Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  The minutes passed. The Narwhal must now be gone. Ken's cheek muscles stood out as he pressed his teeth together. "Well, go on!" he exploded in impotent rage. "What are you waiting for? Kill me! Eat me if you're going to!" And he cursed the silent forms around him till his ears hurt from the reverberation.

  After the Narwhal had vanished in the gloom, the torpooner's captors lifted him from the bottom and propelled him leisurely forward again, the slight, graceful roll of their flippers slipping them along smoothly.

  A dull hopelessness came over him. No longer could he hope that his submarine would find him. Only one thing was certain, and that was that death would soon come. For even if his captors did not kill him at once, he had but thirty-six hours before his air-units would be exhausted. Certainly, having captured him, the seal-creatures would not release him. And it was too much to expect them to realize that his sea-unit was only an artificial covering which enabled him to live underwater, and not his own flesh and blood.

  And as for the chance of breaking loose—the idea was laughable. His speed was snail-like in comparison with theirs. Even if he did manage somehow to get away, what good would it do? How could he, a puny, helpless mite, ever hope to locate the Narwhal in this vast sweep of Arctic sea? His torpoon was wrecked, and he had no means of communication.

  His situation was quite hopeless.

  Far ahead, a dark shape grew in the foggy murk, and as they neared, spread upwards and outwards. They angled up and up; the sea-floor was higher there. Ken, peering as best he could, made out that the mountainous, looming bulk was the face of a giant underwater mound, whose uneven formation indicated that it was the result of some long-past upheaval. It was the first of a rolling series of such hillocks, six or seven in all, stretching back into the gloom. Their rounded peaks reached to within a few feet of the water's ice-sheathed surface. Surely the creatures' home was among these mounds.

  He was skirted round the base of the first hillock and caught a glimpse of something in its face which was apparently of his captors' construction. It was a hole, dark, mysterious, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, and barring it were three great gray stakes, reaching from top to bottom. Behind the stakes, Ken got a jumbled impression of a body, large and sleek, of black streaked with white, that moved restlessly back and forth in the hole and occasionally seemed to lash out in anger. He wondered what it was. Before long, he knew.

  The party of seal-creatures stopped before the second of the row of hillocks. In its face, too, was a hole—a well of blackness—but with no stakes across it. He twisted his head back and saw the carcass of the killer whale he had slain being guided up to the entrance and shoved through. Then, from the upper rim of the hole, three stakes similar to the others he had seen slid down and barred it.

  "Storehouses!" he muttered. "Storehouses, I'll bet anything. And killer whales are their food. They keep 'em in the holes until they're needed. But I'll swear it was a live whale I saw in the first one—and how in the dickens could they capture a mighty killer with their dinky spears and ropes?"

  There he had to leave the question, for its answer implied greater intelligence in the creatures than he would admit.

  Intelligence—in seals!

  And now he was guided smoothly forward to the third hillock, where the leaders of the group glided through a V-shaped cleft in its face. His guards brought him along behind.

  A wry smile twisted Kenneth Torrance's lips. To him, the cleft was more than an entranceway. To him it signified the beginning of the hopeless, lonely end of his life....

  The cleft led into a corridor, and the corridor was softly illuminated with a peculiar light whose source he could not discover. It served to show him a passageway that was wide rather than tall, and gouged from the firm, clayey soil by blunt tools that had left uneven marks. Straight ahead it led, and, as they continued, the mysterious illumination brightened, until suddenly, rounding a turn, its source appeared.

  Like will-o'-the-wisps, a score of arrows of light flashed softly into view down the corridor. They were of delicate green and orange and yellow, glowing and luminous, and hovering like humming birds between floor and ceiling. Ken looked at them in some alarm until his nearer approach showed him what they were, and then he exclaimed in amazement:

  "Why—they're fish! Living electric bulbs!"

