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.
I looked away at last.
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.
Entt whispered suddenly. “Look—out there!”
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.
We flew onward. The sound of the rushing water was monstrous ahead of us.
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.
“Keep hold of me, both of you,” Entt whispered.
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.
“There is the gate-house. I think there are no Gians here.”
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.
Then he grinned. “Ruined! It’s off, Jeff. You can see me, can’t you?”
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.
“What of it?” said Tad. “There isn’t any one here.”
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?”
“Yes.” I had shielded it with a fold of my robe.
He gestured. “I’ll shove the door, Jeff. We’ll rush in together. Get back, Entt. Ready, Jeff?”
“No! Stoop here, on one side. I’ll kick it open. We’ll wait and see—”
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.
“Run, Jeff!”
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.
Failure! It pounded at my heart—failure now at the last!
I was striving to get up.
“Jeff—you all right?”
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.
We lurched to where Entt lay huddled on the floor, then I pulled Tad away.
“Dead?” he asked.
I gasped. “Yes—don’t look, Tad. His face—burned where she struck him—it’s—too badly burned.”
Thank God he was dead!
Failure! It pounded at us, beyond thought of Entt, or ourselves. These gates, this torrent!
The mechanism lay inert where Rhana had demolished it. But more than that—
“Jeff, listen! Good God!”
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.
“Jeff!”
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.
Failure!
“Yes, Jeff. We’d better get away.”
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?
We were both suddenly calmer.
“Easy, Jeff, don’t waste its charge. How many flashes has it got?”
“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.
“It works, Jeff! Give it to me—I’ll try one.”
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.
We had to shout above the roar.
“You think you can guide us out, Tad?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“We’ve got to get to the tunnel and find Arturo and Nereid.”
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.
“Where are we, Tad?”
I shouted it as we lay prone, clinging to the leaping little aëro.
“In the main abyss, I think. God, Jeff, look over there!”
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.
“Is that the fire caldron?”
“I don’t know—I think so—or was it the other way?”
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?
We flew aimlessly, seeking the tunnel-entrance. Did it still exist?
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.
“Higher, Tad—we’ll be—choked—”
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.
This doomed realm!
“Tad, look! Is that the entrance?”
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.
Fearsome, but romantic cataclysm to bring so suddenly this change!
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!”
She knew it. And then her mind rang with other words:
“Stop! Don’t let them attack us! Stop them!”
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!”
Dr. Plantet talked with the authorities. A week went by.
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.
Dr. Plantet came back to Polly. He was grim. He slumped in his chair.
“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.
“Nereid!”
She started, alarmed. Then relaxed. “Oh, it is you, Jeff.”
I sat beside her. “What are you doing up here?”
She hesitated, but she answered softly:
“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.”
“Polly!”
“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.”
“But you don’t know where we are—how could you tell her where to come?”
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?
“Nereid, we must show a light as a guide.”
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.
“Nereid, you’d better go down, I’ll stay here—”
“No.”
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.