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!”