CHAPTER I.

HUMAN GIRL, OR SIREN?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

He glanced up at me. “That’s very pretty, Jeff, don’t you think so?”

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

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

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

“Wait a minute, Arturo, shut that damn thing off--”

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

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

Arturo followed me. “What’s the Malaysia?”

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

“Where is she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

Arturo gripped me. “Jeff!”

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

“Danger ahead.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Jeff, look!”

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

[Illustration: _For an instant he saw the strange face in the mirror._]

And the light from them struck at me with a shudder and a lure.

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

Arturo murmured, “Oh.”

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