under the Atlantic.

But it would take years to drain our oceans. A year perhaps, to fill up the two main caverns here. I said it to Arturo.

“Yes, Jeff. But the gates and the walls and the dams out there won’t hold. They’ll break under the full surge of water and the erosion. The walls of the upper passage, with that torrent flooding down, will break sidewise—”

He burst into a half coherent description. The scientists of the Middge were able to estimate it. This whole region, from here up to the ocean bed, was honeycombed; and the rock strata themselves comparatively loose and porous. With the gigantic torrent of swiftly descending water, rifts would be made. Small, then greater. The whole region would collapse. And there were molten fire-pits everywhere. The water would reach them.

“Yes. But only a trifle, at the distant end. The water escaped into passages across the monsters’ realm. They lead, no one knows where.”

“Everywhere,” I said. “And that water mingled with the fires of the earth—you remember, Arturo.”

“Yes,” I agreed. We had been thinking, Arturo particularly, only of this subterranean world. But what about the surface? Our own world up there? Our great nations, our millions of people? My mind went to little Polly.

My imagination widened. This rolling globe in space which we call earth, its teeming millions, its civilization, the gigantic unknown forces of nature, were being tampered with, so that one set of humans might bring harm to another. A titanic whirlpool of events, rushing to overwhelm us.

And in the midst of it all, Arturo and I sat here in this fortress cell. Two tiny grains of sand on a vast beach with the ocean pounding. What could we do about it? Of what use to try? A million minds were groping with it; our great nations, with all their far-flung resources; the Middge scientists down here.

In all the interwoven, complicated affairs of struggling nations, the individual always is supreme. Sometimes, just one individual. The keystone of an arch—you pull it out, and the arch falls. And with the arch, the whole great edifice comes down to destruction.

There was this one woman, Rhana. She had opened these gates, to start these tumbling, cataclysmic events. But might not the gates be flung closed, now while there was yet time? A single small operating mechanism—why, one hand, mine perhaps, might close them. And demolish the mechanism—one hand, mine perhaps, might do it. They would stay closed then. And with it done—that one vital thing like replacing the keystone of a crumbling arch—all these far-flung events would cease.

I leaped to my feet. “Arturo, see here—I’ve got to get to that gate-house! We must escape from here at once. I think I know how we might do it!”

CHAPTER XIV.

IN THE DARK CORRIDOR.

He picked up one of the small metal chairs and flung it at me. I ducked. The thing was heavy, and crashed against the bed with a violent clang. I ran at him.

He whispered, “Easy, Jeff—you’re strong.” We wrestled. I flung him to the floor of the cell; the table overturned, clanging with metal against metal like a gong. We lay, listening.

“Yes.” I had previously noticed sounds coming down the ventilator from above; occasionally the faint blended murmur of voices as though from a room overhead. “Better keep it up,” I whispered. “They may be able to see us.”

We rolled, fighting and shouting. In his zeal Arturo turned me over and was sitting on me. We presently heard the sound of our cell door opening; I twisted free, flung him away and leaped to my feet. In the doorway three gray women stood; Arturo lay writhing.

“What—you do—what you doing?” One of the women came in. A woman tall, but shorter than Rhana. She wore a similar shield, and a cloak of brown. She was jeweled.

I was panting, but alert. The chance might come any time. This woman did not seem armed. The two in the doorway stood keenly watching me. They were all garbed the same; they seemed rather more like high-born attendants upon Rhana, than guards.

I said, “He is a fool—I don’t want to be here with him.” My gaze was contemptuous. The other two women had come into the cell. Out of the tail of my eyes I surveyed them. Seemingly unarmed. I could make a run for it. Arturo was alert. Lying groveling, but tense to spring up at my signal.

Abruptly I relaxed. Men were in the corridor outside. A group of them. I could see weapons in their dangling hands.

“Take me out of here,” I demanded. “He sickens me—he is a fool—I will kill him if I stay here.”

“I don’t like him—I don’t like this room. Take me to another—” He gestured overhead. “Up there—this has no air down here—”

If she would do it! I added, “He can come with me—it is the air here—I won’t fight—we’re both hungry—”

The woman rasped out a sudden command. Two men came into the room. They were about the woman’s height; stocky fellows, with bullet heads of close-clipped black hair. Guards, evidently, garbed in gleaming suits of metal cloth, wearing bands about their foreheads with gleaming jewels. In their hands, and hanging against their chests were weapons; a curving, knifelike blade; small girds and projectors.

One of the men pulled at me, but I pushed him off. “I want him to come with me—”

The woman leaped. Her hands went to my shoulders; her dark eyes blazed at me; unreasoning anger in them—she might have done anything—ordered me killed without stopping to think of it. “You talk much. Go!”

We followed the dim vaulted corridor. The women went ahead with their catlike tread. There were two men beside me; others in front and behind. We passed other vaulted doorways. A turn up a small incline; over a dark interior bridge of metal. It spanned a black void; overhead, the vaulted metal roof was within touch of my hand. Into another larger corridor; this one brighter.

I was alert trying to remember the turns—I would have to get back here some way to Arturo. Or persuade Rhana to bring him up.

The interior of the building seemed enormous. We turned other corners evidently into another wing; ascended another incline. It was surprisingly long and steep. I realized Arturo’s cell must be underground. We came to an upper hallway. I saw a room with barred windows that seemingly opened to the garden. There were lights out there now. We advanced through a room thronged with Gians, men and women. They made way for us; the babble of their voices hushed, and they stared at my towering figure curiously. We crossed the room. A wide door opened.

I was in the presence of Rhana. She sat at a table. It was littered with flexible sheets—metal, perhaps—like paper, with strange writing upon them. Women sat around her. Men, garbed in vivid clothes of bright colors, were in the room, most of them standing. A man to whom Rhana had been speaking, made an obsequious gesture and hastened from the room. Two other men and a woman came forward to report to her.

There was an air of hurried activity. That outside room with its waiting, excited throng; here, in this inner private apartment, Rhana with her close subordinates, directing the departure. There were broad windows through which I could see the lighted garden; Gians out there, moving about with apparatus; a large aërocar was there, being loaded. Departure for battle. I did not need to be told it was that. It was plainly to be seen.

They stood me before Rhana. I met her gaze, with a level frown of my own. My heart was pounding. These windows were larger, and unbarred. The ground was no more than twenty feet below. I remembered my vaulting over the garden palisade. I could leap from one of these windows and not be hurt. Or, there was a staircase here in the room, leading to the roof.

Some of these men were armed. There were too many here now. If I could wait here until they went away.

Rhana looked at the women beside her, as though to see what they thought of me. She was smiling with faint amusement.

She said something about me to the other women. They nodded, smiled and regarded me with a new interest—as though I were a precocious child, to be admired and tolerated.

A man was near me, standing by an empty chair. I shoved him out of the way, and sat down, as though I were a willful child. But there was something else in the expressions of these women. I was a man; it was to them a new masculinity, instinctively to be admired. The Gian man shrank from my frowning aspect. Rhana said:

“So? You are very bad—but interesting. You shall be fed here, if you do not annoy me.”

“I’ll sit over there.” Another empty chair, much nearer one of the windows. But these women were not fools. Rhana gestured sharply. Two armed men—they looked like beribboned popinjays in their bright gaudy costumes—moved quickly over between me and the window.

Rhana went back to her work. I sat there perhaps an hour. Food and drink came to me. I tasted it cautiously. But I was famished, and glad of the strength it would give me. Strange things—but I ate and drank with relish.

The activity of the room went on. I could not understand anything that was said. The garden was active—every appearance of bustling, feverish haste. The aëro—a gray thing a hundred feet in length—was loaded and got away. Another, empty, came sailing down to take its place. Gians were arriving. Men and women; and there were children. Food; apparatus—all loaded on the arriving and departing aëros. A line of marching gray men assembled, and were loaded on an aërocar. It left.

I saw not a single Middge. But down in the city I could hear occasional cries. Once, a throng of Gian families—carrying children and household goods—came up from the city escorted by soldiers. There had been a disturbance a moment before; I imagine a mob of the Middge may have assailed them. Rhana issued angry commands, and several messengers dashed away.

A stream of couriers constantly arrived with what seemed reports from distant localities. Rhana and the other women consulted over them.

The room at last began quieting. There was a lull in the garden. I wondered if my chance had come. But I was constantly being closely watched. There were three of these popinjays near me now. Each had a small black weapon in his hand; they never took their eyes off me.

Rhana at last stood up. Her command cleared the room of its waiting people. The women at the table went up the steps to the roof and vanished. I was alone with Rhana, save for my three men guards. They were still beside me, alert as ever.

She gestured. “Come over here—sit by me. I am tired now. It will amuse me to talk with you.”

The guards moved over with me. I sat by her. She began questioning me about my world. The size and the extent of the surface up there. She said nothing of her plans—nor asked me anything personal of myself. They seemed idle questions; generalities. I told her as well as I could, things about our civilization. Our mode of life. Things at random as they occurred to me. But I kept clear of anything which might be of military value to her.

“You talk always of men. Your men must be very strange. Your friend they call Tad, spoke of them the same—men like women—”

I said: “Ours is a man-made world. But we realize, we men are what our mothers make us. There are things in life more important to women then trying to run the world.”

She said decisively: “It is not so here.” It amused her. “A world run by men! How absurd it must be!”

I could read her thoughts. She was going to war against men; she felt it a very simple thing.

She said it with a smile, but there was an edge under it; a tigress’s claws lying within the soft paws.

I parried cautiously: “Did I say that? We have had women who were queens and empresses. Women who stood alone at the head of nations.”

She purred: “You do not like commanding women—like me?” She was toying with one of her dangling ornaments. I could have said I liked Nereid somewhat better, but I did not. I retorted:

She seemed annoyed at herself. At her weakness perhaps, for asking a man’s opinion. She said: “You are a fool. Conceited because you are big and strong. I will show you—”

She stood up quietly. “Sit still, Geoffry Grant.” The chains on her wrists were looped up around her arms to be out of the way. She began unfastening them.

I think it was her intention to flog me. I had been all this time surreptitiously watching my three guards. If I could get one of them near me—snatch his weapon. Or by a sudden rush knock them down—

Rhana unloosed the chains. “I will show you!” Her eyes were abruptly blazing with anger at me. A sound behind made her look around. A man blundered into the room through the farther doorway. He had seemingly come in not realizing where he was. A Gian from another city perhaps. Her anger turned on him. She leaped at him. My guards rushed for me; one stood with a weapon pressed against me. I remained docile.

The Gian man groveled as the chain struck him. She lashed; and with his cries of pain her rage burst into a fury ungovernable. He lay insensible and bleeding when she had finished. Other men appeared. They carried him away. She wound the chains around her sleek gray arms; came back to me. She was breathing hard, but the fire had gone from her eyes. Her voice was perfectly composed.

“A stupid man, Geoffry Grant, to come in here like that. He will not do it again.”

My guards had relaxed. They were standing away, but still within reach of me if I leaped. I was tense. Rhana sat down. She began to talk. I scarcely heard her. I was planning how to fight my way out of here. My thoughts ran swiftly, no more than half coherent. Down to Arturo—fighting my way. But that was impossible. I would be caught and killed. But the flood-gates, off there in that distant cavern, must be closed. That was my purpose. Far above my own life, or Arturo’s. I could get out of here perhaps, with a rush for one of those windows.

I was answering Rhana mechanically. I would have to leave Arturo, but I could come back for him. These Gians would depart and leave him there to die. Tad and I would come back and release him.

Thoughts are swift-flying things. They flooded me; yet it was all but a moment. Tad. It seemed abruptly that something asked me, “Where is Arturo?”

My own thought? No, it was not that. Something else—Tad, or Nereid. I felt the presence of them both, their thoughts, something of them here—imploring me, “Where is Arturo?”

“Yes,” I said to Rhana. “I think so.” What had she asked me? I could not remember. I was recalling the route I had taken up from Arturo’s underground cell. And something replied, soundlessly in my mind, “Oh, yes, I know.”

Like a thought from Tad, or Nereid. But now it was more than that. Something of them tangibly here. Rhana felt it. She, too, moved uneasily in her chair.

She abruptly stopped what she was saying to me. And added tensely: “You feel it? What is it?”

There was almost fear in her voice—the fear of the gruesome, the uncanny, the unknown. Her hand moved along the table edge. The illumination of the room abruptly vanished; darkness enshrouded us. I could see nothing. Then, just the outlines of the windows with the lights of the garden behind them. In the silence I thought I could hear Rhana’s breathing. I could sense her near me; and the guards. Make a run for it now! But I could barely see in this darkness; and I remembered that these Gians could see comfortably.

The three guards and Rhana? But there was something else here. Something not to be seen, scarce to be felt. The presence of something. It drove from my mind all thought of escape. I sat stiff, straining my vision in the darkness.

Something here, moving soundlessly. Something touched me! Brushed me gently. I shrank; my chair slid on the metallic floor with a grind. One of my guards, even now alert, moved over and held me firmly. Rhana’s voice said softly:

She illumined the room. It was so soft a light it did not bother my eyes, even after the blank darkness. But I realized that for a moment now it might dazzle the sensitive eyes of Rhana and these three men. Her hand was shading her face. The man holding me had an arm against his eyes. My chance had come. I stood up suddenly; knocked his weapon from his hand, and my other fist caught him in the face. He fell without a cry at my feet.

Rhana shouted. I whirled away from her; launched myself at the other two men who stood blinking in confusion. My body struck them full. Under my weight they went down. One of their weapons was discharged—a soundless stab of radiance. It missed me.

In my rush I stumbled over one of the falling men. I went down with him. He was far smaller, lighter than I, and his body seemed queerly, unnaturally fragile. My fist cracked against his shoulder; broke it. I caught his wrist. Gruesomely it snapped with my twist. I held his weapon when I rose, a small, heavy thing of metal. But I did not know how to fire it. I thrust it under the shirt of my suit.

Rhana stood by the table; she made no move. The third man whom I had flung down was up on one elbow. I saw his leveled weapon and leaped aside. He was evidently hurt. He twisted around, but before he could aim again, I seized a heavy metal chair and hurled it. He lay still, with the chair partly on him.

The way was open. I ran for the nearest window. A black metal grating slid up in it; barring it. I turned away; ran for another. I was confused now. Like an animal, caged, rushing one way and another and finding always bars. The uproar was bringing people to the room. Men and women were running in.

I dashed at another window. But the bars came up before I got there. And another. Two men and a woman were in my way. I scattered them. Some one fired at me. I felt the tingle of the flash, but it missed.

From the table Rhana was working a mechanism controlling the bars. The windows were all closed now; a grating closed the roof doorway at the head of the stairs. People were up there vainly trying to get in.

The place was in confusion. Shouts everywhere. They had spread to the garden; a gathering throng out there.

It was all a confusion of impressions to me. I made a dash at Rhana; decided against it; turned and ran the other way. There seemed perhaps twenty people in the room. Every instant I expected to be hit by that stabbing flash. The main doorway was still open, and men were coming in. I rushed at them and they scattered. There was another flash, which stung my shoulder. A woman was leaping at me, swishing a chain; the shot caught her and she went down. There was no more firing after that.

In the doorway I was engulfed by half a dozen men who rushed me at Rhana’s vehement command. I went through them; waded, kicking, twisting, heaving them off, flinging them bodily away.

I found myself in the entry room. The people in it scattered before me. There were several flashes, but I was untouched. I went through the room with a rush to find myself in a dark corridor. There was pursuit behind me; I could hear the shouts. I ducked into a long, empty, dim room, and went down its length at a full run. All its windows were barred. One of the gratings slid up as I got there.

Rhana was back at her table, I knew, barring every exit of the castle. I ran on, through doorways, always dark corridors—an endless maze. I was wholly lost. Occasionally I encountered a Gian, but none could stop me.

I found myself going down an incline; over a bridge up near a vaulted ceiling. It was familiar. I stopped; panting for breath I stood in the blackness clinging to the rail. An abyss was below me. I had shaken off my followers. I was alone here. In the silence I heard what seemed murmuring water far under me.

Familiar. I had crossed this interior bridge, or one very like it, on the way up from Arturo’s cell. I thought I could find my way back there now.

With recovered breath I started. Cautiously—now that I had escaped pursuit, I wanted to avoid any one again finding me. Get down to Arturo; if I could open his door from the corridor side, together we would find some way out of this place.

I moved along. Over the bridge. It was darker here now than when I had been brought up. I felt my way along the stone passage.

