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.