The sea girl

We were hauled, as swimmers are hauled from the sea, over a low rail and flung to the aëro’s deck, with the tall gray figure of Rhana imperiously surveying us.

CHAPTER XXIII.

WHITE SHAPES IN THE MOONLIGHT.

We were upon that gray-white aëro which, like a ghost, swept at the Zero-level along the edge of the Australian Highlands. We had been upon it, and in the encampment of the Gians, some two weeks. The aëro had only been observed in Australia—the seeds of the new disease were first scattered there and nowhere else. But the aëro had made a far longer voyage—a strange, weird exploration through these vast new Lowlands!

It was Rhana’s desire to survey this world she was about to conquer. She avoided the Highlands where an attack upon the aëro might be made. She had wanted, if I were still alive, to capture me in advance of the active warfare she contemplated. She believed I would be with Nereid.

The Gian encampment was located within some hundred miles of where the Middge emerged. The Gians were south, across a gradual rise toward the Caroline Mountain chain. Rhana had been alert to receive any possible thoughts from Nereid. It was Rhana whom Nereid had reached—Rhana, quick to simulate Polly—Rhana, laughing ironically and saying she would not come alone.

She was triumphant to have me; and pleased to have Nereid, whom later she would use as envoy to the Middge when our surface nations were conquered. And myself—she told me characteristically when first we were drawn aboard the aëro. Its twenty feet of width held small cubbies, like cabins. I was taken from Nereid and thrust into one of them alone. Rhana came presently to see me. She sat beside me.

“So we are together again? That is very good, Jeff Grant.”

Cool, ironical smile. I could not forget that last time I had seen her, in the roaring gate-house when she had struck Entt down.

I drew away from her. We were rushing through the black mist. The dark panorama of the Lowlands was spread outside the cubby bull’s-eye.

“What do you want of me?” I demanded.

She told me tersely. This world of mine was strange to her. There was much that I could tell her about it. I could be of great help to her, if I would.

She toyed with her dark-lensed eyeglasses. “If you wish to help me, Jeff—”

So strange, her caressing use of my single name! I think she was barely aware of that caress in her tone. She leaned toward me as I shrank away.

“So? You are afraid? I thought the big man was different.” It was not irony this time. Her dark eyes glowed. She touched my arm, and I held tense. “You interest me, Jeff—” Then she sat back, away from me. “I would not frighten you.” She added quietly, but there was a sudden sweep of emotion back of it—unreasoning creature of moods and passions: “Can’t you guess, Jeff? I want your regard—I want you to admire me, respect me. I want your love. I frighten you? Oh, that I would not do—”

Her smoldering eyes held me. Her voice was gentle. Life has different standards. To her, man was a quarry to be pursued. She must not frighten me!

She added: “You could have guessed that I loved you. It comes, this thing that is love, so suddenly. You do not speak—”

I managed, “I did not guess—” This gray, imperious feline creature—suddenly amorous now, I could not doubt. But the change from love to hate could be swift. I repeated cautiously, “I did not guess.”

“But now, Jeff, you know, and I am going to conquer this big world up here. I am a masterful woman, Jeff—most powerful. I want you to think of that—you who are so big, so strong and beautiful of body—a man so worthy to rule this world with me. You could help me, Jeff—the inspiration I would have with you beside me—”

She paused. I began: “Why—”

“Do not answer now. You are frightened. I would not confuse you. I want, some time, not now, your love.”

“Why—” There was nothing I dared say. Her mood, exactly as I feared, turned suddenly.

“This girl of the Middge I found you with!” She rasped it out. “You love her?”

“No,” I said, alarmed for Nereid.

Rhana’s gaze searched me. “You are lying! Oh, but why should I think that little white creature could interest you? She amounts to nothing.”

“She loves my friend,” I said, “not me. Nor I her.” I decided to chance it; I might perhaps bargain. “You want me to help you, Rhana, to tell you what I can about this world of mine? If I do it will you treat me kindly?”

She smiled gently. “Why should I harm you? I want your admiration for what I do—for the woman, the leader that I am. A woman of destiny, as you call it, Jeff.”

“And this little white girl—this Middge we named Nereid—you will guard her safely? Because I ask you to, for the sake of my friend?”

“Yes.”

She stood up suddenly, as though my insistence annoyed her. “We will talk again. You have nothing to fear.”

She left the cubby. At the door a Gian came and stood to guard me.

I was allowed a fair liberty, here in the gray-white aëro. I moved where I pleased with increasing freedom, though always with a watchful man of the Gians beside me. Often I was with Nereid; there were times when we could snatch brief moments of talk, but always with watchful eyes upon us.

The aëro, with its length of two hundred feet or more, was decked over with a long, low narrow cabin, which was divided into many small compartments, with a narrow passage down the center. A few of the rooms occupied the entire width of the vehicle; one such was in the bow-peak, with the operating mechanisms; behind that, another which was Rhana’s cabin.

There was a narrow outer deck the length of the ship on both sides. Amidships was a room of weapons and apparatus for war. But this I was never allowed to approach. I think that the mechanism for spreading the disease germs was here. I never saw it.

