“Proved it? Hah!” said the Director of the Tropicans, managing to sit up straight in his chair in his excitement. “Have they not proved it? No, of course they haven’t. And there’s plenty of proof. We know there are fossil trees and creatures and plants millions of years old, here in Antarctica. And coal—which means great forests once existed here!”
“Yes,” said Robby. “But—”
“But! But!” said Waub, waving his fat hands in the air. “Plants and animals and forests—right where there’s a layer of ice two miles thick, now. Could the ice have been there when the plants were there? Of course not. Could the South Pole have been where it is now? Could the continents have been where they are now? Of course not.”
He almost glared at Robby.
“You have to keep an open mind about such things.Gondwanaland was here, then. The South Pole was in a different place. And the whole earth was like one tropical land where oranges grew from the South to the North Pole.”
He sank back into his chair.
“Look at the continents—the way they fit together,” he puffed. “Rock layers on land separated by thousands of miles of ocean fit together. Fossils match.”
He fumbled on a little table beside him and picked up a small oblong object with buttons and dials, about the size of a transistor radio. Behind Robby, Cerberus gave a sharp, involuntary bark.
“Not that!” Waub grumbled. For a second his voice sounded also from Cerberus’s transceiver. He dropped the device, which Robby recognized as a Control Box—no doubt the one for the transceiver and cap Cerberus was wearing—and picked up another small device with buttons, He pushed one. “You shouldn’t upset me like that, Boy! I’m not supposed to be upset. Doctor’s orders. ‘Not proved!’” He broke off suddenly as a small voice spoke from the object he was holding. “Dick, Harvey, come get this boy and lock him up in one of the bedrooms. ‘Not proved!' You’ll see it proved when I set off the bombs that will blow up the Ross ice shelf and the permanent pack ice and start the ice melting all around the South Pole! Once started, it’ll melt all the way and the continents’ll drift back together again. It’ll be Gondwanaland again, and the world will be a tropical paradise—oh, there you are, Dick!”
“I’m Harvey,” said the big man who had just entered the room.
“Harvey, then,” said Waub, “take this boy, feed him, and find him a place to sleep. And lock him in. Leave Cerberus to guard him. You’d better pick one of the bedrooms with a pool and a water lock to the ocean outside.”
Robby stood up. He was not at all unhappy to hear about food and bed. He looked keenly at the Cap Control Box Waub had picked up first. He wondered if he could find one like it. If he could—a yawn came to interrupt him, and he barely got his hand up over his mouth in time.
“You think over what I’ve said, Boy!” muttered the Director of the Tropicans. “I don’t mean to be angry with you. No—no. But I won’t have anyone around me who doesn’t have an open mind about Gondwanaland. Maybe you can come back when you’ve learned not to argue so much. Take him away, Harvey.”
“This way,” said Harvey to Robby, in a friendly voice,and led him out the door, with Cerberus slithering along in the rear. Robby heard the big oak door close behind him,cutting off the voice of the Director of the Tropicans, who was still muttering to himself in outrage at Robby’s refusal to believe in Gondwanaland, and the tropical paradise that would result from its return.
“Is he . . .” mumbled Robby, half-asleep in spite of himself. But the end of the question was lost before he could get it out of his mouth.
“You’d better be careful how you talk to the Director,” he thought he heard Harvey’s voice say from a long way off as the man guided him down the corridor. “We’re all here to bring Gondwanaland back to life. And there’s only twenty-four hours more to go before we do.”
For some reason, Robby thought sleepily, he should be very frightened by what Harvey had just said. But just then he was too close to the dark mists of slumber to figure it all out.
Song of Mr. Lillibulero
He woke with a start some hours later, with Harvey’s last words ringing in his ears. He sat up in the dark and peered around him, wide awake all at once, and trying to see where he was. He had suddenly remembered, dreaming, why Harvey’s words about twenty-four hours before the Tropicans brought Gondwanaland back to life should have frightened him. And his dreams had put the understanding into pictures.
In his dream, he had seen Brownlee Patterson Waub pulling a large red lever, inside a closet in his room. Then, in a flash, Robby had been watching from above in the air as the pack ice around the Antarctic coast and the whole Ross ice shelf went up in a sheet of flame. And abruptly, where all that ice had been, there was a tremendous tidal wave curling over and bearing down on the Palship X Two, as his father tried in vain to outrun the wave.
Just before the Palship had been buried under all that water,Robby had awakened. Now he sat upright and tried to see in what kind of a place he had been put.
He was in a bed, and a dimness that was not a complete blackness surrounded him. It was the dimness of the Antarctic underwater with the great mass of the floating ice above him hiding the sunlight. Robby could just barely make out that he was in a good-sized room with the flat darkness that must be the surface of the pool Waub had mentioned covering the floor at the other end. Shapes of furniture bulked here and there nearby, and there was the faintly seen outline of a small bedside table.
He reached out to the tabletop, found a row of buttons there, and pushed the first one.
Light sprang on all over the room. He sat there blinded and blinking in the unexpected brightness.
