by Don Wilcox
Snap. The soggy snail was beginning to list.
Dick’s hopes fell and rose by turns. Now again he thought there was a chance of drifting closer to the tenth finger before those fish ate the fleshy boat from under him.
Snap. The diminishing snail shuddered and wobbled. It had evidently become too much exhausted to resist these attacks by drawing itself into its shell. Had it done so, Dick would unquestionably have turned it over.
He was working at the ropes furiously now. The latest stab of the sharp-toothed fish had cut a rope clean, thereby freeing his right arm.
He was getting loose—little by little—both arms—his body—one leg.
He was compelled to sit carefully. Once his vigorous motions almost overbalanced the snail. It wouldn’t do to be dumped here in mid-ocean. The prospect of a watery grave now began to haunt Dick. He tried to coax the beast shoreward.
Dip-dip-dip . . .
The white shell was beginning to slap the water on the starboard side.
“The wide ocean,” Dick muttered with a shudder of fatalism. “I’d like to change places with Captain Meetz . . .”
Yellow! Yellow waters! . . . Lights under the sea!
His discovery made him doubt his own senses at first. But when he saw within the circle of light a tiny platform standing a few feet above the level of the water, he was willing to take it at face value.
“I’m saved,” he thought aloud. “Whatever this pumping station is, I’m saved.”
His jaw tightened. To have one’s life snatched from the jaws of death seemed to imply some providential encouragement for him to go on with his original plans. If he could get back to shore he would fight as he had never fought before.
He splashed over the side of his half-eaten snail, allowing the fragments of water-soaked rope to sink.
His muscles all but refused to function, after their long imprisonment. But he managed to swim and soon reached the platform.
He rolled onto its warm surface weakly.
Swish!
At first the sound meant nothing more than the loud lapping of waters. But a shadow fell over him. He turned, amazed, and his bluish face went colorless. Some strange projection had risen out of the center of the platform.
A door in the wall of the projection opened, and an old man with stern eyes and flowing white whiskers stood there, staring.
“What’s up, Grandpa?” Dick swung to his feet ready for trouble.
The old man’s voice was cracked, but his eyes were alive with a feverish light of discovery.
“I told them!” he squawked. “They wouldn’t believe me. Come. I’ll show them. Come, come, young man. Don’t stand there like an idiot.”
“Where we going?” said Dick.
“Down,” said the old man. He led the way down the spiral staircase and Dick followed.
CHAPTER XXVII
On the previous afternoon Stupe Smith had ridden down into the sea with the princess. He hadn’t been quite sure, when he took that plunge, whether he had been prompted by duty—his obligation to J.J. Wellington-or his personal interest in the beautiful girl.
S-s-splash!
At the very moment of dashing into the water he sternly reminded himself that his original task—to capture the girl and bring her back to the earth—must be his first consideration.
Along with his crisscrossing motives he was quite aware that he was momentarily placing his life in her hands. It was a plunge to be taken on faith.
Ker-thoop! The water closed over the three of them—Marble Boy and the two riders.
Strange, Stupe thought, that a flash of memory should have brought back the image of pretty red-haired Mae Krueger at that moment. He had been in love with Mae once. They had parted good friends after a spirited quarrel over Stupe’s refusal to avoid dangerous adventures. He had been infatuated with pretty Mae, but she had married his rival Krueger. So Stupe had gone on with his life of adventure uninterrupted by any further infatuations.
“Hold tight!” The girl’s words were muffled by the sounds of thrashing water.
Down, down—how deep could they go, Stupe wondered, before his eardrums would burst from the pressure? He wanted to press his hands over them, but he was too busy following the good advice to hold tight.
His lungs tightened. In another moment they would be bursting for a breath. He looked up through the yellow water, calculating the distance to the surface. If he let go—if he took five or six upward strokes—
Darkness!
All at once the light that filtered down through fifteen or twenty feet of water was closed off. They were entering some sort of tunnel. The thumpity-thump of the stallion’s hoofs on a solid surface jolted against his throbbing eardrums. A panic seized him. He was entering a trap. They were riding into a walled-in shaft. Now it would be impossible for him to let go and rise to the surface.
But all at once he knew that the pressure was easing. The tunnel path was leading upward. In the blackness he sensed that automatic doors were opening and closing. A rush of water almost struck him off. Then, suddenly, there was no water.
A breath. A deep full breath. His lungs and heart and spinning brain were instantly relieved. His eyes and ears and fingertips were throbbing hard, but every breath was a promise. Life was surging back. A moment earlier he would have traded his chances at a million dollars for one breath of air.
“Hold tight,” the girl said, and this time her voice was a hum of echoes within the narrow passage. The stallion’s hoof beats melted together like rolling thunder.
Another descent. But not through water. The valves had been passed and the sea had been shut out. Down . . . down. Could the stallion’s eyes penetrate this sticky darkness—or was this path so well known that the very hoof beats had found a rhythm to its turns?
Down-down—spiraling swiftly, dizzily. A weird misty grayness was emerging out of the depths.
