CHAPTER V.

NEREID OF THE SEA.

The westward-bound Australian mail left its Hendon Airport at 5 P.M., Greenwich time, August 10. At 9 P.M., Washington time, in the luminous darkness of the late summer twilight, we saw its lights over Norfolk--the immense, quadruple banks of its lighted hull windows. It came down over the landing field where our little Dolphin, with three of us on board, was lying cradled and ready. It hovered; its electro-magnetic grapples caught us up; in ten minutes, with the great flyer on its westward way again, we were stored on its lower deck.

Three of us on board: Dr. Plantet, Polly, and myself. We had had no heart to try and find a last minute substitute for Arturo. We could handle the Dolphin, we two men. It was, indeed, a craft with every modern device operated by the levers in its forward instrument room, of one-man control.

We had found no trace of Arturo. Dr. Plantet had uttered one anxious, heartfelt cry: “Why did he not tell me? I would have understood and advised him.”

Ah, but there lay the trouble! He would have advised his son; but he could not, probably, have understood! Whatever Arturo contemplated, quite evidently he feared that his father would have disapproved of it. And, disapproving, would have forbidden him to do it, with a gruff command enforced against all possibility of argument. Arturo knew it; Polly and I, as we read his timorous, pleading little note, realized it was true. But Dr. Plantet did not think of that, and there was no one to tell him, and no use in telling him.

He had done what he could to trace Arturo. The lad’s own small Wasp was gone from its hangar. Arturo had gone alone, by air. For an hour that afternoon when we returned from Norfolk to find him gone, Dr. Plantet shut himself up with his instruments; notified the authorities; had every detective bureau at every transfer point and in all the traffic towers of the country on the watch. But Arturo had evidently planned carefully. No report of him came to us.

We were very busy those last hours. With all his worry over his son--shot through with anger also, I am sure--Dr. Plantet would not let it interfere with our voyage. That was not his way; though he was right in that, of course. We were not going on a mere experimental voyage to try and chart the great unknown deeps. That was a mere incidental. The oceans were still receding; the deeps might soon be dry, so that any one could see and explore them. By this August 10, another eight fathoms were gone from the oceans. Some eighteen fathoms in all--over a hundred feet. We heard a newscaster give the figures on the evening of August 9. The oceans down nearly a hundred feet below low tide levels, everywhere, and the world was seething with the confusion of it.

Our voyage might locate the cause. But, most important of all, we hoped to locate this unknown enemy race, somewhere down there, to whose existence so much evidence had pointed. An enemy, perhaps making ready to attack our world; we must determine that, one way or the other; locate the point of attack, if attack there were to be; estimate its nature, and the best methods of repulsing it. These were the main reasons for our voyage. The fate of our world might depend upon our success--and no disappearance of a wayward son could swerve Dr. Plantet from the least detail of his starting preparations. Within an hour the affair seemed to be wiped from his mind.

Flying southwest, the mailship carried us over Mexico during that evening. We passed to the Pacific at latitude twenty-two degrees N. At fifteen degrees N. and one hundred and twenty degrees W., some one thousand two hundred miles off the Mexican coast, Dr. Plantet told them that they could put us down. By local time for that longitude, it was then nearly midnight.

The cranes lowered us into a placid sea; we lay awash, the three of us standing on the tiny deck of the Dolphin, watching the lights of the great liner vanish among the southwest stars. The lights winked, red and green and purple, and presently were gone.

We were alone on the falling Pacific. Our enterprise was begun!

* * * * *

I must recount now the strange adventure to which Arturo had set himself alone. From what he afterward told Polly, and, to a lesser degree, his father and myself, I can construct a picture of it. A picture no doubt lacking much in detail, for none could fathom the emotions that beset him. Yet withal it may be fairly accurate, for I doubt if he himself could have analyzed his motives.

Guiding him, no doubt, was the clear vision that upon his own slender shoulders might rest the salvation of his world. That, perhaps, was his compelling urge. I have no doubt but that he thought so. But beneath it, mingled with it, was what may have been an even stronger urge--a strange lure.

