by Eando Binder
“From the frying pan into the fire,” commented Barton ruefully. “We not only have to go underwater, but reach the bottom of a pit.” He turned to Hillory. “The question is, can your psi-bubble transport us under the sea?”
“That’s a new one for me,” admitted Hillory. “I only aimed at levitation through the air at comparatively low pressure. Diving down a mile or more will surround us with tremendous water pressure.”
“If we have to ask Clyde for some sort of deep-sea diving vessel,” said Barton glumly, “he’ll probably refuse and turn the project over to the government.”
Hillory jerked his body erect. “We can’t let that happen. This project is our baby. But how in the world can we go down to a sunken world….”
He snapped his fingers. “Remember my psi-spectrum? Astral projection is the answer.”
“What’s that?” Barton asked warily.
“Well, it’s sort of converting your physical body to a different plane of vibration and projecting it through matter without touching it.”
“Like a ghost?” said Barton, aghast.
“Yes—and no. We don’t separate our psyche from our body but turn our body into a psi-form, so to speak. In the psi or astral form, our bodies will then be impervious to water pressure when we descend into the ocean.”
“Have you done this before?”
“Yes, but only to a limited degree, such as walking through a wall, or swimming underwater for a mile. To reach Atlantis, however, we’ll have to stay in the astral state for hours.”
Hillory turned to face the other two. “Look, I won’t ask either of you to try this experiment. It could be dangerous. I’ll go it alone…”
“The hell you will,” said Merry.
“You took the words out of my mouth,” added Barton. “Show me the ropes, and I’ll ghost along with you down to Atlantis.”
Hillory took them to his lab and spent the rest of the day showing them the technique. Merry and Barton each wore a helmet with a tektite crystal on top. Hillory instructed them in how to concentrate.
“It’s really not hard. The tektite does the work and siphons down psi-power for you. You really will yourself to become astral.”
Merry, who had shared much of Hillory’s psi-experiments, caught on more quickly. Her body suddenly turned wraithlike, almost transparent. Barton stared, then concentrated, and also turned into a misty form.
“I can see right through you,” said Merry impishly. She realized it was telepathy talk since her lips made no sound.
Experimentally, Barton poked his fist at the wall. He felt a weird cold feeling, but nothing solid was in his way.
“This is an oversimplification,” said Hillory by way of explanation. “But all your atoms and molecules have speeded up their motions until you are at a totally different vibratory rate from ordinary matter. You can then ‘ooze’ through matter without being hindered.”
“Say,” said Barton suddenly. “Is that the form the mind-alien has?”
“No,” said Hillory emphatically. “Don’t get the different psi-states mixed up. Jorzz is a free-mind, something I haven’t achieved yet. That means he has separated his mentality from his physical body and acts independently of it. In our case there is no such separation.”
Barton swung his fist at the wall again, but this time there was a bruising thump and he jerked back with a howl of pain.
“You didn’t hold your astral state long enough,” grinned Hillory. “But now that you have the hang of it, you can practice staying in the astral state for more than an hour. And I have to practice right along with you.”
A while later, the door opened and Dr. Clyde came in. He looked blankly at first, as if seeing nothing. Then he noticed the three ghost-like figures and turned white.
“Hillory…Barton…Merry Vedec. Are you dead?” he quavered.
Hillory snapped into view as a fully solid and real person. “Hardly, chief. Let me explain about where spot number two is on the alien map and what our method will be for finding the treasure.”
When Hillory had finished, Clyde looked worried. “I don’t know if I should let you try these paranormal experiments, risking your lives. Something might go wrong. The government could send down a deep-sea vessel….”
“And risk the lives of a big crew,” put in Hillory. “Deep-sea stuff is no picnic, in any case. And I believe psi-powers can be more depended on than technology.”
“Go to it then,” sighed Clyde. “Do you need any special supplies?”
‘That’s the beauty of it,” said Hillory. “In astral form we won’t need deep-sea diving suits or air or anything. We can explore miles down in the ocean as if taking a stroll through a garden.”