  A school of slender, ten-inch fish they were, each one a radiant, shimmering, lacey-finned gem of orange or green or yellow. In concert they shot to the ceiling over the party of seal-creatures, who still swam impassively ahead, paying no attention to them, and from there scattered in quick darts in all directions, showering the cortege with washes of spectral luminosity. Then the corridor crooked again, and with one simultaneous movement they were gone. And the scene that lay revealed before Kenneth Torrance took his breath from him.

  In the passageway he had seen a score of the living jewels; now he beheld hundreds. He peered up at a shimmering sheet of brilliance, composed of hundreds of the slender refulgent fish, all swimming in slow rotation. Below them was a large cavern, which he guessed had been created by hollowing out one of the underwater hillocks. The sides were rounded, and pitted with holes that represented other passageways, showing dark against the luminosity from above. And streaming out from these dark holes of corridors came dozens of the seal-creatures, gathering in response to some unheard, unseen signal that had called them to witness the strange captive their fellows had brought in....

  Ken's guards gripped him more firmly and he was guided forward and downward to the smooth black floor of soil.

  Scores of large, placid eyes stared at him from the slowly undulating, brown-skinned bodies packed close about him. The sight was so weird, so beyond his imagination, that he laughed a little hysterically.

  "Dreaming!" he said. "Dreaming! But what a dream!"

  Silently, a space cleared in the center of the horde. His bonds were taken away, the guards released his arms and he righted himself and stood there on braced legs, the object of a concerted gaze.

  This, the torpooner felt, was the crucial period. Something was about to be decided. If it looked bad he would make a wild—and of course, futile—break for freedom, and die quickly when they punctured his suit. But meanwhile he would stick things out. Anything might happen in that fantastic convocation.

  There came a stir in the tiers of brown bodies. An aisle cleared, and down it a single seal-creature glided slowly towards Ken Torrance—undoubtedly the leader of the herd, ruler of the underwater labyrinth.

  Gracefully the creature glided up to the lone human, and when only a foot away extended one of its long upper flippers so that its webbed edge rested on his sea-suit's casque. And its placid brown eyes hung close to the face-shield and gazed through inquisitively, intelligently! Intelligently! No longer did Kenneth Torrance doubt that. As he held absolutely motionless under the close-searching scrutiny, his brain rang with the conviction that this creature, this thing of blubbery body and long, webbed flipper-arms and legs—this brown-skinned denizen of the Arctic underseas was, with all its fellows, related to him, a man of the upper world.

  Men they were; or, rather, blubber-men!

  Previously he had marveled at something suggestively human-like in their appearance; now he recognized human intelligence in his observer's peering brown eyes and questing movements of the flipper over his head casque and suit. Warm red blood flowed in its blubber-sheathed body; an intelligent brain lay in the fat round head. And why not?

  Whales, ages ago, were land mammals, animals that walked on the soil of the dim, early world. They had taken to the seas in quest of food, had stayed there and never returned; and Nature had guarded their bodies against the cold and great depths by giving them layer upon layer of oily blubber. The ancestors of these creatures before him might well have lived on the soil, walked and run as he did; then, when the ice came, taken to the sea and made a new home for themselves.

  They had enticed the splendent light-fish into their caverns to gi
ve illumination. Intelligence almost human. A brain not as highly developed as man's, but a human brain!

  Ken Torrance had been almost apathetic toward his eventual fate, but suddenly, now, a great hope came to him—and twin with it, on its heels, came fear. If, or since, this creature inspecting him had an intelligent, human brain, in some way he might be able to correspond with it. He might be able to show that his real body was inside the sea-suit; that he had to have air; that he would die if he were kept underwater, that he could not survive as a prisoner. These creatures appeared to be friendly; seemed to wish him no harm. If he could show them that he was a man of the upper world, they might let him go.

  If he could do it! He had to make known to the herd leader that he breathed air, and that he'd die if they didn't release him at once. On that depended life and death.

  Ken trembled as he cast about for some way of putting over his idea, and then the plan came. Smiling through his face-shield at the brown eyes so close, he drew back slowly and took out a short steel crowbar from the belt at his waist. He bent over and made a line on the soft floor.

