by Don Wilcox
CHAPTER VIII
Instantaneous Igloo
I awoke to the sound of crunching footsteps.
A polar bear? No, a polar tiger. It came toward me out of the mist, its huge cat-face looming large, its yellow eyes gleaming.
Within fifteen feet of me the beast stopped.
Back of it was the foggy background of dark water. I was still lying where I had landed at the bottom of the slide.
I seized my revolver, made ready to shoot.
Then a voice spoke a low command. “Don’t pull the trigger. That’s Whitey. He brought me down here to pick you up. Please don’t shot him.”
I turned to see the girl standing beside me. She bent down and helped me to my feet. Very much ashamed of my fear, I put my gun away.
“Come, Whitey,” she called. “He’s awake now. We’ll take him back.”
The beast’s big shoulders moved gracefully as he ambled up beside me. The girl helped me on.
It was the strangest ride I ever had, borne along by the swift rhythmic trot of “Whitey.” The light hold of the girl’s arm around my waist was enough to keep me from slipping off the tiger’s back. We ambled up one steep bank after another. In the smoky mist I lost all sense of direction.
My cold-numbed muscles began to feel a returning warmth; and this was puzzling, in view of the freezing temperature. It was a mellow, restoring warmth that radiated from the body of the polar tiger.
I bent to press my face against the animal’s furry back, to test my discovery. Yes, there was an aura of electric warmth hovering about this beast.
So that was why this girl could survive in these frozen wastes, defying the deadly blizzards.
At last we were back upon the topmost ridge of rocks.
Imagine my delight when I heard voices and looked up to see Gandl and Steve Pound waiting for me.
“Here we are, safe at last, thanks to the young lady,” said Steve Pound.
The young lady and Gandl were, at the moment, looking at each other with such serious intense expressions that I wondered if Steve and I weren’t unnecessary.
But the girl turned to us and studied us through her merry, curious eyes.
“You men are quite brave to come exploring in this weather. Don’t you know a blizzard is due?”
“We’d better get back to the ship,” said Steve. “Will you come with us?”
“There wouldn’t be time,” said the girl. “The storm is about to break.”
“We’ll have to make camp,” Gandl said in his low all-wise manner, and he led the way to a deep little valley wedged protectively within two jutting arms of mountain.
Thirty minutes later we were gathered around a blazing campfire.
I took in the picture hoping that sometime I could paint it. We were in the semi-darkness of the approaching arctic night. To our right the skies were red and blue with twistings, spiraling streaks—a gorgeous aurora borealis. We could hear the snapping and threshing of electrical activity. It was a scene rife with color from faraway to near at hand; for the crackling fire, too, was a rare mixture of colored flames. Incidentally, I must note that this fire was another proof of Gandl’s ingenuity: he had somehow found an abundance of fuel hidden under the icy ledges.
The four of us, then, sat in comparative comfort—three men and this entrancingly beautiful creature out of the Viking story book. Back at a little distance was the white tiger curled up for a cat-nap, its eyes half-closed.
All in all, I thought, here was the most exotic picture that I had ever encountered. I must paint this. As long as I live I’ll never see anything quite so colorful or romantic.
But there I was wrong. For although I did not know it at the time, this was only my first approach to a new world—a world so completely exotic as to leave all reality in a limbo of the past.
The girl’s rippling laughter dominated the mood of our camp fire visit. She seemed so very enthusiastic over meeting with strangers—and Steve and I were strangers. I was not so sure about Gandl.
When the girl told us that her name was Veeva, I couldn’t help wondering whether she and Gandl might be members of the same racial stock.
Steve and I were eager to talk with her seriously. We bombarded her with dozens of questions. We wanted to know how she got here and where she lived, and how she had managed to follow along with our boat. Where had she gotten that superbly trained beast and how could she manage to find food for herself and it in all this wilderness of ice.
We had meant to get around to the subject of Lord Lorruth and his hidden furs. But our natural curiosity about Veeva crowded everything else out.
Do you think we got any satisfactory information from her? She liked to laugh too well. She had every advantage of us and she knew it? She told us only what pleased her.
“Food for Whitey?” she echoed.
“Of course he has to be fed. Whitey is a ravenous eater . . . Carnivorous? Certainly.”
“He eats fish, then?” Steve suggested.
“Only when he has to,” said Veeva.
“He much prefers human flesh.”
I must have shuffled uneasily, for she quickly added, “But he’s very well behaved. You three handsome gentlemen needn’t have any fears.”
Steve began to catch the spirit of her remarks and he winked at me.
“We’d better not let your tiger see Shorty Barnes. He’s one of our plumpest crewmen.”
“And we’d better look out for the captain,” I said. “The captain would be good eating. He’s better fed than anyone.”
The girl laughed, “Just wait until you get shelved on top of the winter’s ice. We’ll be over, Whitey and I, and see if you don’t have a few persons on board that you don’t really need. Whitey will take care of them.”
We turned the subject abruptly. “Where did you get that name Veeva?”
“I can’t remember that far back,” said the girl.