I rounded a corner. There was a small dim light. The passage was empty; but I ran squarely into something solid—something invisible. It gripped me.

CHAPTER XV.

THE FIRE CALDRON.

Tad stood in the garden of the castle, with Nereid and her father. Rhana was on the parapet, talking to the Middge crowd. Tad did not miss Arturo and me; he assumed we were close behind him. His attention was on Rhana. He knew her perhaps better than did any of us. When first he had been brought here, with a vague memory that the freighter on which he had been traveling was sinking, Rhana had taken him to the castle. He had lived there for a time, and had taught her much that she knew of our language.

He listened now to her, but of her language he still understood only occasional phrases. Entt joined him.

“She says the Middge need not fear. She will show them a way of escape from here. Or they can stay—”

“How can they stay?” Tad whispered. “Those flood-gates will break in a week or two at most.”

“It must be found,” said Nereid. “Not where she says—we cannot trust her. We Middge must find it ourselves.”

For a long time now the Middge had been secretly sending out exploring parties, but so far without success.

Fen interrupted impatiently: “We listen to her, not talk.” Rhana’s speech went on. Then she stopped. At her final command the mob began dispersing. Soon the garden was nearly empty.

Nereid had just suggested it. “My father, should we not go home? There will be messengers there for you by now. You remember? We must go to the meeting in the Caldron.”

“Yes, you say right, child. There will be attack upon the gates. We must try to get them closed.”

It was then they missed Arturo and me. Nereid said: “Arturo, we will start now—”

But he was not behind her. Tad saw her look around; saw her run a few feet, gaze and then run back. He saw her face. It went suddenly blank. And then fear sprang to it. She gave a timid little cry: “Arturo!” She stood trembling and stricken.

She knew then, or guessed, I am sure. She stood, with trembling intense thoughts trying to reach us. But could not.

They searched around the garden. They did not see the dark arch in the wall into which we had been drawn; Tad thinks it was closed up, presenting only stones.

Bhool searched with them. He whined, “Masters, this is dangerous. If she sees us here, punishment with the chains.”

They decided we must have been separated from them, unable to find them in the departing crowd. We would go home; they would find us there waiting.

But we were not there. Instead were three Middge couriers. They had been there some time. Fen listened to them. His old face brightened.

“Good news,” said Entt. “A passage upward has been found. At the Caldron the meeting is called now. The weapons are not ready, but an attack will be made.”

Bhool was eagerly listening to what was being said. Tad shoved him out of the way.

“Yes. Now.” He added in his own language: “Bhool, get ready the arras. We will ride.”

Bhool left reluctantly. But Nereid did not want to go. We might come back here—she wanted to be here. But they would not let her stay.

Tad left us a note. They would be back in a few hours—three or four at most. Tad was worried over us. But he tried to persuade himself that in a little while we would be in. The note did not say where they had gone, some Gian might come upon it who could read it. He ended in his whimsical fashion: “Go to sleep—it will do you good for what is coming.”

Nereid had said nothing. She sat in a shadowed corner. Her face was solemn, fear-stricken. She sat thinking—calling intensely to us. We were both unconscious at this time. She thought once she had reached Arturo. She leaped to her feet; sank back. “No, it is nothing! He is gone.”

Bhool arrived at the street doorway with the arras. Sleek black animals, large as a horse, with long narrow faces and bulging eyes. They moved with a panther tread, soundless on padded feet.

The couriers were already gone. Bhool said: “I will carry her.” He indicated Nereid.

“You ride with me,” Tad declared, “if you go at all. I don’t see why you should.”

But the fellow seemed too frightened to stay in the house. Nereid mounted behind her father. Entt rode alone. Tad put Bhool in front of him on the broad saddle.

Like giant leopards the three arras loped off down the narrow street. They reached the open country, where the road was a waving gray ribbon over the rocks. Occasionally they were challenged by Middge guards. Then on again.

A ride infernal. The glare grew. The air was steadily hotter, as a sulphurous quality came to it. Down, as though into a legendary inferno. The passage broadened. Its walls spread; its rocky, shaggy ceiling lifted until Tad no longer could see it.

Bhool whimpered: “I do not like it here.” But Tad did not answer. If Tad had only known what was in that fellow’s mind!

Ahead, the red glare now was solid. The passage was gone. They ascended a gentle rising slope, came to the brink of a crest and stopped.

Tad had never been here before. He gazed, awe-struck. He was on the lip of a huge circular caldron which lay perhaps a thousand feet beneath this upper rim. A round, shallow bowl. The ceiling over it was too high to be visible; behind the rim, rocky walls rose up into the black void.

The whole area was a dull glare of red; but soon Tad’s eyes grew accustomed to it, and he refused the glasses which Entt proffered. This upper lip of the bowl was bent in a huge circle; it stretched in both directions as far as Tad could see—a small segment of the whole—a caldron here a hundred miles across, at least.

There were boiling pits of red molten fire down there. One was quite close—a mile or so away. It boiled sluggishly, a viscous mass in a giant pot. Its surface bubbled; moved and crawled. Red, with a purple-green sheen on it.

Far off, there seemed a lake of fire; a cloud of black gas hung over it; rolled slowly upward, and away.

The nearer jagged rocks here on the rim were painted with the lurid red. It hung like a mist everywhere—a monstrous red shadow of it slanted up into the void overhead. The heavy choking smell of sulphur was in the air; a black coil of smoke was drifting up from one side, slanting off on an air-current, a suction toward the further distance.

A scene infernal. Slumbering forces. Restless. Stirring. Nature infernal, here in leash. A slumbering giant down here, breathing uneasily.

And when, throwing off his bonds, the giant rose? Honeycomb passages, breaking upward with his lungs! His surging breath—we at the surface then would call this a volcano. Or if, still far underground, the porous rock strata broke sidewise; shivered, trembled and broke—an earthquake then, to dash a tidal wave against our coasts, to engulf our islands—or with a trembling, quaking earth-surface, to bring down our cities in ruins.

CHAPTER XVI.

UNMASKING THE TRAITOR.

As Tad listened, standing on the caldron’s rim, he heard yet another sound, unnatural and fearsome. It seemed to come through a rift in the side wall here—a cañon rift slashed like a huge black gash. A sound very far away, but gigantic; a dim, monstrous surge—the roar of tumbling water! He turned.

Ah, and when, backed up with its pressure, or breaking through the walls, it reached here?

There was human activity here—sights and sound and movement. On the broad, nearer slope from this upper rim to the red level where the fire began, stone buildings were set in terraces. It was the main industrial village of the Middge. Great pipes led up, bringing the heat for power, to the factories, not active now. They stood with windows dark, their outlines edged with red.

But there was one large building, a mile away, with rows of lights. Figures moved about it, and the open rocky plateau beside it was busy with human activity.

This was the Middge scientific workshop. Nereid pointed it out. It was the laboratory and arsenal where the Middge were now assembling their equipment of war.

There was a broad, mile-long ledge, near at hand on the downward slope. It was thronged with Middge; several hundred young men seated in orderly array, and nearly as many young girls, like Nereid, of flowing robes and tawny hair. The pick of the youth of the Middge were here, small, slender, white-skinned, come here to be told what to do. There were older men moving around among them.

Tad was drawn away. Middge leaders came up to greet Fen—small men of middle age, alert, solemn. The party went down the slope, mingled with the crowd on the ledge. The arras were left at the summit, half-blinded by the glare, chained to the rocks.

Tad was there barely an hour. With inactivity came thoughts of Arturo and me. He was increasingly worried—anxious to return. He sat with Nereid. She, too, was frightened over us. She still could not communicate with Arturo.

The Middge meeting proceeded. Fen took no part in it, but Tad noticed that many of the leaders conferred with him frequently. There were speeches made to the assembled youth. Plans were told, immediately to be put into execution.

The plans of men! How easy to make them, earnestly looking ahead to their fulfillment! How easy to look back, too late, and see the causes of their frustration!

There was one cause, here at Tad’s elbow—Bhool, eagerly listening. Even then, it seemed to Tad strange that Bhool, a Gian, should be here. The Gians were never curious over the Middge industrial activity. No Gian ever came here. They bought or confiscated the Middge products, content to have them, incurious of their manufacture. Apathetic, ineffectual were the Gian men; and the ruling Gian women were unconcerned over industrial details. But Bhool now was admitted—Fen’s personal servant, nothing was thought of him.

Plans. There was, in all the chaos, some good news. The exploring party had returned. It had found a new tunnel-passage and followed it for nearly three hundred miles, coming at last to rushing water in a chasm, barring the way. But the scientists in the party had estimated their position: above the floor of the ocean—within what we call a submerged mountain, perhaps. This subterranean river would recede. It was of different quality from ocean water. Its volume lessened while for a day they waited. With the ocean draining, this river would empty. A way of escape for the Middge people was here.

A hundred couriers were now dispatched everywhere throughout the abyss. Most of them were these active young girls, more expert riders of the arras than were the men. The Middge people, nearly a million of them, would be started presently, most of them on foot. A march of a few hundred miles—a migration upward to safety.

The leaders needed Entt at once. He was to go to the tunnel entrance—two hours’ ride from here on his arras. He would stay there for a time, helping to erect the light-beacons which were to guide the Middge people in finding the entrance. He did not want to go; he had hoped to stay with Nereid. He faced her, pathetically. At her gentle smile he turned away, spoke to Tad, and left. A bustling group of Middge leaders swallowed him up.

Within a few days, it was believed, all the Middge public would have departed. But the gates might break at any time. An attack now was to be made upon them. It was hoped that perhaps the departing Gians had already abandoned them.

There were weapons for a small army here in the Middge arsenal, but almost none were ready; all unassembled as yet, for this thing Rhana had done had come too unexpectedly. The weapons—all this equipment for war against the Gians—would be taken up through the passage, to be assembled later. Unless the gates could be closed now, this realm down here was doomed. The Middge would have to cast their lot above—

“Then,” said Nereid, “the people will be turned back. We like it here—you know that, Tad. Each to his own portion. The Creator intended it.”

Some of the weapons were brought up for Fen’s inspection. There was one device which strangely interested Tad. Equipment complete now, for four people. He gazed at it, listened to Nereid as she translated what the scientists were telling Fen about it.

“I don’t know.” He did not. It may have been a premonition, dawning, unformed plans in his mind. But he knew he wanted this equipment—more eagerly than he had ever wanted anything before.

Nereid told her father. There was much discussion. The other men came over; Tad pleaded earnestly.

He got the equipment. He sat beside it, puzzling, wondering what had prompted him to demand it. Bhool had gone a short distance away to another part of the ledge to see what was going on there. He came back. Tad concealed his possessions; he made Nereid sit with her robe over them. He roughly, angrily ordered Bhool to keep away. That, too, was a premonition.

It seemed to the impatient Tad an endless time before they were ready to start back. But it came at last. The Middge expedition was starting now for the flood-gates.

The ride back also seemed endless. Bhool was put with Fen; Nereid and Tad, still with the equipment concealed, rode together.

The open void of the main abyss held a confusion of activity now. The roads were crowded with Middge—the beginning of the retreat. Every house showed lights and hurried, panic-stricken movement. Overhead, an occasional huge aëro of Gians would pass, flying for the City of the Mound.

Tad was hoping that we would be at Fen’s house. But we were not. The note was there, untouched. Tad went to his room, and hid the equipment. Bhool prepared food. Nereid was still trying to communicate with us. At this time, probably, I was still unconscious, and she could not reach Arturo with her thoughts. It may have been that his mind was too absorbed with our plight—I cannot say.

Fen had no plan to find us. But he said once, “They may be in the Castle—if it is success—the gate attack—I will have young men try to get in there—”

Tad recalls that from the adjoining room where Bhool was working a clang sounded as he dropped a metal platter.

They ate a brief meal. They were all exhausted. They would sleep for a few hours. Messengers would come to report the fate of the gate-house attack. If it failed, then Nereid would get together a few belongings. They would leave for the tunnel, join Entt and start upward, with hundreds of thousands of others, fleeing this doomed realm.

Nereid had other plans. She did not know just what, but she knew she would not leave Arturo. But she said nothing, nor did Tad. He was still puzzling, groping with half-formed ideas.

The house quieted. Tad was alone in his room. He lay down, trying to plan. It was coming to him. It was feasible. With this equipment he could get into the Castle. But how could he find us? How know even that we were there at all?

He would need Nereid. Let her sleep now for a few hours. And he needed the rest himself. He did not intend to sleep, but he drifted off, still vaguely planning.

Tad awakened suddenly, wide awake at once, with his mind clear. And like an inspiration he had the answer; as though in his sleep it had come to him, waking him up. That accursed Bhool! Tad saw it all now, clearly; the wonder of it was that he had not seen it before. Bhool in the garden—he had stayed always by me, edged me along. Rhana would want to see me; Bhool had displayed a great interest in me. Tad recalled a dozen suspicious things in Bhool’s actions. And in the garden, when we had disappeared, Tad remembered now that Bhool was for a few moments missing also. And the fellow dropped a platter when he heard Fen say that we were probably in the Castle. Tad had gone into the kitchen and found Bhool in confusion.

It came like an inspiration. Bhool knew where we were. Well, if he did, Tad now proposed to get it out of him.

Tad crept from his room. The house was silent; Nereid and Fen were asleep. He went to Bhool’s room. It was empty. But in a moment there was a step. Bhool came along the passage from the street door. He had in reality just been to the Castle, finding his opportunity now with the household asleep. He had seen us in our cell. Had told Rhana of the coming attack by the Middge on the gate-house; and she had sent him back to get further information.

Tad saw him coming along the passage, smirking to himself, satisfied with his accomplishment. No craven, cringing air about him when he was alone! That was a pose. But Tad leaped out upon him; jerked him roughly into the room. The cringing came to him; but it was not a pose this time—he was frightened, gray-white of face, chattering.

“Master—I don’t know—what you talk—” He chattered off into his own language.

“I don’t know.” He took the cuff of Tad’s hand on his face, cringing, but he mumbled, “I cannot tell—I know nothing—”

It brought Tad a sense of physical nausea, the fellow was so helpless, fragile—his wrist would crack. But Tad gritted his teeth and twisted.

“I don’t care what she does to you.” Tad straightened, triumphant. That cell in which we were imprisoned—he could locate it. He had lived in the Castle, and knew its interior well.

“Stand up, you!” He jerked Bhool to his feet, dragged him out, then woke up Fen and Nereid, and told them.

Tad told them it all. “Cursed traitor! By the code, he’s done enough damage.”

They barred him in a small windowless room. Tad explained his purpose. “Will you try it, Nereid?”

They left Fen to guard Bhool. “We can do it in an hour,” said Tad. “We’ll be back, with Jeff and Arturo!”

They went to Tad’s room. Both of them trembling with the haste and excitement of it, they got out the equipment they had brought from the fire caldron. Within ten minutes they slipped like shadows from the house.

CHAPTER XVII.

PROWLING SHADOWS.

Tad and Nereid had found the apparatus easy to adjust. They tested it before they left Tad’s room; it seemed to work perfectly. It consisted of a long robe of fabric, light as gossamer, dull, dead black. There were four of these robes. Nereid took the smallest. It enveloped her from head to foot; it swept the ground; its sleeves ended in black gloves; its hood covered her head. There was a mask-like flap for her face; small, transparent black panes for eyes; a clip against her nostrils to hold a breathing valve in place.

Around her waist Tad adjusted a narrow black belt. It was a rope of interlaced, tiny black wires. A black curved box like a battery was fastened to the belt. Light in weight—all dead black. There were a dozen dangling black wires. Tad connected them at her shoulders, along her arms to the waist, down to the hem of the robe, and up to the crest of the hood. She stood, in the dim light of Tad’s room, a black grotesque blob of shape against the wall. Fantastic, hooded little figure merging with the shadows. But she was plainly to be seen—the outlines of her, blotting out the table and the wall behind her. An inky silhouette.

She said: “I’ll turn it on.” Her gloved hand fumbled with the battery. The current went into the robe. It glowed luminous for a moment. The shape of her was there, shimmering like a silver ghost. Misty—a fog dissolving—gone! The table and the wall behind her showed clearly; there was nothing to be seen in front of them.

Her voice, calm, from the empty air. Tad reached out his hand and, fumbling, came upon her. The robe was vaguely vibrating.

He could faintly make out the distorted blur of her shape as she backed nearer the table and wall; the table outlines were distorted; the wall seemed to have a shadow on it.

“That’s too close, Nereid. We must remember that—keep away from things.”

