The sea girl

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:

“Tad, my God—did you see that?”

“Yes.”

“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.

Tad was beside me. “Listen to it, Jeff. Raising the devil up there—”

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.

I whispered to Tad: “Where are we going?”

“Up closer. I don’t know.”

Bhool whiningly suggested: “This way, masters—”

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.

“Rhana!”

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.

This woman, Satanic—

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:

“What does she say? Can you understand her?”

“No, not much of it.” He called cautiously, “Oh, Entt!”

Entt moved over. “Entt, what is she saying?”

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!”

“Wait! I listen more—” Entt moved back to join the others.

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.

“What?” I demanded. “Arturo, what does he say?”

Bhool was insistent: terrorized, but insistent. “Masters, look there!”

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.

“What is it, Jeff? Can you see anything?”

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.

“Jeff—”

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.

“You’re not hurt, Jeff? Lean back—take it quietly.”

My head was suddenly whirling; I leaned against the stone wall behind me.

“They said you’d be all right, Jeff.”

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.

“What was it? Where are we?”

“In the Castle. They got us. That accursed Bhool—”

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—”

“That woman Rhana?”

“Yes. She heard of your arrival. Bhool must have been told to get you.”

I tried to stand on my feet, but I was still shaky.

“How long have we been here?”

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

“Did you faint, or whatever it was happened to us?”

“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—”

I got on my feet. “We’ll have to get out of here.”

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.

“No good, Jeff. There’s no chance,” Arturo said.

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?”

“Yes. But there were voices just outside the door.”

“If we could leap on her—make a run for it—”

“With others in the corridor?”

“There might not be, next time she comes. Is she armed?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

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 was sitting on the bed, chin in hand, staring. I sat down beside him.

“See here, Arturo—haven’t you taken a little too much on yourself?”

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—”

“I wouldn’t voluntarily endanger you, Jeff. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t be a fool!”

“I’ve been trying to do my best.”

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

He stared at his feet. “I’ve only been doing my best.”

“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.”

“We are. This horrible woman—”

“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.

In the corridor stood the woman Rhana.

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.

“So? They told me true—you stand higher.”

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

“He speaks, this man, when not directly questioned—”

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.

“You are not then afraid of me?”

“No.”

“So?”

“Should I be?”

“He questions—he dares!”

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:

“What is it, the name they call you?”

“Geoffry Grant.”

She repeated it, memorizing it. “Why is it you come here to my world?”

I said carefully, “My friends are here. We are going back—up there—”

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.

She rasped, “What do you want?”

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!”

I whirled. “Hush, Arturo!”

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—”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

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.”

She turned, and stooped for the doorway. The heavy door closed after her.

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

“That’s of no use now, I tell you.”

We were sitting on the couch of our cell after Rhana had left us.

“Isn’t that for me to judge, Arturo?”

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

“A good many things. What was I supposed to do with this Rhana?”

“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?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“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.”

I had my doubts on that. “She said, take me with her—”

“Her army must be about ready, Jeff. And leave me here to die. Well—”

“But we’re going to get out of here,” I assured him.

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.”

“How many of them are there?”

“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.

There was, near the City of the Mound, a passage a mile or two in width.

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.

I said, “Last night, Arturo, the gates were opened for a time.”

“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.”

He sat up abruptly. “Every volcano was active. Storms, earthquakes—”

“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.

But the human mind individualizes. I saw Polly.

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.

“All ready, Arturo?”

“Yes.”

I shouted at him: “Stop that!”

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.

“Think they’ll hear us?”

“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.