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!”