The vehicle, with its glowing side pontoons and its faintly luminous spar projecting from the bow, quite evidently operated similarly to the ones we had flown in the abyss. There were aboard perhaps fifty Gians. The men did what heavy, unskilled labor was needed and prepared the meals. There were women at the controls.

Besides Rhana, I remembered having seen but one of these Gians before—that man, Bhool! He came sniveling up to me; and as though I did not know the full extent of his treachery, like a proud child he told me. He had murdered Fen; had been there in the house when we arrived; heard our plans to go to the gate-house; had hurried to tell Rhana. She had made her hasty trip to thwart us.

He ended: “Bhool is very clever? You know it?”

I cuffed him; and met Rhana’s approving, tolerant smile.

How far we flew on this trip over the Lowlands I could not say. Or at what speed? I would have guessed it to be fully eight hundred, or even a thousand, miles an hour. The daylight came; we settled into the depths and waited for the light to pass. I was closely guarded in a cabin made dark so my guard could see. And when night came we started again.

In all the swirl of mist and vague moonlight, it was a flight unreal, unearthly. I kept my general sense of direction, from the sun, and at night from the glimpses of the moon. I wondered how these women could pretend to navigate, especially an unknown region. But I saw they had curious instruments, and were making charts of what was passing beneath us.

I asked Rhana.

“We do not know where we are going,” she said. “But to come back the same way is very easy.”

In general we flew, at first, to the north, I imagine at about three thousand feet below the Zero-level. Occasional rises lifted above us. The water was always far below—for a time there was an unbroken sea down there—one of the great mid-Pacific deeps. Or again, a tumbled land of black crags; ravines, gullies, with river torrents of water surging everywhere. We reached the fallen Polar Sea with its jammed masses of ice; the heights of the Aleutians loomed ahead of us and we turned back.

There was a night when I fancied we were flying in a gigantic circle over the Central Pacific Basin. A broad, level stretch of water, far down—receding but still many hundreds of fathoms deep. I saw what might have been the sharp, jagged rise up to the Hawaiian Peaks.

Verdured mountain-tops were up there, unreal, fairylike in the moonlight, towering above the Zero-level, above the dank, evil mists of the Lowlands; a purple sky up there, with the mountain peaks standing into it; the stars, and the white clouds of a world serene. We avoided the heights. I had even fancied I saw the lights of a plane up there.

We stopped at the Gian encampment—I think about the time it was first discovered by the searching earth planes. None had seen us in our low, night flights; and in the daylight stops Rhana had always chosen places well obscured, far in the depths.

We made a second flight—the one to the Highlands of Australia—where first the earth saw us. Nereid and I were not aware of Rhana’s purpose then; not until afterward, in the Gian encampment, did we learn it.

I had, that second flight, a clear view of the topography of the Lowlands in this section. We came from the south, that night of October 15. What had before been called the Coral Sea we saw as a great, irregularly circular valley, a giant caldron surrounded everywhere by the Highlands. It was empty of any expanse of water save a few mountain torrents tumbling down its slopes or an occasional shallow lagoon, trapped in the rocks, drying by evaporation.

It was my studied policy now to win Rhana’s confidence. I told her always what I could of the geography of the regions through which we flew. The caldron of the Coral Sea barred us dangerously by its Highlands. I turned us northeast. At a depression of perhaps a thousand feet beneath the Zero-level we passed to the right of the Solomon rise and came again over the lower levels of an open abyss.

We stayed high. I think now that what might be termed the “ocean level” was down fifteen or twenty thousand feet below Zero. Certainly I saw no evidence of the sea here. The Japan Trench might still be full. I did not doubt but that the great Nero Deep off Guam was still and probably always would be a great salt lake ten thousand feet or more in depth.

Sweeping north, we saw under us the Caroline rise coming up. We passed through a broad valley of the Caroline Mountains. The verdured island-tops occasionally showed. I did not know it then, but since the discovery of the Gian encampment by the world, the Carolines were deserted by most of their inhabitants—all who could get away had already fled.

Beyond the mountains here, the Lowland floor again sank. A broken, desolate plain lay down there, blurred with rising mist. We crossed it; and soon it began rising again to the ridge we now call the Moon Mountains. None rose nearly to the Zero-level. A volcanic region, starkly grim with its inky black shadows, and weird patches of moonlight that sometimes filtered down.

It lay strewn like wreckage; here, undoubtedly, some great cataclysm of nature had in by-gone ages convulsed it, leaving the strewn crags and bowlders; pits like black holes, roundly punched by some giant finger; precipitous cliffs; ravines, narrow and deep.

But the whole, from this southern approach, was steadily rising. On the top of the ridge, still many thousands of feet below Zero, the Gians were encamped. Porous, honeycombed volcanic mountains these were, like a great oblong sponge, perched here. They contained caves, grottos, passages and tunnels of every size and character—a vast catacomb.

It lay, I think, some thirty miles in east and west extent along the top of the ridge; and ten miles north and south. Beyond it, northward, the mountains and the catacombs ended in a descending northward slope a hundred miles over a broken floor to where the Middge at a still lower level, were intrenched.

