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.