  All eyes watched him; every creature held motionless, apparently interested, eager to understand. Under his suit-clad figure the crowbar traced a rude outline of a man in a sea-suit. The torpooner pointed to the drawing and then fingered his suit, repeating the gesture several times. Then he drew another figure in the soil, this one intended to represent him without the sea-suit. It was not as bulky; the features were sharper and thinner. Ken pointed to the twin dots standing for eyes, then tapped his face-shield; he did this again and again.

  For a moment the leader did not move; but then he slid forward and stared through the shield. Rapidly Ken opened and closed his eyes, and pointed again to the dots on the drawing's face.

  "Eyes! Eyes!" he said excitedly, voicing the thought his brain was making. "Eyes—inside the suit! The suit's not me; I'm inside! Eyes!" He waited for a reaction, tense and strained. The blubber-man reached out one flipper-arm and took the steel bar from his hand.

  A thrill ran through him as the creature dipped its body down and began to draw in the soil. Laboriously, crudely, he outlined another sea-suit, and on the circle representing the face-shield marked two dots—eyes.

  "He's getting it!" Ken cried.

  The blubber-man went on drawing. He sketched a second suit, similar in all respects, and looked up at the torpooner, inquiringly, it seemed.

  Ken nodded rapidly. He tapped the drawings, then his suit; nodded again. "The idea's over!" he told himself. "Now I'll make a move towards that corridor to show them that I want to go, and if—"

  But before he could stir, the leader of the blubber-men, with one quick gesture, summoned two creatures from the innermost circle. Swiftly they placed themselves alongside Kenneth Torrance, lifted him and bore him forward, right across the cavern to another of the passageway-entrances.

  It was so sudden that for a moment Ken could not think clearly. What had happened? Were they releasing him? Or was he still to be kept a prisoner? No doubt the latter. And he had been so sure that he was communicating with the blubber-man's brain!

  His lips pressed tight in a hard white line. It was a tough blow to take.

  "Well, that's that," he said. "It was all imagination."

  He did not know that his drawings had signified something to the leader of the herd—that each had mistaken the meaning of the other. Nor did he have any inkling of the greatest surprise of all that now lay just before him.

  The surprise lay in another cavern.

  A quick turn through a cleft-like entrance brought them into it. The room was only a fraction of the size of the central meeting place, and its light, from but several of the light-fish, was dim and vague, barely enabling Ken to see what looked like a pile of rocks in the chamber, heaping upwards. The ceiling was flat and strangely blurred, a rippling veil. As he wondered what caused this, his guards lifted him rapidly towards it, up alongside the rocks.

  Not only towards it, but through it! His head-casque pierced through; rivulets of water gurgled off it—and he realized that the blurred veil he had seen was the top plane of the water, which only filled three-quarters of the cavern.

  Surprise left him breathless. At first he could see nothing, could only feel that his shoulders were above water. Then he was pushed slowly upward until he rested almost completely above the surface. How did the cavern come to be but part-filled with water? he wondered. And was this dim emptiness around him air? Could he breathe it?

  Then he was vaguely aware of a presence on the top of the rock heap. He sensed rather than heard a stir of movement. Then suddenly a ray of light stabbed through the darkness and impinged on his head-casque—white, electric, man-made light!

  And there came to his ears, muffled by the suit and distorted by echoes, a call that sounded like his own name!

  "Ken! Is it you, Ken?"

  Bewildered, he motioned the blinding light to one side. It turned upward and backward, and in its glare a face suddenly appeared out of the darkness.

  "Good God!" Kenneth Torrance cried.

  It was a pale, drawn face, stubbled with beard, and its eyes were wild.

  It was the face of Chanley Beddoes, the lost second torpooner of the Narwhal.

  Ken stared, his body rigid. Chan Beddoes! The dead brought back! So it at first seemed. And here, in a cavern of the blubber-men!