The grottos, as I first saw them, presented a darkly sinister, wholly unearthly scene. They held fifty thousand of the gray Gians. Already it had the appearance of a fantastic underground city. Hundreds of the dark caverns were occupied by men, women and children in crude interior shelters. But work was going on. Small stone houses were being built. Lights were erected. The openings to the upper air—this was all near the surface—were shaded against the periods of daylight. A scene of sputtering lights, grotesque shadows—unearthly.

A subterranean stream of fresh water had been found. The Gians seemed well supplied with food. There was a cavern of war equipment. The army was organized—an army of men, drilled and led by the women. There was a broad passage that rose to the outer air in which I saw three other aëros such as the one Rhana was using.

I slept in a newly-built, small stone house, always closely guarded. Nereid was with two of the Gian women. The encampment slept during the daylight periods. There were guards then, with heavily shaded glasses, at all the many upward passages. In the night, the activity went on.

Neither Nereid nor I were able to learn many details. No one would talk to us, except occasionally Rhana. And our pseudo-liberty was always closely watched.

I wondered what could be the plans of these Gian women against our great nations. I could imagine, once our existence here was discovered, that the earth armies could drive us out of these grottos and exterminate us. Yet there was about these women an aspect of confidence. Was it ignorance of what our civilized millions could do in warfare? What weapons did these Gians have to make them so confident?

I said once to Rhana: “If you want me to help you—why not tell me your own plans? These nations you are going to conquer are very powerful.”

She told me abruptly. I sat, speechless, stricken, and stared at her. Ah, the warfare of our civilized millions! I could see now how readily it might go down into defeat against this enemy inhuman! Spreading broadcast a fatal, incurable, uncontrollable disease!

She did not seem to notice my horror. She told me many things of the past; how long the Gians had planned this; how, when a year ago the gates had been opened a trifle, she had thought to come with her army up through the water. That menace at Maui, which we had seen from the Dolphin. But she had found it impractical—and had planned this present method.

It was the longest talk I ever had with Rhana. It was, I think, about the night of October 17. Nereid interrupted us. She came, forcing her guards to let her join us, vehemently protesting as they tried to hold her.

Rhana frowned. “You make a disturbance?” She said it in English; and Nereid answered the same way.

“I do not! They tried to hold me. I—I have communicated with some one I know—she—”

“That girl you call Polly?”

“Yes.”

I was on my feet. “Nereid! Think what you say!”

But her swift glance reassured me. She was careful.

She said: “Yes, I have reached her. She has been trying to reach me.”

There had never been, I knew, an hour when Nereid had not been flinging her thoughts toward Polly. And now, at last, Polly’s thoughts—a message—had come clearly back. The world was alarmed. The authorities wanted—before they attacked this enemy—to talk about it. Polly was trying to arrange a meeting. The United States proposed to send an unarmed plane with a white banner of truce to a designated place over the Lowlands.

I could visualize it. I had met our kindly, earnest President. I knew well his ideals, his aspirations to instill in humanity that unselfishness, that altruism it never has had, and never will. I knew also his closest friend, the gray-haired British minister. And the Anglo-Saxon director of foreign relations.

I could imagine these three—highest types of our great civilization—in conference now over this sudden menace. I could imagine them saying: “These people are human like ourselves. Misguided, that is all. Why should they attack us in this fiendish fashion? Why force us to make war upon them?”

Unanswerable arguments of idealism! The earth with all these new Lowlands, had room for all. Why should one or another set of humans strive to kill, or to be killed? Unanswerable.

Rhana listened quietly. “So? They are frightened? They fear me already? That is good. Can you still talk with them, Nereid?”

“Yes. I think so. I will try—if you will meet them.”

“Of course, child. Tell them what they wish shall be done.”

Calm, impressive, gray face. That hawklike profile, impassive, unruffled. “Tell them, Nereid, I will do what they wish. I am glad I have you now.” She just barely smiled. “You and Jeff will go with me to this meeting—you are a good interpreter with your flying thoughts.”

She made no effort to keep me from Nereid. “Tell me when you have arranged it.” She strode away.

“Nereid, is that true what you have told her?”

“Yes.”

“But not Polly—Polly isn’t coming? Tell her and Dr. Plantet not to come. No use. Why, Nereid, she might hold them here—keep Polly away from here.”

“The foreign director will come. Oh, Jeff, do you think it will be of any use? I want it to be. I pray—I have prayed so much—to my God—to Arturo’s whom he told me about—which is the same God.”

She sat beside me. Poor little Nereid! The struggles through which we had passed; the murder of her father—her people lost with their doomed realm; the long fight to get upward into the daylight—it all had changed her. She was pale and wan; always trembling, eager, earnest, pathetically anxious to be of help.

We were, for this moment, quite alone. She put her hand on my arm.

“Jeff—I was thinking of Arturo. I have tried to reach him, but I cannot. I wanted you to know. Did you know I love Arturo?”

“Why, yes, Nereid.”

“I think he loves me. We have never spoken of it. I just wanted to say that if—if you ever get back to Arturo, safe out of all this—”

She stammered, her voice broke, but she went on with a rush: “If you are safe sometime with him and I—I am not, I want you just to tell him that Nereid loved him. Will you do that? I want it very much—want him to know what might have been for us—it seems so very beautiful, what might be.”