There is one of these robes now in the Anglo-American Museum of Science, in London. Apparently it cannot be duplicated. But the fundamental principle of its operation is simple. The electrification of the fabric—vibrations of an unknown current akin to what we call electricity—set up in the air surrounding the robe, a magnetic field. As Nereid stood in the center of Tad’s room, the light rays from the table and wall behind her were bent around this magnetic field so that their image was carried unbroken to Tad’s sight. It was only when she stood too close to the wall that its light rays were blocked by the solidity of her.

The robe itself reflected no light rays. The color we call black is no color at all, but merely the absence of all colors—black, because it absorbs almost all the color-bearing light rays which strike it. There is, however, generally a glint, high lights and shadows. But this robe, with the current into it, reflected no light rays, no tiny glint from its folds.

And with these two principles, for practical purposes it was invisible. Nothing really eerie or uncanny. Solid science, strange but rational. The bending of light rays for a century has been observed and understood by our astronomers. Our sun itself has a similar magnetic field about it, bending the light rays from the distant stars which in reality are behind the sun, but seem to be off to one side.

Tad was triumphant. Nereid helped him adjust his robe. He carried under it two others—for Arturo and me—carefully folded and tied around his body.

Nereid was a little doubtful and cautious. “We must remember what they told my father—in the real darkness we Middge, and the Gians, are keener of vision for very close objects.”

They were both standing with the current turned on. Nereid put out a tentative hand. “Even in this light I can—I almost think I see you, Tad.”

They started from the house, invisible shadows, walking quietly, hand in hand not to lose each other. The streets were in a confusion of excitement. Middge couriers had aroused the people to the necessity of leaving. The houses showed bustling, frantic activity. Middge families, with household treasures piled on their arras, were starting for the open country. The beginning of the flight. Men, women and children, with impedimenta that very soon would be discarded, plodding away. A long line of them, assembled in an open, parklike space, started marching off. There was another street, up which a line of Gians was headed for the fortress garden. The Middge avoided them. The Gians, intent upon their own activities, took no notice of any one.

Through it all Tad and Nereid moved unseen. There was no danger, save for a chance collision. They came to the garden. The lower windows of the Castle were barred; the upper ones were open. The garden was bustling with activity. A huge aërocar was being loaded.

Gians were passing in and out. Tad and Nereid cautiously mounted the steps. They kept near the edge. At the top a man suddenly came out; he nearly ran into them. Tad pulled Nereid hastily aside; they stood at the doorway, pressed against the wall. Tad clung to her; he could not see his outstretched arm; nor her. He whispered:

In the doorway a group of Gian women were talking. One of them looked squarely at Tad. His heart leaped; but she idly looked away.

They were talking of the Middge attack upon the gate-house. Gians had been sent to repulse it. That accursed Bhool!

One of the women spoke softly to her companions; abruptly they were all looking toward Tad and Nereid. Too close to the wall! He realized it. The women saw something—puzzling shadows.

They moved soundlessly into the doorway. The women went on talking. Clinging together, the two slipped past.

They were in the Castle. A dim entryway. It was thronged with people. Nereid was frightened. It was difficult to avoid being run into—and to avoid getting too near anything.

“This way,” Tad whispered. He drew her toward a side corridor. In a few minutes they would reach our cell.

He heard nothing but the babble of Gian voices. But Nereid’s hearing was keener.

She led Tad across the room; they threaded their way, infinitely dangerous. They came to a broad doorway, its door ajar. They did not dare open it. They waited, crouching aside from the passing people. The door opened presently; a woman looked in for a moment.

They slid through the doorway. Tad saw me sitting beside Rhana, with three men guards standing over me!

There was no one else in the room. Tad and Nereid found a place to crouch. They listened to our talk, waited, hoping to find a way to get at me and help me escape. A sudden rush at these guards—

Tad had brought Nereid because if blank darkness were encountered in the Castle corridors underground, Nereid would be able to guide him. He was sorry now that he had brought her. Had he been alone—a leap on these guards; he and I fighting our way out—

Nereid, crouching silently, reached me with her thoughts, but she must have reached Rhana also. Nereid, intently thinking, had crept forward close to the table; Tad still clung to her. Rhana suddenly put out the lights. Tad was confused. He decided to make a sudden rush for me. He even brushed me with his robe, but Nereid pulled him away. Her mind, her whole heart now, instinctively was for Arturo.

And Tad agreed it was better. My thoughts had given Nereid the information she sought.

She and Tad moved swiftly for the door. It was partly open now; they slid through. They would get Arturo and come back for me.

In the dark corridors they moved more freely. They crossed the bridge, went down the incline, came to Arturo’s cell. The route was what my thoughts of it had given them, for this was not the cell Bhool had described. Even in that he had lied to Tad.

The cell door could be opened from the corridor side. They found Arturo, and robed him like themselves.

They were ready. Nereid stood listening. From overhead came muffled sounds, cries, running feet.

They left the cell and crept back along the corridor. Tad was leading. At a sharp corner he ran full into me!

CHAPTER XVIII.

NEREID’S STRATEGY.

Four of us now, shadowed prowlers. It had taken them only a moment to get me into the robe and adjust its connections. Strange experience! I felt the tiny vibrations of the robe; it tingled my flesh. Through the dark panes of the goggles I could barely see the outlines of the dim corridor; but in a moment they seemed clearer. Empty corridor! It was so strange to hear the voices of others beside me—and yet not see them. To stretch out my hand, yet not see my arm. To touch, in a lighted corridor, something unseen.

As if in blank darkness, fumbling, he started. It was difficult for so many of us to keep together, so we went in pairs, Arturo and Nereid went ahead. Tad and I momentarily lost them. We came to the bridge and stopped.

They had agreed to wait here for us. We had passed no Gians as yet; there were none in sight here. Tad spoke softly:

Nereid lifted the robe a trifle at her neck; a vague sheen of light was here now; I saw the patch of her skin, hovering in mid-air above the bridge rail ten feet away.

We joined them. I recalled that Rhana had closed every Castle door and window. In the silence under the bridge the running water sounded. I whispered:

We decided to try to locate an upper window that might be open. Nereid thought she could leap with safety that far; she was not sure.

We were soon among the Gians. The Castle was in a turmoil over my escape. And presently from the lower passages we heard shouts; Arturo’s escape had been discovered.

We passed through many rooms. All the windows were barred. With all our strength we could not move them.

A dozen times we were nearly discovered. The Castle was being ransacked for Arturo and me.

We were passing through a small room. A Gian man came running from behind us. We did not hear him in time, and he ran solidly into us, and fell, shouting an alarm. Tad leaped on him.

I heard the gruesome splintering crack as Tad wrenched at his neck. The cries were silenced; Tad was shuddering as he rose.

Other Gians came running, but we avoided them easily. We came to the front main doorway, but found it closed. Gian women were on both sides of it, excitedly talking through the bars.

We were trapped. There was no way out. I told them how Rhana had stood at her table, closing the windows and doors. We decided to go there.

We got into the room. A dozen women were there; Rhana sat by the table. Nereid’s voice said, at my ear:

“If we could get to the roof, Jeff, a ladder at the farther end leads to the ground.”

But how could we get to the roof? From where we crouched I could see the steps leading upward—a seven-foot flight of stairs, but there was a grating, barring the top. The stairs were empty at the moment. And the roof up there seemed empty.

Freedom, beyond that grating. But how get past it? Rhana sat like a cool gray statue at the table; her hand rested beside the mechanism. Occasionally she would speak to one of the women, or issue some command.

Tad’s voice came: “We’ll creep over there, get up to her, make her open it. By Tophet, I’ll make her!”

But if she did not do it at once, her cries would bring the whole Castle upon us. And even with momentary control of the mechanism, we did not know how to operate it for ourselves.

“Let’s kill her and have done with it,” Tad whispered. But that would not get us to the flood-gates.

Nereid’s voice whispered: “I have a plan. I can talk like a woman of the Gians—let me try.”

We crept across the room, up the empty staircase. At the top, near the grating, we paused. My heart was beating fast. It might work, or within an instant we might be discovered.

But Nereid tried it. Her voice rang out, startlingly loud in the silence up here at the top of the stairs. She spoke in her own language, imitating the Gian accent:

Would they see us? They might have noticed the blur of us against the stairs near the top. But they did not. They were puzzled. Rhana spoke:

“Here, on the roof. Open, please, for an instant—you will want to hear my news.”

The bars slid aside. We jammed our way out before they were fairly open. Freedom!

We dashed across the empty roof, down the ladder, and safely threaded the turmoil of the garden, plunging into the dark city streets.

Nereid saw him. We were almost to Fen’s home. The street chanced to be deserted. Entt rounded a corner, riding his arras. We were visible now; there seemed no Gians in this part of the city; we had cut the current from our robes and thrown back the hoods for greater comfort.

He pulled up and we crowded around him explaining what had happened. He was pleased; he smiled as he shook my hand. But he was very solemn.

He nodded. The first of them were past the tunnel-entrance; many were well on their way. But a million people could not be started on a march like that at once. It would take several days before they were all away. Much confusion had been reported. From the opposite surface across the abyss the Middge were being brought in aëros. But there was a shortage of cars. Many families were starting to march around, following the surface curve. It would take them too long; when cars were available, these Middge would have to be rounded up and brought across.

Entt was increasingly solemn. Nereid demanded: “What is it? Something is wrong?”

The Middge attack upon the gate-house had been defeated! The expedition had got close up to the gates. The place seemed abandoned by the Gians. And then an armed aëro had arrived from the City of the Mound. The Middge were caught by surprise by the counterattack. An utter rout; there were no more than twenty of the Middge band alive to struggle back to the tunnel, and the Gians remained in possession of the gates.

“But there is!” I exclaimed. I outlined my plan. With these invisible suits two or three of us could get into the gate-house, even though it was held by the Gians. A desperate venture—suicide possibly. But if, before they found and killed us, we could get the huge gates closed and demolish the mechanism, it would be worth it.

Entt’s eyes flashed. “I think I understand that mechanism. I will go with you.”

I still held the small weapon I had seized from my Gian guard in Rhana’s Castle room. It had been of no use to us in the Castle, since none of us knew how to fire it. The weapons of the Gians in this realm had been very closely held. Nereid had never even had such a weapon in her hand before. But Entt knew how to use it. He would show me. At the gate-house it would be of service.

We started again for Fen’s home, walking, with Entt on the arras beside us. My plan was to leave Nereid with her father. They would get together what belongings they wanted and start for the tunnel and wait there at the entrance for the success or failure of our venture. If we were still alive, we would join them there.

We were three minutes, no more, reaching the house. My mind roved what lay ahead: The horrors here in this dark abyss, unseen by our great world spreading above. These escaping Gians—forty or fifty thousand of them, with all their equipment of war, passing upward through the locks into our falling ocean. This harried Middge people, unarmed, in panic, a million of them fleeing their doomed realm, marching desperately into a tunnel that might lead them to safety.

That titanic surge of water, off there in the neighboring abyss of the monsters—coming down to mingle with the slumbering fires of the earth. Vast horrors impended for our upper world.

But the human mind individualizes. I chiefly felt, and considered, the personal danger to this little band of friends with whom my interest lay. And as we approached the silent doorway of Fen’s home, the sense of impending tragedy—crowning horror—was strong upon me.

A fear was creeping into Nereid’s voice. We hastened, bursting into the main apartment.

The closet into which Bhool had been thrust and locked, stood open. There was food upon the table in the room. On the floor in a huddled heap lay old Fen. Gruesome, a red stain against his neck, a small, spreading pool of crimson on the floor; a broad knife-blade, bathed in crimson, lying here discarded by the murderer.

He lived to open his eyes and see us. He seemed to recognize us. Arturo knelt with Nereid.

Fen’s words were faint. “Yes—he—was hungry—and then—he killed me.”

A kindly act at the last, and the reward was death! Life can be so tragic, so cruel!

Fen lay very still, with eyes closed. But in a moment he opened them. He tried to focus them on Arturo. “You—will guard—my little daughter—”

He drew Nereid’s head down to him. He seemed to sigh; and then he lay unbreathing. There was no sound but Nereid’s sobbing.

“Yes. I know it.” I smiled into his earnest, sorrowful eyes. “But three of us will be enough, Arturo. And Nereid needs you.”

He turned away. We three were ready. Entt was equipped with his black robe. I carried my weapon. He had shown me how to advance the charge from its storage battery to the firing chamber; and how to fire it. An oblong thing of black metal the size of my hand, it discharged a stab of radiance with an effective range of perhaps a hundred feet. Or at fifty, with an altered form of its vibration, the radiance, like an electro-magnet, would seize an object, grip it, hold it.

We had one giant arras which could carry all three of us. There was a small aërocar available at the tunnel-mouth—the tunnel into which the Middge people were retreating. Entt had left the aëro there.

“Yes, Jeff.” He was docile now. No more forcing of his own ideas. “We’ll load one with our things, lead one, and ride the third.”

“Exactly. And wait at the tunnel-entrance. You’ll find our arras there, where the aëro is now. Wait there, Arturo—we’ll join you if we can. But not too long. Understand? If you know that the gates have broken and we have failed, ride on. Will you?”

To any one who cared to look, our giant arras was loping through the gloom unmounted. We clung to its long saddle, Entt in front, guiding it. We went in great bounding leaps, over the river-bridge, with the hot wind rushing past us. Tad’s solid body before me was a vague black blur, and I could not see Entt at all. We took the road Tad had already traversed toward the fire caldron, but we soon swung aside.

We came at last to the tunnel-entrance. Activity here. Twin light-beacons mounted on the rocks marked it for the arriving Middge people. They were coming in groups; a throng of them surged in confusion at the broad entrance, passing the guards, starting on their long upward march.

We avoided attracting attention. No one heeded our wandering, seemingly unmounted arras. We found, beside one of the rocky walls of the entrance, the small cavelike recess where Entt had left his aërocar, and here we chained the arras.

In my heart was a prayer that within a few hours we would be safely back, with the flood-gates closed, and find Arturo and Nereid here waiting for us.

Tad was hopeful of it. “Those Gians won’t stay in the gate-house. Why would they? The Middge attacked—they couldn’t figure it would be anything but a last attempt, and they’ve defeated it. To stay there, with the gates likely to break any moment, that would be crazy!”

“The Gians are nearly all departed now,” Entt agreed. “Our watchers say the last of them from this surface and the other are started for the locks.”

“And if,” Tad added, “Rhana did leave a few to guard the gates, they’d desert—wouldn’t wait there for the flood to kill them. They’re all cowards anyhow, unless they’ve got weapons and you haven’t. Don’t worry, we’ll find the whole place deserted. It’s exactly the time to strike at it now, at the last minute!”

We climbed to the aërocar, where it rested on a rock ledge. It was no more than ten feet long—a narrow strip of gleaming metal. With the currents out of our robes, and hoods flung back, we lay upon the car. Entt was at the controls.

The car slowly lifted. We slid silently from the recess. The arriving Middge stared up at us. A guard up on the beacon platform challenged us. Entt called a signal, and he relaxed.

We rose and sped forward, gathering speed as we rushed into the darkness. Underneath I could see a long line of the arriving Middge families; but we soon were past them.

Flying low. Presently there were no houses, no signs of human life. A rocky, barren surface; sometimes a black area of squat forest trees; to the right I made out the outlines of a rocky wall which we were following. Then we turned toward it, into a mile-wide passage. We seemed nearly always ascending; but of that I could not be sure.

The glaring white beacons along here, placed to blind and turn back the monsters, had been extinguished and broken by the Gians. It was a dark, sinister passage, turning, rising, dipping; narrowing almost to a small tunnel; or again opening into a great rocky amphitheater, with an extent I could not estimate.

Half an hour’s flight. Tad and I saw almost nothing; but to Entt the way was clear.

I became aware that the air had changed. A fetid quality had come to it. The passage ceiling had lifted. We were beyond the confines of the connecting passage. The abyss of the monsters lay before us!

CHAPTER XIX.

WITHIN THE GATE-HOUSE.

I could see still less now; and it was doubtless my very limitation of vision which added to the sense of fear and awe that surged at me. An abyss here, dark and soundless, the air was heavy, motionless, save as it moved past us with our forward flight. Air that now was foul as though heavy with the hot breath of the unseen monsters.

There was no visible ceiling, no walls. But, as though my pupils were expanding in this greater darkness, I saw presently a black surface beneath us; and in another moment saw that we were flying barely a hundred feet above it.