He had planned it for a long time. He had fought against it, for there was a fear lurking in it, a strange instinctive dread, mingled with the urge that seemed rushing him on. He would have gone before, but he could not find opportunity. Our departure for Norfolk that morning gave him his chance.

There was a night--I think it was the evening of August 1--when he made up his mind definitely that he must act alone. It was that evening we heard the newscaster say that a fast air cruiser had been dispatched by the American Government from Guam to the uninhabited island upon which the mermaid had been reported. A formidable company of marines had landed with a flourish upon the outer shoals to which the ocean now had receded. They had scrambled up to the beach and searched the island to capture this mermaid. But nothing human or otherwise had been found to capture.

It came to Arturo evidently as at once a disappointment and a relief. And it spurred him to his decision. If his adventure had any rationality, any possibility of success, it must be undertaken alone. I think, too, that secretly in his heart he welcomed this.

He took his radio sender and a copy of his improvised radio code; in his Wasp, which he had provisioned and fueled, he started from “Sea End” within an hour after we had left. The Wasp, tiny as it was, could do a good three hundred. He flew north, and high, taking his chances with the traffic towers, who would have ordered him down below the five thousand foot lane upon any normal occasion. But this was not a normal occasion. The country was in confusion; the air directors were all more or less lax. Arturo was visible that morning to a score of their finders. But none, evidently, bothered to record his number; and when the air police, dutifully pursuing Dr. Plantet’s inquiry, sought to check the travel, there was no one to report his passage.

Arturo was no fool. He had guessed all this, and played upon it. He clung to the ten and twenty thousand foot through lanes. With his three hundred mile speed he swept north far into Quebec; turned west, passing over the Dominion, where he guessed they would be even more lax. He went west, crossed the middle of Vancouver Island. At Alberni he took a necessary chance and refueled. He had played skillfully for his favorable wind-drift, and made good time. By ten o’clock that evening he was over the Pacific.

He headed now southwest. It was a calm, clear night. The ten thousand foot lane was deserted. He lashed his controls, set his warning bells, and went to sleep.

* * * * *

The sun was rising when he awakened. The deserted sea beneath him was calm. No islands were in sight. The air was clear of craft.

He seemed poised, motionless and alone between the two matched domes of sea and sky. He was young enough to be thoroughly refreshed and hungry. He had slept very nearly nine hours; he ate a lavish breakfast.

Then he took his position. He found himself in thirty-two degrees twenty minutes N. and one hundred and fifty-five degrees six minutes W. Four hours of elapsed time afterward he swept over Gardner Island of the Hawaiians. The sun was still well in the east--he was gaining an hour of comparative local time for every fifteen degrees of longitude he traversed on his westward flight.

He had feared that the Gardner tower might challenge him, but they did not.

It was a long day of flight, but his eager thoughts possessed him. She might perhaps be there on her island. He wondered if it were the same girl he and I had seen in the globe beneath the surface. We had seen that face in the ocean not very far from this same island where the mermaid was reported.

Had she been on her way up from the abyss then? Coming up, perhaps alone? For what reason?

If she had still been upon the island, those marines, landing there with such a vainglorious, belligerent gesture, undoubtedly would have frightened her. She would have hidden, plunging into the lagoon perhaps, to await their departure. She might still be there. And Arturo, alone--he told himself that he would not frighten her. He found himself trembling. Ah, it would not be she who would be frightened; yet with every fiber of him he longed to encounter her.

The setting sun before him found Arturo and his little Wasp in the neighborhood of nine degrees thirty minutes N., one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. He had met a fresh, strong head-wind for most of the day. And his engine, over this long, continuous flight, had been giving him some trouble. He had cut down his speed. But he was here, at sunset; it was that same evening of August 10 during which our little Dolphin was being carried westward by the Australian mail.

In the late afternoon Arturo had passed over the Northern Marshalls--the tip of the Ratack Chain. He had seen several of the through Flyers during the day, passing to the sides far above him; but none had spoken him.

