After the meal they luxuriously crawled into their warm sleeping bags
and lay talking for an hour. Having exterminated the adjacent rookery
of monsters they saw no necessity for setting a watch. The chances of
any adventurous prowlers from the interior of the crater foraging the
icy wilderness were negligible.
They decided to have a good night's sleep and be fresh in the morning
for a deeper descent into the crater. The day following Edith had
reserved to take her father to the unruined paradise which she and Ole
had discovered. The others were to march to the oil lake and wait there
for Edith to take them across. They were then to return to the ship
for a second attempt to reach the black barrier of Anderson's first
objective. Although they had not yet devised a means for traversing
the dangerous trough of blowholes which they had blundered on in their
first expedition, nevertheless they felt confident that necessity would
stimulate their inventiveness to a safe plan.
Anderson was more determined than ever to reach his first goal. There
was no doubt that the black rock barrier beyond the trough was the wall
of another vast ruined paradise. Therefore, he argued, there must be
oil in its vicinity. What was true of one hole in the ice, he said,
must be true of another just like it. Lane had considerably modified
his veto of the possibility of finding oil in such a formation. And the
deciding factor in his change of opinion was his discovery that the
black cement was not of natural origin.
"What do you make of it all, Lane?" the Captain asked from his sleeping
bag.
"I told you the other day. We have discovered the final product of
an intelligence that vanished from the earth before America was a
continent. That intelligence, I believe, either deliberately or
accidentally solved the problem of life. For some reasons I think it
more probable that the initial discovery was a blunder.
"The authors of the mistake were impotent to control it. Everything we
have discovered points to their inability to direct their creation. As
I said the other day they realized what they had done only when it was
too late, foresaw its probable consequences, and destroyed their entire
civilization in the attempt to nullify their blunder. That they failed
to carry out their destructive purpose completely is self-evident. Had
they succeeded not one of those dead monsters over there would ever
have come into existence."
"If they knew enough to create life," Ole objected, "they must have
known how to destroy it."
"Not necessarily. An idiot with a test tube of the right sort of
germs might start a plague that not all the doctors of the world
could control. And so with this thing. The minute specks of living
matter which they created--I am assuming the process for the sake of
illustration only--multiplied like bacteria. Now what is the last
remedy for a plague infested village? Why, to burn it to the ground. So
possibly those rash experimenters learned. But the seeds of life--again
I am merely guessing--had been scattered broadcast over the country by
the winds.
"What was to be done? Fire the whole country? That would have been
useless. For it is impossible to bake the soil over thousands of square
miles to a depth of several feet. I am assuming from tangible evidence
that the plague of life had passed so far beyond control that the very
soil was impregnated with its germs.
"What would they do? What could they do but seal every mile of the
infected soil? No air must reach the life spores. Light must be
excluded. They systematically set about burying the fertility of their
continent under millions of tons of air tight cement."
"But why should they bring slow starvation on themselves," Edith
objected, "if, as you say, they had not created any dangerous animals
to prey on them, but only the merest beginnings of life?"
"For one very good reason, my darling angel child. We may assume that
their intelligence was higher than ours. Otherwise they could not have
created life. Knowing enough even to blunder onto the secret of life
they certainly would be competent to decide whether their creation was
in line with orderly, normal evolution. Finding that their artificial
life spores all were but the potential ancestors of abominations to
be evolved to maturity millions of years in the future, they looked
forward to the probable state of the world as a result of their
mistake. They foresaw hell on earth.
"There was no immediate danger. There was not even the possibility of
slight discomfort for millions upon millions of years. But there was
the absolute certainty at the end of ages of a world that a decent
beast wouldn't live in. They weighed one against the other--the
certainty of continued happiness for their race for a few million years
longer against the equal certainty of hell on earth forever thereafter.
And they decided that their protracted happiness, even their continued
existence, was not worth its deferred cost.
"I have said that they were intelligent. The deliberate sacrifice
of their own happiness for a future that would never dream of their
existence, proves my assertion. It is your stupid man who has the soul
of a hog. Drake, you go on."
"Let me first knock the stuffing out of one of Ole's numerous
theories," Drake began. "Then I can go on where the Doctor stopped.
Ole maintains that the intelligent beings--I won't call them human,
for they were too unselfish to deserve the epithet--who depicted all
those acres of fantastic monsters actually saw the creatures whose
outlines they pressed into the wet cement. He contends that the artists
drew from living models. That I flatly deny. I admit that they saw
the models which inspired them. But they saw with the mind's eye
only. Lane, I believe, is right. They actually created nothing more
terrifying to behold than tiny specks of jelly."
"You must prove your theory," Ole exploded, rising bodily in his
sleeping bag to defend his offspring.