The lights and sounds and smells always would seem to Stupe, looking back on this moment, like the bursting of a new world upon his senses. Venus itself had been that, when he had first arrived. But here was a new world within a new world.
“Where are we going?” he called, clinging tight. The girl didn’t hear him. They were thundering down, down through the darkness. The stallion’s hoof beats echoed within the narrow passageway like the roll of a score of drums.
Suddenly the walls of the passage materialized under a dim glow of light, pale blue. They were walls of glass-like substance with polished surfaces. The glances of light reminded Stupe of blue starlight glinting through spaceship windows.
By now, he guessed, they must have been at least sixty or seventy feet below their starting point near the water’s surface. There was no sign of an ocean within these walls. As the lights grew brighter, however, Stupe could see the dark ocean pressing against the transparent surfaces from the outside. Occasionally a school of black fish with yellow eyes could be seen bumping their noses against the surfaces, then scurrying away at the sight of the approaching horse.
Marble Boy knew this track by heart, Stupe decided, and loved every turn. At the sight of an arch, lined with ribbons of light, the stallion broke his even running pace to a jubilant gallop.
“We are home!” the girl cried out.
But it all happened too suddenly for Stupe. With the first lurch his seat went out from under him and he bumped off the rear end. It took all of his tumbling skill to roll without injury and come to his feet.
The girl turned and saw what had happened. Instantly she leaped off the horse and came running back to him. Marble Boy clattered on alone, down the gently curved passage and out of sight.
“Do you not want to come?” the girl called, returning.
Stupe laughed to himself. “She thinks I changed my mind. It was the horse that changed his pace.”
He felt a little self-conscious as she turned him around, touching his elbows and shoulders, examining him for injuries. So she knew he had fallen accidentally.
Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “Are you no longer hungry? Do you not want to come down and have food?”
“Sure I’m hungry,” Stupe grinned. “Got any hamburgers?”
“Hani-hambers?”
“Burgers. You know. Ground steer in a bun.” No she wouldn’t know. How could she? He tried to simplify the order. “It’s fried meat between two slices of bread. It’s yummy.”
“Ah, you shall have hamburger,” she said confidently. “Come. You shall have—”
“Now wait a minute, lady. Don’t start whetting my appetite for something I know I can’t have. After all, here we are down in the lost end of a strange world. Where would you get steers for your meat?”
“There is the meat,” she said, nodding toward the plastic wall. Beyond, the light revealed a cluster of weird looking black fish with yellow eyes. As she pointed toward them, they darted off into the dark waters. “You shall have burgers.”
Stupe gulped dubiously. “Fish-burgers?”
“I shall fix them myself. You will like my fish-burgers.”
Under the conditions, thought Stupe, he would have to.
The girl stopped in a listening attitude and put a hand to her ear. Marble Boy’s hoofs could no longer be heard.
“He has already reached home,” said the girl. “We are almost there. Only a short walk to give you an appetite.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
Stupe’s suspicions were going out in all directions. The girl was talking too fast for him to catch everything. Her allusions to great numbers of people startled him.
“They live down there,” she said, with a casual wave of her hand.
Stupe looked down at the floor of the parlor into which the tunnel had led them. He had thought this to be the bottom of the ocean. It was an opaque floor, of a plastic material similar to that of the ocean platform, but dark red in color. And solid. Was it possible that this structure could be somehow suspended, not firmly rooted to the ocean’s floor?
“There are many people—like you—and me,” the girl went on.
Stupe was finishing his third sandwich. At the moment the joy of eating could scarcely be disturbed by her remarks. Yet the foreshadowing of possible contacts with great numbers of undersea people called for wariness on his part. He hadn’t forgotten the actions of the group on the platform who had come looking for a prisoner.
“If you will give me a chance to rest after this lunch,” he said, “I think I can swim back by myself.”
“You do not want to see the city in which my people live?” Disappointment was in her voice.
“Is it safe?”
The girl was laughing at him. Her response shot through him. Was she teasing? Making mischief? Or hurling a challenge at him?
“After you have seen my world, then, perhaps—” she hesitated—“perhaps you will take me to see your world.”
Stupe walked across the room leisurely, turning his back toward her. He was attempting to memorize the lay of the land. The tunnel through which he had descended branched in four or five directions at the entrance to “her home.” He wanted to be sure—yes, the soft blue lights identified the passage. Again he glimpsed the dark fish with the yellow eyes exploring along the outsides of the walls.
A foreboding of peril haunted him. How easy it would be for that wall to crack, he thought, and let the sea come dashing in. He could hardly imagine people living here in a feeling of comfort and security. But if these undersea dwellers all possessed the girl’s mysterious ability to go through the waves, then the terror might be as nothing to them.
No, it could not be dismissed so easily.
The very weight of water that would press down upon them at this depth would crush out their lives unless they were something more than human.
He was still pondering these mysteries half an hour later when he dozed away on a soft couch. A flood of images crowded his sleepy thoughts. This couch was too soft—made of feathers—feathers from the wings of wingmen? What relationship existed between the winged and non-winged creatures of this world?
