CHAPTER VI
Leolo and Zoru
Brick breathed a sigh of relief. While he realized the respite was only temporary, he had been so close to the brink of death that any delay was welcome. It would take the Germans a little time to discover that their bodies were not buried beneath the debris of the room they had just vacated.
He turned from the door, determined not to waste a second of their precious advantage. The gray-haired man had lost his air of uncertainty, he noticed. Now he was calm, deliberate and poised; and in his dark eyes there was the unmistakable flash of authority.
He turned, motioning to them and moved toward a door at the far end of the room. The girl followed him without hesitation.
"Come on," Brick said to Pop. "These people seem to know the score."
The two Americans followed their strange benefactors through several dimly lighted corridors that appeared to be hewn from the solid rock. Finally they entered a spacious hall, somewhat similar to the large room Brick had first seen in Atlantis. The walls were pure white and gleamed strangely, casting a soft illumination over the entire room.
This room, however, was different in many ways from that Brick had seen first. This room was not bare and empty. Every corner was filled with huge machines and the walls and ceiling were covered with tubes, charts, strange indicators and graphs. In the middle of the room was a giant switchboard, covered with rheostats and pressure gauges of a design unfamiliar to him. It was obviously a laboratory, and although it was covered with a film of dust, it looked as ageless and as young as knowledge itself. . .
The girl closed and bolted the heavy door through which they had entered the vast laboratory, and the strange, gray-haired man moved swiftly to a large cabinet against the wall and began removing various trays of equipment and odd-looking devices. "What's up now?" Pop asked. Brick shrugged helplessly. "You've got me."
He watched intently as the gray-haired man carried the equipment he had selected from the cabinet to the huge, intricate switchboard in the middle of the hall. He watched him make adjustments and changes on several of the dials that pitted the surface of the board, and then his eyes widened slightly as he straightened up and beckoned to him and Pop.
The gray-haired man had four small flat boxes in his arms, and from each of these trailed a single wire about a foot long. At the end of the wire was attached a perforated disc with a tiny knob oddly set in the center.
Brick approached curiously, Pop trailing a few cautious feet behind him. The gray-haired man extended one of the boxes to Brick and one to the silver-haired girl who was standing to his left.
The girl took the box immediately. Brick hesitated an instant and then accepted the strange contraption gingerly. With very obvious misgivings Pop did likewise.
The box was about eight inches long, four inches wide and not more than an inch thick. It was made of some black, grainless material that was as hard as steel to the touch. It had a long slender clamp on one side of it, and the perforated disc also was fitted with a clamp similar to the kind used on radio headphones.
The gray-haired man clamped the disc to his ear so that the tiny knob pressed against his eardrum and then he clamped the slim black box to his shoulder. The foot of wire between the disc and the box was sufficient to allow him to move his head in all directions.
With gestures, he indicated that Brick and Pop were to do the same. Brick complied with his unspoken request in silence, but Pop grumbled.
"Dang it all, what for?" he snapped. "How do we know what he's up to? These things may blow up after we get 'em on."
"He has them on too," Brick pointed out. "So has the girl. It isn't likely he'll blow them both up with us."
Muttering wrathfully, Pop clamped the apparatus awkwardly on his head and slung the box over his shoulder. Nothing happened for a while. The tiny knob in Brick's ear was cold and hard, but it was not particularly uncomfortable. He waited patiently for some explanation of the mysterious apparatus and its use.
The gray-haired man was speaking to them now. But still in the musical, unintelligible tones. Brick tried desperately to gain some meaning from the man's words, but the effort must have shown in his face and eyes, for at a soft word from the girl, the gray-haired man stopped talking and turned impatiently to the switchboard.
There he made another series of adjustments and changes on several of the dial-like devices before turning back to Brick.
His dark intelligent eyes were almost imploring, as he opened his mouth and said,
"Can't you understand me? I am Zoru of Atlantis!"
Brick jerked to attention, every muscle tense. He stared at the gray-haired man incredulously, too dazed to speak.
For the words had been spoken in perfect English!
He could feel Pop's fingers digging into his arm, and he heard the old man's frantic voice in his ears.
"Brick!" Pop gasped. "I'm goin' crazy. I'm hearin' things."
"Please do not be alarmed," the gray-haired man's smooth voice flowed on in cultured English. "The devices you are wearing are merely translating my speech into thought impulses which are delivered directly to your brains. I am not speaking your language but you can understand me. These instruments operate on a principle with which I gather you are unfamiliar. That is not important, however. The fact that they permit us to communicate is all that counts."
He turned to the girl standing next to him and smiled.
"This is my daughter, Leolo. She was saved by you, she has told me. That is why I brought you here to safety."
"Can you understand me?" Brick asked.
The man who called himself Zoru nodded.
"Perfectly," he said.
Brick looked from him to the girl, Leolo in perplexity. The girl was smiling slightly, displaying even, white teeth that gleamed like pearls against the faint rosiness of her lips.
He had never in his life seen such people as these. There was a nobility and dignity about them that flashed from their clear, intelligent eyes and stood forth in their carriage and bearing.