"It proved itself the first time I saw your precious photographs. Of
all those thousands of different monsters represented in your pictures,
not one was in a posture that by any stretch of the imagination could
be called natural. Every last one of them is drawn in some grotesque
attitude that would set an Apache artist's teeth on edge. There has
been a deliberate and successful attempt to make each posture unnatural
in at least one detail. The variations are not mere conventions. They
are systematic, infinitely various, and exceedingly ingenious.
"That gave me my first clue. Whatever race designed those inscriptions
had done its best to convey the information that the beasts were in a
definite sense, imaginary. They were not imaginary in the sense that a
fire breathing dragon is fictitious. By the help of half a ton of books
I learned that such creatures were not flesh and bone impossibilities.
They _might_ have come into being if natural evolution had started from
different beginnings. Lane helped me a lot on this. My own first guess
was merely a jump in the dark.
"Being ideal representations of non-existent but possible creatures,
what could they signify? The answer was immediate: the results of an
elaborate scientific prophecy.
"Even I, unscientific antiquarian as I am, have heard of those
astronomers who predicted the exact spot in the heavens in which a
planet--Neptune--that no human eye had ever seen, would be found at
a definite time on a certain night. And in spite of Lane's harsh
estimate of my scientific incompetence, I have also admired that
splendid discovery by the Scotch mathematician who foresaw from his
equations our wireless waves and described their behavior a generation
before wireless became practical.
"Knowing these antiquarian scraps of scientific history I let my
imagination loose. If it is possible for us to predict unseen planets
and foretell in detail great scientific advances, why should not a more
intelligent race beat us at our own game? We predict only physical
things. Why shouldn't Lane, if he had brains enough, predict the future
course of a hen's life from an examination of the unhatched egg?"
"No reason at all," Lane laughed. "Some day they will do better than
that. You should let your imagination go."
"It might never come back to earth if I let loose altogether. Well,
I made my working guess. I supposed that the authors of those
inscriptions were predicting the distant evolution of some form of
life. Taking that as a foundation I tried what I could build.
"You remember my remarking the entire absence of human figures from
the inscriptions. Not one of those thousands of creatures represented
could by any flight of the imagination be considered above brute
intelligence. The artists had taken great trouble to depict in each
instance a savage, almost brainless stupidity.
"Now I had also noticed immediately the vivid and life-like pictograms
of sanguinary battles. Putting these two facts together, the total
absence of all higher intelligence and the repeated depiction of
terrible conflicts, I reached what seemed an obvious conclusion.
"The authors of the inscriptions, I inferred, were predicting their
own annihilation by an enemy as yet not fully created. Further they
predicted the subsequent reign of brutal anarchy and unintelligence.
The inscriptions were a forecast of what was to happen in the course
of evolution. Intelligence, they predicted, was to disappear from the
earth. Brute force, nature gone mad, and a chaos of living things were
to rule in the place of dethroned order.
"So much for the prophecy. Now for the recorded history. Almost at the
first glance I recognized that two distinct periods of art, separated
by a vast interval of time, were represented in the inscriptions.
Between the earlier and the later the technique of pictorial design
had changed fundamentally. The art of both periods is developed almost
to perfection. Nevertheless, ages separate the two schools, and they
belong to the same race. I need not bore you with the evidence. It
is of the same sort as that which enables archaeologists to say at a
glance whether a sculpture is Greek or Egyptian and further to fix its
date relatively to some standard object.
"Notice now the extraordinary and significant detail. The two periods
of art, although widely separated in time, were of equal brilliance.
During the ages between the first and second there had been no decline.
We have no parallel to this in recorded history. A few centuries, or
at most two or three thousand years, sees the rise to approximate
perfection and the sure descent to mediocrity.
"This fact puzzled me more than all the other difficulties together,
and it still is baffling although to a lesser degree. I was totally
unable to decide which inscriptions were the earlier. The inscriptions
of both periods depicted struggles and, so far as I could see for
a long time, struggles of almost identical character. What was the
obvious conclusion? The earlier inscriptions prophesied the ghastly
conflict, the later recorded its occurrence. I became convinced that
the forgotten race early foresaw its extinction in the shadowy future,
lived for ages in undiminished vigor anticipating destruction, and
finally was overwhelmed in the height of its power, surviving only long
enough to leave a record of impending and absolute defeat.
"I then tried on this hypothesis to decide which set of inscriptions
was the earlier. The net result was nil. Either the problem was beyond
me or I had gone stale.
