The Last Days of Atlantis
Page 10
He fairly bellowed these last words. Two heavy fighter robots trudged over toward me under remote command of Lt. Cunor. I was torn from my seat and carried bodily to the Command Central's escape tube. Tarth responded to my transport of rage with ringing laughter.
"We'll be waiting for your radio signal—'Atlan' 3 times, by word or code, and I'll risk the landing. Until that time I have a few things still left to do. Go, my friend, and bear in mind that I honor you and your family."
Before me the round lid of the emergency exit opened—a three-foot tube that ran a straight 1,200 feet to end in a fully automated air chamber. Using this piece of equipment the crew of the Command Central could exit swiftly from the midship area.
As they closed the lid on me I was still yelling in a frenzy of rage. The stream of compressed air converted my body into a projectile. These crash exit tubes were not especially comfortable but were commensurately practical. I landed in a bed of compressed air inside the reception chamber, hard put to land on my feet. Instantly I dodged aside as another body came shooting through. It was Lt. Cunor whose robots had made short work of dumping me into the tube.
"I'll bring you before a ship's court martial!" I shouted, beside myself, and grasped him by the shoulders.
Naturally I wasn't able to carry out my threat any further because the heavy armor plate hatches glided upward and we were swirled outward into the open by a second jolt of compressed air.
I pressed a button switch that activated my flying equipment. In the spacesuit's backpack the combined micro-reactor and mini-powerpak were already humming away. The antigrav auto-control stabilized my flight so that all I had left to do was make sure that my small pulse-engine started. Behind me was Lt. Cunor, one of the most audacious and daring officers of the flagship. And of course he had been ordered by Tarth to accompany me on my difficult way.
"Lots of luck!" Tarth's voice rattled in my ears as saw his face on the tiny screen inside my helmet. "Can I blast out now? We're picking up new images on the trackers."
"You're not off the book yet," I told him, although by this time my anger had subsided somewhat. "That was a blatant violation of orders involving physical constraint as well. So you'd better prepare yourself, Old Man!"
He only laughed and in the end it was all we could do to get out of the suction of the giant ship as it, started off again. At a safe distance, Tarth picked up speed. Spewing flames, the Tosoma hurtled into a sky darkened by nuclear clouds. When it disappeared and the deep rumbling of air masses crashing into the vacuum of its wake subsided, I heard Cunor speaking warily.
"There's a high gamma fallout, Eminence. Our friends must be using old-fashioned bombs."
He had no sooner spoken than a new rumbling was heard. A gleaming phantom shot past far overhead but simultaneously opened up with its guns. I was hurled from my course by a hard shockwave and then a storm of fire raged over the tortured land. My palatial government seat had been annihilated. All I could see of it were the still-smoking remains. Far and wide there was not a sign of any living creature. It became clear to me that the transit of the relative time zone that Feltif had reported had resulted in sucking up everything that even remotely resembled an organism. Only vegetation had remained but that had been destroyed by the unleashed storm of atomic forces.
We drifted along close above the fire-scarred ground, circumnavigated the ruins of Atlopolis and turned our flight toward the open sea.
It was then I noticed that the ocean seemed to be stirred up by a typhoon—that is, such was my impression for about a second! After the shockwave from the attacking ship subsided, the air itself was fairly calm. In spite of this the raging waters towered into foaming breakers. The peninsula that had protected the harbor was nowhere to be seen. Farther to the East the ocean inundated the shorelines and swallowed up great stretches of land.
To the West of our location the ground had cracked open. The old volcanoes, which we had considered long extinct, had opened their craters to spill forth death and destruction. The thundering and rumbling was not being caused by a battle but by the forces of Nature.
"Atlantis is sinking!" shouted Cunor, horrified.
It was then that I perceived clearly that the ground was swaying. It was the most tremendous earthquake I had ever witnessed. In the distance a typhoon was brewing, the first gusts already howling across the sinking island.
The inner harbor basin was already flooded over. The breakers came onward as though intending to swallow all of Atlantis in a matter of minutes.
We landed close beside the boat bunkers that had been carved out of the high rocky headlands with disintegrators but the land was still sinking. Even as I opened the bunker doors the water was washing about my feet. Normally we would have had to take the pressure-screened vehicles 100 feet below to reach sea level.
Cunor prepared one of the special machines for operation. It was a craft built for the Fleet, which was intended for use in land operations on impassable water planets or swamp-covered worlds.
Meanwhile I attempted to get in touch with the Tosoma. I succeeded on the first try. The highly sensitive special equipment on the flagship could still receive the weak signals from my helmet transmitter and amplify them in their receiver a million times.
"Everything alright on board." In my helmet loudspeaker, Tarth's answer was garbled by interference sounds. "I'm just weaving in and out of their fire and taking occasional potshots. How far along are you?"
"We're just getting on board. Be careful—the island appears to be going down. We've registered powerful earthquakes."
"The whole planet's acting crazy. In the big ocean to the West, a new continent is rising out of the waters. The axial position of this world is changing! We can expect to see a global deluge! Over and out!"