  He pulled himself further up on the rock pile, unfastened the clasps on his helmet and took it off—for Beddoes wore none, and that meant the space was filled with breathable air.

  "Chan!" he said. "And we were sure you were dead!"

  A high-pitched, hysterical voice cried in answer!

  "It's you, Ken! They got you too! Oh, but it's good to see you! It's been so lonely, so dark.... You are there, Ken? I'm not just dreaming again?"

  Ken realized that the other's nerves were shot, and he replied gently:

  "You're not dreaming, Chan. I'm here with you now. Steady. Take it easy. Lord, this air—it's pretty foul, but it smells good to me, and it'll save our units. How ever do they get it down here?" He asked the question in hope of steadying Beddoes; giving his mind something definite to occupy it.

  A soft ripple sounded just then; looking round, Ken saw that his two guards had slipped back beneath the water, leaving them alone.

  Chan Beddoes' helmet was off, but the rest of his body was still clad in a sea-suit. He half squatted on the rocks, his face raised and peering at the first torpooner fearfully, as if afraid he would disappear as suddenly as he had come. The beam of light came from a hand-flash held in his hand. Scattered around were pieces of whitish meat—fish—and the air was sickening with its smell. Ten feet above was the chamber's domed ceiling, from which water kept dripping to the slimy rocks below.

  "Air?" repeated Beddoes, stupidly. His mind was obviously affected. "They fetch it from the surface with seal-hide bags, and release it. They change it often. All over the caverns. They have to breathe, too. I think they sleep in rooms like this." His voice rose with hysteria. "Ken, they're seals and yet they're human! Human, down here! They have arms and legs and they breathe air, like whales—and they've kept me here for weeks, years—I don't know! They're devils! It's been so dark and cold and—and—" He began to cough painfully.

  "I know," Ken told him sympathetically. "Steady, man. How did you get here? How did they catch you?"

  Beddoes' eyes wandered. He sucked his lips.

  "I can't remember," he said. "No. Yes! We left the Narwhal, both of us, chasing those killers. They broke up and we went after different ones, and I lost sight of you.

  "I chased mine for a long time, and when I fired I only wounded him. He went like hell, and I after him. After half an hour I was ready to give up; I couldn't get close enough. God! Ready to return! To the submarine! To life!"

  His voice broke, and he paused until he was able to go on.

  "Then I saw another shape ahead of the whale. A queer looking thing—one of t
hese human seals, though I didn't know it then. It seemed to be fleeing from the killer, just as the killer was from me. There was something big and dark ahead—a shadow, I thought, and kept my eyes on the whale. And the next second my torpoon crashed and I was knocked cold.

  "It's a deliberate scheme," he went on at a tangent. "The seal things get a killer chasing them and lead it towards the traps they've got in the sides of these hillocks. They dart in and the whale follows; then bars drop over the entrance and they've got the killer trapped. They eat them."

  "But how does the blubber-man get out?" Ken asked.

  Beddoes scowled. "Oh, they're clever enough! A passage runs off the trap, big enough for the seal thing, but not for a killer.... Well, my torp had gone into the trap and was stuck in one of the walls. When I came to I reversed my engines full, but I couldn't get free. The impact had ruined my radio.

  "Through the after peep-holes I could make out the killer in the trap with me, lashing around like mad. The bars over the entrance were wide-spaced enough to let the torp squeeze through—but I couldn't get loose.

  "As I lay there, wondering what to do, I saw some more of those blubber-men in the corridor raising the bars. They had long spears and knives—and in ten minutes that killer was dead and the place black with its blood.

  "Well, I thought I saw my chance. I got into my sea-suit, thinking I maybe could dig the torp free and escape before the damned fish caught me. I climbed out the port and was hacking at the mud bank with my crowbar when a rope slipped over my head and they had me."

  Ken nodded. "They got me in the same way," he said.

  "And gave you the once-over in the big room," Chan declared. "You'll get plenty more of that."

  For most of the man's narrative his tone and manner had been sane enough, but now again he broke out wildly.