In fifteen minutes he had dropped through the whirling clouds into the shattering fury of the storm once more. The globe reeled crazily under the onslaught, was mastered once more by flawless controls, dropped swiftly to the tarmac outside the hangars. Here and there other machines had already landed.
“How now?” Terry leapt to the girl as she lay still.
A trace of her old smile curved her lips. “I—I don’t quite know,” she whispered. “Funny thing is … I can’t feel anything!”
“What!” Terry’s effort to disguise alarm was futile. He seized her band tightly. “Can’t you even feel this?”
Her dark head shook. Her gray eyes seemed unnaturally large in her pale face.
“No—not a thing … Oh, Terry, I’m getting scared …”
He caught her behind the shoulders, held her close to him for a moment.
“No need to get scared, sweetheart,” he breathed gently. “Just a touch of radiation gotten into you; that’s all. I’ll have you fixed in no time …”
He laid her down again, swung round to the radio and snapped it on.
“Attention, ambulance quarters!” he barked. “Send ambulance immediately to Globe 47H outside Hangar 92. Emergency case—Miss Dallaway! Hurry!”
He returned to the girl’s side, breathed gentle reassurances to her as she lay limply on the bed, then he got to his feet at the approaching scream of a siren. Swiftly he undamped the airlock, stood aside as two heavily oil-skinned ambulance men came in with a stretcher. Behind them trailed Dr. Arthur Fletcher, the efficient chief physician and surgeon to the Corporation.
“Trouble, eh?” he asked laconically, snatching out a watch and seizing the girl’s wrist at the same time. He said nothing when he had finished, merely motioned his men to take the girl out, watched with impassive eyes as she was lifted gently onto the stretcher and taken out under transparent mackintosh.
Terry followed as far as the ambulance, leaned inside it with his anxious face a few inches from the girl’s.
“See you later, honey,” he smiled. “I’ve work to finish. Keep your chin up …”
“I’ll try …” Her voice was so low he could hardly hear it. Heedless of the driving rain he watched the doors close, then turned as Fletcher came hurrying past to climb up beside the driver.
Terry caught his arm. “Doc, what is it? Prostration?”
“Guess so …” Fletcher shrugged narrow shoulders. “Slow pulse, feeble respiration, partial paralysis. All the symptoms. She’ll be all right in a week or two …” He paused and narrowed his piercing eyes. “You had no damn right to permit her to go into the stratosphere anyway! She may know globes backwards but she doesn’t know the tricks to keep out of danger. Well, see you later. She’ll be in the private ward; I’ll take care of her personally.”
“Yeah—yeah; thanks …”
Terry moodily watched the ambulance back round then go moving off through the rain and wind to the hospital wing of the vast building. At last he turned and strode away toward his own office quarters.
For the remainder of the day Terry was kept fully occupied. Once he had despatched his reports to the Scientific Analysis Department he was kept busy giving orders for the answering of distress calls endlessly pouring in.
Planes were being lost, vast portions of the country being inundated with flood waters, humanity was being trapped in areas where only storm planes and stratosphere globes could reach them. Hour after hour the tale of rising woe flowed in to him from various sources—nor did the intoned weather reports, given hourly during the existent climatic crisis, give much hope—“Ceiling zero; wind 86 m.p.h., increasing. Continuous rain all areas. Advise caution to aircraft. Treacherous triple wind currents near all mountain ranges. Visibility 3 to 5 yards.”
Several times Terry made fast trips himself to rescue stranded people and bring them to the comparative safety of New York.
By six o’clock, what should have been a normal spring evening, was a chaotic darkness of rain—rain and cyclonic wind that snatched away his breath and pounded him unmercifully as he at last found a spare moment to visit the hospital wing.
Immediately he arrived in the hall the starch bosomed matron telephoned Fletcher. In a moment or two he appeared down the main passage, grave faced and tight lipped.
“Glad you came, Terry,” he said quietly. “I was going to ring you … Miss Dallaway is much worse. No use in trying to disguise it.”
