The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

“I’m afraid we aren’t,” said Davis, smiling. “The telegraphed orders that brought me here told me simply to make an examination and make a report. My plane can’t do anything for the yacht, of course.”

  “Then what—”

  “I’ll go back and report,” Davis explained, “and they’ll send boats to try to get in to you people. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger, and at worst you can all be taken off by aëroplane, if we can rise again from that jelly mess.”

  Nita wrinkled her small nose.

  “I know we aren’t in danger,” she said, “or at least I know it now, but are we going to have to stay here and smell that horrid smell until the government gets ready to rescue us?”

  The odor of the jellylike animalcules was far from pleasant. It was an unclean scent, as of slime dredged from the bottom of the sea.

  “Well-l,” said Davis thoughtfully, “I dare say we can accommodate two more people. It isn’t quite regular, but that’s a detail.”

  “But the crew?” Morrison looked inquiringly at the captain of the yacht.

  “Milk seas always break up, sir,” said the captain. “I have no doubt this silver sea will break up as well. We can wait and see, and at worst we have our wireless.”

  “Then it’s settled,” said Nita joyfully. From sheer gratitude she smiled at Davis.

  “Always providing we can get aloft again,” said Davis.

  “The propellers of the ship, sir,” suggested the captain, “though they can’t move the yacht, yet manage to thrash a fair-sized patch of this jelly into liquid.”

  “A good idea,” said Davis heartily. “We’ll haul the plane around to the stern, and you’ll set your engines running.”

  In a very little time this was done. The great propellers of the yacht thrashed mightily, and a narrow patch of open water opened in the silver sea. The seaplane was laboriously hauled around to the stern of the yacht, and the party was lowered on board.

  With some difficulty the motors were cranked again and the plane scuttled madly down the lane of water. With a quick jerk of the joy stick Davis lifted the plane from the water just as the open water ended and the silver sea began.

  The big plane circled in the air, rising steadily as it circled, and at last headed for the west again, still flying in that incredible appearance of sky above and sky below, with the reflected sun glaring upward just as fiercely as the real sun beat down.

  CHAPTER III.

  Nita sat in the seat beside Davis’ control chair, pointing to the instruments one by one.

  “And that’s the inclinometer,” she repeated, “to tell you the angle at which the plane is climbing or descending. That’s the barometer, which reads—let me see—seventy-four hundred feet. We’re over a mile high, aren’t we?”

  “We are,” said Davis, “though by the looks of things we are ten thousand miles from anywhere.”

  The silver sea was still beneath them, and they still seemed to be floating in a universe of air. Nita paid no attention.

  “And that’s the compass dial, and that— What did you call it?”

  “An anenometer,” said Davis again, smiling. “It’s the speedometer of the air—or the patent log, whichever you like to call it.”

  “You only have to learn one syllable,” said Nita. “They all end in ometer. It’s convenient that they’re named like that.”

  Davis smiled.

  “I never thought of that before, but it is convenient.”

  “But how do you balance the plane?” Nita demanded.

  “In straightaway flight it balances itself,” Davis explained. “It’s one of the new inherently stable designs. For turning, the wing tips work automatically. We’ve a gyroscopic affair that attends to them.”

  Nita subsided for a moment, then demanded further information.

  “What’s that lever for? To change speeds?”

  Davis laughed.

  “Well, no. We haven’t but one speed forward and no reverse—”

  “You’re making fun of me!”

  “That’s the joy stick,” said Davis, chuckling. “We dive and climb with it. Pull it back and we go up. Push it forward and we dive.”

  “Mmmmm,” said Nita interestedly.

  Her father took his cigar out of his mouth long enough to join in Davis’ chuckle at Nita’s absorbed air.

  “Don’t talk to the motorman, Nita,” he said. “He may run past a switch.”

  Nita turned around and smiled at him. The car was rather crowded with seven people in it. Gerrod was looking curiously at a bit of the silvery jelly, with which he had filled several pails before leaving the yacht. He took a bit of it between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth speculatively.

  It seemed faintly granular to the touch, but at the slightest pressure underwent a change that felt like crumbling, and was nothing but watery liquid.

  “I’ll bet anything you care to name,” he said thoughtfully, “that this is just a mass of little animalcules with little silvery shells. The silvery shells would account for the reflection we see.”

  “The captain of my yacht,” observed Morrison, “said that he thought it was like a milk sea. That’s a mass of little animals that glow like phosphorus in the dark.”

  “Perhaps,” said Gerrod meditatively. “I’d like to look at this stuff under a microscope.”

  “Oh some of it will go to the government chemists,” said Morrison with a large air, “and they’ll figure out a way to kill the little beasts. There’s a cure for everything.”

  “Perhaps,” said Gerrod.

  The plane flew on steadily, Davis finding some amusement in gratifying Nita’s suddenly aroused curiosity about every part of the seaplane. When her curiosity about the plane was satisfied, however, and she began to make inquiries about himself, Davis was much less comfortable.