“Is it a Norse name?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It comes from much further back than that—much, much. I really can’t remember.”
This was a strange statement, and I wanted to believe she was only joking. But again I caught that mysterious impression of something timeless and eternal. “Only a delusion,” I thought, “accentuated by these deep gray mists, and the strange colored light of the fire.”
“Gandl tells me that you’re a queen,” Steve said presently.
I pricked up my ears at this. It was news to me. Steve must have had some conversation with Gandl that I had missed—probably during the interval in which she had come to my rescue.
“I am a queen,” Veeva answered simply, and she wasn’t laughing.
“Queen!” I gasped, and instantly a blunt question escaped my lips. “Who is the king?”
She looked at me sharply. All at once the merriment was gone from her eyes and in its place was an expression of suppressed hurt. I stumbled to recover myself but probably made matters worse.
“That is—er—if there’s a queen then—there must be a king-and I just wondered—”
Steve came to my rescue. “What Jim means is, he’s jealous because he’s not the king. Isn’t that it, Jim?”
“How’d you guess it?” I snapped, kicking awkwardly at a burning log. “You must be jealous yourself.”
“Maybe I am,” said Steve. “Who knows? Maybe I could have been a king if I’d been born in the right family.”
“I can say that too,” I retorted.
“What does a king have that I don’t have?”
“A kingdom, for one thing,” the girl said.
“And for another,” said Gandl, with a low bitter laugh, “a queen.”
This talk had got under Steve’s skin as much as mine. He rose impetuously.
“If I were a king,” he said hotly, “I’d have the queen—don’t worry.”
I didn’t like it, the way his eyes were burning down at Veeva, with her smiling up at him. I jumped up.
“If I were a king—”
>
But Gandl broke in with, “Maybe you men would like to fight for it.” His withering sarcasm made both of us feel foolish. We settled down and stared into the fire.
But the whole conversation had evidently jarred upon Veeva’s merry mood too deeply.
“Such talk!” she said. With an impetuous gesture to her pet tiger she sprang up. The tiger ran to her. She leaped to catch its mane, flung herself to its back and went racing away.
Gandl gave a low disappointed growl.
“Where is she going?” I asked.
Gandl shook his head. “You see, she is a queen. She doesn’t care for roughhouse arguments.”
“We acted like a pair of fools,” Steve said. Then he bounded up and ran in the wake of the flyaway snow. He cupped his hand and shouted with all his powerful voice.
“VEEVA! Please! Forgive us! Come back, Veeva!”
I joined him, and the two of us kept calling. Our voices echoed back through the fog.
“VEE-EE-EEVA!” Instantly it happened.
Perhaps no scientist has ever lived who has seen that peculiar combination of forces in action. To us it was a ‘magical’ phenomenon. It happened as we shouted, and for an instant it swallowed up the very echo of our voices.
A sphere of ice formed over us.
It happened like a swift flash of light. At once it cut off the sight of the retreating girl. It blocked out the color of the aurora, thrust away the sight of the sky, the mountains, and every object that was more than forty feet away from us. It enclosed us completely—
“VEE-EE-EEVA!” Steve shouted, and this time his voice echoed round and round within the sphere of ice as if it were a solid stone cave.
CHAPTER IX
Frozen Waves
Our voices softened to whispers. It was a ghastly weird enclosure that we were in and the curves of the ice over our heads flickered with the reflection of the colored firelight.
So perfect was this spherical temple that every breath of sound was magnified over and over. The crackle of fire was like the rapping of thunder traveling around and around until it melted away in the emptiness of the place.
“What caused it?” Steve asked. “Where did it come from?”
“It must have fallen,” I suggested, “just like a big nutshell—”
“Over three nuts,” Gandl said dryly. He seemed not the least disturbed.
But Steve’s wild eyes were roving back and forth with unspeakable curiosity.
“There’s an electric storm up in the sky,” said Steve. “There must be electrical winds that have created this ice—somehow.”
“How can an electric storm, or any other storm, make such a ceiling of ice,” I argued. “It happened instantly. We know that much. And it couldn’t have dropped down out of a cloud or it would have blown us off our feet. Besides, the whole structure would have smashed to smithereens.”
My final word echoed with a weird “eeeennnnzzz,” and faded to silence. Now we could hear the sleet and snow beating down upon our magic igloo.
“I think” said Steve “that the girl must have clamped this icehouse on us. She’s full of tricks. She might have drawn a wide net, and it caught the mist—”
I speculated upon this but it didn’t seem possible. In fact, the whole happening was so devilishly mystifying that Steve and I were talking without rhyme or reason.
Then Gandl said, “The sound did it. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“Sound? You mean thunder or something?”
“Not thunder . Your own voices calling ‘VEE-EE-EEVA! I’ve seen it happen before.”
“Why, that’s outlandish,” I growled.
“How could we bring on an ice roof just by calling ‘VEE-EE-‘?”
“Stop it!” Steve warned. “If you bring on another one we might be buried in tons of ice. How thick is that ice, anyhow? Where do we get out?”