A level spread of silent water. There may have been a black luminosity to it; a phosphorescence, black, yet visible. I seemed, after another interval, to be staring over a great distance.

A silent sea lay spread here under us. A vast area of water lying here like a great black shroud. A scum seemed on its dead, unriffled surface. A silent sea, yet it breathed with a slow rise and fall, as though with labored breath it lay dying. A world apart.

I had thought our turgid ocean depths fearsome. But here was a new quality—a dark foul sullenness—this silent sea aloof, remote here in the bowels of our earth. I shuddered as I stared, for it seemed to me suddenly that only the dead should gaze upon such a place as this.

And yet I knew that there were living things here. Creatures alive, but only in that one thing akin to living humans. Monsters lurked here, foul spawn of things unnameable, of form and manner and horror beyond all conception of the human mind.

This soundless abyss! But presently I began to hear a murmur; a surge; a roar. The water roaring at the flood-gates. And soon I saw that there was no longer water beneath us; a naked black rock surface.

Far away I saw a dull-red point of light. No! It was not far; a few hundred feet—a dull-red smoldering torch. It moved. A black shapeless blur seemed with it. A living creature slithering away on the rock surface? Formless, soundless: I was grateful for the concealing darkness. There are things which it is not good for human eyes to see—things that mark the mind with horror.

I did not want to see it, yet I stared. And with imagination beyond curbing, I futilely tried to supply a head out there on the black rocks, or a giant black body, or legs and a tail. They are all words with meaning to our human mind. But this was none of those. My imagination was blessedly futile!

For this thing, though perhaps it was partially visible, was beyond my conception. The eye—was it an eye? Or a fiery breath, congealed in the air? Or a heart—the essence of the thing’s being—nakedly visible? The red glow mercifully vanished, with only a dim radiance remaining, lingering like an infernal wraith of something which had been there and now was gone.

Entt said: “We will land here. If there are Gians, they must not see us coming.”

We left the aëro in a recess at the summit of a small rise. Invisible again, we started forward on foot. What revulsion I had felt, flying in the air and gazing down to where monsters might lurk in the darkness, was intensified now. Here on the rocks, walking, seeing nothing, hearing only that monstrous torrent ahead, I felt my flesh creeping with horror. Why, any moment something unspeakable, lurking here, might spring upon us.

Silent shadows, we walked swiftly. The ground was rough, broken now into great crags among which we climbed, steadily ascending.

There was light ahead—a milk-white glow, faint as star-dust. And a jagged black wall, clifflike, rising into the void beyond my vision.

A few minutes of climbing, and the roar grew. It beat upon me deafeningly. It seemed for a moment to engulf all my senses. A titan roaring—this torrent of water. An infuriated titan—yet still in leash. The milk-white radiance broadened; beside us the rock wall now was close.

Entt stopped us. We stood at the summit of the rise up which we had come. Entt spoke, shouting at us now, for the blare of dashing water tore at his words and flung them away.

We followed his gestures with our gaze. I stood peering, holding my weapon in my hand.

From here a path led down the rocks to the right. A hundred feet away down there the cliff wall rose sheer, smooth and black. The path, from where we were standing, went down the declivity and came to a small door, a gateway in an artificial wall.

Beyond it, looking down upon the wall from this greater height, I could see a small inner courtyard, with the wall inclosing it, and another door. Beyond that, a narrow, precipitous flight of metal stairs, with a wall around the bottom of them, led upward a hundred feet. Up there, perched like some aerie against the cliff-face, was a small black building, the gate-house. It hung there, with a dim oval of radiance from within marking its window.

Tad shouted at my ear: “If those courtyard doors are open—Or we might climb the walls.”

Those courtyard walls seemed no more than ten feet high. No Gians were here, and the whole place appeared deserted.

“Wait a moment,” Entt cautioned. “If there is any one here, we’ll see movement.”

The little metal house up there on its perch seemed unoccupied. Its door was ajar, showing a slit of light, and the window on this side was open. The room within was lighted. Was any one there? We waited, closely watching, for any shadow of movement.

My attention wandered to the vaster scene spread before us. The milk-white radiance illumined the distance. Beyond the path and the small courtyards there was a sudden drop, a thousand feet perhaps—a void here, all at that lower level. The cliff wall, to which the gate-house clung, went down that thousand feet—and up out of sight overhead. And stretched off in the milky distance. Smooth, black and sheer.

But there were lines marking it into great rectangles; giant blocks of metal out of which it was built. Not a cliff, but a titanic dam! I could see only this end of it—twenty miles of it possibly. At about the level of the gate-house, the water was surging through it, in a tremendous horizontal gash. It stretched off and lost itself in the blur of distance. And through the gash the wall of water was arching out and falling a thousand feet.

Uncounted Niagaras! A million? I could fancy so. A million Niagaras, piled one upon the other for a thousand feet of height; laid end to end for hundreds of miles. An utterly inconceivable torrent, falling a thousand feet into a white sea of foam down below—a boiling, lashing sea hundreds of miles wide, leaping and tumbling away into other cañons. White-lashed water, catching what little light was here, reflecting it as a milky radiance.

There was wind here, its roar mingling with the greater roar unnoticed. Wind whirling and plucking at us. Spray, even up here. Giant spirals of upflung mist. The salt tang of the sea-spume whipped and sucked and flung by the wind.

We stood only a moment. No Gians were here. Why would there be? This water could not surge through that wall for very long without tearing it away. Inconceivable torrent! But it was a mere slit in the wall—the dribble of a child’s spillway on the shore of a sea. Our great oceans were up there—pressing to get down. What Gian would stay here on guard, with all his fellows escaping to safety?

We crept cautiously down the path. The wind whirled us; the spray, suddenly leaping in some chance gust, drenched us. I clung to Tad. Entt I could not see. I felt a sudden mild electric shock from Tad’s robe. He cried out involuntarily; became visible so that I saw him beside me. His hands tore at his hood; his startled white face appeared.

The water had evidently short-circuited his robe. And in a moment mine went the same.

Entt cut out his current. We flung back our hoods and took off our gloves. The freedom of it was pleasant, but we were no longer invisible.

We came to the low door in the first wall. It opened to our touch. The courtyard was empty.

I clutched my weapon, with its lever adjusted to give the stabbing flash. It seemed to aim readily, very much like an automatic. There was a reassuring security in the feel of it. At a hundred feet I could drill any one we might come upon.

There were inner doors to rooms in this courtyard wall. We crept upon them one by one; flung them open, tense to meet what might be within. All were empty. Small empty rooms, with evidence of the Gian garrison here hastily departed.

We passed the inner wall door. No one here. We climbed the long metal ladder up the cliff-face to the gate-house.

I led, with Tad next. “Easy, Jeff! Hang on—don’t get dizzy. By the infernal, what a place!”

The ladder seemed to sway under us. In spite of all my flying experience, I found myself clinging, with senses whirling for a moment. It seemed that ladder was a spider web hanging over the chaos of water. The white turmoil of spume engulfed us.

A slow, patient climb. We stood at last on a small metal grid, the platform at the top of the ladder. The gate-house door was ajar.

Tad gripped me as we braced ourselves in the wind. “You’ve kept the projector dry?”

He gestured. “I’ll shove the door, Jeff. We’ll rush in together. Get back, Entt. Ready, Jeff?”

With my foot I swung the door inward. We crouched to one side. Nothing came out, nor was there any sign of movement in there. Weapon ready, I advanced to where I could see all the room. A square metal apartment of perhaps twenty feet, it seemed to occupy the entire little house. One window was here beside the door, another window faced the maelstrom of the dam. A bunk, a few pieces of furniture.

A table near the farther window held a square metal tablet, no larger than my chest. The dim interior light shone on it; switches and wires; dials; a glowing bowl of radiance, like the fluorescence of an atomic tube. The gate mechanism!

My heart pounded as I gazed at it. This little thing—diabolical! But Entt knew how to operate it. A minute now and we would start it closing the great gates.

We advanced into the room, cautiously, then with a rush. I whirled with my weapon ready. Tad stood alert, tense, his eyes roving every corner. Entt dashed for the mechanism, and hastily seated himself at the table.

There was a movement behind me! In the outer doorway stood Rhana! She flung off a long, wet cloak. “So? You did come?” She advanced a step and then leaped for Entt.

A panther’s leap! I met it with the stabbing light of my weapon; caught the sheathlike shield of her body; struck her full. There was a flare—a wave of vibration came surging back at me.

She was unharmed. A glow was around her; it streamed like a mantle down from her headdress. Her leap carried her to Entt. He rose up, was caught half turning. And then he crumpled, slumped and fell at her feet.

Tad and I rushed at her. And I saw that Tad had staggered back; he fell, but he was alive, shouting: “Jeff! Look out—run!”

Rhana whirled at me. I fired again. The flash was reflected upward; the room ceiling reddened for an instant where it struck.

Tad was on his knees. I leaped forward—and struck the radiance surrounding Rhana as though it were a solid wall. A wall of vibration. The flesh of my arm burned; my robe shriveled about me. I was dashed back and fell; my weapon clattered to the floor.

Rhana had ignored my attack. An instant only she stooped over the table, then she turned from the instruments. I caught a glimpse of her face. Her lips were parted in a mocking smile. She went past Tad and me before we could rise; she caught up her cloak, went through the doorway. The metal door closed upon us.

Tad got to his feet, wavering, almost falling again. I stood with him in a moment, stood shaking. My left arm hung limp and my legs were almost unable to hold me. The smell of burned flesh, noisome, was heavy about us. My arm was burned; Tad was scorched. Both our robes were shriveled and charred about us.

I gasped. “Yes—don’t look, Tad. His face—burned where she struck him—it’s—too badly burned.”

Failure! It pounded at us, beyond thought of Entt, or ourselves. These gates, this torrent!

Monstrous roar and surge of the water. But there were other sounds in it now—a muffled rumbling, far away, a vague blended rumble, crashing, tearing, as of great mountains of rock split and torn and moved away. It was growing into a tumult—sweeping nearer, louder.

The window by the broken mechanism was closed; but its heavy pane was transparent. We could see the dam through it. A mile away, as we stared, a great segment of metal moved outward, broke and fell into the torrent. The dam was crumbling!

A snapping violet light, huge as a rainbow, was out there, darting along the wall as far as we could see into the distance—a powder train of light, laid by the Gians, which now Rhana had released. It ate and tore and ripped at the wall. Another segment crumbled and fell—a mountain of metal rock, instantly engulfed by the greater surge of water from behind it; engulfed and flung down and lost as though it were a pebble.

The seething white abyss was visibly higher now. In ten minutes more it would be up here to the gate-house level, its backed-up water surging into the dark realm of the monsters, surging everywhere.

“Tad—it’s breaking!” Was that my voice, so calm in the midst of a cataclysm like this? “Breaking, Tad. We can’t do anything about it. Just get out of here—”

His eyes were big, luminous as torches; his white face expressionless with the shock of it.

The window near the broken mechanism was closed by its heavy thick pane. We found now that the other window was closed! And the door! We pulled at them. With all our shattered strength we tore at them. Futile! We were trapped. A metal cage, now, this little house clinging to the rocks, with the mounting torrent already risen almost to engulf it!

CHAPTER XX.

DOOMED REALM!

It seemed for an instant that we had not the courage left to struggle. Yet even a rat within a cage plunged into water frantically fights to its last strength. We stood with full realization, apathetic; and then panic descended upon us. The instinct for self-preservation, overwhelming, driving us into unreasonable panic. We flung ourselves at the door; upon the thick windows we beat with bruised, futile fists.

This inconceivable torrent, rising. The windows were wet with the spray; as though a wave had struck us, solid water dashed against them and then receded. A white chaos out there, with the violet light leaping through it.

“Jeff! We can’t—we can’t get out! Jeff! Here—help me hit it! Let’s try hitting it with the table—”

I stood, with some remnant of reason, striving to master the panic. So this was the end?

“Tad, for God’s sake, stop! Don’t waste time. Stop and think what’s best to do. We’ve got to find a way out!” I held him, shook him. “We’ve got a few minutes—there must be some way!”

So this was the end of Tad Megan and Jeff Grant? Ah, there is a fate to guide us all in the making of our destiny. In stress, in crisis, in disaster—always some little thing.

My foot struck against the small projector lying on the floor. I stooped and seized it.

“Tad. This?” I moved about the room. With this stabbing, burning light, could we not blast or burn our way out through some vulnerable spot?

“I don’t know.” The building shook under the blow of an upflung surge of solid spray. “We’ll find some spot that might fuse easily.”

The window facing the ladder platform—its thick pane seemed embedded in a casement like lead, a gray soft metal. I stood a foot from it and fired. The stab of light came back at me, the recoil like a blow, and burning. My hand and arm were seared. But a portion of the casement was gone. The wind from outside came through.

A dozen or more blasts of the projector, then it failed us, empty, its charge exhausted. I flung it away. But the bull’s-eye pane was almost free. We raised the metal table, heaved it. The corner of it struck the pane; the whole thing fell outward. Wind and spume came beating madly through.

We climbed, and fell outward upon the platform. The roar was deafening. We crouched, clung and found the head of the ladder, then went down it.

There seemed still only spray at the bottom. In the white murk I saw the wet black ground, wet courtyard walls. The crest of a wave engulfed them. We clung to the bottom of the ladder. The water fell away.

We leaped, reached the ground, and ran, the spray following us down the declivity. The white abyss into which the water had been falling was nearly filled. I saw, as we turned and ran, the blurred vision of that gigantic crumbling dam. But even that would be very soon but a portion of the torrent.

The aëro was still unharmed. It seemed, as we climbed to it and started it aloft, that a wall of water swept under us. The car bucked and whirled in the wind; the spray was like a torrential salt rain as we mounted through it.

The water raced us. We rose perhaps five hundred feet. This abyss of the monsters now was not silent, nor dark. Behind us we could hear the roar and lash of the water pouring in. The dark, dying sea was whipped into fury, and rising visibly. The turmoil of water was white now. The white radiance streamed from it. I saw, far overhead, a rocky ceiling. I looked back. The radiance showed the clifflike wall back there, blurred by the white chaos; but I saw it crumbling.

We found the connecting passage leading out to the abyss of the Middge and Gians. The water had reached here—the first surge racing through here, a mile-wide subterranean torrent. We flew close over it. There was a place where the ceiling came down. We barely got through.

Racing, with the abyss behind us breaking under the pressure. Distant, muffled rumbling, horribly gigantic, behind us. There was a vague muffled explosion off somewhere—some fire-pit which the water had reached. The vibration of it—the suddenly increased air pressure—dashed our aëro into a wild upward leap, and then a drop. We barely recovered, and raced on.

The torrent here in the passage was eating at the walls. One of them broke through as we went by. A rock mass fell close behind us. The water backed against it; it broke sidewise in other places.

A chaos of falling rock was back there. The dammed-up water turned other ways, into other abysses—filled them, soon rose, pursuing us again.

We seemed rushing through the familiar abyss of the Mound City. But it was no longer familiar. I followed Tad’s gaze, and saw a red glare in the distance.

The outlines of the abyss were changing; the walls breaking down; fire pits opening. For a time—how long I cannot say—we were lost. An hour perhaps? Or more?

This doomed realm! There were things Tad and I saw in that hour or more of flight which have marked us forever with horror, a myriad small fragmentary glimpses which were all our minds could grasp—tiny fragments of the whole which was beyond conception.

The distant red glare spread. We avoided it, flying the other way. Tad thought that the black wall off to our left held the tunnel mouth. But it began breaking, and a wall of water engulfed it.

The hot breath of the fires reached us, thickly sulphurous. We soon were gasping.

Everywhere the honeycomb was breaking down. Still distant—but the familiar conformations of the abyss were changing.

Lost. And then a new hope came to us. The surface beneath us showed clear in the red glare. Houses were here now, and a road.

“We’ve passed the tunnel,” Tad shouted. “That’s the road from the Mound—I know the way now!”

We turned back and followed it. People were down there. Middge and loaded arras, running in panic.

A muffled explosion sounded through the mingled roar of water and falling rock. A hot sulphurous wave of gas came surging. It seemed to cling to the surface—a black mist rolling, spreading. It engulfed the struggling line of Middge. Its tongues of flame licked at them. They wilted, shriveled. Human cries came up to us—shrill, tiny as shrieking insects. The gas-cloud hid them.

We mounted. The air was pure here, wet with wind and the salt of the inrushing sea. A wall of water came tumbling, engulfing, lashing at the surface, then pounding off to some lower area. A monster—something still alive, struggling with instinct of fear—trumpeted with a strident, uncanny scream. The cry stopped in a moment as the thing was swept away.

