_The Fate of the Peary_
Quiet, and utter, liquid darkness.
Liquid! Around him, Ken heard a gurgling, at first loud and close,
then subsiding to a low whispering of currents. The amphibian had hit
water.
Gone in an instant was the shriek and fury of the storm and in its
place the calm, slow-heaving silence of underwater. The plane was
shattered in a dozen places, but the torpoon had easily stood it.
Ken turned to action. He switched on the torpoon's dashboard lights
and twin bow-beams, and saw that the shell was wedged in the fuselage.
The plane was apparently entirely under the surface, and her interior
filled with water.
Holding the propeller in neutral, he revved up the powerful electric
motor. Then he bit the propeller in, slowly. The torpoon nudged back
for inches. Then, throwing the gear into forward, Ken gave her full
speed. The torpoon leaped ahead, crunched through the weakened corner
ahead and was free.
It was a world of drab tones that she came into. Down below was
impenetrable blackness, shading softly overhead into blue-gray which
was mottled by lighter areas from breaks in the floes above. All was
calm. There was no sign of life save for an occasional vague shadow
that, melting swiftly away, might have been a fish or seaweed. Placid
always, would be this shrouded sea of mystery, no matter what furious
tempest raged above over the flat leagues of ice and water.
But the seeming peacefulness was but a mask for danger. Kenneth
Torrance's face was set in sober lines as he sped the slim torpoon
northward, her bow lights shafting long white fingers before her. For
now there was only one path--and that lay ahead. He could not turn
back. Storm and water had destroyed the plane that could take him back
to land. He could not possibly reach any outpost of civilization in
the torpoon, for her cruising radius was only twenty hours. He had
planned to land the amphibian on the ice above the spot where the
_Peary_ had disappeared, then find a break in the ice and slide down
below in the torpoon on his quest--to return to the plane if it proved
fruitless. But now there was no retreat. It was succeed, or die.
And with that realization a more dreadful thought flashed into his
mind. All those men, of the whaling company and the sanitarium,
thought him a little crazy. And, since lunatics are always convinced
of the reality of their visions, what if the sealmen--his adventure
amidst them--had been but a dream, a nightmare, an hallucination? What
if he were in truth crazy? The fear grew rapidly. What if he were?
God! He, hunting for the _Peary_, when all those planes and men had
failed! He, expecting to achieve what those searchers, with far
greater resources, had not been able to! Did not that give evidence
that his mind was twisted? Creatures, half-seal, half-men, living
under the ice--it certainly seemed a lunatic's obsession.
Then something within him rose and fought back.
"No!" he cried aloud. "I'll go bugs if I think like that! Those
sealmen were real--and I know where they are. I'm going on!"
And, an hour later, the dashboard's shaded dials told him he was on
the exact spot where the _Peary_ had last reported....
* * * * *
Here was the real Arctic, the real polar sea. No sun, no breath of the
world above could reach it through its eternal mask of solid ice. As
one of the few unfamiliar aspects of the earth, it was as far removed
from the imagination of man as if it were part of a far planet hung
spinning millions of miles out in space. Men could reach it in shells
of metal, but it was not meant for him, and was always hostile. A
dozen times a daring one could cross safely its cold lonely reaches,
but the thirteenth time it would snare and destroy him for the
unwanted trespasser he was.
It was here that the _Peary_ had stepped off into mystery. At this
point her hull had throbbed with air, movement, life; at this point
all had been well. And then, minutes or hours later, close to here,
the sea devil had sprung.
What had happened? What had trapped her? What, even more baffling, had
kept her men with their manifold safety devices from even reaching and
climbing up on the ice above to signal the searching planes?
Ken Torrance, oppressively alone in the hovering torpoon, gazed
through its vision-plate of fused quartz around him. Gray sea,
filtering to black beneath; distant eerie shadows, probably meaning
nothing, but possibly all important; ceiling of thick ice above, rough
and in places broken by a sharp down-thrusting spur--these were his
surroundings. These were what he must hunt through, until he came upon
the crumpled remnant of a submarine, or the murky, rounded hillocks
which gave habitation to the creatures he suspected of capturing that
submarine's crew.