The room was, as he had suspected, a large one. The wall farthest away from him was transparent, letting in the fain dim light of underwater when the artificial light was turned off. As he had thought, a pool filled a full third of the room and touched the transparent wall. A water lock bulged beyond the wall, so that it would be possible to swim from the pool to the ocean outside, or vice versa.
As he watched, the still surface of the pool broke and Cerberus raised his head to look at the bed and Robby.
Robby looked around at the rest of the room. On a round coffee table not far from the bed was a silver tray. And on the silver tray was a bowl of soup, two sandwiches stacked on top of each other, and cut diagonally down through the center, and a pint bottle of milk.
Robby got out of the bed, discovered that he was still wearing his usual slacks and tee shirt. His Outside Suit had been taken off and laid on a chair. In his stocking feet he padded over to the coffee table and sat down in the chair before it.
He picked up one of the sandwich halves and bit into it. It was a cheese sandwich and the bread had got rather dry while he slept, but just then it tasted good. He opened the bottle of milk and drank some. It was warm, but it tasted better than the sandwich. The soup, of course, was cold. But by the time Robby finished the sandwiches and the milk he was still hungry, so he tasted that, too. It was tomato soup, which is not at its best cooled down, but Robby surprised himself by eating it quickly.
With something inside him, he began to feel better. His mind started to work. He got up and went over and tried the door to the corridor. It was locked. Then he discovered that there was a bathroom attached to the room he was in and he went in there to splash cold water on his face and bring himself wide awake.
The water worked. When he came out again, he was thinking of several things he had been too sleepy to pay attention to when Tropican Director Waub had been talking to him. The first thing was that Waub had admitted that Tropicans had shot down Mr. Lillibulero’s flyer. If that was so, then they were the ones who had taken the Control Caps, too. Mr. Lillibulero must have been after them from the start and that was how he happened to be on the scene when Robby and his father found that the Palship had been broken into.
Then, Waub had mentioned blowing up the pack ice of the Antarctic and the Ross ice shelf. He had be
en very angry and excited at the time and perhaps he had not intended to let that slip out. But he had meant it—and it was almost as enormous a statement as someone saying he would blow up the ice of the whole frozen North Pole area. The Ross ice shelf alone, Robby knew, was as big in area as the country of France.
Blowing up something that large could only be done with nuclear explosives. Nowadays these were made only in very small sizes for commercial use such as mining and harbor construction, in packages that could be carried in one hand. It would take a tremendous number of these packages to blowup all the Antarctic pack ice.
The third thing that Robby now suddenly remembered was that the twin, Harvey, who had led him away from Director Waub’s room, had said something about Gondwanaland being brought back to life in the next twenty-four hours. If that meant the Tropicans were planning to blow up, and actually could blow up and thereby melt all that ice by that time, then maybe Robby’s nightmare about the tidal wave crashing down on his father in the Palship was not too far from becoming real.
Robby began to feel scared and helpless once more but he fought the feeling down. Don’t waste valuable time feeling sorry for yourself, he could almost hear his father saying, as he was in the habit of repeating whenever some project of Robby’s went wrong, or something Robby was building fell apart. Do something!
Robby looked at the pool. A thought occurred to him. He went over to his Outside Suit and climbed into it. When he had it firmly on and the helmet sealed tight over his head, he walked into the pool. The bottom sloped steadily until the water was over his head. Cerberus, who had been down under the pool’s surface on some investigation of his own, swam over to see what Robby was doing. Under the water he looked enormous.
He made no objection, however, as Robby examined the water lock. This was simply a small room with two doors.You opened the inner door, went into the small room, closed the first door behind you to seal in the water and air behind,and then opened the outer door.
Robby tried it, shutting the inner door before Cerberus could follow him into the small room. The outer door was not locked. He found he could open it easily the moment the inner door was safely sealed and closed. He remembered how Director Waub had expected a boy like Robby to be frightened of being towed by Cerberus down under the water. It had never occurred to Waub, evidently, that Robby would try the water lock as a way of escape.
Now, he swam free out into the dark Antarctic waters below the pack ice. But there, his courage failed him. And he turned back.
No one could blame him. It was true Robby had spent most of his free time in and under the waters around the Point Loma Station since he was old enough to wear a swimming mask. But it was a far cry from those sunlit waters with the friendly bottom less than fifty feet below, and in plain sight,to this murky darkness under the ice roamed by killer whales and leopard seals, like Cerberus but uncontrolled by caps, in which he had no way of knowing where he was going or what might be chasing after him.
Heavy-hearted, desperate, Robby swam back into the water lock, closed the outside door, and opened the inner one. Cerberus nosed curiously at him, but he ignored the great seal and made his way back up out of the water and sat down at its shallow edge, discouraged, with his feet lapped by the water and no hope in his heart.
Fat Director Waub had been right. There was no escape out the water lock for a thirteen-year-old boy, no matter how much at home he was in the sea.
Robby sat there, feeling more alone than he had ever felt in his life. Suddenly a heavy weight settled down across the toes of the boots of his Outside Suit.
He looked down to see what the weight could be, and blinked. Cerberus had come up to the shallow end of the pool and laid his great dog-like head upon Robby’s feet. His dark seal-eyes stared up into Robby’s, and they were the eyes of every animal who had ever come to love and trust a human being.