“Worse?” Terry repeated bleakly. “But—but Doc, what is the matter with her?” He kept pace with the active surgeon along the white enameled corridor. “She was taken ill so suddenly … so strangely …”
Fletcher paused suddenly. “Frankly, Terry, I don’t know what’s wrong. It isn’t cosmic wave prostration at all. It’s something that’s utterly beyond me; and beyond our instruments too …” He bit his underlip, said slowly, “She’s dying, boy … I’ve got to tell you that. Her heart beats and respiration are getting feebler all the time —”
“She can’t be dying!” Terry exploded frantically. “In God’s name, Fletcher, you can’t stand there and calmly tell me that! A young girl like her, full of life and vigor, just dying for no reason—You’ve got to do something! Do something!”
“I’m doing all I can.” The specialist tried to look calm. “You know I am —”
“Where is she?” Terry glared hungrily round and Fletcher silently opened the door of a private room. Slowly Terry went forward to the silent figure in the bed, glanced in fearful horror at the significant screen and oxygen cylinder standing by the bedside.
In the moment that he stood gazing down on the girl he knew Fletcher was right. Elsa was waxen looking, motionless, her long lashes lying on her ashy cheeks with scarcely a quiver.
“Elsa—dearest …” Terry took her white, cool hand, looked down briefly as his fingers encountered that blazing ring.
“Elsa, it’s me—Terry …”
Very slowly her eyes opened. Their gray depths seemed misted, clouded by the unknown. Slowly her lips moved.
“Floating over stormy waters,” she whispered softly. “Terrible landslides—volcanic eruptions … And the wind—! Merciful Heaven, the wind …” She shifted uneasily, her eyes staring into vacancy.
“Elsa!” Terry implored brokenly. “Please speak to me!”
He glanced up haggardly as Fletcher shook his head slowly.
“Delirium,” he murmured. “Been like this for two hours now. She doesn’t know you; doesn’t even know herself. Keeps on talking about sand and floods and wind …”
“A city, so beautiful …” she whispered. “So beautiful, and yet—It crumbles. Down it goes …” She stopped speaking, made a sudden writhing movement and clutched her throat. Instantly Fletcher was by her side, holding the oxygen cone over her mouth. She gasped noisily, struggled with a fierceness that made Terry wince to behold it.
He caught her hand, was suddenly aware that she had ceased making a noise, that the hand was deathly still. Dumbly he stared down on her. The cone had been removed now. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes closed.
It seemed to Terry in that moment that the whole world turned inside out. Blinding tears obscured his vision. The sheet rising over the girl’s face, the scream of the wind, the drumming of rain on the windows—
“Dead!” he screamed suddenly, pounding the bed rail. “Oh, God, no—! No, Fletcher! No, she can’t be dead … mustn’t be!”
The specialist’s face seemed to dance in mist. His powerful hand closed on Terry’s shoulder.
“She is dead, Terry,” he said gently. “Please, I beg of you, try and control yourself—These things have to be faced.”
“Without reason? Without cause? Don’t hand me that!”
Things went blank for Terry thereafter. He did not faint, he did not scream. Subconsciously he had hold of himself again, but grief had deadened him to all external happenings. He had a hazy recollection that he went out of the hospital and walked and walked until he was soake
d to the skin through his leather clothes …
He walked and walked interminably, and the hurricane seemed to bear in its moaning breath the spirit of the girl who had died but a few short hours before.
III – Mystery in the Sahara
Terry could not piece anything together for days afterwards. He remembered that it seemed to rain eternally, that clouds constantly scudded over the sky. All thought of work was dashed from his mind … His chief recollections were bitter ones—were those of following a great funeral cortege behind the mourners from the Corporation, of seeing the coffin carried amidst blinding rain into the Dallaway mausoleum on the hill top ground which marked the boundary of the immense Dallaway estate. The stone sarcophagi of the girl’s ancestors; her own tomb—It was more than he could stand.