Dear little Nereid! I said quietly: “You are coming safely through it, Nereid. Don’t think things like that.”

She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder. You will tell him?”

“Yes. I will. But it’s nonsense!”

I met her eyes. They had always seemed eyes with the green mystery and romance of the sea in them. I had thought of that often; there was no sea in the abyss of the Mound. I had spoken of it—her love for the water—the way she swam. There was a river, by the City of the Mound, and all the joy of her girlhood was found in its murmuring water.

And now the sea was gone from our world up here. But still, she could have a river. I met her eyes. The sea was gone from them now as it was from our world. Its dancing light; the sparkle that Arturo had described as she swam for him those first nights in the pool of the island cave. Her eyes were worn and dark now with trouble, sorrow, apprehension.

“I’ll tell him, Nereid. But it’s nonsense, because you’ll tell him yourself.”

I pictured, while she clung to me, our beautiful world of stars and moonlight for her and Arturo. “You shall live by a river, little Nereid—sparkling silver water with the moonlight on it. You and Arturo.”

And the wistful thought was in my mind: “And you, Jeff Grant, with Polly!”

I have read of those ancient times when a party of explorers often was stranded and lost in the unknown polar wastes. Two or three of its members, sometimes, would leave the others, and try, desperately to reach civilization. So it was with Tad and Arturo, there in the Middge camp after Nereid and I had so mysteriously disappeared in the night. They waited for a time, hoping for our return. But we did not come. Food and water were giving out. The Middge soon would be in desperate plight.

With Nereid out there as interpreter, Arturo and Tad had difficulty talking with the Middge leaders. And soon they began feeling like outsiders, aliens. The Middge were busy with their activities, but Arturo and Tad were made to feel that they were not wanted in that grotto where the war equipment was being assembled.

“They seem resentful of us,” said Arturo. “I don’t understand it.” Resentful, almost suspicious.

But Tad thought it perhaps natural enough. Their desperate position in this inhospitable world of the Lowlands.

“And don’t forget,” said Tad, “the first thing that happened here. Down comes a bomb and kills a dozen or so of them. Our people did that to them, Arturo. How would you feel?”

With the recurring daily periods of blinding daylight the Middge seemed disinclined to venture from the caves. But Tad and Arturo were aware that they had sent an exploring party back underground.

There came a day, while the camp was sleeping, that Arturo and Tad decided to leave it. If they could reach civilization, they would send help back. They made packs of a few belongings; a supply of food and water. They slipped quietly away; out to the mouth of their cave; clambered down the slope into the desolate barren wastes.

“Tad, look! Look up there!”

They had been wandering for several days and nights—covered with ooze and slime now, torn and bleeding with stumbling, falling on the rocks. How far they had gone they had no idea; traveling, they calculated, generally eastward. There were a few island mountain-tops, they thought, between here and the great Marshall Rise. It was soon not a journey, but a desperate wandering, with mountain streams to avoid; cliffs to descend, to climb again when the valley laboriously had been crossed; mud, sometimes like quicksand, upon which they crawled. Dank, hot days, often with blinding sunlight; dank, cold nights with the black noisome fog settling around them.

Arturo was burning with fever now. They were both gaunt, haggard.

“Tad, look! Look up there!”

It seemed about sunset, though of that they could never be sure. The sun was gone down behind some distant upstanding rim. There was sunlight on the white clouds of the heights, but in the abyss the deep purple shadows of night had long since gathered. There was sunlight still on the distant domes; a waterfall, halfway down, gleamed like a white veil; but the crags and tumbled land beneath it were grim and dark.

Tad and Arturo stood gazing up into the fading daylight. A white-winged plane was slowly circling, up near the Zero-level and five miles or so north of them. It came nearer, like a great white bird, soaring. The sunlight up there edged it with yellow and red. A long white banner streamed from it, waving with its forward motion. Silent, soaring white bird, it circled, and went slowly back northward.

The mists of the Lowlands were not yet gathered. The scene was clear to Tad and Arturo as they stood down on the dark floor. Breathless, awe-struck; a silent drama was beginning up there.

The plane with the white banner was alone. But far above it, off in the northern distance, a speck showed close under the white clouds, several thousand feet above the Zero-level. A speck; another earth plane, taking no part—like Arturo and Tad, just watching.

For a time the white banner of truce circled alone. And then, as the night gathered and deepened, another shape appeared, wingless, long and narrow, and gray-white.

The sunlight soon was gone up there, the yellow glow merged to the silver of the moon—a full moon, still below the eastern horizon of the Lowlands. But it caught and painted with its silver the fluttering white banner; the narrow, wingless aëro glowed in it, unreal as a ghost.

The two white shapes neared each other. The wingless aëro stopped dead, poised. The white banner, fluttering its peace offering, its message of humanity, approached slowly.

Tad and Arturo stood gazing, breathless. Then suddenly stricken. Why, what was this! What—What—They stared, unbelieving, clutching each other.

Drama, tragedy, so silent up there in the moonlight over the darkly spreading wastes of the abyss!

They stared. And presently when it was over, they started forward, running.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CRIMSON RAINBOW.