What of the prisoner that had been sought on the platform? Must one be found? Would a wingman eventually serve? Or would these sea dwellers find their way across to the mainland and seek out one of his own party—Hefty?
Hefty—Hefty—A hundred unanswered questions swarmed through Stupe’s mind.
Hefty would think it a streak of luck if he knew that the girl had been found. He and the other members of the party would rejoice if they knew. They would make preparations to come at once—perhaps by plane—no, by raft. They would come prepared to capture the prize.
“Carefully. Gently.”
Stupe, three-fourths asleep, had muttered the words aloud. Mentally he was protecting the girl. In fact, he was already tortured by his own infirmity of purpose. He was weakening in his resolve.
“No, no, I must not—” His fingers clenched tight. The prize could be won—diplomatically. Carefully. Tactfully. There need be no cruelty. Had the girl not already suggested that she might wish to visit his land?
This opened a new avenue of argument in his mind. If she were dissatisfied here, a flight to the earth would be the ideal deliverance. Could it be that she was an outcast from this society?
“She lives apart,” Stupe mumbled to himself. “No family—”
But she did have servants. He had seen four or five of them on his arrival here—two half grown boys dressed in single-piece brown uniforms which she had identified as servants’ costumes. Two or three older women had been at work in an adjoining room preparing foods. No, this girl was no outcast or she would not be living in such luxury.
“Do you talk in your sleep always?”
The girl tapped him gently on the forehead. At once he was wide awake. She was smiling down at him.
“What funny things you mutter,” she said. “You cannot be so angry as this for having eaten fishburgers.”
He roused up, laughing. “Anything I said was strictly off the record.”
“Good. Now you are ready to come with me to the observation balcony. We shall look down upon my city.”
CHAPTER XXIX
Stupe had little idea what to expect when he walked with the “Princess” out to the observation balcony. The new undersea world burst upon him as a complete surprise. At first the yellow light from overhead was almost blinding. It was like a disc-shaped sun hanging in the top of a huge glass globe, or more accurately, half a globe.
This half globe, or inverted bowl, as he soon began to visualize it, reached from the top of the sea to the bottom—a distance of about eight hundred feet. The mile-wide circle of level floor was designed in the shape of a six-point star. The center of the star was directly beneath him. He could have dropped a rock from the edge of the suspended balcony on which he stood and it would have dropped into a pool of water eight hundred feet down. This pond was the center of an artificial garden, the center of the wide six-point plaza around which the city was built.
The white-metal structures which rose from each of the six parts of the city reminded him of six Eiffel towers. They looked strong enough to support the hemispherical enclosure, in spite of the weight of the sea.
Again Stupe was haunted by the peril of such an environment. One break in the surface of the hemisphere would allow the sea to come rushing in. Evidently the dwellers of this strange city had built with reference to this danger. The tiny houses beneath his gaze were curious mound-shaped structures. The strength of an arch is great, he knew. Each of these homes might be strong enough to resist the weight of the ocean, he reasoned.
“How many people live here?” Stupe asked.
The girl at his side gave him a quick smile. “Sixty-thousand,” she said.
He laughed at her persistent mischief.
Since she did not know figures in English, and he had no knowledge of the numbers she would name in her other language, he was left to his own guess. Along the star-shaped plaza and the many paths he could see less than two hundred
. But this was only a small fraction of the population, he guessed. Within each of the six areas bounded by the plaza from the inside and the surrounding wall that formed the outer limits, there were, he estimated, at least three hundred houses. Three hundred times six—eighteen hundred or perhaps two thousand homes. If each home represented a family of five, a city of ten thousand Venusian souls was enclosed within this colossal upside-down salad bowl.
How did they happen to be here? Why should they live under the sea? Where did they get their food and clothing? How had they managed to enclose themselves and shut the sea out?
“Nice piece of engineering,” Stupe commented as his eyes roved over the upward curve of the distant wall. “Who did it?”
“Engineering?” the girl asked blankly.
“These white metal towers that support the egg-shell over our heads. This observation balcony. All those tunnels around the sides. Who drew up the plan for such weird living quarters?”
In answer she pointed to the old man—the same white bearded man that Stupe had seen up on the surface—who now sat in a throne-like chair on a level several feet above their balcony.
“Ask him,” she said. “He remembers all about it.”
“Is he the architect?”
“He was a small boy when this city was built. His grandfather was the builder.”
Stupe stared at the old man with new respect. The old fellow was studying him from under his bushy white brows.
“I saw him before—up on the surface,” Stupe whispered.
“You need not be afraid of him. He is only lonesome and he would like to talk with you.”
“What about those people who came up looking for a prisoner?”
“They may still be on top.” She pointed to the spiral stairs that wound into the central shaft leading upward to the zenith.
Now Stupe began to get his bearings in relation to the little plastic platform above the sea. When he had rested up there in the sunlight, surrounded by the waves, he had been about fifty feet over his present station. A part of the shaft, enclosing the old man’s “throne” and the spiral stairs, could be made to rise so that the upper end protruded through the circular platform, like a huge periscope. From it the guards at the top of this city could emerge on the surface to survey the sea and the mountains to the north.