“How are you going to see down there?” said Clyde cannily. “It’s pitch-dark in the ocean below 3,000 feet. And even if you find the treasure, how can your nonmaterial astral hands pick it up?”
Barton stared in shock at Hillory, as if suddenly aware of these problems. But Hillory was unshaken. “I’ve thought of all that, chief. And I have the psi-answers, I assure you.”
Clyde threw up his hands and left wordlessly.
“We’ll make our astral trip tomorrow,” Hillory told his two companions.
Chapter 11
The psi-bubble again wafted itself away from Serendipity Labs, holding three passengers. It reached high-mach speed and swung over the Atlantic Ocean. Hillory consulted the earth map they had fed to Brains, showing the ancient landmass of Atlantis. He had marked down the latitude and longitude coordinates that the computer had supplied to the spot marked “X.”
Barton used the Pathfinder, another Serendipity product which acted as a compass, sextant, and inertial guidance system all wrapped in one, leading them unerringly to a spot over the Atlantic that was their jumping-off point into the deep.
Hillory brought the bubble to a mid-air halt, just above the rolling waves. He pointed straight down. Then he handed each of the others a pair of odd-looking goggles, donning a pair himself.
“Clairvoyance goggles,” he said.
“Seeing things through ESP?” grunted Barton.
“Right. By clairvoyance many people have seen in their mind’s eye startling scenes at a distance through some mysterious psi-channel. Clairvoyance has been called ‘mental TV’. What I’ve done with these goggles is make it a deliberate rather than random event. In short, merely by drawing down psi-power with our tektite helmets, we activate the goggles into clairvoyance to show us everything around us. It requires no light, so we’ll be able to see in pitch darkness down at the sea bottom.”
Just how far down was it? This they could not know, nor could Brains give any data. Somewhere below lay an ancient land that had once been a thriving society in 35,000 B.C. Even a super-scientific land. That part might be pure legend but not the land itself.
“Ready for astral submersion?”
The other two nodded. The tektite crystal on Hillory’s helmet glowed as he suddenly turned wraithlike and dove down into the water. Two more phantom forms followed. They felt no sensation of shock hitting the water nor any sense of chill. There was no choking and gasping from drawing water into their lungs.
In astral form they were divorced from all such physical effects. They glided down swiftly, propelled by their own will power, backed up by psi-energy. When the sunlight faded into a dim greenness and then dark murk, their clairvoyance goggles began working. At first their vision was distorted as they saw surrealistic fish swimming by. But then the scenes clarified into sharper details than any searchlight could supply.
Using psi-intuition—another definite psi-spectrum power latent in every human—Hillory could gauge how far down they were going.
“One mile and still going down,” he flashed to his companions via ESP.
“Two miles…nothing in sight”
“Three miles…land ahoy!”
They slowed up as below them spread a vast sunken land of valleys and mountains just as in upper earth. Here
and there they discerned temple ruins of stately stone columns and tumbled archways. Huge statuary was also evident. Roadways that were once well-paved and now uptorn still wound beyond the watery horizon.
Hillory even thought he saw the ruins of giant factories and other industrial buildings. A great civilization had once flowered here, all but forgotten, long before the rise of Sumeria and Egypt. Their alien treasure hunt was changing human history or at least shedding light on the darkness of the past.
But they had no time for exploring. Barton and Merry would only be able to hold their astral state for a few hours. They must find the second treasure and be off before then.
“Erosion,” gasped Hillory in dismay. “Water erosion for 35,000 years. Even on land most ancient meteorite craters have filled in with loose dirt and crumbling rocks. Down here under water, flows of mud and ooze would long ago have filled the entire pit.”
The three halted, confused. “Then we’ll never find the spot,” said Merry with a disappointed note in her ESP voice.
“Wait,” admonished Barton, pointing north. “That wide patch of darkish ooze. It seems to have some sort of high stone wall around it.”