“You shall interpret for me, child Nereid, if we wish to talk at a distance.” Rhana stood before us. “And you, Jeff Grant, are you ready? You shall see me, the great woman conqueror!”

She was garbed rather differently now. At first I did not understand the reason. Ah, but I was soon to know! The same sheathlike body shield; same type of cloak; same grotesque metal headdress. But on her gray bare limbs a strip of flexible metal was fastened, hinged at the knee to bend as she walked; a metal plate like a broad collar was on her neck and shoulders. The chains that usually dangled from her wrists were gone. Along her arms, as on her legs, were strips of gray metal, wound, it seemed, with tiny white wire.

She stood regarding me with impassive face. “You are ready, Jeff Grant?”

“Yes.”

She moved away. I thought as she walked, that her arms were joined to her body-shield by folds of black fabric.

It was late afternoon. Against the fading daylight Rhana wore dark-lensed glasses. She offered a pair to me, but I refused them. She adjusted a pair on Nereid. Strange woman! Impassive, expressionless now; calmly imperturbable. Yet within her there was that obvious vanity. I should see her triumph; she wished even Nereid to witness it.

We boarded the aëro. A crowd of Gian women stood silently in the passage and watched us off. We lifted gently; moved forward, up and into the afternoon twilight of the Lowlands.

We were all in the forward control room. There seemed no one aboard save us who were here. Nereid and I, and Rhana; and two Gian women, and two men. One of the men was Bhool. He had no glasses. He sat crouched in a corner, shading his eyes, and did not speak. Occasionally Rhana issued him some gruff order. He moved to obey, and stumbled in the light.

The others all wore the glasses. The two women were at the controls; the other man stood alert with a weapon upon Nereid and me.

The control room was about twenty feet square and ten feet high to its curved cabin roof. It occupied the full width of the aëro, except for the narrow deck which flanked it on both sides. There were several wide transparent window panes.

Looking forward to where the bowsprit glowed luminous ahead of us was a broad streamline window, V-shaped.

The controls were there on a table—a row of small switches and domelike buttons, with an array of strange instruments of navigation on a board over them.

To one side, in the front pane, a projector was mounted, a bowl-like black projector with a grid of wires across its face. Its mechanism stood separate on a table near it—a range-finder like a small telescope swung in a universal; dials, and levers, and a coil, with wires to a storage tank that lay along the wall.

It was a short flight—we had not far to go. My heart was unreasonably pounding as I sat by Nereid, watching and waiting. The details of the meeting had been carefully arranged; there could be, Nereid was sure, no error. A lone, unarmed plane with a white banner to meet us at the Zero-level. The foreign minister would take off from it in a small helicopter and descend to us. He would come aboard, at Rhana’s mercy, trusting to her honor.

The world would offer every conciliation to her; land should be hers, for her people to live here in our world, at peace with us. There would be, when the meeting took place, another earth plane in the far upper distance. It would carry Dr. Plantet, Polly and a corps of observers with a telescopic image-finder by which our world would see in the mirrors this friendly meeting. Propaganda to insure a friendly public spirit, so that the new race could come and settle and be welcomed.

Nereid had been very earnest. “Do you understand all that I say?”

And Rhana had said: “Yes, of course,” with impassive face and a tone devoid of any feeling.

We flew away from the setting sun, upward in a long slant toward the Zero-level. The control room was silent. Rhana sat alone to one side. Bhool crouched in a corner. The two Gian women were intent at their instruments. Near the center of the room Nereid and I sat together, with our guard watching us.

The windows were broad and clear. The abyss moved past us, their gaunt, rounded cliffs moving backward and dropping away as we mounted. To the west, high above our level, a golden glow marked the setting sun. It was behind us, and we faced a silver night, moonlight streaming above the dark elevations in the murky distance.

Occasionally Nereid would whisper to me. “It will be all right, Jeff?” A hope, a prayer. But I noticed that she was very watchful, her gaze roving the cabin, remarking all its details.

Once Rhana turned. “Nereid, child, do you hear from them now?”

“No. But I am sure they are coming.”

At last we saw ahead of us, a thousand or two thousand feet above us, the plane with its streaming banner. It circled like a giant bird, with motionless outspread wings. The gold of the sun and the silver of the rising moon mingled upon it. But the yellow faded; it soon turned silver, ghostlike.

An added tenseness had come to all of us in the cabin. The goggled women at the controls looked questioningly for Rhana’s orders. Our flight slackened; we hovered, with the plane almost over us. Its banner fluttered, a long silver streamer in the moonlight. The shadows of the abyss gathered beneath us; the cabin, to my eyes, was dim; moonlight came in the side windows and lay in white liquid pools on the floor; it bathed the control table; it etched with silver lines the dark figures of the two women sitting watchfully there.

We were evidently just beneath the Zero-level; the abyss was a dark void some ten or twelve thousand feet down to an undulating rocky floor. I gazed up at the cabin ceiling. Through the transparent pane there I could see the plane with its white banner. Slowly circling, evidently making ready to put out its helicopter.

Nereid whispered: “Did you see the newscasters’ aëro, as they call it?”

“Yes.”