A rock wall still intact loomed ahead of us, and a tunnel mouth, blurred in the mingled spray and smoke. One small beacon light still remained, bleary, winking—vanishing.

We landed on the rock with a crash. Unhurt, we jumped from the aëro. Human figures lay here, twisted, huddled shapes. A few still tried to move.

We choked with the fumes. I passed a child—dead, clinging in death to its dead mother. A woman alone—gruesomely burned from some flaming tongue which had licked the rocks here. I stooped. No, it was not Nereid.

We thought we had come to the niche where Arturo and Nereid were to meet us. It was empty. We stumbled away.

In the tunnel mouth the air seemed momentarily better. A man struggled ahead of us, then fell, lay still. I stooped over him. No, not Arturo.

The tunnel rose steeply. For just a moment at a turn, we stood looking back. A muttering, screaming, hissing abyss of red glare—steam and smoke and mingled water and fire, breaking down all its distant walls, an inconceivable torrent, filling this abyss, smothering these fires, crushing these passages. Rushing thousands of miles—smashing and roaring to find new levels.

We rounded the corner—struggled and stumbled on upward through the dark tunnel.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE WHITE AËRO ATTACKS.

It had been the night of August 15, 1991, when I stood at Park Circle 80, in New York, and saw the news bulletins that the tides again were falling. The days that followed were for our world the strangest, most fearsome of its recorded history, comparable to nothing within our ken. Yet we know so little of the lifetime of our earth. A few centuries out of millions! We look at our maps; we say: “This is the land and this, the water. This is the way things are.” We feel instinctively that it was always so. But it was not.

The events of August, September, and October of 1991 are history now. I cannot detail them; cannot crowd into a few paragraphs the chronicle of more than an infinitesimal fraction of what really occurred.

The tides, for a few days after August 15 were off a fathom or so each twenty-four hours. It brought, in all the interwoven affairs of our nations, a sudden stoppage of all human activity, a panicky confusion. But that was soon over. Human endeavor must go on; without it, we die. Transportation must proceed. Food must come daily to all the great population centers. Without transportation, in forty-eight hours New York City would be starving.

They say now that had 1991 not been the age of the air, the world could not have survived. Doubtless it is so. The oceans had come naturally into disuse, and air transportation, even over our great land areas, was already supreme.

Storms swept the world on August 16. Volcanic activity began. From every part of the earth’s surface came reports of nature disturbed. The news tapes were crowded, and with the disorganization of industry, the newscasters proved inadequate. There were days when even government officials were scarcely aware of the terrible events transpiring.

Dr. Plantet was summoned to Washington. He found there a harassed government in utter chaos. A million abnormal things to be done at once—a million unprecedented problems requiring instant solution, with the safety of our people hanging in the balance. The panic must be allayed. All work, all human endeavor must cease, save those things which were vital.

Transportation of food loomed out of the chaos, most vital problem of all. Storms were wrecking the established air lines. But that supreme thing—food for our millions—must not be wrecked. Industry was at a standstill, but no one cared. The world’s northern harvests were neglected; the southern countries stopped all thought of the spring planting. No one cared. That was the future. This was now, a vital crisis; a matter of days, or hours.

A passenger air-liner coming from London was wrecked in a hurricane which on August 17 swept the Northern Atlantic. The news was ignored—save that such futile transportation was commanded to discontinue.

There would be droughts in the future. If the oceans emptied, what of our rainfall? New desert areas would spring up, to alter all our agriculture. What of it? That was the future. This chaos was now. New supplies of fresh water would have to be found. The scientists thought so—but they weren’t sure. No one knew anything or cared anything beyond this week, or next—to-day, and to-morrow.

Every government in the world was in a turmoil. And private endeavor was inadequate, futile; upon the governments alone lay the burden. Ah, in the serene times of normality, big business decries its government! But when trouble comes—business stands helpless and says: “Tell us what to do!”

In the midst of the welter our war department faced the possibility of an enemy lurking in the ocean depths which the falling water was laying bare. Plans must be made—defense against an enemy inhuman, or at least so strange, so unknown that to plan intelligently to fight it seemed impossible. An army to equip—to fight whom? And where? And under what conditions? No one could say.

Polly remained at the Plantet home on the Maine coast, those days following August 15. The news-tape was in the instrument room; the radio-phones and mirrors were there to carry her with sound and vision to distant lands; the sky was overhead, and the falling sea lay before her. I fancy she saw as much of the whole as any one; her experience was typical.

She sat for hours in the instrument room with the maelstrom of recorded events surging around her. The mind dulls under such a plethora of impressions. Vast ocean currents appearing. A gigantic drift to the Pacific. Rushing ocean past all our Pacific islands and continental coasts. Storms, floods, disasters everywhere. Unusual volcanic and seismic activity. It soon began to have little meaning.

And soon, too, the reports grew vague. There was no one to measure the falling tides; no passing planes to sight many of the icebergs coming down with a rush from the polar regions; no one to record the water temperatures, to reveal the polar seas moving into the warm Pacific.

Polly was busy answering calls for her father; taking messages; fending them off; weeding them out and relaying them to Washington. But there were hours when she was free.

She sat often at the rocky beach, generally in the long evening and night hours. The sea lay before her; lapping at the rocks, far out and down the slope from where once had been a shore-front. A dark area out there, unnaturally low—the ocean lying with the starlight upon it. The rocky headlines of the coast stood with naked black roots exposed.

Polly says that she could notice the drift of the water, like a river slowly moving southward. And each night—each morning when she came out to stare at it—the water was lower, its shore edge farther out and farther down, more of the rocky slope laid bare. The coast headlands and outer rocks began to seem peaks upstanding from this new realm of land. Two rocks to the north, which once had been mere points above the water, now were joined down at their dark roots—twin spires at the top of a widening elevation of tumbled slimy rock.

The smell of the rotting sea had been heavy along the coast under the daylight sun; vaporous like a miasma rolled up from the exposed slopes. A mist clung heavy upon the water which only the sun at noon could dispel. A north wind, the night of the 18th, brought a clearer air. By midnight it was cold—as though this wind had come whirling from the Arctic. And with it fell a torrential downpour—tropical in force—cold enough to suggest that it might have snow coming behind it.

Polly stood on the upper balcony. Black downpour—driving wind. And overhead she noticed a heavy, luminous green murk. Nature was abnormal, disturbed everywhere. She went indoors.

The radio announcer was reeling off reports of the storm. South Greenland, Labrador, and all the north of Quebec Province were enveloped in a blizzard. There was a report that the water in Davis Strait was far colder than normal; an ice pack was coming down it, moving southward.

Polly sat for a time trying to envisage it all. And her thoughts turned to Arturo and me, and Nereid. She thought once that Nereid was speaking to her, but then it seemed only fancy.

The storm was gone by morning. The day warmed again. The wind, unnaturally swinging, blew violently first one way, then another. The sea was lower; another ten feet down—its shore now, where at the seaweed rocky slope it pounded with spent waves from the storm, was another fifty feet away. The mist hung over it, swirled in the wind, and in the lulls gathered like a smoke pall.

The smell of the mist was heavy, noisome almost—rotting weed, barnacles, shell-fish, food of the sea, lying on the slimy rocks, rotting, stinking in the sun. The smell of ooze and sea-mud. A heavy dark murk began to hover always down there. The wind blew it away, but it gathered again. Once it came like a wave on the wind, rolling up the slope to this higher level where the Plantet house stood. Polly closed up the building until the outside air cleared.

The night of August 20-21 was still, soundless, save from far down where the ocean rollers were pounding. It was a heavy, oppressive night; dark, with sullen, green-black clouds. From the veranda there seemed to Polly only a dark void stretching out over the falling ocean, two hundred feet below her—a void of sullen black mist. A green-black murk hung down there with the water level hidden beneath it. The aspect of a vanished ocean had never been so obvious. Here on the Maine coast Polly stood gazing out toward Spain.

It came upon her then: she was standing upon a great height—our whole continental coast was the summit of a gigantic rise. Spain was off there beyond the horizon, standing similarly on a height. And between them was a dark void, an abyss filled now with noisome clouds. But when the clouds lifted?

Polly could envisage then the new lands rolling down there in the abyss between her and Spain. The lands of the depths. New mountains whose highest peaks were lower than her feet. New plains, new valleys—a whole new realm added to our world. Some day, when the air down there was purged and the ooze and mud and rotting sea-organisms were dried, and cleansed by the blessed sunlight, what fertile land would be given mankind! What mines of metal and precious stones might be found!

Villages would spring up. Agriculture, industry would begin down there. Our world of the earth’s surface, suddenly made five times larger. The world of the Lowlands, added to the Highlands which were all we had before. She envisaged the Bermudas tiny mountain peaks towering alone out of the Lowlands toward the sky. And the Azores—and southward, all the little fairy mountain-tops which once we had called the islands of the Caribbean.

That sullen night of August 20-21 passed, to Polly, without incident. But at dawn she was awakened; the newscaster’s voice was blaring. She crowded, with the frightened servants of the household, before the sound-grid.

An earthquake had occurred somewhere under the Pacific Ocean. Two tidal waves had flung from it. The Asiatic and American coasts, even with the ocean level down two hundred feet, were inundated. Thousands dead and homeless. From the Pacific islands meager reports were coming. Many islands had been swept end to end by the wave. The great volcanos of the Hawaiians were in violent eruption. But in an hour’s time they were quiet again.

The tidal waves dashed themselves out. Death and destruction raged for an hour over thousands of miles of seacoast.

An earthquake under the ocean; tidal waves spent and gone; volcanos active, then still. But down there underground, I had seen the cause of all this, had seen a realm and a nation doomed and destroyed.

Yet what I had seen was an infinitesimal part. Who can ever picture the smashing of those underground passages; the compression of steam and gases, ripping, tearing, heaving with one mighty lunge to rip the ocean bottom? An earthquake! Futile term! What have we who feel a trembling that shakes our buildings down, or opens a few cracks in the surface, ever experienced of the reality beneath?

That night of August 20 a giant rift must have opened in the floor of the Pacific. Certain it is that from that moment the oceans receded with ever-increasing rapidity. A hundred feet down on the 21st, more than that the next day; an accelerating drop as the volume of water grew less. There was no one to measure, to do more than guess at it from circling, groping aircraft gazing down at the green-black mist-clouds which hung over the new Lowlands.

On the 21st of August, Dr. Plantet returned to Polly. They stayed there throughout August, September and well into October. Sixty days of world confusion. Ten years from now the chaotic events of those days may be sorted out for some patient chronicler to tell in a coherent fashion. I would not dare attempt it. But there were a few high lights which stand out clearly.

The rainfall was abnormal, gradually lessening. High winds were everywhere reported. Volcanic activity was spasmodic and there were no other earthquakes. As though nature wanted to help struggling, panic-stricken mankind, artesian wells and all sources of fresh water save rainfall, were abnormally bountiful. The climate was changing, on the whole, growing far colder—and this, they said, was only temporary; the Polar seas were moving down with the rush of all the oceans into the emptying Pacific Basin. The oceans, down in the murky depths, were surging like rivers. The roar of them down there against the rocks of their lowering shore-fronts was like a giant waterfall heard everywhere in the world.

The Lowlands were opening up, but great slow-moving cloud masses hung over them. The ocean surface down at the bottom was seldom seen. Heavy mists clung low—every day lower. Peaks began to show down in the abyss, new, sullen black mountain-tops, eroded into rounded domes, unreal to any earthly landscape. The mists clung to them like black veils.

The foul rotting smell of the vapors, when the wind brought them up, caused disease; but daily the menace visibly lessened.

The vapors clung low; soon they seldom rose from the distant, deepest Lowlands. They were not only low, but far away from our coast cities. The continental shelf was exposed for several hundred miles.

Of the new realm, little could be seen save the downward slopes and the distant domelike peaks.

During September the organized aircraft of several nations were regularly cruising over the Pacific Basin. The Lowlands of the Pacific, they now were being called. An enemy might be down there. The planes carried image-finders; the public at its mirrors, gazed upon the strange scene. The planes seldom flew lower than the former sea-level. Rolling dark, heavy clouds lay beneath them. Rounded peaks; eroded mountain ridges. And sometimes the sea would show. Broken now into bowl-like areas, which if they had not drained would have been new, small land-locked oceans. Giant waterfalls, tumbling over great ridges; wide, swift-flowing rivers, draining off to be dry valleys within a week.

It was all so constantly changing. What an observer saw to-day, was unrecognizable to-morrow. There were many tales of dying things of the sea, lying trapped on the rocky slopes—dying, rotting. And occasionally a broken surface vessel of by-gone days, exposed in its grave as the water left it.

There was no sign of an enemy, until September 30th. And that day the civilized world of the Highlands rang with the news.

The oceans were down some eight or ten thousand feet now. No one could measure the exact level. Oceans? The word had lost its meaning. There was no body of water left of any great extent. The realm of the Lowlands was an actuality.

Far down among the black mists water often was seen. Lakes perched in mountain caldrons. Giant waterfalls; tumbling rivers; cañons, some dry, some filled with tumultuous water; domes rearing their rounded heads into the heavy clouds; domes, lower, isolated at the water level; great trenches filled with moving water; ridges, like mountain chains standing aloft.

Strange, black new realm. Its main configurations were beginning to take form. The great ridges of the Atlantic Basin were showing. The huge central basin of the Pacific lay like a dark inland sea. The great deeps were still all unbroken water.

On September 30, a plane was passing over the Micronesia section of the Pacific Lowlands, scouting the tumbled abyss down there, the precipitous slopes from the ridges and domes down to the water-filled caldrons and trenches.

The exact latitude and longitude were not given by the discoverer. The report said: “Micronesia, north of the Caroline Mountain-tops.” Seen vaguely through a rolling cloud mass was what might have been a plateau, with mountain ridges around it. The plane was flying at about our Continental level, the former sea-level. They were calling it now the Zero-height; and in the new technical language this plateau was down in the Lowlands at minus ten thousand feet.

The observers could see very little. A fiercely flowing river, still lower, was tumbling into a boiling pit. The plateau was broken and pitted with dark round areas like cave-mouths. There were moving human figures on the plateau! The plane swept on, came back, and descended to what they claimed was minus fifteen hundred feet, the lowest level any plane had yet attained. Through a cloud rift the observers saw human figures clearly. A brief glimpse. There seemed hundreds, perhaps a thousand figures.

Polly and her father were at home when the news came. Polly, all that morning, was silent. Thoughts seemed struggling to reach her. Once she leaped to her feet, stood trembling.

“Father! I hear—I feel words from Nereid! Arturo—Jeff—they’re safe—still alive!”

It was hardly half an hour later when the newscasters had another report. Two planes had gone back with the discoverer to verify the existence of this enemy. The figures were still to be seen down there. The planes had dropped bombs—they believed, with effect. They had had a brief, telescopic glimpse. The white-skinned people had scattered. Some lay still; many were seen running—small, white-skinned people.

It was plain to Polly. These were people like Nereid. And Nereid’s thoughts were saying: “Stop them! Don’t let them attack us!”

Planes watched this enemy, but no more bombs were dropped. Polly strove for further connection with Nereid, but could not establish it.

On October 8 the Gians were discovered. “Gray-skinned people,” the reports said, “with apparatus of metal.”

They were seen less clearly and more briefly than the Middge, and were farther to the south. Dr. Plantet and Polly identified it as being fairly near the Zero-height peak which was Nereid’s island.

The Gians were seen in a tumbled region which since has been termed the Southwest Mountains of the Moon. The planes circled in the neighborhood for an hour, awaiting a rift in the concealing cloud-banks. But the gray-skinned figures were gone—withdrawn probably into the myriad caverns of the region. And the Middge, too, seemed now to have retreated, hiding down there in the caves and passages which were numerous in all this area of the Micronesian Lowlands.

October 15 came. The authorities were studying the region. Plans for attack were being made, volunteer armies were being organized, and armed planes were being equipped. There was much scientific discussion over changes that would be necessary in wing areas, curvatures, angles of incidence for flying in the greater air-pressures of the Sub-zero levels.

The world, with the enemy now discovered, was immediately less apprehensive. White, and gray-skinned people down there—they seemed neither very numerous nor very menacing. The public rang with boastful predictions of what would happen when our planes were ready to attack.

