Secrets of the Deep

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Secrets of the Deep Page 12

by Gordon R. Dickson


  “Back, Cerberus!” ordered the voice from the transceiver. The huge seal ducked his head again, this time not as if he had just been hit, but as if he were expecting a blow. Fierce he certainly was, perhaps as ferocious as the mythological monster from which he got his name, the three-headed dog supposed to guard the entrance to the underworld of the ancient Greeks. But the voice seemed to have this Cerberus under control. Hastily, his head disappeared from view and Robby heard him slithering back down the icy slope outside the enclosed area.

  “Come on, Boy!” called the voice from the transceiver. “I sent Cerberus after you to bring you back here where you’ll be safe. Follow him! Do as I tell you!”

  Automatically, Robby walked forward. There was nothing else to do. The big seal was waiting at the foot of the slope,and as Robby appeared, he bowed his head and turned around.

  “That’s right. That’s right!” said the voice. “Just follow Cerberus.”

  Robby slid down the slope after the seal, who now had started toward the entrance to the larger, ice-walled space.The copper-colored Control Cap, clinging like a skullcap to the back of Cerberus’s head, winked in the Antarctic sun. The sun was fairly low in the sky, but at this season of the year it would not be setting. It would simply come close to thehorizon and then climb back up. This was the South Polearea’s season of the midnight sun.

  With Robby trailing him, the seal turned and slithered and skidded between chunks and walls of ice. It looked as if traveling this way was no pleasure to a naturally sea-living creature. Once or twice the great seal barked in a strange fashion, and Robby thought he could almost detect a sad,weary note in Cerberus’s voice. But he kept on, and Robby followed him. And after quite a distance they came to what seemed to be the base of a large, thick sheet of ice—perhaps the very sheet of ice toward the level top of which Robby had been heading when he encountered the penguins and Cerberus.

  The base was fifty or sixty feet high, and made a sheer,bluish-white wall that seemed to loom over them as they wound along it. Robby could not help shrinking a little inside himself at the thought of part of that wall suddenly breaking off as glaciers break off from the land ice—his father had spoken of glaciers “calving” when that happens—and falling down on him and the big leopard seal.

  But, no such thing happened. After a little while, they came around a sudden comer in the ice wall, and discovered a crack running back through the ice sheet. The crack was a good hundred feet wide where they were, and in the middle of it there was open water, full of floating chunks of ice no bigger than a small house. As the crack went back into the ice sheet, it narrowed, and the open water narrowed, too. But it seemed to go as far back as Robby could see.

  Now, with a bark that sounded as if it was a mixture of relief and sadness, the great seal slipped into the water and started swimming alongside the ice, pausing from moment to moment to look back and see if Robby was following. Robby went slowly and carefully along the shelf of ice between the open water and the great high wall of the crack, on his left.As Robby and the seal went, the towering walls drew together until they seemed to join at the top. Only a little light filtered through, and the ice of the walls became a beautiful blue,ranging from the clear delicate colors of the star sapphire to the pure darkness of the blue sapphire, almost to the purple-blue of the quartz amethyst. It was like being in the heart ofsome precious gem as big as a mountain.

  At last they came to a point where the open water was so narrow Robby could have jumped across it. Here Cerberus stopped and turned to face Robby, who also stopped.

  “Now, Boy!” said the voice from the transceiver. “That suit of yours will protect you, so you don’t have to worry. Let yourself down into the water and take hold of Cerberus’s collar. He’s going to have to tow you down under the water for a little way. But you’ll be quite safe. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said Robby disgustedly. He was rapidlylosing whatever fear he had had of the voice from the transceiver. “I’m used to being under water.”

  “I hope so. I hope so,” said the voice. “All right. Don’t waste my time now.”

  Robby sat down on the edge of the ice and lowered himself into the water. Because of his suit, he felt no difference from being out in the air, except that now the water buoyed him up. He swam a single stroke that brought him to where Cerberus’s great head was lifted out of the water, watching him. He took hold of the seal’s collar, and as he did he looked directly into the big, dark seal eyes. They looked back into his sadly and savagely, and he was suddenly aware of tears seeping out of them into the coarse hairs of the rough fur lying flat on the broad muzzle.

  For a moment he was startled by the thought that the big,predatory seal was actually crying. Then he remembered what he had learned a long time ago about the “true” seals of which the leopard seal is one—how their eyes often water when they are out in the air to protect their vision. So the tears of the leopard seal were like the smile of the killer whale and the other dolphins, something built-in by nature and not necessarily reflecting their feelings.

  All the same, there was something tragic about Cerberus to someone like Robby who had grown up among the creatures of the sea. It was the tragedy of any free creature roped or harnessed or forced to do things against its own will. Balthasar, Robby’s Risso’s dolphin back at Point Loma, was Robby’s pet and companion because he wanted to be. He was free to swim off, but he chose not to do so.

  It was not so with Cerberus. His jaws were the jaws of a hunter. His eyes were wild, untamed eyes without pity. His gaze was the gaze of death for even the big, five-foot emperor penguins and for the Ross, the Weddell, and the crab-eater seals—anything less than the killer whale, who in turn hunted Cerberus and his brothers. But it was a free, savage, proud gaze, that did not belong in slavery.