I had seen it, indeed. The plane carrying Polly. It could still be seen—a tiny dark speck up in the distant silver sky. Nereid said aloud to Rhana:

“There is the aërocar watching us.” Her voice was earnest, tense, vibrating with her emotion. “You see it off there? This world watching us, great Rhana—to see your friendly greeting—to welcome you—”

Rhana moved toward us in the shadows with her soundless, catlike tread. “So? Yes, I see it. You say they have instruments to see us clearly from such a distance? That is very good.” Her tone was emotionless.

She moved away like a gray shadow. For a moment I did not notice her. My attention was fixed on the ghostly outlines of the plane over us. It bore now a small light; in the glow I saw the helicopter in its bracket; the figure of the kindly gray-haired foreign director—I recalled him well—showed in the helicopter seat.

My heart stopped, and then wildly plunged. Incredible, this that I was seeing! From our cabin a light sprang upward. It glowed, narrowed to a beam. It caught the plane up there. The fluttering white banner of truce shriveled and burned. The plane rocked. It tilted; rocked and swayed in the grip of the light.

Incredible! I was on my feet with Nereid clinging to me in stupefied horror. The Gian man sprang, a gray menacing shadow in the gloom of the cabin—sprang and crouched between me and Rhana. His weapon was leveled upon me. Rhana was bending tense over the projector mechanism. It hissed, snapped and hummed with its current.

The plane up there was rocking, struggling in the grip of the beam like a wounded bird. Coming down.

It only lasted an instant. Then Rhana snapped off the light. I stared, transfixed with horror. The silver shape of the plane swayed crazily. It was on fire; red tongues of flame licked at it. The light sprang again; caught it; tilted it over—left it. The plane flopped in an arc, righted, and flopped again. At our level now. Then below us. With its crazy swoops the red-yellow flames streamed from it.

Down—then I saw it whirl in a dive. A red-flaming torch, dropping, spinning downward with a line of flame and smoke like a tail streaming above it. Down—dwindling as it fell into the abyss. A tiny red spot down in the darkness—a flaming falling torch. A soundless impact down there, with a faint red glow where it lay.

In the dark tenseness of our cabin Rhana’s voice rang out. Triumphant now. “You see, Jeff Grant, how Rhana rules this world?”

A minute. It had taken no more than a minute. Sixty seconds is sometimes an eternity. I stood confused, my senses groping with the shock of these whirling events.

“Oh, Jeff!” Nereid’s voice; her hand plucking to turn me. I saw through the side window, far off to the west where the sun had been golden, but now there was only the purple night—saw a white flare puff like a bomb. The Gian encampment was off there.

Rhana’s voice came sharply. “What is that?”

It was no Gian light-flare. She was surprised, and she rasped: “What is that?”

It caught little Nereid; confused with horror, she blurted: “The earth attacking you—you have broken faith!”

And then there was a red-yellow spot like a bursting shell in the distant darkness. It seemed, after an interval, that we could hear very faintly in the heavy air of the abyss, the muffled explosion.

“You—have broken faith—”

Amazement swept Rhana; amazement and a dawning wild anger. “Attacking? Your earth dares attack—me?” She stood half crouching behind the Gian man whose weapon was still levied at Nereid and me. “Attacking?” The moonlight caught her hawklike gray face, showed it distorted now with fury. “So? I will show them! Why, there will be millions of them dead in another day—”

She straightened; issued swift orders to the women at the controls. Our aëro began rising. My thoughts whirled. Sixty seconds. It had been enough time for that watching plane to radio Washington; and for Washington to order its army, already assembled in the abyss, to the attack. Another red explosion showed off there.

We were rising swiftly. I whispered: “Nereid, what is she going to do?”

“She—oh, Jeff, she’ll rush to the Highlands, find some great city, loose the disease broadcast, pollute your great cities!”

To-night, in one flight, spread death over the world. Thoughts are swift-flying things. The red spot in the abyss where the plane had fallen was still almost beneath us. Nereid was whispering to me vehemently, but my thoughts flew afield.

The observing plane with Polly and Dr. Plantet could never follow our nearly thousand-mile-an-hour flight. A few hours in the moonlight over the Highlands, loosing the germs of that foul disease, polluting the air of our great cities! It would sweep our continents. What use if, in her demoniac, unreasoning fury, Rhana was finally brought down? What if our attacking army back there were able to annihilate the Gians? They would drive the Gians out of the grottos in a few days, no doubt. What of it? An uncontrollable plague would be sweeping our world, bringing death to millions.

But what was Nereid saying? Her vehement whispers penetrated my consciousness; her fingers were digging into my arm.

“That little coil, there at the edge of the control table—you see it? I can get to it with a sudden leap. I know what that coil controls. If I could tear it with my fingers—”

The confusion of my thoughts dropped away. Death? There is a calmness comes to one who finds death at hand. It seemed that all my thoughts were sharpening—all my senses sharp and clear to hear Nereid’s whispered words of death.

“—tear it, rip it away. It controls the current in the side pontoons, Jeff. If I break it, we will fall. You see? Fall the way the plane fell—kill us all.”

Was the burning plane still almost beneath us? An eternity passed in these few whispering seconds.