"The intense scrutiny was not however a dead waste. A suspicion which
had long been germinating in my subconscious mind struggled up to
certainty. One set of inscriptions undoubtedly and possibly the other
also, was in cipher. The actual conflict depicted was merely the symbol
of a deeper war. It was not beast against beast, but beast against
intelligence. Unmistakably the battles of one set of inscriptions were
symbols of a conflict that was not material. What then could have been
its nature?
"By a process of exclusion I decided that the only rational guess
was a struggle against natural laws. The conflict was not material;
it could not be against spirits. It therefore most probably was
intellect against brute nature, the endless struggle of intelligence to
be master of itself and creator of its own fate. The symbolic set of
inscriptions, I decided, must record the struggles of the long extinct
race to subdue nature. In short the inscription must be a summary of
the more important scientific discoveries and technical achievements of
the race.
"The next question was, why should they wish to conceal their
scientific knowledge? My answer was immediate. It was also, I am
now convinced, inadequate. The scientific knowledge of the race, I
reasoned, must have been entrusted to a particular cult whose business
it was to increase and apply the store of wisdom. To prevent disasters
this cult by means of hieroglyphics and symbolic language would conceal
from the uninitiated all dangerous discoveries. Only a history of the
severe struggle to master the secrets of life and the material universe
would be recorded, so that later generations of seekers should not
repeat the experiments and encounter the same dangers.
"It was now natural to ascribe the purely symbolic, or scientific,
writings to the earlier period. The later inscriptions I took to be
a record of the destruction of the race by the creations of its own
science. The ruin which their scientists early predicted overtook them,
and the perishing race left a warning to intelligent life, should such
ever again inhabit the world, not to repeat the uncontrollable blunder
which had destroyed its first perpetrators.
"This hypothesis received a startling confirmation when we discovered
that lump of black cement with the embedded inscriptions. The interior
inscriptions, those which had been cemented over, belonged to what I
had decided was the earlier period; those on the face of the fragment
to the latter. Evidently the attempt at concealment had been much more
thorough than I dreamed. The race not only disguised their dangerous
scientific knowledge in ambiguous symbolism; it actually buried the
obnoxious wisdom beneath several inches of a cement as hard as diamond.
"What could have driven them to such drastic caution? Only the
desperate determination to obliterate the last traces of their
scientific knowledge. Any why? Because in the final conflict they had
found its consequences terrible beyond belief.
"As to the nature of their dangerous knowledge and the aspect of the
monstrous catastrophe which it engendered, I can only follow Lane in
his speculations. That race blundered onto the secret of life. Creating
it, they fashioned the seeds of abominations. This they realized. And
they foresaw that with the lapse of ages evolution would breed from
their beginnings, innocuous enough at the time and for millions of
years to come, a swarming, uncontrollable multitude of monstrosities
without intelligence.
"Lane has outlined their probable motives in choosing for themselves
wholesale destruction. Until we shall have spent several years on the
inscriptions we can venture no theory as to how they created life."
"I have a theory!" Ole exploded. He had been suffering for twenty
minutes.
"Pipe down," the Captain ordered. "Lane, how do you account for all
those dead monsters over there by the blowholes? And for the thousands
on the beach, to say nothing of the half million I saw boiling up from
the bottom of the ocean?"
"Easily. Those originators of life destroyed their creation, I pointed
out, by burying the fertile soil of their continent under millions of
tons of air-tight cement. A job like that takes time. The longer they
worked at it the slower became their rate of progress. And for a very
simple reason. As the cemented region grew the food supply diminished.
They took care, of course, to cement over the most dangerous places
first, leaving the lighter work for the last few survivors of the race."
"Now where did they get the rock and other material for making their
untold millions of tons of the hardest cement?"
"Out of the ground, of course. Mines."
"Exactly. That crater we were in today is the ruin of one of their
mines. The vast circular depression that Ole and Edith visited is
another. It fortunately is still undestroyed. That black barrier you
are so determined to explore is the ruined floor of another, heaved up
by the explosion of vast quantities of oil and natural gas. How many
more there may be dotted about this frozen continent I hope some day to
discover.
"Well, as I see it, they mined out those enormous holes to get
material for their cement. The execution of so vast a project as
theirs demanded the highest intelligence and extraordinary engineering
skill. I suspect that they sunk those pits so deep in order to utilize
the internal heat of the earth. In their day, millions of years ago,
the heat at comparatively shallow depths must have been much greater
than it is today in our deepest mines. For the same purpose, and also
perhaps in the search for rarer minerals required in making their
time-outlasting cement, they drove enormous tunnels, galleries and vast
pockets far into the rocks at every stage of their work. We have heard
the tides of oil and water surging along them under our feet.