We broke through the lower edge of the five- or six-inch crust of ice. For the next hour we trudged around through the swirling sleet and snow, examining this strange icy temple, trying to understand its form.
It was as big as a small church. It had materialized around us like something out of a void. It had imprisoned us just in time to let that beautiful girl who called herself a queen, ride away from us, heedless of our calls.
The small valley in which this spherical prison was located was shaped like an A. And now we noticed that the sphere had locked itself over each of the side arms of this triangular formation. Here was a strange thing. There was no bulge beyond the outer circumference of the sphere at any point. But we remembered that on the inside there had been several small bulges. We returned inside to examine them by the waning firelight.
The accumulating warmth was causing little rivers of melting ice to creep outward from the zenith, like ribs of a liquid fan, spreading into a huge crystal star-fish of icicles. Soon this place would become dangerous with falling ice. But we must examine those bulges. Gandl followed us.
Mid-point along the icy ledges which I have called the arms of the A, the curved surfaces of the sphere became a clutter of smaller ball-like formations—convex scallops within the perfect curve of the circumference.
We asked Gandl if he could explain the meaning of all this.
“Sound caused it,” he said. “The sound froze.”
It was a vague answer, but I began to see some logic in it. We should have had Professor Peterson with us. He might have carried the explanation much further.
“What do you make of it?” Steve Pound asked me.
“It’s a good subject for a painting,” I replied. “One of the most interesting studies in form I’ve ever seen. Look at the zig-zag designs running through the ice wherever you break into a cross-section.”
Steve was very much annoyed. He continued to mutter that he was not a believer in magic. But he couldn’t argue this thing out of existence. For that purpose our little campfire was much more effective. Suddenly there was a cracking and roaring of ice.
I caught glimpses of the glittery fall.
Tons of the stuff was crashing downward. Big seams ripped wide and the shrill whistle of the winds blasted our ears.
We rushed out in rough-and-tumble formation, falling and rolling in the snow. By some miracle we escaped the final huge concussion that brought our temple down in a mass of frozen wreckage.
Those irregular blocks of ice were still our friends, however, if we could work fast enough. The blizzard was howling with the promise of freezing us to death. If we could pile the ice blocks together fast enough we might devise a cone-shaped shelter and protect ourselves until there was a chance to get back, to the ship. Already Gandl had leaped into the debris of ice to save the fire.
Steve and I worked like snowy demons.
Right around the fire the shelter took form.
A cowardly hope crowded at my mind. If Veeva would only come back and rescue us—or even give us another instantaneous igloo—if it was in her power to do so.
But Steve was much less selfish.
“I hope she’s not out in this awful storm,” he said.
At length we were again enclosed—this time in a tiny little structure that jabbed our backs and elbows with sharp points of ice. We baked our faces and froze our rears and got our eyes filled with blue smoke. But for the present we were sheltered. I steered our talk back to the instantaneous igloo.
“Did you ever,” I asked, “see diagrams of the form which sound waves take?”
I got my sketch book and drew a few simple illustrations.
“Here,” I said, “is an electric bell. Where must you stand to hear it when it rings?”
“Where?” said Steve. “Why anywhere, of course, as long as I’m not too far away.”
“The sound waves go out from the point of vibration in a sphere, don’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“You know they do. You know that if a train whistles and you’ve placed a man ten rods north of it, and another ten rods south, another ten
east, and another ten west—all four men will hear it at the same time. The same would be true if you were up in the air ten rods above it. That means that every sound vibration tends to spread in the shape of a ball that keeps spreading wider and wider. Now, do you see what might have happened here?”
I pointed to my illustrations which represented a number of concentric waves growing from the source of the sound.
“If these waves should be caught at a certain point and frozen into something rigid, we would get the exact shape of a sphere.”
“How could such a thing happen?”
“I don’t know. I only know that the whole structure we had here proves it did happen. Even those smaller inward bulges fit into the same scheme perfectly. Obviously the few waves that struck the banks of ice were bulging back on the rebound-echoes, you understand—when the freeze caught them.”
Steve nodded. We both looked toward Gandl who shrugged.
“That’s better than I could tell it,” said Steve, “and don’t ask me to explain it when we get back to the ship. Somehow I’d rather we’d just say nothing about it.” Then he frowned. “But if it happened once, what’s to keep it from happening again?”
“It can,” said Gandl. “Whenever the mist is thick it can happen.”
“What bothers me is whether Veeva might get trapped too,” said Steve.
Gandl replied with a blunt, “No” More than ever, then, I wondered if the girl had some peculiar power over the sphere of ice. “I think she did it to trap us. We displeased her.”
Again we looked at Gandl for any expression which might confirm or reject this new theory.
“You men are my friends,” said Gandl. “I must tell you that there are many dangers in this land. You do not know them but I—I have been here before, and Veeva has been here longer than I. She knows all the dangers.”
All of us slept. When we awoke the fire was gone, and the snow was so thick around us that we had to climb the outer walls of our shelter to get up on the surface.