  He tried to be evasive, but she pinned him down, and was filled with excitement when she found that he was the same man who, as Lieutenant Davis, had flown the two-seated flying machine that had destroyed the Black Flyer and with it Varrhus’ menace to the liberty of the world.

  She tried very hard indeed to get him to tell her the story of that fight, but he blushed and said there was nothing to tell. It would be hard to say to what lengths she would have gone had not something outside the plane caught her attention.

  “There’s the horizon!” she exclaimed. “We’ve come to the edge of the silver sea, and from here on it’s just the plain, good, old-fashioned ocean.”

  The line that marked the point where sea and sky joined was indeed visible, and a gradually widening bank of darker blue showed that the silver sea had indeed come to an end.

  As the seaplane flew onward the darker, wave-tossed ocean came toward them and passed below, but blended so gradually with the jellied ocean that it was impossible to tell where the silver sea ended and blue water began. It was evident that the silver sea was still growing.

  Then, for a long time, the seaplane sped onward over the blue waters, while Nita tried ingeniously to extract from Davis the details of the fight with the Black Flyer.

  Davis was acutely uncomfortable, but nevertheless he felt strangely disappointed when the dim line of the coast appeared ahead. He hovered a moment to get his bearings, and then sped northward toward the aviation station to which he was attached.

  Nita, too, seemed disappointed. She had enjoyed tormenting Davis, and he impressed her very favorably. After the plane had swooped downward and come to rest on the water a scant two hundred yards from the hangar in which it was kept, she turned to Davis.

  “Well,” she announced, “since I haven’t been able to make you tell me what I want to know this time I warn you I shall make you tell me next time.”

  Davis smiled.

  “May I hope there will be a next time?”

  Nita smiled a
t him.

  “I shall be angry if there isn’t,” she said demurely.

  The launch came up to tow them ashore, and Davis was busy for a few moments, but before Nita and her father climbed into the motor car they had commandeered to take them to the city he found time to make a more definite arrangement and learned he was expected to call at the Morrison mansion “very, very soon.”

  The description of the silver sea aroused but little attention in the newspapers. A particularly pathetic murder trial was filling the public mind, and small paragraphs in obscure corners, describing the plight of the yacht, contained all that the public learned.

  Every one seemed to dismiss the matter as a natural curiosity which would probably disappear in a little while. An aggregation of tiny animalcules which had clustered together until they formed a jellylike mass did not promise much in the way of drama, and our newspapers are essentially purveyors of drama.

  Obscure notices in the shipping news, however, told of the growth of the silvery patch, and at last there was a ripple of interest caused by the news that the crew of the yacht claimed that the jellylike creatures were clambering up the sides of the ship and threatening to overwhelm the vessel.

  Seaplanes put out from shore and took the crew off, and then public interest lapsed again. An almost uneventful accident to the yacht of a steamship magnate was good material for society news, but not for the pages devoted to items of general interest.

  To Davis, however, anything pertaining to Nita had become of surpassing interest. He practically haunted her house, and Nita seemed not at all unwilling to have him there. Her father was as cordial as Nita at first, but later began to watch Davis’ frequent appearances with something of disquiet.

  Davis was sufficiently well known from his Black Flyer episode to be considered socially eligible anywhere, but he was far from rich. He had consistently refused the numerous offers from motion-picture companies and book publishers to enact or relate his exploits, though the acceptance of any of those offers would have meant a small fortune.

  Davis was instinctively unwilling to commercialize his reputation. Morrison could find no fault with him personally, but he could not quite believe that Davis’ increasingly evident infatuation for Nita was real—that he was actually more than a fortune hunter.

  The shipping news continued to give sparsely phrased notice of the location and size of the silver sea. Two naval vessels were assigned to observe it, reporting regularly to the meteorological bureau.

  It must be recorded to the credit of that much-maligned department of weather forecasts and maritime information that it was probably the first body to see the possibilities of evil that lay in the silver sea.

  It had quantities of the silvery mass of animalcules brought to it for study, and set its scientists to work to try and find a means of destroying them. Fish would not eat them. They seemed to possess some repulsive taste that led all the carnivorous fishes to avoid them at all costs. Placed in an aquarium with a huge sea bass that was exceptional for its voracity, the sea bass avoided the tiny, jellylike mass as it would the plague.

  The silver globule of jelly multiplied in size, and still the sea bass avoided it, retreating to the farthest corners of its tank to keep from coming in contact with the little animalcules. At last the aquarium was a shimmering mass of silvery, sticky jelly, and the bass was unable to retreat farther. It was found gasping out its life outside the tank, having leaped from the water to escape from the omnipresent silver menace.

  The silver sea grew in size. It began to figure in the news again, when passengers on the transatlantic liners noticed that the steamers were taking a route much farther to the north than was customary. It was admitted at the steamship offices that the detour was made for the purpose of avoiding, the now vast silver sea.

  Late in March people along the eastern coast of the United States began to remark upon a musklike, slimy smell that was faintly discernible in the sea breeze. A steamer, going from New York to Bermuda, reported seeing a patch of the silvery jelly only three hundred miles from the eastern coast. The disagreeable, musklike smell was strong and noticeable.