“I’ll jump at the table, Jeff. You leap on the guard. He’ll fire at you—he’ll forget me. You see?”

“Nereid—death, now?”

“Yes. We’ll fall—but Jeff, those millions of people!”

Death? Why, Polly was in that distant plane—Polly! I would never see her again.

“Death, Nereid? You are right. Those millions of people or just us.”

“Arturo—and your Polly—will remember us.”

Her fingers seemed pressing a good-by. I answered it. Polly’s face was shining in my mind. Good-by, Polly—

“Jeff, when I start to move, you leap. Now—”

“You wait, Nereid! A second after the guard has come after me! Your best chance then.”

The figure of Bhool had come crouching toward us. He shouted a warning: “Rhana!”

It may have distracted the guard. A rush of confusion was in the moonlit cabin. I leaped low at the guard’s legs; the upward desperate sweep of my arm struck his weapon; its stab missed me. Nereid’s leap landed her at the control table. The two women and Rhana were upon her; but her frantic clutching hands ripped and tore at the little coil. The cabin seemed to lurch; the shafts of moonlight swayed. Through the windows the abyss was turning over.

We were falling, irrevocably. Every one in the cabin knew it. Death! The strife among us ceased abruptly; the women cast Nereid away and Bhool gave a long piercing scream of terror.

Falling.

But I saw Rhana spread her arms. Black folds of fabric hung like wings from them to her body. The metal strips on her limbs and her metal collar glowed green with a current in them. She flung open the door, gripping its casement to steady herself. I heard her words clearly. “So you wish death, you fools!”

Realization swept me. She wore a device like the pontoons of this aëro to protect her, as a parachute once protected the old-fashioned aviator. She was on the deck.

I recall snatching up Nereid, then leaped with her and caught Rhana at the rail. We three went over into the uprushing void. Rhana was struggling silently, and her arms flapped like a frantic bird. The wind rushed up at us. An endless fall. Momentarily I was aware of a gray shape like an arrow plunging past. A muffled, splintering crash came from below, where the aëro lay, mangled metal upon the rocks.

Rhana fought to cast me off, but I was far stronger. My arm was crooked about her throat, and I held Nereid with the other. The glowing metal on Rhana burned against my flesh. We fell—a fluttering gray bird with two enemies clinging to it, pulling it down with their weight. Rhana’s fingers tore at me futilely. I tightened my grip about her throat. I think I recall a crack. Rhana went limp.

A black surface of rock rushed up at us and struck us.

“Jeff! Come back to me.” Soft, whispered, woman’s voice; soft arms were holding me. “Jeff, dear—please!”

I struggled back to consciousness as though from an emptiness remote. This was Polly’s voice; these were her arms. I murmured: “Polly, dear?”

There was a dark confusion around me; but in the midst of it I lay and knew that I was unhurt. And Polly was here, with me at last. Dr. Plantet was examining me; he said I was unharmed. I remembered Nereid.

“Polly, where is she?”

Then Dr. Plantet’s voice: “She’s all right, Jeff. Here she is.”

And Nereid’s voice: “Is he safe? I—I was afraid it had killed him.”

All like a dream. My head was whirling with it, and my ears roared. But I found myself sitting up, with Polly helping me. Dark rocks; heavy air, making me gasp. Grim dark shadows, but the moonlight hung a great silver canopy far overhead.

Other figures were here, and Dr. Plantet’s plane stood near by. Its engine smoked; its navigators were moving about it anxiously. A red glow a mile away showed where the other plane had fallen. And nearer, there was a tangled mass of gray-white metal. Rhana’s aëro.

“No one left in it alive,” said some one. “We’ve been there.”

And Rhana—she lay here on the rocks, broken, crumpled. I did not go to look at her.

“Neck broken,” said Dr. Plantet. “Broken when she struck.”

I let it pass.

A man came up. “I don’t know if we can get up out of here with that engine. The Allen climber is the worst type for a depth like this.”

“We’ll start.” Dr. Plantet helped me up. “Good enough, Jeff—you’re fine. You want to start now, Smithby—we’re ready.”

Nereid, unhurt and gently smiling, stood before me. My body, and perhaps Rhana’s, had broken her fall. She murmured to Polly: “We said good-by to you and Arturo up there. I’m so glad, Jeff, it did not have to be good-by—not for you and Polly.”

But Arturo?

There was a distant shout. Two figures, half a mile away, were clambering down the rocks, shouting weakly.

They came. Our men from the plane here rushed out to meet them, and came back, carrying the two bloodstained, tattered figures, covered with mud and slime. Their torn and bleeding feet were wrapped with cloth into bulky bundles.

Reunion. A babble of voices. I stood confused, my ears still roaring, my legs weak from the shock of the fall. I heard Tad’s cheery, tired voice. I saw Arturo carried past me, and glimpsed his haggard white face, his eyes burning with fever. The man set him down. Arturo stood; he called; and I saw Nereid run like a child into his opened arms.

One scene more—an hour later, as from the cabin of the Allen climber we gazed down into the abyss. We had come up laboring. At the Zero-level we soared to the west. The full moon was well above the horizon behind us. Beneath, the Lowlands were white with patches of moonlight, black with inky shadows. Ahead some twenty miles and a few thousand feet down, the jagged ridge of the Moon Mountains lay white and black, sharp-etched as a lunar landscape.