Instinctively he knew them to be good. It ^gas difficult to conceive of them being anything else.
"Who are you?" he asked, directing his question to them both.
Zoru answered:
"It might be hard for you to believe, but my daughter and myself are Atlanteans. We are the last survivors of a race that perished twelve thousand years ago."*
Brick stared from Zoru to his startlingly beautiful daughter bewilderedly. Atlanteans! It was incredible! Impossible!
"You do not believe us," Leolo said quietly. "I can see the doubt in your eyes."
"Good Lord," Brick cried, "I want to believe you, but how can I? Atlantis has been under millions of tons of water for thousands of years. To believe that you—"
* Plato places the final destruction of Atlantis about 9,000 B. C. The submergence was gradual, and it was known to the scientists of Atlantis that it was coming. However, the last submergence was cataclysmic, and volcanic action accompanied it. It is believed that the Mediterranean Basin was flooded when Atlantis sank.—Ed
Zoru raised a slim hand to Brick's outburst.
"Please," he said. "Listen to me. Possibly I can explain the things that trouble you and raise doubts in your mind."
Brick found himself curiously calmed by the almost pleading sincerity in the voice of Zoru.
"Go ahead," he said. "I'm afraid I've been rude."
Zoru was silent for an instant, and Brick noticed that his dark eyes were strangely glazed, as if they were seeing, not the scene before him but instead were beholding a scene that existed only in time and memory.
"As a scientist of Atlantis," Zoru began, "I knew that one day the continent would sink. A volcanic pressure was building steadily beneath the the continent and it would only be a matter of time until it would get beyond our control. I tried to make the ruling groups understand the immediacy of the danger, but they were too occupied with their savage wars of conquest to heed my pleas. I
t was Atlantis' misfortune, at that time, to be in the power of a despotic tyrant whose only concern was the extension of his power and armies into every corner of our world."
Zoru paused and his mouth straightened into a bitter line.
"When I realized that nothing I could say or do would prevail against his madness, I decided to save my daughter and myself, if possible, from the holocaust I knew was imminent.
"Accordingly I perfected an opiate and administered it to us a few days before the time, as determined by my calculations, when the volcanic pressure would erupt. We retired to separate sealed chambers, stocked with quantities of condensed food in tablet form, and when my predictions were proven accurate several days later, we embarked on a voyage of dreamless sleep that lasted until a few months ago."
"What awakened you?" Brick asked.
"Air," Zoru replied. "Our chambers were practically perfect vacuums when we constructed them, but time had created fissures and cracks through which air seeped. Our first conclusion was that the continent had risen from the floor of the ocean. My instruments soon convinced me that the position of Atlantis had not changed in the years we had been slumbering. The air, we soon discovered, came from the huge chambers and halls of the city which had been pumped free of mud and water.
"At first we decided to make ourselves known to the strange visitors who had inhabited our former city, but in the end we made up our minds to remain in the comparative safety of these sealed chambers until we knew more of them.”
"Then, somehow, you must have shattered the lock that controls the entrance to our hidden chamber."
Brick explained how that had been accomplished. He also explained from whom they had been fleeing and why. When he finished Leolo's dark eyes were flashing indignantly. Zoru shook his noble head gravely.
"When I awoke and realized that these mighty halls and chambers had been pumped dry and hermetically sealed to keep out the ocean, I was certain that an intelligent race of people had sprung into being in the years my daughter and I had been slumbering. People who could accomplish such a feat of hydraulics and engineering would be like unto gods, I thought. It saddens me terribly to think that such genius is being perverted and prostituted to cause misery instead of peace and happiness in the world."
"They ain't goin' to get away with it," Pop broke in explosively. "No sir!"
Leolo, the silver-haired girl, shook her head sadly.
"It is always the same," she said softly. "A group of ruthless men seize control of armies and use them to enslave their fellow man. Because those that are decent and kind do not wish war and bloodshed, they suffer the tyrants to gain great power before they attempt to stop them. Then it's too late. I presume it is that way now. You have permitted this beast to gain supremacy over you and--"
"No we haven't," Brick said grimly. "I think the people of the world have awakened in time, for once."
Leolo looked at him doubtfully, but deep in her liquid eyes there was a faint glimmer of hope.
"What can we do to help?" she asked impulsively.
Brick felt a sudden excitement quickening his pulse. As long as spirit like this lived, as long as ideals remained imperishable things, immune to the thought of danger or the ravages of time, liberty and freedom would never be driven from the heart of man.
Zoru stepped forward taking his daughter's hand in his own.
"My daughter speaks without deliberation," he said quietly. "But words Spoken from the heart are often more beautiful than those spoken from the mind alone. The failure of Atlantis was partly our failure, since it was really the people of our continent that failed themselves. Perhaps we can extenuate ourselves by aiding you in your fight against the same tyranny that we faced so' many centuries ago. If we can we will consider it a great privilege. We are kin to you Americans."
Pop ran his hand through his scanty hair impatiently.