  Now, as if at a signal, Cerberus ducked his head under the surface and swam down through the water, trailing Robby along with him. In the dimly lit waters, Robby could barely make out the ice walls of the crevasse like dark shadows on each side of them. For a moment it seemed that the walls were closing in and that they would be caught between them.Then, suddenly, they were in open water below the ice entirely.

  Cerberus turned off at an angle, swimming level now. Only somebody as used to being under water as Robby could have known that they were not going still deeper. But by the“feel” of the water against his suit and the pressure of the air in his helmet, he knew that their depth under the surface was staying about the same.

  All at once the darkness before them seemed to blossom with light. They had come around some dark body, and before Robby’s eyes was a brightly lit underwater, floating structure—whether ship or station, he could not tell. The light dazzled his eyes, and before they had time to adjust, he found himself towed through some sort of an air lock and his feet struck an underwater floor. He stood up, still blinking against the unexpected light, and waded forward out of what seemed to be a small air-locked pool.

  Then his eyes adjusted to the light. He found himself at the beginning of a long corridor with transparent floor, ceiling,walls, and doors, through which he could look in all directions. He could see that there was one floor above and one below, and only now and then was there an opaque wall so that he could not see what lay beyond. There were rooms like living rooms, only bigger; rooms like offices full of desks;rooms full of plants; and still other rooms full of laboratory equipment or machinery.

  Just then two huge men muscled like heavyweight wrestlers stepped out of a door and stood in front of him in the corridor. They wore neither shoes nor shirts; only wrap-around kilts or skirts of brightly flower-patterned cloth in theP olynesian fashion of the South Pacific Ocean islands. The two men had open, smiling, good-looking faces. They were both young. And they looked exactly alike.

  “Are you all right?” asked the one on the left. “You can open your helmet, if you want. You won’t have to do anymore swimming.”

  Robby put his helmet b
ack.

  “I want to call my father, Dr. James Hoenig. He’s on the Palship X Two,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said the one on the right. He looked unhappy. “You can’t do that just yet. You’ll have to see the Director first.”

  “Why?” said Robby.

  “He said to bring you to him,” said the one on the left.

  “Right away. Bring him right away!” snapped the transceiver behind Robby. He turned around to see that Cerberus had followed him out of the pool. “And introduce yourselves. Reassure the boy.”

  Robby looked back at the two big men.

  “I’m Dick,” said the one on the left. “This is my twin brother, Harvey.”

  “We’re Tropicans,” said the one on the right. “Members of the great Tropican Movement. This is Tropican Underseas Headquarters Number One.”

  “What’re Tropicans?” said Robby for the third time that day. The twin brothers looked at each other.

  “Well ...” said Dick.

  “I don’t know if we ought to—” said Harvey, uneasily glancing at the transceiver.

  “We’d better take you to the Director,” said Dick. “Come on. He’ll explain.”

  They started off down the corridor. Robby caught up and walked between them. He could hear Cerberus slithering after them.

  “What’s his name?” Robby asked. “The Director?”

  “His name,” said Dick—at least Robby thought the one on the left was Dick, if they had not switched places when he had turned around to look at Cerberus. There was no other way but position to tell the two brothers apart—“his name is—”

  “Brownlee Patterson Waub!” crackled the transceiver behind them. “Of the Waub Magnetic Clothes-Fastener—if you know anything about inventions, Boy. Come on now. Hurry on!”

  They hurried. They turned right off the main corridor and went down a flight of stairs. Then they went straight along a shorter corridor to a door that was not transparent at all but seemed to be made of heavy, beautifully polished oak. It swung open as Robby reached it.

  “Come in, Boy!” snapped the transceiver behind them. “Dick, Harvey, I won’t need you for anything more right now. Come in, Boy!”

  Robby walked through the door, hearing Cerberus follow him. He found himself in a luxurious living room with a desk at which nobody at all was sitting and a number of ordinary armchairs that were dwarfed by one special overstuffed arm-chair almost as big as a sofa.

  In the armchair sat the fattest man Robby had ever seen.

  He was wearing the same sort of flowered cloth kilt that the twins had worn, but his was as big as a blanket and above it he wore a kind of short, fancy vest that covered his chest but left his arms free. His face was as round as the sun, and would have been just as cheerful if it had not been for a pucker of worry between his eyebrows and a frown line graven deep in his forehead above the pucker and below reddish-blond hair. Behind him, on the wall of the room at right angles to the transparent wall that looked out into the water of the Antarctic Ocean (just as Robby’s bedroom at the Point Loma Station looked out under water), was a big oil painting of a man. The man in the painting looked as if he might be a relative of Brownlee Patterson Waub except that he was as skinny as Waub was fat. The eyes of the painting and the eyes of the Director were the same. They were blue eyes, innocent and sparkling with wild enthusiasm at the same time.

  “Well, Boy!” said Brownlee Patterson Waub, “you see me as I am now and as I was in that picture before I invented the Waub Magnetic Clothes-Fastener. Without the invention of the fastener, I would probably still look the way I do in that picture. And you would not be here now in Tropican Headquarters Number One, where I’m going to have to keep you a prisoner.”