As I closed the pressure-resistant cupola of the flat glider we were washed out of the bunker by the frothing waves. For some moments the craft danced about in the quake-shaken turbulent water, while Cunor pointed eastward silently.
I suppressed a cry of horror when I saw the titanic moving front of overlapping time zones. It must have had a velocity of more than 6,000 miles per hour. Its presence was discernible because of the shimmering of the air and the darkening of the sunlight as it progressed. It occurred to me then that we had lost nine days because of a mysterious time shift—and meanwhile the dreaded full opposition of Planets 2 and 3 had arrived.
The swiftly traveling catastrophe approached us silently. It was a typical overlap curtain that spared no form of life in its wide sweep.
Cunor swung down the rheostat lever of the gravo-mechanical pressure screen. Immediately the water was pressed back away from the boat hull. An air-exhausted zone was generated which acted as a protective cushion between the thin hull material and the pressing water.
The flood tanks filled. We sank like a stone. We didn't notice a lessening turbulence until we had descended 150 feet beneath the surface. However such powerful submarine shockwaves assailed us that I feared for the stability of our screen.
The infrared searchlights snapped on. We looked for the pressure dome that Feltif's specialists had constructed, knowing it must be about 50 fathoms under the surface. I had only been there once before for the purpose of having the impulse detector of the guiding robot brain pick up my physical vibrations.
I knew that at this depth a submarine plateau began, its massive cliffs reaching to the ocean floor. We had anchored the foundation of the structure there. The dome could withstand any conceivable pressure because in an emergency it could be strengthened by repulsion screens.
But the plateau could not be found! Cunor's face paled so swiftly that I could clearly guess his thoughts. The ground quakes had also swept our last refuge place into the deeps.
"Down!" I ordered harshly. "Down deeper! The dome can't have been destroyed. Its anchorage pilings were built into the planet with Arkon steel using thermal injection molding. I'd like to see any force of Nature capable of loosening it!"
We were gripped by remote guidance controls and drawn downward at a dizzying pace. The 400-foot diameter stronghold was ground-fastened but the ground kept sinking. By the time we could finally make out the bluish gleaming contours of the dome we were more than 550 fathoms deep.
The identification surveillance by the robot brain was accomplished by means of the prescribed, brain-frequency test. I placed the feedback probes on my skull and turned on the transmitter.
"Entrance permitted, Your Eminence," came the tinny voice of the automaton a few seconds later.
We were taken hold of by a tractor beam and hauled with breathtaking speed into the opening high-pressure lock. I listened impatiently to the high-pitched whining of the pumps. When the chamber was empty and air streamed in, I instructed Cunor hastily: "Wait here. I'll put in the program add-word that will make the gates respond to normal code signals. Then we have to go up again in order to call the Tosoma. It's no longer possible to call them from this depth. The dome doesn't have a hyper-transmitter."
A plastic-covered robot simulating an Arkonide appeared in the inner lock port. I simply dashed by him and sprang up the few spiral stairs to the programming room.
Beyond the dome was heard a rumbling and thundering. The laboring sounds of the mighty energy station indicated to me that the central brain was compensating for the resulting pressures with protective force screens. There was an alarming grinding and crunching sound in the foundation. The pressure effects of the stone masses moved by the quake must have been of unimaginable magnitude.
A violent movement suddenly flung me to the deck. I waited until the wave of earth tremors had passed and then staggered, gasping, into the control room. The CPU or Central Programming Unit of the small but highly effective brain was encased in a man-high, bell-shaped steel cabinet. I was received with a stereotyped "Welcome, Your Eminence."
Wordlessly I ran my fingers over the program board in order to cancel the individual block mode of the machine's operation, placing it instead in the normal mode where it would open the locks to ordinary code signals. The call word was identical to my name.
Without questioning the machine, I ran back to the main lock. Cunor was waiting impatiently. "Over a mile deep already," he announced with amazing composure.
I paid no heed to it. Moments later we were out in the water again but this time a number of erupting volcanoes here and there on the sea bottom turned the waters into dangerous, steel-hard looking spouts—submarine pillars of turbulence that glowed red from the flaming undersea eruptions.
Atlantis was dying!
But at least continents would be changed so that new lands would be born.
We required 10 minutes to reach a safety depth under the surface. We couldn't actually go higher because we didn't know whether the time-front had passed through yet or if perhaps straggling offshoots would be following.
"The time-wall's speed was high, Your Eminence," said Cunor. "It must have really gone away by now."
I staked all we had on one move. Although we would have been safer in the depths of the sea, we surfaced. The timefront had actually passed on but we were met with such a tidal wave that our craft became a helpless plaything of the giant billows. Only the highest mountaintops of Atlantis were still to be seen. I saw water wherever I looked. But there was no trace of the Tosoma.
Even the enemy ships had ceased their attacks. If their commanding officers had even a grain of sense they would have to know that there was nothing more here to destroy. That department was being adequately taken care of by the quakes and the terrible tidal waves.
