CHAPTER II.

“COMING UP, FROM UNDER THE SEA!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Father will want to see us. You can talk about it then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I went,” said Arturo.

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

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

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

I glanced at Arturo.

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

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

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

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

He turned to me:

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I repeated, “Fight--what, Dr. Plantet?”

From the house Polly came breathless, bearing the tray of refreshments.

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

I ventured, “The oceans are receding--”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You do not mention the most serious thing of it all, father.”

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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