As they glided their astral forms overhead, they could distinctly see the lines of the ruins where once immense stone structures had walled off the edge of a pit now filled in.
“We’ve found it, thanks to the Atlanteans,” sang Hillory, cheerfully. “They evidently walled off the pit because it was so hazardous to keep children or grazing animals from falling in. Or maybe it was a famous scenic spot and they ran vehicles along a flat wall to gaze down awed into the gigantic hole. Anyway, there it is. Now we dive down through the mud just as easily as water…
There was just a vague change in temperature and an adjustment required in using the clairvoyant goggles, as they plunged down through the sediment piled up for centuries. No digging machine could ever penetrate to the bottom, but their intangible forms found no barrier to stop them.
“Now to find the treasure container itself,” said Hillory. “Just where it will be is hard to say. We don’t know the exact bottom of the former pit.”
“Then we have to hunt blind,” said Barton doubtfully. “It might take hours…days….”
“You should know better than that,” returned Hillory easily. “There are psi-tricks for every problem. You’ve heard of metal detectors up on earth used for finding minerals and ores. I’m going to use a psi-metal detector.” Hillory drew down psi-power into his tektite crystal, then mentally fashioned it into electromagnetic radiations that spread in all directions. Quite like a scintillometer, the tektite began to sparkle suddenly as he drifted through the ocean-bottom ooze.
A moment later his clairvoyance goggles spied the huge arm of a buried statue. And in its giant hand was a square metal box exactly like the one they had found on Mount Everest.
Hillory tried to grab the box before he realized his astral hands would only go through it. Then he concentrated on drawing down psi-energy and spraying it over the box until it too turned into a misty astral box.
“The second treasure,” exulted Barton as Hillory brought it to them. “Hmm, do you suppose the same thing is inside….”
“Yes,” said Hillory who had mentally adjusted his clairvoyance goggles to peer into the metal box. “The same big crystalline globe. The same coiled up strips that look like a tape.”
“Ouch,” said Barton. “That means like the first one we can’t open that crystal globe. It begins to look as if the four spots will give us four strips of tape which are to be spliced together—to do what? Show movies or give us a travelogue of the galaxy?”
“No, I’m sure it’s nothing that trivial.” Hillory’s ESP voice was grave. “I have a hunch—another psi characteristic—that it will be of earth-shaking, or universe-shaking, importance. The deadly eagerness of the mind-alien to get hold of this treasure is another clue to its vast importance.” He sighed. “Well, we won’t solve that new mystery until we gather all four tapes and get the gem-globes open. Let’s go up now, with the box.”
Barton glanced upward nervously. “This is about the time for Jorzz to strike. Keep your eyes, or clairvoyant goggles, open.”
As they wafted their astral forms up out of the pit and its ooze into the clear ocean water, Merry gave a little ESP screech. “What’s coming? That giant wriggling body…it’s a sea serpent!”
Undulating its long sinuous body, a fantastic monster was charging them, gaping jaws and sharp teeth open wide.
“Just as he was able to take over the android, Mr. Mind took over the primitive brain of that sea monster,” Hillory said rapidly.
“But what are we worried about?” laughed Barton suddenly. “In our astral form, he’ll clamp his jaws on nothing—nothing solid. How can he harm us?”
Barton stopped laughing as the sea serpent began to change—into a rippling mistiness.
“Well aware of our astral state,” barked Hillory, “Mr. Mind is siccing an astral sea serpent at us. His bite will be just as effective as if we are all in material form. Can you two speed up?”
But Barton and Merry were unable to increase their gliding motion through the water. “We’re not experts in using psi-power,” gulped Merry. “We’re drawing down all we can now. But you can draw more, Thule. You have the treasure box….”
“So get going,” yelled Barton.
Hillory’s ghost-form did suddenly shoot away. Merry gave a half-sob and Barton stared disbelievingly. I didn’t think he’d turn coward…think of his own skin….”