The abyss was like a great deep bowl, rising everywhere to a dim high horizon. To the south the tremendous slope rose toward the Carolines. Our earth artillery had been sent there—a precautionary measure if the truce should fail.

We could see now the bombardment proceeding—the Essen fire-shells rising in a tremendous hundred-mile arc, dropping, pounding the Moon ridge; some of them releasing their gases.

Over the ridge a covey of war-planes hung, directing the range. Occasionally a light-flare was dropped. Bombs were dropping. We could see them strike. The noise was like a muttering muffled thunder in the distance.

The Gians had evidently remained inactive. Then we saw their attacking light-beams spring up. The planes scattered—some of them were caught. But the slow bombardment from a hundred miles away, went methodically on. It would take days.

Smithby, at my elbow, babbled of the earth plans. And questioned me avidly.

With my information to give our authorities, we could land planes closer; send in an army, fighting in the grottos—or perhaps the artillery could pound this porous ridge to pieces in a week or two.

Could the enemy retreat farther underground? We would have to stop that.

If we could get the wind right, our gas-shells would fill those caverns—smoke the enemy out like bees. And if we could get them out into the daylight, blinded—

Nereid’s cry silenced him. “The Middge! Look!”

From the dark northern horizon a crimson light came in a beam. Light, or fire? A beam of something, crimson as a blood-stream. It rose from the northern distance; like a gigantic crimson jet of fluid it arched up and fell. An arc, huge as a rainbow—a rainbow of blood across the void of the abyss. Its distant source we could not see; its end fell here upon the Mountains of the Moon and drenched them with its crimson.

The planes overhead winged away; the earth bombardment stopped. We approached within ten miles or so, with our image-finder trained upon the scene.

Smithby could never forget his mission; our snapping sender flashed out the image to be caught and relayed over the world. Hundreds of millions of people everywhere sat tense at their mirrors watching the silent red scene.

Rainbow of blood-light falling upon the dark Moon Mountain ridge. A great round pool glowing at the end of the rainbow. The mountains were melting; as though they were molds of black and white wax under the heat of a pressure torch, they melted.

The rainbow end moved over, slowly traveling along the ridge, melting it away—wax fuming, bubbling and plowing in lava streams down the slopes. The nearer end of the ridge where first the blood-light had struck was a depression now—a great caldron where the ridge had been; a caldron of fused molten rock, viscous, cooling from yellow-red to red and then to black. Along the whole length of the ridge the blood-red rainbow sprayed its penetrating heat.

A silent, red inferno. And presently there were dim muffled sounds as underground gases exploded; and the hiss of the licking gas flames.

We could feel the heat. The glare rose and painted all the sky with blood.

Abruptly the crimson rainbow was gone. The Moon ridge shad vanished into a boiling trench of lava, topped by hungry licking red-green tongues of flame, with a huge black gas-cloud, rolling up.

The fires cooled and died. The red turned slowly black. The trench lay naked and dead in the moonlight—fused rock cooling into shapes fantastic. A dead, empty trench with a gray mantle of ashes sifting down upon it, to mark where the Gians had been.

CHAPTER XXV.

MURMURING RIVER.

They call this now the era of our Greater World. This year that has passed has brought us many strange things. I am not one to recount them—the wonders of the Lowlands, the world’s changed climate; the struggles, the reorganization, it seems, of everything which we held to be standard.

There is still chaos. I could not, with authority or understanding, write of it. I have told the rôles which I and my friends had forced upon us, that is all.

For those many omissions which would have made my narrative more logically clear, I ask indulgence.

Books, in future years, will be written upon many angles of the subject. The science of those two races who with enmity and smoldering strife lived in the depths of our great earth—our scientists will attempt to picture it. But that will be futile, no doubt. The Middge have gone. From that very night when their crimson rainbow annihilated their enemy, they have never been seen.

Strange race! Our scientists say that in those last days they undoubtedly located the Gians and blasted them with a hatred born of centuries of oppression. And then, with their exploring parties underground finding food and water, they vanished with their weapon into the dark realms from which they had come. They wanted nothing of our world—feared us perhaps.

We are an adventurous civilization. There is already talk of exploring the depths—finding the Middge.

There will be books of sociology written upon the strange Gian civilization. I have no more than hinted at it. Already there is much controversy. It has been said that Rhana was the personification of all womanhood if given unlimited power. I think that is unjust to womanhood. In every age and every race there have been bad men and good men—bad women and good women. There was Rhana—and there was Nereid.

A river flows beneath these windows of the house where Polly and I are living. It murmurs its endless song. Arturo and Nereid are no more than half a mile up its stream. They often come past in a boat—sometimes swimming down, with the boat floating after them. They went past like that this evening, just a short while ago. Polly was here with me then—pushing aside these pages to sit with me and watch the moonlight on the river.

And Arturo and Nereid came swimming past. They looked up and saw us. They waved. Nereid’s hair streamed out long and tawny in the silver rippling water; her face was laughing as she flung up her arm toward us and dived after Arturo.

THE END.