  Gondwanaland Will Live Again

  Robby stared at the fat man.

  “You can’t keep me a prisoner!” he burst out. “My father and the police will come looking for me. If you keep me here, that’s kidnapping. It’s against the law!”

  “Now, now,” said the Director. He was too heavy to squirm in his chair, but he managed to ripple uncomfortably. “Now, now, it’s just for a little while.”

  “I don’t care!” shouted Robby. “You can’t keep people prisoner. You’ll be arrested. You’ve got to call my father and have him come get me!”

  “I can’t,” said Brownlee Patterson Waub. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  He did look sorry. And there was something regretful but definite about the way he said it that stopped Robby suddenly from saying anything further.

  “I’ll have you treated just as well as we can here,” said Waub. “But I and the other Tropican Movement members with me here at Headquarters are finally on the verge of changing the whole world for the better. If we called your father, or delivered you safely to some place like McMurdo, shortsighted people who don’t realize how important our work is would find our Headquarters and stop us from the great work we’re about to do.”

  “You should’ve left me on the ice then,” said Robby, “so they could have rescued me!”

  “But what if they hadn’t?” asked Waub. “You might have died, and it would have been our responsibility.”

  “Why?” asked Robby.

  “Because,” replied Waub sadly, “we’re the ones who shot down the flyer you were riding in.” He sighed again. “Believe me, I hate to do things like that. But our work is so important that we can’t take chances. One day, Boy, you will be proud to tell your children how you were present at the rebirth of Gondwanaland.”

  Robby stared at the fat man. The last word had sounded vaguely familiar, but he could not remember where he had learned it.

  “Gondwanaland?” he said.

  “Gondwanaland!” repeated the fat man, his blue eyes lighting up. “The paradise of the past, brought to life once more. Trees and flowers and singing birds here at the South Pole where the ice now lies piled two miles deep. And over the rest of the earth, everywhere warm sunshine, blooming plants, and summer the year around.”

  Robby sat down on one of the armchairs. He was tired from all the walking and scrambling over the pack ice, and he felt he had waited long enough for the Tropican Director to invite him to take a seat. His first wild feeling of alarm at being told he was a prisoner was beginning to fade before the tiredness and hunger inside him. He wanted a sandwich, a cold glass of milk, and a short nap. After which, he thought,he would find some way of getting to a phone, and calling his father.

  “That is why”—Waub was still talking—“we work so hard. Our aim is to turn earth into a tropical paradise. You see where our name comes from—Tropicans. And all because of the Waub Magnetic Fastener.”

  The last statement was such an odd one it woke Robby up from the doze he had been starting to slide into.

  “Fastener?” he said. Then he remembered the magnetic strips that replaced zippers on his Outside Suit.

  “Yes,” said Waub. “Before the fastener, I was no different from a hundred, or a thousand, other starving inventors.Then one day I happened to be in a library looking up the word ‘gonfalon’ to see if it had been used as a trade name for a patented article. Directly in front of the cards labeled ‘gonfalon,’ I found cards for books and articles on Gondwanaland. ’ ’

  He looked at Robby.

  “The name caught my eye, and I began reading one of the books. After a page or so, I couldn’t put it down. I realized then that here was the goal I had been dreaming of all my life—to do some big work like bringing Gondwanaland back to the world. It inspired me. Two months later I invented theWaub Magnetic Clothes-Fastener, and I was rich.”

  Robby yawned, but covered his mouth in time with hishand. The fat man, wrapped up in his dream, did not notice.

  “I resolved,” he went on, “to devote all my money and the rest of my life to bringing South America, Africa, Australia, India, and all the other parts of Gondwanaland back into one continent again.”

  Robby’s eyes flew wide open.

  “Toget
her?” he said. “Bring South America and Africa together?”

  “And Australia,” said Waub. “As they once were. You don’t believe me. Look at the map on the wall there. No, not the wall with my portrait on it—the other wall.”

  Robby turned around and looked behind his chair. On a big wall map he saw a strange sort of continent made up of four pieces. One of the pieces had the shape of South America,and the bulge that was Brazil fitted into the indentation of West Africa. Antarctica was up against the east side of Africa, and the Wilkes’ Land bulge of the Antarctic Continent fitted into the shallow hole of the Great Australian Bight in the side of Australia that was now turned to the south.

  In fact, the four big chunks of land in the south part of our world were fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle to make one monstrous continent. On it, the South Pole was not, as now,in the middle of Antarctica, but off on one edge.

  “Gondwanaland,” said the fat man, blissfully, “as it existed over a thousand million years ago. And as I will make it exist again.”

  But Robby has just remembered why the name Gondwanaland sounded familiar. He had overheard his father talking about it with a geologist friend just before Dr. Hoenig and Robby had come down here to Antarctica.

  “But that’s all just a theory!” cried Robby. “The name of it even comes from some place in India. Somebody just suggested it over a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago—”

  “Eduard Suess,” said Waub. “A great nineteenth-century geologist.”

  “But nobody’s proved it—” began Robby.

 

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