  The newspapers woke to the possibilities of the silver sea. Ships could not navigate in its jellied waters, nor fish swim. It covered thousands of square miles now, and was growing with an ominous steadiness that foreboded ill.

  The seaside resorts along the Atlantic coast were practically abandoned. Tourists would not stay where that foul, slimy, musklike scent was borne to them constantly on the sea breeze. The patches that were the forerunners of the silver sea itself appeared along the coast. At last the horizon disappeared.

  The silver sea had come close, indeed, to the shore. Then every newspaper burst into huge headlines. For the different papers they were phrased differently, but the burden of each, displayed in the largest possible type, was

  COASTAL NAVIGATION STOPPED!

  America’s Communication With the World Cut Off By Silver Sea.—Harbor Blocked from Maine to Georgia.—Authorities Helpless to Fight Silver Menace.

  Then the world began to be afraid.

  CHAPTER IV.

  Davis was unwontedly silent as Gerrod drove him out to the tiny cottage to which he had been invited.

  “Evelyn’s expecting you,” said Gerrod as the little motor car wound up a hill between banks of fragrant trees that line the road on either side. “We rather looked for you last week, but you wired, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Davis gloomily. “I went somewhere else.”

  Gerrod smiled. Davis was sufficiently his friend to break an engagement and admit it frankly, and besides Gerrod more than suspected where Davis had gone.

  “How is Miss Morrison?” he asked.

  “She’s all right,” said Davis still more gloomily. “But damn her father!”

  Gerrod raised his eyebrows and said nothing until they arrived at the cottage with the little built-on laboratory. Evelyn came out at the sound of the motor and shook hands with Davis.

  “We were beginning to be afraid the competition was too much for us,” she said with a smile.

  Davis looked at her and tried to smile in return, but the result was a dismal failure.

  “Oh, I’m glad to be here now,” he said dolefully.

  Gerrod made a sign to Evelyn not to refer to Nita again until he could speak to her, and helped Davis carry his two suit cases into the house.

  “Your usual room, of course,” he said cheerfully. “Dinner is served at the same hour as before, and you can do just as you please until you feel like coming down. I’ll be in the laboratory.”

  Davis went heavily upstairs, his usually cheerful face suffused with gloom. Evelyn glanced at Gerrod.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked quickly. “Has he quarreled with Nita?”

  Gerrod shook his head, smiling.

  “I asked about her, and he answered by damning her father. I suspect he has run against a little paternal opposition.”

  Evelyn’s eyes twinkled and she laughed.

  “Best thing in the world for them,” she declared. “When he’s ripe for it I’ll take a hand. Nita Morrison was a classmate of mine in college and I know her well enough to help along.”

  Gerrod chuckled.

  “He was like a funeral all the way out. We’ll let him alone until he wants to talk, and then you can advise him all you like. But just now I want to get back at those small animals that are raising so much particular Cain.”

  He went into the laboratory and slipped off his coat. He had a number of test tubes full of the silvery animalcules and was examining them under all sorts of test conditions to determine their rate of growth and multiplication.

  He was rather hopeful that he would be able to demonstrate that after a certain period they would—because of their extremely close packing together—either die from inability to obtain nourish
ment or be poisoned from their own secretions.

  He was looking curiously at a phenomenon that always puzzled him when Davis came into the room. His expression was that of a man utterly without hope.

  “What’ve you got there?” he asked listlessly.

  “Some of our silvery little pets,” said Gerrod cheerfully. “I’m studying them in their native lair. Have you looked at them under a microscope?”

  “No.”

  Gerrod smeared a bit of the silvery mess on a glass slide and put it under a microscope. He worked busily for a moment or so, adjusting the focus, and then waved Davis toward the eyepiece.

  “They’re funny little beasts. Look them over.”

  Davis looked uninterestedly, but in a moment even his gloom was lightened by the interest of the sight he saw. The enlargement of the microscope was so great that only a few of the tiny animals were visible, but each of them was clearly and brilliantly outlined.

  They were little jellylike creatures, roughly spherical in shape, with their bodies protected by almost infinitely thin, silicious shells that possessed a silvery luster. From dozens of holes in the fragile shells protruded fat, jellylike tentacles that waved and moved restlessly, forever in search of food.

  Under the microscope the shells were partly transparent, and within the jellylike body inside the shell could be seen a single dark spot.

  “That blotch in their shells seems to be the nucleus, or else their stomach. I can’t quite make out if they’re one-celled animals like amoebæ, or if they’re really complex creatures.”

  “Rum little beggars,” said Davis without removing his gaze from the eyepiece. “They’re separate animals, anyway. Odd that they should make a jellylike mass.”

  “Move the slide about a little,” suggested Gerrod. “You’ll see how they do that. You’re looking at individuals now. Sometimes—and I think it’s when food gets scarce—they twine their tentacles together and the tentacles actually seem to join, as if they were welded into one. In fact, as far as nourishment goes, they do seem to become a single organism. That’s when they’re so noticeably jellylike.”

  Davis watched them curiously for a few moments, and then straightened up. He moved restlessly about the room.