Hillory had dashed upward, pumping psi-power from the tektite. Now he turned and made a feint at the sea serpent’s head. Its cruel jaws snapped shut too late. Hillory kept going along the sea serpent’s length and then his eyes gleamed. As he suspected, the tail end of the serpent was not wraithlike. Mr. Mind had not taken the trouble to astralize the entire beast when only the head end would be needed to kill.
Glancing about, Hillory saw a hilly slope and rocks at the top. Darting there, he picked a house-sized boulder that was roughly round in shape. Then, sucking in another charge of psi-power, he sent a psi-blast of PK at the rock. Like dice being tumbled about by PK power in ESP experiments at universities, his psi-blow heaved the great stone forward down the slope.
Down it rumbled, though silently to Hillory’s psi-ears, and crashed into the tail of the sea serpent, ripping out a huge wound from which blood began to pour. The sea serpent’s tail began to lash and writhe in agony, and its head end came swinging around as if to see what had attacked it.
That left Barton and Merry free of menace, and they were already streaking upward. Hillory followed, staring down at the awesome sight of a monster longer than a whale twisting and coiling in its death-throes as its lifeblood poured out, staining the water. The front end of the serpent had now materialized.
“Mr. Mind had to abandon it,” said Hillory in satisfaction.
“You won another round in your mental duel with Jorzz,” said Barton, admiringly.
But Hillory still had an uneasy feeling, a hunch that their mental enemy had not yet given up. A subtle psi-warning told him that Jorzz was nearby, perhaps working up another menace.
Hillory’s psi-voice became urgent. “Hurry,” he told the other two. “We still have two miles to go to the ocean surface. Mr. Mind is still around and may pull another trick….”
Then he saw it. A deep-sea fish of fantastic shape, with knobs all over and a row of luminescent spots, came swimming directly toward them. It had two huge eyes that glowed redly in a fixed stare. And unlike other fish, it did not flee from them but swam boldly in their direction.
“That fish,” warned Hillory. “Mr. Mind has taken it over and is projecting a hypnotic stare through those eyes.”
Hillory then felt the telepathic command that went with the luminous eyes. “Stop! Go back…back to the deep-sea. Turn back down…down…down….”
With a furious effort of will, Hillory pumped psi-power through his te
ktite and was able to wrench his eyes away. But to his horror he saw Barton and Merry stop as if in a trance. Their astral forms had turned rigid. And as the hypnotic chant grew stronger, they obediently turned and wafted themselves down—down toward the sea bottom again.
“No, don’t do it,” came Hillory’s ESP yell. “Barton…Merry…listen to me. Don’t go down…go up.”
For a moment the pair stopped, hesitating. But then the deep-sea fish swam in front of them, fixing them with its large unblinking stare. Within the fish, controlling its movements, the mind-alien sent forth his mesmeric command: “Go down…down…down….”
Hillory groaned as he saw Barton and Merry dive down again. To their doom. Soon now their power to hold onto their astral forms would fade away. They would turn to their normal material forms, three miles deep in the ocean. No human beings could survive there for an instant. They would be immediately crushed by the pressure, even before they had a chance to drown.
Hillory still held the treasure box, which was what Jorzz wanted. Yet even though Hillory had warded off the hypnotic command, he was now forced to turn and also dive down in desperation, hoping to save his companions. Hillory himself was now in danger, having drained so much of his psi-gathering power in the battle against the sea serpent. He too would soon lose his psi-hold on his astral form and turn material.
Then three crushed human bodies would lie on the dark sea bottom, while some squid or other sea creature animated by Jorzz would then snatch away the treasure box.
All this rushed through Hillory’s panicky mind as he dove after the wraith forms of Barton and Merry. What could he do against the devilish psi-powers displayed by the mind-alien? How could he break the hypnotic spell?
Inspiration rose out of his whirling thoughts. Setting his astral lips grimly, Hillory increased his speed—not swimming but gliding frictionlessly through the water—and began to overtake the deep-sea fish which was swimming in wide loops in order to periodically turn and face the diving pair, keeping them under hypnotic control.