* * * * *
He began the search systematically. He angled the torpoon down to a
position halfway between sea-floor and ice-ceiling, then swung her in
an ever-widening circle. Soon his orbit had a diameter of a half-mile;
then a mile; then two.
The torpoon slipped through the water at full speed, her light-beams
like restless antennae, now stabbing to the right to dissolve a
formless shadow, now to the left to throw into blinding white relief a
school of half-transparent fish which scurried with frantic wrigglings
of tails from the glare, now slanting up to bathe the cold glassy face
of an inverted ice-hill, now down to dig two white holes in the deeper
gloom.
Ken continued this routine for hours. Steadily and low the electric
motor droned in the ears of the watchful pilot, and the stubby
propeller's blades flashed round in a blur of speed between the
slightly slanted rudders. Somewhere, miles away, a splintered
amphibian plane was slipping down to her last landing, and above,
perhaps, the white hell of storm which had brought her low still
bowled over the trackless wastes; but here were only shadows and
shifting gloom, straining the alert eyes to soreness and tensing the
watcher's brain with alarms that, one after another, were only false.
Until at last he found her.
Immediately he shut off all his lights. He no longer needed them. Far
in the distance, and below, wavered a faint yellow glow. It was no
fish; it could mean only one thing--the lights of a submarine.
And lights meant life! There would be none burning in a deserted
submarine. His heart beat fast and his tight, sober lips widened in a
quick grin. He had found the _Peary_! And found her with some life
still aboard her! He was in time!
So Ken rejoiced while he slid the torpoon down to a level just a few
feet above the silty sea bottom, reducing her to quarter-speed. There
was an urge inside him to switch on his bow-beams, reach them out
toward the submarine's hull to tell all within that help was at last
at hand; he wanted to send the torpoon ahead at full speed. But
caution restrained him to a more deliberate course. He was in the
realm of the sealmen, and he did not wish to attract the attention of
any. So he advanced like a furtive shadow slinking along the dark
sea-bottom, deep in the covering gloom.
Nearer and nearer, while the distant blur of yellow light grew. Nearer
and nearer to the long-trapped men, while the consciousness that he
had succeeded intoxicated him. He alone had found them! Sealmen or no
sealmen, he had found the _Peary_! And found her with lights lit and
life inside! Nearer and nearer....
And then suddenly Ken halted the torpoon and stared with wide, alarmed
eyes. For the submarine was now plainly visible in detail--and he saw
her real plight and with it knew the answer to the mystery of her long
silence and the non-appearance of her men on the ice field above.
* * * * *
The _Peary_ was a spectacle of fantastic beauty. It was as if a huge,
rounded piece of amber, mellow, golden, lay in the murk of the
sea-floor. Not steel, hard and grim, but of transparent, shimmering
stuff she was built, all coated a soft yellow by her lights, clearly
visible inside. Ken had known something of her radical construction;
knew that a substance called quarsteel, similar to glass and yet fully
as tough as steel, had been used for her hull, making her a perfect
vehicle for undersea exploration. Her bow was capped with steel, and
her stern, propellers, diving rudders; her port-locks, for the
releasing of torpoons, were also of steel, as were the struts that
braced her throughout--but the rest was quarsteel, glowing and golden
as the heart of amber.
Beautiful with a wild yet scientific beauty was the _Peary_, but she
was not free. She was trapped. She was fastened to the mud of the
gloomy sea-floor.
Ropes held her down; and Ken Torrance knew those ropes of old. They
were tough and strong, woven of many strands of seaweed, and twenty or
thirty of them striped the _Peary's_ two hundred feet of hull.