Died from heart failure, Fletcher certified. Heart failure? In a girl so strong and active? Terry’s mind revolted at that …
The day after her burial in the mausoleum the rain ceased. Drenched landscapes and flooded cities lay under scudding clouds through which a weak sun was trying to shine. Terry began to rise out of the miasma into which he had been plunged. Little by little he took a hold on himself again, faced once more the battle of life. But with Elsa gone nothing really mattered.
The proving of her will, rushed through at express speed because of the countless things contingent on it, revealed that Terry was the new owner of the Corporation, a thought which pleased him, though he extracted no happiness from it. All he could do was try and guide its destinies in the way the girl would have wished.
As days drifted by and Terry took up his new post in the girl’s former office as chief of staff, there came fresh news of disaster—of terrific volcanic eruptions by Vesuvius and Krakatoa, together with tremendous earthquakes in other zones, followed by another unceasing downpour of rain in nearly every part of the world. As he heard the news Terry could not help but remember Elsa’s dying words—“Terrible landslides—volcanic eruption …”
A vision of the future perhaps as she was near death? He shook his head bitterly; went back over her strange words in the stratosphere globe, her feeling of superficiality. Was there any conceivable link between these happenings and—?
“Hallo there, Terry!”
He looked up with a start, his chain of thought broken. It was Boyd Conway, his burly successor as chief pilot, who clumped into the office. With a sigh of relief he pulled off his helmet and released a wiry mass of ginger hair.
“Things pretty bad,” he commented, perching on the desk and looking at Terry with serious brown eyes. “We’ve just had reports through from the Analysis Department on our findings a few weeks back. Seems the chances of sunspots or anything like that causing the present upheavals is most improbable. Whatever it is it’s in the earth itself.”
Terry nodded idly. “So I figured. What about Munro? What’s his angle?”
Conway grinned at the mention of the Corporation’s master scientist. “Oh, he’s having the time of his life—and he’s doped out a pretty reasonable theory too. He says that every four thousand years or—probably less—the Earth undergoes immense inner changes in its structure—pressures change, stresses alter … You know, the idea worked out by Soddy several years ago. Well, most of the pressure being sealed inside the Earth, it has to have an outlet sometime. During the four thousand year period certain parts of the pressure dribble off through volcanoes and so forth, but there comes a time finally when this is not enough and the pressure inside gets really tough. Then things happen.”
“But that wouldn’t cause all this rain,” Terry objected.
“No, but it causes the landslides and earthquakes. The rain is the direct outcome of enormous quantities of hot vapor from volcanic blasts striking the cooler levels of the upper atmosphere and thereby producing condensation.”
Terry nodded moodily. “I get it. And if it goes on much longer where are we all going to be?”
“Drowned, I guess …” Conway smiled twistedly at the thought; then he glanced up expectantly as the radio speaker gave its warning signal.
“Attention, Stratosphere Corporation! Despatch one hundred globes immediately to western Africa and remove all possible people to nearest zone of safety. Severe earthquake has caused the Mediterranean Sea to overflow Libya and it is now sweeping over the Southern Sahara to Nigeria. Settlers and new colonists are in great danger. Ordinary planes unable to cross storm areas raging in the Atlantic. Depart immediately. Message ends.”
Conway sighed and stood erect, pulled on his helmet again.
“More trouble! I’ll be seeing you, Terry.”
“O.K. Keep in touch with me over the radio.”
The door closed behind Conway and Terry turned to stare again at the great windows as the rain washed inexorably against them.
*
In the two days of rain that followed, it became more and more evident that disaster was creeping over the world—disaster so wholesale that scientists found themselves hard put to it to explain the reason.
The report of Whitaker Munro, chief scientist, was generally accepted as the correct one. Inner earthly pressures, pent up through ages except in unsatisfactory escapes through volcanoes and geysers, could no longer be denied. Vastly superheated gas in the earth’s core was expanding relentlessly, and in consequence something had got to go. The shift in the earth’s rind was, by comparison with the main pressure, almost infinitesimal—but it was quite sufficient to cause unparalleled havoc. The merest rise or drop in supposedly solid land, when it takes place in an instant, can shatter man’s creations entirely.