It was a miracle, but then perhaps it was not so much of a miracle after all, if you take for granted the much repeated miracle of affection between human and animal. There were reasons behind Cerberus coming as he did now to offer his friendship to Robby.
The first of these was his intelligence. The seals do not have the highly developed brains of the whales and the dolphins. But below this level they are among the brightest,and very possibly the most bright, of the animal kingdom.It is true that in his ordinary wild way of life in the ice pack it was his great strength and savage courage that Cerberus depended on the most. But the intelligence was there, and he was quick to recognize situations and under-stand them.
For many centuries man had believed that the only animals he could really tame were those who could be made dependent on him, like the dog, the cat, the ox, and the mule. He had believed that the wild animals, and especially the great carnivores like the timber wolf and the African lion, could never be safely known by human beings unless these beasts were safely penned behind the bars of a cage.
Then, gradually, stories began to come from people who had made friends with the great carnivores without trying to cage them first. And, here and there, it was begun to be understood that each animal is an individual in its own right.Some will respond to affection, as some people will respond to affection, more quickly than others. The most important thing is that people do not try to make toys or playthings out of them. For the great carnivores are not built to be dominated by force and if man tries to so dominate them, they will always look on him as an enemy to their teeth and claws. But if they come to understand affection and friendship, even these wild and powerful beasts will sometimes come of their own free will—as the lion has been known to do and as Cerberus did now—and lay their head in trust and affection on the feet of a human being.
What exact thing or things had brought Cerberus to do this, was something it was impossible for Robby to tell. Certainly,for some time now the leopard seal had been held in the power of the Control Cap, made to come and go, stop and wait, by harsh signals to his brain sent by the unskilled hands of Director Waub. Perhaps this had made the big seal helpless and unhappy for the first time in his life, and as a result, he was receptive to kindness. Robby’s long experience in handling his dolphin, Balthasar, and other sea and land animals had perhaps made his touch different from most people’s. So that when Robby took hold of the seal’s collar to be towed down under water to Tropican Headquarters Number One, Cerberus had recognized that here was a kind person, the first potential friend he had met since he had been made the slave of Waub.
Now, neither he nor Robby was alone in this underwater fortress and prison any longer.
The effect was electrifying upon both of them.
Robby’s first reaction was to do something about the Control Cap fastened to the back of Cerberus’s collar and pressing against his head. He bent over with the seal’s head in his lap to examine it.
It was, as he had almost expected, stamped with the name and number of the Salt Water Research Division. It could not be one of the Caps stolen from the Palship X Two, because Cerberus had evidently been wearing it for some time. Therefore it must have been one stolen from some other ship or warehouse at an earlier date.
However, this Control Cap was like the ones Robby was familiar with, and which he had been going to write his school paper on. They were made in two attached parts. One part was like a radio receiver that received the signals transmitted by Waub’s Control Box. The other was a little transmitting device which relayed electrical impulses set off by the signals directly into the proper area of the seal’s brain. In this way, if Waub pressed his controls for the signal “Stop,” almost immediately inside Cerberus’s head the big seal felt a sudden alarm, as if he stood on the edge of an ice floe above water in which a hungry killer whale had just shown his raking back fin, black as a pirate’s sail.
That was all there was to the cap—the really delicate and intricate machinery was in the transmitter in Waub’s hands.But the Control Cap did have a little plate that could be removed, so that the power of th
e impulses it received could be set stronger or weaker.
Now Robby, with experienced fingers, unscrewed the plate and quickly set these controls down to the very minimum.Then he replaced the plate. It was not much to do in return for Cerberus’s offer of friendship, but it would at least tone down the hard signals that had been making the big seal flinch and duck.
Then he reached down under the powerful jaws and gave the transceiver a half-turn in its mountings on the collar. Now the camera part of it pointed not straight ahead, but down at Cerberus’s hairy throat and chest. Waub would not be able to see what was going on until he got the transceiver turned straight forward again.
“Now, Cerberus,” said Robby patting the big head. “Let’s see if we can’t figure out something to do before they find out I’ve adjusted your equipment.” A thought was beginning to take shape in Robby’s mind that filled him with hope.
He had turned back from facing the dark waters outside alone. But, if he had Cerberus with him, things might be entirely different. For one thing, used as he was to having someone like Balthasar, his dolphin, with him, he would be a lot braver in Cerberus’s company. For another, Cerberus with his knowledge and instincts would know how to find an opening in the pack ice where they could crawl out, and would also sense if any enemy came toward them. Moreover, Cerberus could tow Robby many times faster than Robby himself could swim.
“What we could do—” Robby was murmuring to Cerberus,when a distant sound of voices and of running feet approaching the hall outside the locked door of his room made him look up.
He scrambled to his feet. As he did so, the running feet stopped at the door. The lock of the door clicked back. The door flew open and the two twins, Harvey and Dick, burst into the room, carrying heavy revolvers in their hands.
“What’s going on?” cried Harvey—or it may have been Dick—as they bore down on Robby. “The Director thought the seal had eaten you, or some—”
Secrets of the Deep Page 13