"We're all talking too much," he said irritably. "Sure we all want to fight, but what're we goin' to fight with? How're we goin' to get out of here to warn our people about this nest of adders down here? Them's the things we gotta be thinkin' about."
"Pop's right," Brick admitted. "We are helpless as we stand now."
Zoru smiled, an expression of faint amusement touching his eyes.
"Not completely," he said cryptically.
CHAPTER VII
Miracles in Atlantis
"What do you mean?" Brick demanded.
Without speaking Zoru walked to the side of the room and pressed a square panel that was set in the wall about three feet from the ground.
Noiselessly a large section of the wall, from the ceiling to the floor, swung back, revealing another large room.
"Come with me," Zoru said. He entered the newly disclosed room.
Rather uncertainly Brick and Pop followed the straight figure of the Atlantean. The room was the most practical looking room of all those they had seen outside of the Nazi occupied area of Atlantis.
* The sealed halls of Atlantis were not all undamaged by the earthquakes, and many of them filled with water. It was these that the Nazi engineers pumped dry and repaired for use as bases for the pocket-submarine fleet. The ingenuity of the German engineer is well-known, but it must have been a tremendous task to empty those vast halls, construct locks and entrances for the submarines, and maintain a sufficient air pressure to care for all the wants of the base.—Ed.
The walls were of heavy material that looked like a form of hard asphalt, and in one wall was a huge bronze plate that was hinged on one side and clamped on the other. In the center of the room was a queer contraption that looked surprisingly like a huge, metallic bug. It was about twenty feet long, eight feet high and four feet wide. It had one door as far as they could see, and the top was made of heavy green glass. It rested on six spiked wheels, which were almost as high as the machine itself.
"This," Zoru explained, "was a conveyance used in crossing rough, rugged terrain. I think with a few repairs and adjustments we can utilize it in leaving Atlantis. That is, if you're willing to take a rather long chance."
"We'll take any chance," Brick said, "but how can this thing get us out of here? We're hundreds of feet underwater you know."
"Yes, I am aware of that," Zoru said, with faint irony. "But," he pointed to the huge bronze plate, "that clamp opens to a corridor about fifty feet long. With luck we can devise a decompression chamber of sorts. I take it we'll need something like that. Then we can convert this land machine into a below-surface craft. Our only serious problem will be in bringing it to the surface. But we can face that problem when we come to it. The important thing is to start readying this land transport for our needs."
The Atlantean's quiet confidence in speaking of these Herculean labors was impressive.
"O. K." Brick said grimly. "Let's start to work."
In the days that followed the three men worked like horses for sixteen hours out of each twenty-four. Leolo discarded her flowing gown for a pair of loose trousers and a blouse and worked beside the men, handing them tools and doing what work she could.
She brought them their food, which consisted of the condensed tablets Zoru had stocked in their chamber before taking the opiate.
In spite of Brick's realization of Zoru's scientific wizardry, he was being constantly amazed by the man's almost supernatural skill in adapting his talents to the creation of things far outside his own experience.
Oxygen tanks puzzled him for about fifteen minutes, but when Brick got the principle across to him, it was a matter of only days before they were completed.
The two Americans learned much of the civilization of ancient Atlantis, its people, its ways and customs, but one product of Atlantic that Brick found practically insoluble was the silver-haired Leolo.
As each day passed her attitude toward him underwent subtle changes. But woman-like the changes were not consistent. One minute, discussing a mechanical problem, she would be all warm, eager friendliness. The next second she would turn, as if h
e had offended her, and leave him.
One day while they were resting briefly, she said.
"You have no thought in your mind but this work, have you?"
"That's right," he said. "It's the only thing that counts with me."
She was silent for an instant, then she rose and left him without a word. He sat up, puzzled, wondering what he had said wrong.
He sighed and stretched out on the floor again. He wanted her to like him more than he wanted anything, but he didn't seem to be making much progress.
At the end of the second week it was obvious that the job ahead of them was bigger than they thought. The crawler, as they had named the machine, was still land-bound. A practical method for permitting it to reach the surface had not been hit upon.
A fear that Brick had kept to himself was gnawing at him. He knew that the German sub base was preparing to launch a mighty attack—somewhere, sometime. But where? When?
It was maddening to be so near and yet so far from being able to check their plans. For two rest stretches he tossed sleeplessly. For it was becoming more and more apparent what he must do.
Pop was the first to notice the tension he was under.
"What're you so edgy about?" he asked bluntly.
Brick ran both hands through his wavy hair nervously.
"When we left the base," he snapped, "they were preparing to make a big raid somewhere. I know it's not an ordinary attack because the captain practically implied that it was being directed at the American navy too. The thing is this: We've got to get the details on that attack. If we don't it won't do us any good to get out of here."
"But how're you going to find out?" Pop demanded. "The only guy'd know would be the captain. And he ain't been accepting our invitations to tea lately. In fact it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he ain't downright mad at us."
"This isn't funny," Brick said soberly.
"I know it ain't," Pop retorted, "but the only way you're goin' to find out what you want is when the captain drops in on us so you can ask him."
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