Hour after hour, day and night, reports screamed through the tortured ether, filled earth’s peoples with horror. Already South America’s greatest cities lay in ruins; thousands of people were fleeing before the greatest floods in history as Atlantic strove to meet Pacific across the quaking, crumbling country.
The same upheaval sent titanic tidal waves crashing inward on all the western coasts of the States, produced an inevitable flood that roared inland as far as Nevada and Idaho. The Bering Sea was advancing inexorably into Siberia; Greenland was subsiding hour by hour. Far out in. the middle of the Pacific a new and tremendous tableland was forming. All earth’s geological formation was altering, sweeping untold thousands to doom, smashing away the creations over which mankind had labored for generations.
So far New York was untouched. Most of the eastern American seaboard had escaped, beyond the incessant rain that flooded the streets and made it next to impossible for the sewers to carry away the weight of water. Inevitably they would finally block themselves up, then indeed serious trouble would begin.
Terry, in the Corporation building, was not in such a bad position. His quarters were in the building itself; everything he needed was supplied by the vast place. And further, the great walls around the building, together with the solid gates, were sufficient to keep any floodwaters at bay for many days if necessary.
Most of the time he was kept constantly occupied in arranging for rescue work. In the few quiet intervals he wondered how Conway was faring on the African job, a wonder which deepened to genuine alarm by the third day and there was still no news. Then around 2:00 o’clock Conway’s clipped voice came over the short wave radio.
“Terry?”
“Speaking,” Terry answered, fingering the dials. “What’s the matter? Where’ve you been all this time? Moving the people?”
“Got rid of them a long time ago; the rest of the squadron will be home any time now. I got separated from them in the storm and went over the Northern Sahara—Right now I’m in the middle of the desert and it’s raining like hell. In fact I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the whole desert goes down one of these days and forms the bed of an ocean.”
Terry frowned at the instruments.
“Well, what the devil are you taking such a risk for? Come on back!”
“Not yet. Give me time to finish, can’t you? Truth is, I’ve found something queer—if s be
en revealed by the earthquakes and unexpected flooding around these parts. I’ve found a metal dome in the sand, some sort of metal that’s tougher than anything I ever struck. I guess only a flame gun would go through it. This dome’s about forty feet across and the base goes down into the sand. Must have been buried for centuries. Seems to me it ought to interest Munro, and you too. How about it? Can you come and bring equipment with you?”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re rambling about, but I’ll come,” Terry answered. “I’ll drive a globe over myself. I’m about the only one to handle it in this storm. Munro’s no pilot.”
“O. K. Radio me when you’re near Africa; I’ll direct you.”
Terry switched off and puzzled to himself for a moment. Dome in the Sahara? He shrugged, switched over to the science department and contacted Munro. Ten minutes later he arrived, accompanied by Dawlish, his assistant, carrying various small but efficient scientific instruments.
The six foot four, bald headed scientist was in ecstasies. He rubbed his long claw-like hands together eagerly.
“Dome in the desert, eh?” he breathed gleefully, his pale gray eyes losing something of their frigidity. “Is that something!”
“Probably a mirage,” growled Dawlish, his round, fleshy face anything but pleased. “The idea smells if you ask me.”
Terry grinned faintly. “So far as I know, Munro, Conway really thinks he’s found something. We’d better go and look.”
“Most decidedly!” Munro struggled into oilskins, flattened down a sou’wester over his dome. He looked oddly like a lamp post wrapped in cellophane as he swung to the door.
“Well?” he demanded, toothbrush black eyebrows shooting up. “What are we waiting for? Come along …”
Terry waited only long enough to hand over his work to the capable Davies, then followed the scientist and Dawlish onto the rain swept expanse of tarmac outside.
The vast winds and vortices raging in the tortured atmosphere more than once nearly defeated Terry’s efforts. The stratosphere globe rolled and pitched wildly under the impacts, gained and lost altitude constantly—but very slowly, due to superb airman-ship, it finally began to climb gradually over the storm areas, higher and higher into the angry gray that was the afternoon sky. Up and up to the calmer heights, until at last the wind dropped and Terry felt safe to drive forward.
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