We took the shaking and buffeting for two hours while I sent out uninterrupted calls on the craft's strong transmitter. High aloft, above and beyond the dark hurricane clouds, there was a far-outstretched light phenomenon. It couldn't be the sun because the sun was never in the North.
I knew what the scattering atomic fires of an exploded spaceship looked like but I didn't want to believe my eyes. Then the next overlap front came racing toward us.
Secretly broken-hearted, I gave the order to dive. My friends were no longer among the living.
8/ DEEPSLEEP
In 10 minutes I would be medically dead. According to instructions I lay loosely relaxed on the contour couch and listened to the soporific strains of hypno-music. Poised over my skull was the probe helmet of the pulsator. My normal vital rhythm was gradually slowing down.
Still to come was the automatic injection of preservative serum, a technique that my worthy race had known for a long time. Healthy subjects were able to survive biomedical deepsleep for more than 500 years entirely without harm. Life functions, such as metabolism, were reduced almost to zero.
The pressure dome had been fitted out with the necessary equipment. Formerly the installation had been on board a hospital ship belonging to my full squadron but we had transferred it here.
I relaxed my will completely in order to yield to the insinuating effects of the music. The time had come for me to retreat into the absolute calm and peace of deepsleep if I didn't want to lose my reason. I had become the loneliest living being on the planet.
It had taken about four months before the elements had subsided enough for us to even consider emerging to the surface. After that we had begun our long and futile search.
I had not been able to discover either Arkonide or native Atlantean. The protective fortresses and pyramid silos erected by Feltif still existed but the people had disappeared.
A sense of despair had driven Cunor and myself from place to place in senseless haste. We finally located life here and there but they were creatures of such a frightfully primitive state that we avoided making any contact with them. The barbarians of the icy North had been spared but our truly intelligent Atlanteans and the colonists in the East and West were no longer there. Either they had been killed by the mountainous tidal waves or they had been drawn up into the numerous time-fronts.
For six long months we had searched, sent out radio calls, searched some more and signaled again and again. Arkon appeared to have forgotten us completely. The irreplaceable radio stations of Atlantis and the two southern continents had been destroyed by the effects of enemy action. The transmitting capability of the undersea dome was comparatively weak and could never bridge the gulf between the home worlds and us. I came to regret not having installed a powerful, major class transmitter in the submarine stronghold. At the time it had seemed purposeless, since hyperwave installations had no business being under the surface of the sea. The dome was supposed to be a refuge only a provisional shelter on a short time basis. Why should we install such large, space-consuming equipment when we needed every corner, so to speak, for the really vital installations?
So it was that we flew over every continent in the glider. The face of the third planet had changed. Great islands had sunk and new oceans had come into being. Among the sunken lands was Atlantis, which was only marked now by a small archipelago of islands that were actually the mountaintops.
Our pressure dome base of operations had finally come to rest at a depth of 9,348 feet, which was more than 1,500 fathoms below the surface.
Then, shortly before our time of final resignation, Lt. Cunor was struck down with a stone hand-axe by a stupid barbarian of the North. I had stood dry-eyed over the grave of my last companion for a long time, finally flying away in a state of inexpressible weariness and exhaustion.
My one last measure of precaution was taken solely on the basis of a stubborn ember of hope that still lay smoldering deep within me. At some time or another certainly somebody would have to investigate what had become of Admiral Atlan. Somewhere along the way someone would have to process—ergo, become aware of the
hypercom message I broadcasted shortly before the explosion of the Paito. Arkon was certainly not dead yet and after all I was a member of the ruling house.
On the basis of these considerations I mounted a small super-sensitive apparatus on the highest island mountain peak. Capable of reacting to disturbances such as a spacewarp, it was designed to hail any chance spaceship coming out of transition within reasonable cosmic distances. In which case a relay transmitter would notify the robot brain in the sea dome and as a consequence I would be awakened at once from deepsleep.
I had cautiously set the maximum limit of sleep for 500 years but was quite certain that my comrades would come before then, if only in a miserable courier cruiser.
So I had given myself over to the sleep couch with a certain sense of reassurance. It would have been senseless and dangerous to my mental health if I had waited day after day and night after night. In deepsleep time became negligible and my detector was reliable.
I became sleepy. Next to me stood my servant robot, a special model with which I could converse because of its excellent positronic brain.
"How long now, Rico?" I asked in a whisper.
"Immediately, Your Eminence, you will go to your rest at once," said the medmachine. This time I was not disturbed by the metallic timbre of its mechanical vocal cords.
"Go to rest?" I repeated hesitantly. "Rest—peace—freedom! From whom or what? My conscience?"
"Relax yourself, Eminence," came the insistent words from the mouth of the robot.
Fiery pinwheels began to spin before my vision. Suddenly I saw Tarth's deeply lined face. He smiled at me encouragingly. Then came Inkar, Cunor, Kosol, Cerbus and all the many friends whom I had driven to their deaths.