Unevenly spaced, stretched clear over the ship from one side to the
other, they were caught around her up-jutting conning tower, fastened
through her rudders, and holding tight in a score of places. They held
the submarine down despite all the buoyancy of her emptied tanks and
the power of her twin propellers.
And the sealmen swam around her.
* * * * *
Restless dark shadows against the golden hull, they wavered and darted
and poised, totally unafraid. Another in Kenneth Torrance's place
would have put them down as some strange school of large seals,
inordinately curious but nothing more; but the torpooner knew them as
men--men remodeled into the shape of seals; men who, ages ago, had
forsaken the land for the old home of all life, the sea; who, through
the years, had gradually changed in appearance as their flesh had
become coated with layers of cold-resisting blubber; whose movements
had become adapted to the water; whose legs and arms had evolved into
flippers; but whose heads still harbored the now faint spark of
intelligence that marked them definitely as men.
Emotions similar to man's they had, though dulled; friendliness,
curiosity, anger, hate, and--Ken knew and feared--even a capacity for
vengeance. Vengeance! An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth--the old
law peculiar to man! Chanley Beddoes had slain one of them; if only
the _Peary's_ crew had not killed more! If only that, there might be
hope!
First he must get inside the submarine. Warily, like a stalking cat,
Ken Torrance inched the torpoon toward the great shining ship. At
least he was in time. Within her he could see figures, most of them
stretched out on the decks of her different compartments, but one of
whom occasionally moved--slowly. He understood that. For weeks now the
_Peary_ had lain captive, and her air had passed beyond the aid of
rectifiers. Tortured, those survivors inside were, constantly
struggling for life, with vitality ever sinking lower. Some might
already be dead. But at least he could try to save the rest.
He approached her from one side of the rear, for in the rear
compartment were her two torpoon port-locks. The one on his side was
empty, its outer door open. The torpoon it had held had been sent out,
probably for help, and had not returned. It provided a means of
entrance for him.
At perhaps a hundred feet from the port-lock, Ken halted again. His
slim craft was almost indistinguishable in the murk: he felt
reasonably safe from discovery. For minutes he watched the swimming
sealmen, waiting for the best chance to dart in.
* * * * *
It was then, while studying the full length of the submarine more
closely, that he saw that one compartment of her four was filled with
water. Her steel-caped bow had been stove in. That, he conjectured,
had been the original accident which had brought her down. It was not
a fatal accident in itself, for there were three other compartments,
all separated by watertight bulkheads, and the flooded one could be
repaired by men in sea-suits--but then the sealmen had come and roped
her down where she lay. Some of the creatures, he saw, were actually
at that time inside the bow compartment, swimming around curiously
amidst the clustered pipes, wheels and levers. It was a weird sight,
and one that held his eyes fascinated.
But suddenly, through his absorption, danger prickled the short hairs
of his neck. A lithe, sinuous shadow close ahead was wavering, and
large, placid brown eyes were staring at him. A sealman! He was
discovered! And instinctively, immediately, Ken Torrence brought the
torpoon's accelerator down flat.
The shell jumped ahead with whirling propeller. The creature that had
seen him doubled around and sped in retreat. In brief snatches, as the
torpoon streaked across the hundred-foot gap to the empty port-lock,
Ken glimpsed his discoverer gathering a group of its fellows, and saw
brown-skinned bodies swarm after him with nooses of seaweed-rope--and
then the great transparent side wall of the _Peary_ was before him,
and the port-locks dark opening. Ken threw his motor into reverse,
slid the torpoon slightly to one side, and there was a jerk, a jar,
and a sensation of something moving behind.
He turned to see the port-lock's outer door closing, activated by
controls inside the submarine--and just in time to shut out the first
of his pursuers. Then the port-lock's pumps were draining the water
from the chamber, and the inner door clicked and opened.
Kenneth Torrance climbed stiffly from the torpoon to enter the
interior of the long-lost and besieged exploring submarine _Peary._