Not a very numerous enemy, nor very menacing! Not menacing? A gray-white shape was observed on the night of October 15, flying at the Zero-height near the Australian Continental shelf. It was vaguely described. An aëro—very flat and narrow—wingless—several hundred feet long by twenty feet wide.

On October 17 a strange disease was reported from Southeast Australia. People were stricken by it over a widely separated area. But all of them lived at or near the Zero-height, at the edge of the Southeast shelf, the border of the Lowlands.

Strange disease indeed! The reports came to Dr. Plantet. A number of the suffering victims were brought by fast airline to Washington. Dr. Plantet, with a group of leading medical men, met in Washington to study the disease.

Whether contagious, or infectious, or both, they could not say. A germ disease undoubtedly. Swiftly progressing. A day of darkening fingernails. Fingers and toes turning numb and black. The whites of the eyes turning dark. A lassitude. A gruesome coma with the victim screaming as in a nightmare. Then a calm, trancelike catalepsy, followed by death.

“We don’t know what it is, Polly. Nothing we have ever had to deal with before.” She had never seen him so solemn, so drab. He lifted his white tired face; his eyes were burning from lack of sleep.

“It’s from that thing they saw, Polly—that gray-white aëro. Nothing much has been said about it publicly, and I hope to Heaven they won’t yet for awhile. But that’s where this disease came from—we’re sure of that.”

He sat up with a slight return of his old energy. “They’ve got to annihilate this enemy! At once—it’s got to be done. They’ve been saying: ‘We’ve got them helpless, down there in the Lowlands. They can’t harm us.’ Harm us? This is no warfare of the kind we’ve ever known! Inhuman, unreasoning—what sort of men must these gray people be! No attack—nothing military—no open warfare—nothing! Just spreading a disease. There are women and children among those victims, Polly—more women than men. It will wipe us out—it will mean the end of the world for us all unless we can check it!”

CHAPTER XXII.

REFUGEES OF THE LOWLANDS.

Tad and I struggled upward into the tunnel-passage. The fact that with Arturo and Nereid, and some two thousand of the Middge people, we at last reached the surface I have already made evident. I need not detail those weary, despairing days and weeks in the darkness. It may have been a march of several hundred miles. I do not know. I would have said it consumed a year, rather than those weeks.

We came upon Nereid and Arturo within a few hours. The passage was strewn with the Middge refugees. Out of the million in the abyss, perhaps a hundred thousand actually got into the tunnel. And only two thousand survived. We passed them hourly; families resting, encamped, to take up again the burden of the march. We passed them dead, or dying—burned and maimed at the tunnel-entrance, or before they got into the tunnel—struggling on now, falling at last.

The tunnel was heavy with gases. Sometimes, when we thought our last choking breath had been drawn, side rifts would seem to bring us purer air. We had started without equipment or food, or water, but there were hundreds of loaded arras in the long line of refugees. We very soon found one whose owner had succumbed. Arturo and Nereid, when we overtook them, we found them well supplied. They had waited until a wave of flame had surged to the tunnel-entrance. They had even gone back there once; then despaired of us, and left.

We heard, soon after we four were again together, a muffled, terrible roar far away in the earth, and felt the tremble of it. It was the earthquake under the Pacific, though we could no more than guess it then. The tunnel shook; part of the roof near us fell, crushing a score of the Middge. We saw then that behind us the tunnel was blocked. The air ahead soon grew purer. No Middge could follow us, but those in advance were in less distress. We made better time, but at that it seemed an endless struggle.

Weeks of August’s close, and of September. We lost all possible track of them. We did not know until afterward that it was probably September 29 when the first pitiful little vanguard of our party reached the new world.

The food and water were running low. The arras had all given out and were abandoned. The changing air-pressures, the new quality of air, affected us all somewhat, but the animals were stricken, a few at a time. We left them, pitifully breathless, gasping.

There was one stage of the march where for what might have been a week we were halted by a subterranean river torrent. We waited, helpless, despairing. But the water in the cross passage into which our tunnel abruptly ended, at last roared away. New air came to us, dank, with a rotting, salt tang to it.

We traveled, those final days, with the surviving Middge scientists. They told us that they had a weapon; a huge affair, for long range operation. It was not assembled. But when we reached the surface—

Ah, how many times in those days of struggle we voiced the thought: “When we reach the surface!” To come out upon a friendly earth. To join, with this weapon, the earth’s armies against the Gians. “When we reach the surface—”

“Why,” said Tad, “everything will be all right then. What can those Gian women and men do against our earth? Say, what is this Middge weapon?”

Good old Tad! His spirits never flagged. There were moments when his cheering voice to the Middge—the laugh which they could understand though his words were foreign—helped many a despairing family to get up and plod on farther.

Nereid did not know what the Middge weapon was. They did not care to talk about it now. But in the times of rest there was much talk of our food and water supply. If it would only last us to the surface. Ah, when we reached the blessed surface!

I think I shall never forget that moment when we struggled out into the dim light of the Lowlands. I stood with Tad and Arturo, half blinded. But of them all only we three had eyes that would adjust to the light. We stood in a cave-mouth, seemingly upon a mountainside. There were a score of ramifying caves beneath us. The Middge were crowding up into them. The light! The blessed, frightening daylight! We could hear the Middge babbling about it. Safety at last!

We three stood, with our pupils contracting—and at last we could see. It must have been nearly noon; through a rift in the dark clouds the sun momentarily showed.

Our blessed sun! Here again in our own world! But we stared, unbelieving. Foul mist hung about us, thick with the heavy, choking smell of ooze and slime. Beneath us, a thousand feet or more, a land surface lay in a tumbled mass of black crags. A river flowed tumultuous in a gorge. Behind us a great slimy plateau spread into the misty distance. Ooze caked by the daylight heat lay red and black upon it. Dark peaks, rounded and blurred, showed looming against the far horizon.

Our world? It seemed perhaps a lunar landscape. No, for there were clouds and dank mist enshrouding everything. A strange world, an infernal landscape, not of this planet, nor even of the moon.

Disappointment, such as I had never known before, flooded me. Not a living being to be seen here in all this desolation! Why, I could seem to see out over this tumbled waste for hundreds of miles! Safety here, with our food and water nearly gone? Why, we were as far from safety as any ancient explorer of the Polar icefields, standing lost upon a berg, surveying the desolation around him!

In a chain of dank slimy grottos close under the surface of this plateau-like elevation, the Middge clustered to await our communication with earth civilization. In a score of dim caves, the families grouped together, setting up small shelters of garments and robes, like tents, for privacy. The night came. Small glowing hand torches sprang with points of dim light. Strange encampment of struggling humans, here in the new world, waiting to be rescued!

Arturo, Tad and I came to prominence. The Middge leaders were already working on their war equipment. With Nereid for interpreter, we were questioned on where we were, and what was best to do. But we did not know where we were! This had been the Pacific Ocean. No islands were near here; in all this desolate panorama there had been no mountain top with any sign of verdure.

Could we travel on foot, here on this land? We did not know. A mile or two a day, perhaps; climbing the crags, descending into valleys, avoiding mountain torrents, picking our way over the caked ooze—struggling as men on foot have struggled over Polar icefields!

But in which direction? How far to the nearest mountain top where people might be living? We could not say.

“But one thing,” said Tad, “they’ll be planes flying over here. We must go up in the daylight, many of us on top where they can see us.”

We built, that next day, a tent of white for a signal, and crowded around it. The Middge came up, blinded by the light.

A plane went overhead. We could barely see it, just for a moment in a rift in the clouds. It seemed ten thousand feet above us, at least. It was a familiar model, we recognized its shape. But a bomb came whistling down. Our little tent was gone. A score of the Middge lay maimed and dying.

It was then that Nereid thought she had communicated with Polly, sending her desperate plea: “Don’t let them attack us!”

She was sure she had reached Polly. And all that day she struggled to communicate further. The night came—our second night in the Lowlands. Nereid had a little tent to herself against the wall of one of the caves. Arturo, Tad, and I had a shelter near it. We had discussed the possibility of organizing a party to start on foot for help.

A week or two here, even with the starvation rations upon which the encampment now was put, and our plight would be desperate. Nereid opposed it—she still thought she could direct Polly to bring help to us. And she believed, that evening sitting alone in her tent, that she had reached Polly again. But she said nothing to us.

It may have been midnight. Arturo and Tad were asleep. Exhausted with weeks of marching, this inactivity here was needed by us all. I had been sleeping soundly. I do not know what awakened me—chance perhaps, or fate.

I went to the flap of our little tent. The cave was in darkness; the fantastic tents, with a dim light here and there, were silent.

I saw a figure moving, recognized it for Nereid. She had evidently just come from her tent. I was alert at once; but instead of speaking to her, I drew back, watching. There was a furtiveness about her; she moved swiftly, silently across the grotto, her hair and veils floating as she walked.

In a moment, I followed. She was headed into one of the small tunnels that led a few yards upward to the open plateau. I lost sight of her for a time; but when I was out upon the upper level I saw her again. She moved along the rocks cautiously but swiftly and came to the edge of a cliff that fronted the distant void of the abyss. I stood watching.

It was dark enough, so that she could see comfortably. The clouds hung low over the plateau. The rounded rock spires, caked with ooze and slime, were dark sentinels in the gloom. The further distance was solid black; but in a moment moonlight broke through, edging the naked black rocks with a green-white glow.

In a hollow down the precipitous slope, a tangled rotting mass of sea vegetation lay slumped and limp in a dark pool of water which was trapped in a basin of the rock. And miles away and a thousand feet below where I stood, the moonlight slanted down through the clouds in a great white shaft and fell upon a giant caldron of inky water, painting it with white fire.

Against the moonlight Nereid flung a protecting hand to her eyes. She sat on a rock. The clouds closed over us; the scene was dark when I reached her.

“I am very glad you came. I was frightened, to be up here alone. But I thought I wanted to be alone. Polly is coming! I have reached her—I am sure of it.”

“Yes. With help for us. This morning I reached her.” She put a timid hand on my arm. “You, Jeff my friend—you know I am trying my best. I think I reached her this morning. And later, a few hours ago, I think she understood me again. She is coming—”

If only she were! My heart was beating fast. “But not alone, Nereid? She isn’t coming alone?”

“No. With others. I think she laughed when she told me there would be others.”

I stood up. Polly, with a searching party, here in this abyss—“But Nereid, we must show some light.” I stared up at the impenetrable dark mist hanging in a low ceiling above us. Nereid stood with me. She said anxiously:

“Do you think there is a chance? I tried to describe these cliffs, this level top, the cave mouths. It was two hours ago, I think, when she said she was starting. Jeff, would she be that near here? Could any one fly from your cities nearest here in a few hours?”

Polly, down here on one of the mountain-tops which had been a South Sea island? It was possible. And the Marshall group, I thought, ought to be within a thousand miles to the east, and the Carolines not much more than half that to the south. Mountain ranges towering above the clouds of these desolate Lowlands. Was Polly on her way down from them to seek us?

She produced a globe from her robe. Futile little spot of radiance! We held it aloft.

An hour or more passed. We sat on the rock, with the light between us. Who could ever see us, tiny figures down in this barren, cloud-swept waste?

There was not a sound; a heavy thick silence hung over the Lowlands, with just a sullen murmur floating up from the tumbling water of the lower levels to the north.

Another hour? We heard nothing. But from over us presently there seemed movement. A blur in the cloud-bank; a blurred, nearing shape, hovering.

I leaped to my feet. Something quite close over us, stolen upon us. No earthly airplane! A long, narrow, gray-white shape!

Nereid gave a little cry. I gripped her; started to run. But too late. From above a light darted down in a narrow beam. It seized us, held and pulled and sucked us upward. I did not lose consciousness. I clung to Nereid. We were whirled, gasping, through the air. The gray shape magnified, gigantic at our heads. Hands and arms came reaching down; clutched us; the light vanished.

We were hauled, as swimmers are hauled from the sea, over a low rail and flung to the aëro’s deck, with the tall gray figure of Rhana imperiously surveying us.

CHAPTER XXIII.

WHITE SHAPES IN THE MOONLIGHT.

We were upon that gray-white aëro which, like a ghost, swept at the Zero-level along the edge of the Australian Highlands. We had been upon it, and in the encampment of the Gians, some two weeks. The aëro had only been observed in Australia—the seeds of the new disease were first scattered there and nowhere else. But the aëro had made a far longer voyage—a strange, weird exploration through these vast new Lowlands!

It was Rhana’s desire to survey this world she was about to conquer. She avoided the Highlands where an attack upon the aëro might be made. She had wanted, if I were still alive, to capture me in advance of the active warfare she contemplated. She believed I would be with Nereid.

The Gian encampment was located within some hundred miles of where the Middge emerged. The Gians were south, across a gradual rise toward the Caroline Mountain chain. Rhana had been alert to receive any possible thoughts from Nereid. It was Rhana whom Nereid had reached—Rhana, quick to simulate Polly—Rhana, laughing ironically and saying she would not come alone.

She was triumphant to have me; and pleased to have Nereid, whom later she would use as envoy to the Middge when our surface nations were conquered. And myself—she told me characteristically when first we were drawn aboard the aëro. Its twenty feet of width held small cubbies, like cabins. I was taken from Nereid and thrust into one of them alone. Rhana came presently to see me. She sat beside me.

Cool, ironical smile. I could not forget that last time I had seen her, in the roaring gate-house when she had struck Entt down.

I drew away from her. We were rushing through the black mist. The dark panorama of the Lowlands was spread outside the cubby bull’s-eye.

She told me tersely. This world of mine was strange to her. There was much that I could tell her about it. I could be of great help to her, if I would.

She toyed with her dark-lensed eyeglasses. “If you wish to help me, Jeff—”

So strange, her caressing use of my single name! I think she was barely aware of that caress in her tone. She leaned toward me as I shrank away.

“So? You are afraid? I thought the big man was different.” It was not irony this time. Her dark eyes glowed. She touched my arm, and I held tense. “You interest me, Jeff—” Then she sat back, away from me. “I would not frighten you.” She added quietly, but there was a sudden sweep of emotion back of it—unreasoning creature of moods and passions: “Can’t you guess, Jeff? I want your regard—I want you to admire me, respect me. I want your love. I frighten you? Oh, that I would not do—”

Her smoldering eyes held me. Her voice was gentle. Life has different standards. To her, man was a quarry to be pursued. She must not frighten me!

She added: “You could have guessed that I loved you. It comes, this thing that is love, so suddenly. You do not speak—”

I managed, “I did not guess—” This gray, imperious feline creature—suddenly amorous now, I could not doubt. But the change from love to hate could be swift. I repeated cautiously, “I did not guess.”

“But now, Jeff, you know, and I am going to conquer this big world up here. I am a masterful woman, Jeff—most powerful. I want you to think of that—you who are so big, so strong and beautiful of body—a man so worthy to rule this world with me. You could help me, Jeff—the inspiration I would have with you beside me—”

“Do not answer now. You are frightened. I would not confuse you. I want, some time, not now, your love.”

“Why—” There was nothing I dared say. Her mood, exactly as I feared, turned suddenly.

“This girl of the Middge I found you with!” She rasped it out. “You love her?”

Rhana’s gaze searched me. “You are lying! Oh, but why should I think that little white creature could interest you? She amounts to nothing.”

“She loves my friend,” I said, “not me. Nor I her.” I decided to chance it; I might perhaps bargain. “You want me to help you, Rhana, to tell you what I can about this world of mine? If I do it will you treat me kindly?”

She smiled gently. “Why should I harm you? I want your admiration for what I do—for the woman, the leader that I am. A woman of destiny, as you call it, Jeff.”

“And this little white girl—this Middge we named Nereid—you will guard her safely? Because I ask you to, for the sake of my friend?”

She stood up suddenly, as though my insistence annoyed her. “We will talk again. You have nothing to fear.”

I was allowed a fair liberty, here in the gray-white aëro. I moved where I pleased with increasing freedom, though always with a watchful man of the Gians beside me. Often I was with Nereid; there were times when we could snatch brief moments of talk, but always with watchful eyes upon us.

The aëro, with its length of two hundred feet or more, was decked over with a long, low narrow cabin, which was divided into many small compartments, with a narrow passage down the center. A few of the rooms occupied the entire width of the vehicle; one such was in the bow-peak, with the operating mechanisms; behind that, another which was Rhana’s cabin.

There was a narrow outer deck the length of the ship on both sides. Amidships was a room of weapons and apparatus for war. But this I was never allowed to approach. I think that the mechanism for spreading the disease germs was here. I never saw it.