“Nereid’s Island.” He was already calling it that in his mind. He would call her Nereid.

He had not wanted to reach here before the sunset anyway. In the golden path of the setting sun he raised the island. At low speed his motor was quite silent. He might have been a softly humming wasp, circling over the lonely little island, coming gently down, circling.

It lay, a strangely augmented patch of land in the fallen ocean. All around it was a low, outside circular area of green-black and coral rocks, sloping steeply upward, strewn with shriveled, drying marine vegetation--at the bottom of which the sea was lapping. A sodden, upward rocky slope led to where, high up in the air, a fringe of white beach lay queerly dry. Above that, a crescent area of palms and vegetation. The inner lagoon was dry--an empty, sandy bowl, perched up there in the air on a spreading rocky base.

It seemed no earthly island; a small mountain top with a shallow crater in its center and a strange fringe of trees and meaningless beach.

There was no sign of moving object. With his heart pounding, Arturo gazed down. There were many caverns and pools in the lower slopes from which the ocean had fallen--she could hide there very easily.

And then he saw, or thought he saw, something unusual--the bulge of a metallic surface. It lay nearly submerged in a rift of rock far down the outer slope at the water’s edge. The globe we had seen in the ocean that night?

He fancied so. Lying in that position it would have been well covered by water when the marines were here.

In the glowing, glorious twilight of that tropic night, Arturo landed in the basin of the empty lagoon, then rolled his Wasp up the gentle slope of the inner beach.

* * * * *

He sat there that evening, silently waiting. Over him spread the blazing southern stars strewn on purple velvet. The arching palm fronds whispered about him as the night breeze stirred them. Ahead, down the slope of beach and lower slope of rocks, the sea lay quietly breathing. A quarter moon was following the vanished sun. It dropped a bright silver path on the water; it glorified the beach; it laid upon the brooding little island an amorous spell.

Arturo sat, edged with silver. Would she see him? Would she be too frightened? Was she, perhaps, not here at all?

The moon fell lower. He went, with sudden thought, back to his plane. He sat again under the palm, and the low voice of his violin throbbed into the somnolent night. He wondered if she would be as frightened, as emotion-swept as himself.

I think, as he sat there softly playing, that the world of 1990 was far away from Arturo. I think his mind must have been flung back, past all the counted centuries to those fabulous, magic times when the sea had no history, but only legend. One of the sailors of Ulysses, with his ears stuffed with wax against temptation, but being more courageous, or perhaps weaker than his fellows, might have slipped ashore--and waited thus, with the wax cast away, singing perhaps a soft song of his own to tell that he had yielded.

Arturo must have trembled, as the song of his violin was trembling. Was this a daughter of Amphitrite, mockingly cast in the fashion of a woman? Or was it a human girl?

And then he saw her. Partly behind him, among the long, slanting shadows of the palms. A dark figure edged in a silver patch. It stood motionless; then it moved toward him a trifle, and stood again.

Arturo laid his violin and bow beside him on the sand and very quietly got to his feet. He could see her better now, only a few yards away. A small, slim figure of a girl, white-limbed, but flushed like moonlit coral. A brief, dangling robe, which might have been green; smooth, lustrous green, as though a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.

He stood tense, unmoving. The moonlight was on him--his slight, boyish figure of long, slim black trousers, and white ruffled shirt; his black tousled hair thick in waves over his pale forehead.

He stood trembling. She moved again toward him. The moonlight struck her face. Ah, this must be a human girl! He saw her features--a face of strange, soft beauty; wide eyes, parted coral lips; a face, timorous, gentle, eagerly wondering. And framing her face, lying in waves upon her coral shoulders, a tangled mass of tawny hair.

No fabulous siren, this! A strange, but very human girl--and yet, for all that, a siren.

Arturo spoke, tremblingly, very gently.

“Nereid! Can you hear me? Can you understand?”

She stood frozen. But her lips parted with a smile. He said: “Nereid!” He moved slowly toward her.