"Now for your animals. The race in its prime having cemented all the
most dangerous regions, the diminishing survivors had only to complete
the project by cementing the easier places. Their task was to seal the
mines and subterranean chambers. The mines are these vast holes in this
forsaken wilderness. The one we explored this morning certainly has
been plastered with cement. They did a thorough job. That black wall
must have been yards thick before the gas explosion blew the whole
interior to bits.
"The first engineers, foreseeing that the last survivors must perish
of starvation before the completion of their work, took the precaution
of making the sides of their mines perpendicular. It was extremely
improbable that every square yard of the floors, walls and roofs of the
open mines and subterranean galleries would be safely cemented over
before the last worker perished. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of acres
of free soil would be left exposed to the light, air and moisture. The
dangerous life seeds polluting these extensive uncemented areas would
live and develop, and with the lapse of ages evolve into abominations.
That is why they made those pits, three miles deep, with perpendicular
walls as smooth as glass. Whatever bred in those mines and galleries
would live and die there. Soil and heat alike eventually becoming
exhausted, the last vestiges of life in the mines and tunnels would
perish. We happen to have arrived before the natural end, which may not
come for millions of years yet.
"Why don't we find the mighty engines which those great workers must
have used? Those which they left exposed to the air were rust a million
years ago. Stone will outlast iron, and this cement, hard as diamond,
would outlast the finest steel. As for such of their machines as they
used in their tunnels and caves, I confidently expect to find traces,
perhaps even one or two complete engines. For I intend to explore
thoroughly every mile of those subterranean galleries from here to the
South Pole if necessary, and from there to far under the floor of the
Antarctic ocean.
"I am convinced that the age-long action of heat and water has slowly
widened the tunnels and extended them far out under the ocean. The roof
of one of these, weakening under the same course, gave way, letting in
the ocean. You saw the backwash of oil and dead beasts blown up by the
steam when the returning wave burst through to the subterranean fires.
The monsters, I suspect, came from another such paradise as the one Ole
and Edith discovered. I shouldn't wonder if it turned out to be the
one you are set on visiting.
"I have also a theory, as Ole might say, concerning the origin of your
oil. These monsters have been living, evolving, multiplying and dying
in the galleries and uncemented mines for millions of years, literally
for ages of geologic time. Their constantly decomposing carcasses are
responsible for the lakes and oceans of oil which, I feel confident,
swing their black tides deep down under this polar ice cap.
"Now, one last thing, and I shall have done. We've been talking an hour
and it's time we all went to sleep. I am willing to bet my specimens,
including the incomparable devil chick, against your oil lake, that
when we visit the unruined mine the day after tomorrow, Edith and I
shan't find a single inscription on its walls. No other pit besides
the one we explored today, I am convinced, will show the trace of
an inscription. One record, the authors of the inscriptions rightly
surmised, would be sufficient. So why waste their labor in leaving a
score? The first record, the one which they later cemented over, was
inscribed near the beginning of their gigantic labor. They were just
about to cement over the walls of the first vast mine, now grown so
unwieldy as to be unmanageable. They decided to leave a record of the
harsh science which was driving them to suicide.
"Accordingly as they worked, they pressed into the unset cement the
secret symbolism of their fatal discoveries. This record they intended
as a warning to their successors should intelligence ever again visit
the earth. Thousands of years later, still toiling at their stupendous
task, they realized fully its crushing magnitude and the horror of
the doom which they labored to nullify. While their own end still was
thousands of years in the future they decided to obliterate forever
the record of the knowledge which had driven their race down the long,
slow way to death. Returning to their first mine they cemented over the
dangerous science which was their ruin. Now let us go to sleep."
"Not yet," Ole expostulated. "You have no theory of how they created
life. Your science comes to a dead halt. Now I have a theory--"
"Shut up, Ole!" the Captain roared. "We want to sleep."
"Shut up yourself!" Ole bellowed, struggling to his feet, sleeping
bag and all. "It is always 'shut up Ole.' The rest of you gab all day
and rave all night. I never get a chance to say anything. Now you are
going to listen to me and learn something for once. I have a theory,"
he shouted, "and you've got to accept it because it is common-sense and
the only true theory of life."
They were sound asleep already.
Ole however was not to be balked. He talked to the bags and, having
delivered himself, joined his audience in slumber.
Edith was the first to awake. She first noticed an oppressive warmth.
Not yet fully aroused she turned over on her side for a last nap. The
sense of discomfort increased. Her hair, she imagined, had fallen over
her face as she turned. Some strands evidently had got into her mouth.
Still lazy, she tried to eject the supposed hair with her tongue.
Failing, she used her fingers. The suspected hair having an unusual
feel she held it before her eyes for examination. In the semi-darkness
she saw that it was green. Startled, she looked more attentively. What
she saw was a mass of fern-like foliage of hair-like fineness.
It was the enemy.
20