The vehicle, with its glowing side pontoons and its faintly luminous spar projecting from the bow, quite evidently operated similarly to the ones we had flown in the abyss. There were aboard perhaps fifty Gians. The men did what heavy, unskilled labor was needed and prepared the meals. There were women at the controls.

Besides Rhana, I remembered having seen but one of these Gians before—that man, Bhool! He came sniveling up to me; and as though I did not know the full extent of his treachery, like a proud child he told me. He had murdered Fen; had been there in the house when we arrived; heard our plans to go to the gate-house; had hurried to tell Rhana. She had made her hasty trip to thwart us.

How far we flew on this trip over the Lowlands I could not say. Or at what speed? I would have guessed it to be fully eight hundred, or even a thousand, miles an hour. The daylight came; we settled into the depths and waited for the light to pass. I was closely guarded in a cabin made dark so my guard could see. And when night came we started again.

In all the swirl of mist and vague moonlight, it was a flight unreal, unearthly. I kept my general sense of direction, from the sun, and at night from the glimpses of the moon. I wondered how these women could pretend to navigate, especially an unknown region. But I saw they had curious instruments, and were making charts of what was passing beneath us.

“We do not know where we are going,” she said. “But to come back the same way is very easy.”

In general we flew, at first, to the north, I imagine at about three thousand feet below the Zero-level. Occasional rises lifted above us. The water was always far below—for a time there was an unbroken sea down there—one of the great mid-Pacific deeps. Or again, a tumbled land of black crags; ravines, gullies, with river torrents of water surging everywhere. We reached the fallen Polar Sea with its jammed masses of ice; the heights of the Aleutians loomed ahead of us and we turned back.

There was a night when I fancied we were flying in a gigantic circle over the Central Pacific Basin. A broad, level stretch of water, far down—receding but still many hundreds of fathoms deep. I saw what might have been the sharp, jagged rise up to the Hawaiian Peaks.

Verdured mountain-tops were up there, unreal, fairylike in the moonlight, towering above the Zero-level, above the dank, evil mists of the Lowlands; a purple sky up there, with the mountain peaks standing into it; the stars, and the white clouds of a world serene. We avoided the heights. I had even fancied I saw the lights of a plane up there.

We stopped at the Gian encampment—I think about the time it was first discovered by the searching earth planes. None had seen us in our low, night flights; and in the daylight stops Rhana had always chosen places well obscured, far in the depths.

We made a second flight—the one to the Highlands of Australia—where first the earth saw us. Nereid and I were not aware of Rhana’s purpose then; not until afterward, in the Gian encampment, did we learn it.

I had, that second flight, a clear view of the topography of the Lowlands in this section. We came from the south, that night of October 15. What had before been called the Coral Sea we saw as a great, irregularly circular valley, a giant caldron surrounded everywhere by the Highlands. It was empty of any expanse of water save a few mountain torrents tumbling down its slopes or an occasional shallow lagoon, trapped in the rocks, drying by evaporation.

It was my studied policy now to win Rhana’s confidence. I told her always what I could of the geography of the regions through which we flew. The caldron of the Coral Sea barred us dangerously by its Highlands. I turned us northeast. At a depression of perhaps a thousand feet beneath the Zero-level we passed to the right of the Solomon rise and came again over the lower levels of an open abyss.

We stayed high. I think now that what might be termed the “ocean level” was down fifteen or twenty thousand feet below Zero. Certainly I saw no evidence of the sea here. The Japan Trench might still be full. I did not doubt but that the great Nero Deep off Guam was still and probably always would be a great salt lake ten thousand feet or more in depth.

Sweeping north, we saw under us the Caroline rise coming up. We passed through a broad valley of the Caroline Mountains. The verdured island-tops occasionally showed. I did not know it then, but since the discovery of the Gian encampment by the world, the Carolines were deserted by most of their inhabitants—all who could get away had already fled.

Beyond the mountains here, the Lowland floor again sank. A broken, desolate plain lay down there, blurred with rising mist. We crossed it; and soon it began rising again to the ridge we now call the Moon Mountains. None rose nearly to the Zero-level. A volcanic region, starkly grim with its inky black shadows, and weird patches of moonlight that sometimes filtered down.

It lay strewn like wreckage; here, undoubtedly, some great cataclysm of nature had in by-gone ages convulsed it, leaving the strewn crags and bowlders; pits like black holes, roundly punched by some giant finger; precipitous cliffs; ravines, narrow and deep.

But the whole, from this southern approach, was steadily rising. On the top of the ridge, still many thousands of feet below Zero, the Gians were encamped. Porous, honeycombed volcanic mountains these were, like a great oblong sponge, perched here. They contained caves, grottos, passages and tunnels of every size and character—a vast catacomb.

It lay, I think, some thirty miles in east and west extent along the top of the ridge; and ten miles north and south. Beyond it, northward, the mountains and the catacombs ended in a descending northward slope a hundred miles over a broken floor to where the Middge at a still lower level, were intrenched.

The grottos, as I first saw them, presented a darkly sinister, wholly unearthly scene. They held fifty thousand of the gray Gians. Already it had the appearance of a fantastic underground city. Hundreds of the dark caverns were occupied by men, women and children in crude interior shelters. But work was going on. Small stone houses were being built. Lights were erected. The openings to the upper air—this was all near the surface—were shaded against the periods of daylight. A scene of sputtering lights, grotesque shadows—unearthly.

A subterranean stream of fresh water had been found. The Gians seemed well supplied with food. There was a cavern of war equipment. The army was organized—an army of men, drilled and led by the women. There was a broad passage that rose to the outer air in which I saw three other aëros such as the one Rhana was using.

I slept in a newly-built, small stone house, always closely guarded. Nereid was with two of the Gian women. The encampment slept during the daylight periods. There were guards then, with heavily shaded glasses, at all the many upward passages. In the night, the activity went on.

Neither Nereid nor I were able to learn many details. No one would talk to us, except occasionally Rhana. And our pseudo-liberty was always closely watched.

I wondered what could be the plans of these Gian women against our great nations. I could imagine, once our existence here was discovered, that the earth armies could drive us out of these grottos and exterminate us. Yet there was about these women an aspect of confidence. Was it ignorance of what our civilized millions could do in warfare? What weapons did these Gians have to make them so confident?

I said once to Rhana: “If you want me to help you—why not tell me your own plans? These nations you are going to conquer are very powerful.”

She told me abruptly. I sat, speechless, stricken, and stared at her. Ah, the warfare of our civilized millions! I could see now how readily it might go down into defeat against this enemy inhuman! Spreading broadcast a fatal, incurable, uncontrollable disease!

She did not seem to notice my horror. She told me many things of the past; how long the Gians had planned this; how, when a year ago the gates had been opened a trifle, she had thought to come with her army up through the water. That menace at Maui, which we had seen from the Dolphin. But she had found it impractical—and had planned this present method.

It was the longest talk I ever had with Rhana. It was, I think, about the night of October 17. Nereid interrupted us. She came, forcing her guards to let her join us, vehemently protesting as they tried to hold her.

Rhana frowned. “You make a disturbance?” She said it in English; and Nereid answered the same way.

“I do not! They tried to hold me. I—I have communicated with some one I know—she—”

There had never been, I knew, an hour when Nereid had not been flinging her thoughts toward Polly. And now, at last, Polly’s thoughts—a message—had come clearly back. The world was alarmed. The authorities wanted—before they attacked this enemy—to talk about it. Polly was trying to arrange a meeting. The United States proposed to send an unarmed plane with a white banner of truce to a designated place over the Lowlands.

I could visualize it. I had met our kindly, earnest President. I knew well his ideals, his aspirations to instill in humanity that unselfishness, that altruism it never has had, and never will. I knew also his closest friend, the gray-haired British minister. And the Anglo-Saxon director of foreign relations.

I could imagine these three—highest types of our great civilization—in conference now over this sudden menace. I could imagine them saying: “These people are human like ourselves. Misguided, that is all. Why should they attack us in this fiendish fashion? Why force us to make war upon them?”

Unanswerable arguments of idealism! The earth with all these new Lowlands, had room for all. Why should one or another set of humans strive to kill, or to be killed? Unanswerable.

Rhana listened quietly. “So? They are frightened? They fear me already? That is good. Can you still talk with them, Nereid?”

Calm, impressive, gray face. That hawklike profile, impassive, unruffled. “Tell them, Nereid, I will do what they wish. I am glad I have you now.” She just barely smiled. “You and Jeff will go with me to this meeting—you are a good interpreter with your flying thoughts.”

She made no effort to keep me from Nereid. “Tell me when you have arranged it.” She strode away.

“But not Polly—Polly isn’t coming? Tell her and Dr. Plantet not to come. No use. Why, Nereid, she might hold them here—keep Polly away from here.”

“The foreign director will come. Oh, Jeff, do you think it will be of any use? I want it to be. I pray—I have prayed so much—to my God—to Arturo’s whom he told me about—which is the same God.”

She sat beside me. Poor little Nereid! The struggles through which we had passed; the murder of her father—her people lost with their doomed realm; the long fight to get upward into the daylight—it all had changed her. She was pale and wan; always trembling, eager, earnest, pathetically anxious to be of help.

“Jeff—I was thinking of Arturo. I have tried to reach him, but I cannot. I wanted you to know. Did you know I love Arturo?”

“I think he loves me. We have never spoken of it. I just wanted to say that if—if you ever get back to Arturo, safe out of all this—”

She stammered, her voice broke, but she went on with a rush: “If you are safe sometime with him and I—I am not, I want you just to tell him that Nereid loved him. Will you do that? I want it very much—want him to know what might have been for us—it seems so very beautiful, what might be.”

Dear little Nereid! I said quietly: “You are coming safely through it, Nereid. Don’t think things like that.”

I met her eyes. They had always seemed eyes with the green mystery and romance of the sea in them. I had thought of that often; there was no sea in the abyss of the Mound. I had spoken of it—her love for the water—the way she swam. There was a river, by the City of the Mound, and all the joy of her girlhood was found in its murmuring water.

And now the sea was gone from our world up here. But still, she could have a river. I met her eyes. The sea was gone from them now as it was from our world. Its dancing light; the sparkle that Arturo had described as she swam for him those first nights in the pool of the island cave. Her eyes were worn and dark now with trouble, sorrow, apprehension.

“I’ll tell him, Nereid. But it’s nonsense, because you’ll tell him yourself.”

I pictured, while she clung to me, our beautiful world of stars and moonlight for her and Arturo. “You shall live by a river, little Nereid—sparkling silver water with the moonlight on it. You and Arturo.”

I have read of those ancient times when a party of explorers often was stranded and lost in the unknown polar wastes. Two or three of its members, sometimes, would leave the others, and try, desperately to reach civilization. So it was with Tad and Arturo, there in the Middge camp after Nereid and I had so mysteriously disappeared in the night. They waited for a time, hoping for our return. But we did not come. Food and water were giving out. The Middge soon would be in desperate plight.

With Nereid out there as interpreter, Arturo and Tad had difficulty talking with the Middge leaders. And soon they began feeling like outsiders, aliens. The Middge were busy with their activities, but Arturo and Tad were made to feel that they were not wanted in that grotto where the war equipment was being assembled.

“They seem resentful of us,” said Arturo. “I don’t understand it.” Resentful, almost suspicious.

But Tad thought it perhaps natural enough. Their desperate position in this inhospitable world of the Lowlands.

“And don’t forget,” said Tad, “the first thing that happened here. Down comes a bomb and kills a dozen or so of them. Our people did that to them, Arturo. How would you feel?”

With the recurring daily periods of blinding daylight the Middge seemed disinclined to venture from the caves. But Tad and Arturo were aware that they had sent an exploring party back underground.

There came a day, while the camp was sleeping, that Arturo and Tad decided to leave it. If they could reach civilization, they would send help back. They made packs of a few belongings; a supply of food and water. They slipped quietly away; out to the mouth of their cave; clambered down the slope into the desolate barren wastes.

They had been wandering for several days and nights—covered with ooze and slime now, torn and bleeding with stumbling, falling on the rocks. How far they had gone they had no idea; traveling, they calculated, generally eastward. There were a few island mountain-tops, they thought, between here and the great Marshall Rise. It was soon not a journey, but a desperate wandering, with mountain streams to avoid; cliffs to descend, to climb again when the valley laboriously had been crossed; mud, sometimes like quicksand, upon which they crawled. Dank, hot days, often with blinding sunlight; dank, cold nights with the black noisome fog settling around them.

It seemed about sunset, though of that they could never be sure. The sun was gone down behind some distant upstanding rim. There was sunlight on the white clouds of the heights, but in the abyss the deep purple shadows of night had long since gathered. There was sunlight still on the distant domes; a waterfall, halfway down, gleamed like a white veil; but the crags and tumbled land beneath it were grim and dark.

Tad and Arturo stood gazing up into the fading daylight. A white-winged plane was slowly circling, up near the Zero-level and five miles or so north of them. It came nearer, like a great white bird, soaring. The sunlight up there edged it with yellow and red. A long white banner streamed from it, waving with its forward motion. Silent, soaring white bird, it circled, and went slowly back northward.

The mists of the Lowlands were not yet gathered. The scene was clear to Tad and Arturo as they stood down on the dark floor. Breathless, awe-struck; a silent drama was beginning up there.

The plane with the white banner was alone. But far above it, off in the northern distance, a speck showed close under the white clouds, several thousand feet above the Zero-level. A speck; another earth plane, taking no part—like Arturo and Tad, just watching.

For a time the white banner of truce circled alone. And then, as the night gathered and deepened, another shape appeared, wingless, long and narrow, and gray-white.

The sunlight soon was gone up there, the yellow glow merged to the silver of the moon—a full moon, still below the eastern horizon of the Lowlands. But it caught and painted with its silver the fluttering white banner; the narrow, wingless aëro glowed in it, unreal as a ghost.

The two white shapes neared each other. The wingless aëro stopped dead, poised. The white banner, fluttering its peace offering, its message of humanity, approached slowly.

Tad and Arturo stood gazing, breathless. Then suddenly stricken. Why, what was this! What—What—They stared, unbelieving, clutching each other.

Drama, tragedy, so silent up there in the moonlight over the darkly spreading wastes of the abyss!

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CRIMSON RAINBOW.

“You shall interpret for me, child Nereid, if we wish to talk at a distance.” Rhana stood before us. “And you, Jeff Grant, are you ready? You shall see me, the great woman conqueror!”

She was garbed rather differently now. At first I did not understand the reason. Ah, but I was soon to know! The same sheathlike body shield; same type of cloak; same grotesque metal headdress. But on her gray bare limbs a strip of flexible metal was fastened, hinged at the knee to bend as she walked; a metal plate like a broad collar was on her neck and shoulders. The chains that usually dangled from her wrists were gone. Along her arms, as on her legs, were strips of gray metal, wound, it seemed, with tiny white wire.

She moved away. I thought as she walked, that her arms were joined to her body-shield by folds of black fabric.

It was late afternoon. Against the fading daylight Rhana wore dark-lensed glasses. She offered a pair to me, but I refused them. She adjusted a pair on Nereid. Strange woman! Impassive, expressionless now; calmly imperturbable. Yet within her there was that obvious vanity. I should see her triumph; she wished even Nereid to witness it.

We boarded the aëro. A crowd of Gian women stood silently in the passage and watched us off. We lifted gently; moved forward, up and into the afternoon twilight of the Lowlands.

We were all in the forward control room. There seemed no one aboard save us who were here. Nereid and I, and Rhana; and two Gian women, and two men. One of the men was Bhool. He had no glasses. He sat crouched in a corner, shading his eyes, and did not speak. Occasionally Rhana issued him some gruff order. He moved to obey, and stumbled in the light.

The others all wore the glasses. The two women were at the controls; the other man stood alert with a weapon upon Nereid and me.

The control room was about twenty feet square and ten feet high to its curved cabin roof. It occupied the full width of the aëro, except for the narrow deck which flanked it on both sides. There were several wide transparent window panes.

Looking forward to where the bowsprit glowed luminous ahead of us was a broad streamline window, V-shaped.

The controls were there on a table—a row of small switches and domelike buttons, with an array of strange instruments of navigation on a board over them.

To one side, in the front pane, a projector was mounted, a bowl-like black projector with a grid of wires across its face. Its mechanism stood separate on a table near it—a range-finder like a small telescope swung in a universal; dials, and levers, and a coil, with wires to a storage tank that lay along the wall.

It was a short flight—we had not far to go. My heart was unreasonably pounding as I sat by Nereid, watching and waiting. The details of the meeting had been carefully arranged; there could be, Nereid was sure, no error. A lone, unarmed plane with a white banner to meet us at the Zero-level. The foreign minister would take off from it in a small helicopter and descend to us. He would come aboard, at Rhana’s mercy, trusting to her honor.

The world would offer every conciliation to her; land should be hers, for her people to live here in our world, at peace with us. There would be, when the meeting took place, another earth plane in the far upper distance. It would carry Dr. Plantet, Polly and a corps of observers with a telescopic image-finder by which our world would see in the mirrors this friendly meeting. Propaganda to insure a friendly public spirit, so that the new race could come and settle and be welcomed.

And Rhana had said: “Yes, of course,” with impassive face and a tone devoid of any feeling.

We flew away from the setting sun, upward in a long slant toward the Zero-level. The control room was silent. Rhana sat alone to one side. Bhool crouched in a corner. The two Gian women were intent at their instruments. Near the center of the room Nereid and I sat together, with our guard watching us.

The windows were broad and clear. The abyss moved past us, their gaunt, rounded cliffs moving backward and dropping away as we mounted. To the west, high above our level, a golden glow marked the setting sun. It was behind us, and we faced a silver night, moonlight streaming above the dark elevations in the murky distance.

Occasionally Nereid would whisper to me. “It will be all right, Jeff?” A hope, a prayer. But I noticed that she was very watchful, her gaze roving the cabin, remarking all its details.

At last we saw ahead of us, a thousand or two thousand feet above us, the plane with its streaming banner. It circled like a giant bird, with motionless outspread wings. The gold of the sun and the silver of the rising moon mingled upon it. But the yellow faded; it soon turned silver, ghostlike.

An added tenseness had come to all of us in the cabin. The goggled women at the controls looked questioningly for Rhana’s orders. Our flight slackened; we hovered, with the plane almost over us. Its banner fluttered, a long silver streamer in the moonlight. The shadows of the abyss gathered beneath us; the cabin, to my eyes, was dim; moonlight came in the side windows and lay in white liquid pools on the floor; it bathed the control table; it etched with silver lines the dark figures of the two women sitting watchfully there.

We were evidently just beneath the Zero-level; the abyss was a dark void some ten or twelve thousand feet down to an undulating rocky floor. I gazed up at the cabin ceiling. Through the transparent pane there I could see the plane with its white banner. Slowly circling, evidently making ready to put out its helicopter.

I had seen it, indeed. The plane carrying Polly. It could still be seen—a tiny dark speck up in the distant silver sky. Nereid said aloud to Rhana:

“There is the aërocar watching us.” Her voice was earnest, tense, vibrating with her emotion. “You see it off there? This world watching us, great Rhana—to see your friendly greeting—to welcome you—”

Rhana moved toward us in the shadows with her soundless, catlike tread. “So? Yes, I see it. You say they have instruments to see us clearly from such a distance? That is very good.” Her tone was emotionless.

She moved away like a gray shadow. For a moment I did not notice her. My attention was fixed on the ghostly outlines of the plane over us. It bore now a small light; in the glow I saw the helicopter in its bracket; the figure of the kindly gray-haired foreign director—I recalled him well—showed in the helicopter seat.

My heart stopped, and then wildly plunged. Incredible, this that I was seeing! From our cabin a light sprang upward. It glowed, narrowed to a beam. It caught the plane up there. The fluttering white banner of truce shriveled and burned. The plane rocked. It tilted; rocked and swayed in the grip of the light.

Incredible! I was on my feet with Nereid clinging to me in stupefied horror. The Gian man sprang, a gray menacing shadow in the gloom of the cabin—sprang and crouched between me and Rhana. His weapon was leveled upon me. Rhana was bending tense over the projector mechanism. It hissed, snapped and hummed with its current.

The plane up there was rocking, struggling in the grip of the beam like a wounded bird. Coming down.

It only lasted an instant. Then Rhana snapped off the light. I stared, transfixed with horror. The silver shape of the plane swayed crazily. It was on fire; red tongues of flame licked at it. The light sprang again; caught it; tilted it over—left it. The plane flopped in an arc, righted, and flopped again. At our level now. Then below us. With its crazy swoops the red-yellow flames streamed from it.

Down—then I saw it whirl in a dive. A red-flaming torch, dropping, spinning downward with a line of flame and smoke like a tail streaming above it. Down—dwindling as it fell into the abyss. A tiny red spot down in the darkness—a flaming falling torch. A soundless impact down there, with a faint red glow where it lay.

In the dark tenseness of our cabin Rhana’s voice rang out. Triumphant now. “You see, Jeff Grant, how Rhana rules this world?”

A minute. It had taken no more than a minute. Sixty seconds is sometimes an eternity. I stood confused, my senses groping with the shock of these whirling events.

“Oh, Jeff!” Nereid’s voice; her hand plucking to turn me. I saw through the side window, far off to the west where the sun had been golden, but now there was only the purple night—saw a white flare puff like a bomb. The Gian encampment was off there.

It was no Gian light-flare. She was surprised, and she rasped: “What is that?”

It caught little Nereid; confused with horror, she blurted: “The earth attacking you—you have broken faith!”

And then there was a red-yellow spot like a bursting shell in the distant darkness. It seemed, after an interval, that we could hear very faintly in the heavy air of the abyss, the muffled explosion.

Amazement swept Rhana; amazement and a dawning wild anger. “Attacking? Your earth dares attack—me?” She stood half crouching behind the Gian man whose weapon was still levied at Nereid and me. “Attacking?” The moonlight caught her hawklike gray face, showed it distorted now with fury. “So? I will show them! Why, there will be millions of them dead in another day—”

She straightened; issued swift orders to the women at the controls. Our aëro began rising. My thoughts whirled. Sixty seconds. It had been enough time for that watching plane to radio Washington; and for Washington to order its army, already assembled in the abyss, to the attack. Another red explosion showed off there.

“She—oh, Jeff, she’ll rush to the Highlands, find some great city, loose the disease broadcast, pollute your great cities!”

To-night, in one flight, spread death over the world. Thoughts are swift-flying things. The red spot in the abyss where the plane had fallen was still almost beneath us. Nereid was whispering to me vehemently, but my thoughts flew afield.

The observing plane with Polly and Dr. Plantet could never follow our nearly thousand-mile-an-hour flight. A few hours in the moonlight over the Highlands, loosing the germs of that foul disease, polluting the air of our great cities! It would sweep our continents. What use if, in her demoniac, unreasoning fury, Rhana was finally brought down? What if our attacking army back there were able to annihilate the Gians? They would drive the Gians out of the grottos in a few days, no doubt. What of it? An uncontrollable plague would be sweeping our world, bringing death to millions.

But what was Nereid saying? Her vehement whispers penetrated my consciousness; her fingers were digging into my arm.

“That little coil, there at the edge of the control table—you see it? I can get to it with a sudden leap. I know what that coil controls. If I could tear it with my fingers—”

The confusion of my thoughts dropped away. Death? There is a calmness comes to one who finds death at hand. It seemed that all my thoughts were sharpening—all my senses sharp and clear to hear Nereid’s whispered words of death.

“—tear it, rip it away. It controls the current in the side pontoons, Jeff. If I break it, we will fall. You see? Fall the way the plane fell—kill us all.”

Was the burning plane still almost beneath us? An eternity passed in these few whispering seconds.

“I’ll jump at the table, Jeff. You leap on the guard. He’ll fire at you—he’ll forget me. You see?”

Death? Why, Polly was in that distant plane—Polly! I would never see her again.

Her fingers seemed pressing a good-by. I answered it. Polly’s face was shining in my mind. Good-by, Polly—

“You wait, Nereid! A second after the guard has come after me! Your best chance then.”

The figure of Bhool had come crouching toward us. He shouted a warning: “Rhana!”

It may have distracted the guard. A rush of confusion was in the moonlit cabin. I leaped low at the guard’s legs; the upward desperate sweep of my arm struck his weapon; its stab missed me. Nereid’s leap landed her at the control table. The two women and Rhana were upon her; but her frantic clutching hands ripped and tore at the little coil. The cabin seemed to lurch; the shafts of moonlight swayed. Through the windows the abyss was turning over.

We were falling, irrevocably. Every one in the cabin knew it. Death! The strife among us ceased abruptly; the women cast Nereid away and Bhool gave a long piercing scream of terror.

But I saw Rhana spread her arms. Black folds of fabric hung like wings from them to her body. The metal strips on her limbs and her metal collar glowed green with a current in them. She flung open the door, gripping its casement to steady herself. I heard her words clearly. “So you wish death, you fools!”

Realization swept me. She wore a device like the pontoons of this aëro to protect her, as a parachute once protected the old-fashioned aviator. She was on the deck.

I recall snatching up Nereid, then leaped with her and caught Rhana at the rail. We three went over into the uprushing void. Rhana was struggling silently, and her arms flapped like a frantic bird. The wind rushed up at us. An endless fall. Momentarily I was aware of a gray shape like an arrow plunging past. A muffled, splintering crash came from below, where the aëro lay, mangled metal upon the rocks.

Rhana fought to cast me off, but I was far stronger. My arm was crooked about her throat, and I held Nereid with the other. The glowing metal on Rhana burned against my flesh. We fell—a fluttering gray bird with two enemies clinging to it, pulling it down with their weight. Rhana’s fingers tore at me futilely. I tightened my grip about her throat. I think I recall a crack. Rhana went limp.

“Jeff! Come back to me.” Soft, whispered, woman’s voice; soft arms were holding me. “Jeff, dear—please!”

I struggled back to consciousness as though from an emptiness remote. This was Polly’s voice; these were her arms. I murmured: “Polly, dear?”

There was a dark confusion around me; but in the midst of it I lay and knew that I was unhurt. And Polly was here, with me at last. Dr. Plantet was examining me; he said I was unharmed. I remembered Nereid.

All like a dream. My head was whirling with it, and my ears roared. But I found myself sitting up, with Polly helping me. Dark rocks; heavy air, making me gasp. Grim dark shadows, but the moonlight hung a great silver canopy far overhead.

Other figures were here, and Dr. Plantet’s plane stood near by. Its engine smoked; its navigators were moving about it anxiously. A red glow a mile away showed where the other plane had fallen. And nearer, there was a tangled mass of gray-white metal. Rhana’s aëro.

And Rhana—she lay here on the rocks, broken, crumpled. I did not go to look at her.

A man came up. “I don’t know if we can get up out of here with that engine. The Allen climber is the worst type for a depth like this.”

“We’ll start.” Dr. Plantet helped me up. “Good enough, Jeff—you’re fine. You want to start now, Smithby—we’re ready.”

Nereid, unhurt and gently smiling, stood before me. My body, and perhaps Rhana’s, had broken her fall. She murmured to Polly: “We said good-by to you and Arturo up there. I’m so glad, Jeff, it did not have to be good-by—not for you and Polly.”

There was a distant shout. Two figures, half a mile away, were clambering down the rocks, shouting weakly.

They came. Our men from the plane here rushed out to meet them, and came back, carrying the two bloodstained, tattered figures, covered with mud and slime. Their torn and bleeding feet were wrapped with cloth into bulky bundles.

Reunion. A babble of voices. I stood confused, my ears still roaring, my legs weak from the shock of the fall. I heard Tad’s cheery, tired voice. I saw Arturo carried past me, and glimpsed his haggard white face, his eyes burning with fever. The man set him down. Arturo stood; he called; and I saw Nereid run like a child into his opened arms.

One scene more—an hour later, as from the cabin of the Allen climber we gazed down into the abyss. We had come up laboring. At the Zero-level we soared to the west. The full moon was well above the horizon behind us. Beneath, the Lowlands were white with patches of moonlight, black with inky shadows. Ahead some twenty miles and a few thousand feet down, the jagged ridge of the Moon Mountains lay white and black, sharp-etched as a lunar landscape.

The abyss was like a great deep bowl, rising everywhere to a dim high horizon. To the south the tremendous slope rose toward the Carolines. Our earth artillery had been sent there—a precautionary measure if the truce should fail.

We could see now the bombardment proceeding—the Essen fire-shells rising in a tremendous hundred-mile arc, dropping, pounding the Moon ridge; some of them releasing their gases.

Over the ridge a covey of war-planes hung, directing the range. Occasionally a light-flare was dropped. Bombs were dropping. We could see them strike. The noise was like a muttering muffled thunder in the distance.

The Gians had evidently remained inactive. Then we saw their attacking light-beams spring up. The planes scattered—some of them were caught. But the slow bombardment from a hundred miles away, went methodically on. It would take days.

With my information to give our authorities, we could land planes closer; send in an army, fighting in the grottos—or perhaps the artillery could pound this porous ridge to pieces in a week or two.

If we could get the wind right, our gas-shells would fill those caverns—smoke the enemy out like bees. And if we could get them out into the daylight, blinded—

From the dark northern horizon a crimson light came in a beam. Light, or fire? A beam of something, crimson as a blood-stream. It rose from the northern distance; like a gigantic crimson jet of fluid it arched up and fell. An arc, huge as a rainbow—a rainbow of blood across the void of the abyss. Its distant source we could not see; its end fell here upon the Mountains of the Moon and drenched them with its crimson.

The planes overhead winged away; the earth bombardment stopped. We approached within ten miles or so, with our image-finder trained upon the scene.

Smithby could never forget his mission; our snapping sender flashed out the image to be caught and relayed over the world. Hundreds of millions of people everywhere sat tense at their mirrors watching the silent red scene.

Rainbow of blood-light falling upon the dark Moon Mountain ridge. A great round pool glowing at the end of the rainbow. The mountains were melting; as though they were molds of black and white wax under the heat of a pressure torch, they melted.

The rainbow end moved over, slowly traveling along the ridge, melting it away—wax fuming, bubbling and plowing in lava streams down the slopes. The nearer end of the ridge where first the blood-light had struck was a depression now—a great caldron where the ridge had been; a caldron of fused molten rock, viscous, cooling from yellow-red to red and then to black. Along the whole length of the ridge the blood-red rainbow sprayed its penetrating heat.

A silent, red inferno. And presently there were dim muffled sounds as underground gases exploded; and the hiss of the licking gas flames.

Abruptly the crimson rainbow was gone. The Moon ridge shad vanished into a boiling trench of lava, topped by hungry licking red-green tongues of flame, with a huge black gas-cloud, rolling up.

The fires cooled and died. The red turned slowly black. The trench lay naked and dead in the moonlight—fused rock cooling into shapes fantastic. A dead, empty trench with a gray mantle of ashes sifting down upon it, to mark where the Gians had been.

CHAPTER XXV.

MURMURING RIVER.

They call this now the era of our Greater World. This year that has passed has brought us many strange things. I am not one to recount them—the wonders of the Lowlands, the world’s changed climate; the struggles, the reorganization, it seems, of everything which we held to be standard.

There is still chaos. I could not, with authority or understanding, write of it. I have told the rôles which I and my friends had forced upon us, that is all.

For those many omissions which would have made my narrative more logically clear, I ask indulgence.

Books, in future years, will be written upon many angles of the subject. The science of those two races who with enmity and smoldering strife lived in the depths of our great earth—our scientists will attempt to picture it. But that will be futile, no doubt. The Middge have gone. From that very night when their crimson rainbow annihilated their enemy, they have never been seen.

Strange race! Our scientists say that in those last days they undoubtedly located the Gians and blasted them with a hatred born of centuries of oppression. And then, with their exploring parties underground finding food and water, they vanished with their weapon into the dark realms from which they had come. They wanted nothing of our world—feared us perhaps.

We are an adventurous civilization. There is already talk of exploring the depths—finding the Middge.

There will be books of sociology written upon the strange Gian civilization. I have no more than hinted at it. Already there is much controversy. It has been said that Rhana was the personification of all womanhood if given unlimited power. I think that is unjust to womanhood. In every age and every race there have been bad men and good men—bad women and good women. There was Rhana—and there was Nereid.

A river flows beneath these windows of the house where Polly and I are living. It murmurs its endless song. Arturo and Nereid are no more than half a mile up its stream. They often come past in a boat—sometimes swimming down, with the boat floating after them. They went past like that this evening, just a short while ago. Polly was here with me then—pushing aside these pages to sit with me and watch the moonlight on the river.

And Arturo and Nereid came swimming past. They looked up and saw us. They waved. Nereid’s hair streamed out long and tawny in the silver rippling water; her face was laughing as she flung up her arm toward us and dived after Arturo.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The sea girl

The Sea Girl