Blunt, straightforward little Holland was the first nation to propose openly a wholesale transfer of population. Ted read the note, or at least the version of it given the press on February 21st. In substance it simply repeated the arguments Kay had read from the London paper - the plea to humanity, the affirmation of an honest and industrious citizenry, and the appeal to the friendship that had always existed between the two nations; and the communication closed with a request for an immediate reply because of "the urgency of the situation." And an immediate reply was forthcoming.
This was also given to the press. In suave and very polished diplomatic language it pointed out that the United States could hardly admit nationals of one country while excluding those of others. Under the terms of the National Origins Act, Dutch immigrants would be welcomed to the full extent of their quota. It was even possible that the quota might be increased, but it was not conceivable that it could be removed entirely. The note was in effect a suave, dignified, diplomatic 'No.'
March drifted in on a southwest wind. In the Southern states it brought spring, and in Washington a faint forerunner of balmy weather to come, but to the Gulf Stream countries it brought no release from the Arctic winter that had fallen on them with its icy mantle. Only in the Basque country of Southern France, where vagrant winds slipped at intervals across the Pyranees with the warm breath of the deflected Stream, was there any sign of the relaxing of that frigid clutch. But that was a promise; April would come, and May - and the world flexed its steel muscles for war.
Everyone knew now that war threatened. After the first few notes and replies, no more were released to the press, but everyone knew that notes, representatives, and communiques were flying between the powers like a flurry of white doves, and everyone knew, at least in Washington, that the tenor of those notes was no longer dove-like. Now they carried brusque demands and blunt refusals.
Ted knew as much of the situation as any alert observer, but no more. He and Asa Gaunt discussed it endlessly, but the dry Texan, having made his predictions and seen them verified, was no longer in the middle of the turmoil, for his bureau had, of course, nothing to do with the affair now. So the Geological Survey staggered on under a woefully reduced appropriation, a handicap shared by every other governmental function that had no direct bearing on defense.
All the American countries, and for that matter, every nation save those in Western Europe, were enjoying a feverish, abnormal, hectic boom. The flight of capital from Europe, and the frantic cry for food, had created a rush of business, incessant, avid, and exports mounted unbelievably. In this emergency, France and the nations under her hegemony, those who had clung so stubbornly, to gold ever since the second revaluation of the franc, were now at a marked advantage, since their money would buy more wheat, more cattle, and more coal. But the paper countries, especially Britain, shivered and froze in stone cottage and draughty manor alike.
On the eleventh of March, that memorable Tuesday when the thermometer touched twenty-eight below in London, Ted reached a decision toward which he had been struggling for six weeks. He was going to swallow his pride and see Kay again. Washington was buzzing with rumors that Sir Joshua was to be recalled, that diplomatic relations with England were to be broken as they had already been broken with France. The entire nation moved about its daily business in an air of tense expectancy, for the break with France meant little in view of that country's negligible sea power, but now, if the colossus of the British navy were to align itself with the French army-.
But what troubled Ted was a much more personal problem. If Sir Joshua Lovell were recalled to London, that meant that Kay would accompany him, and once she were caught in the frozen Hell of Europe, he had a panicky feeling that she was lost to him forever. When war broke, as it surely must, there would go his last hope of ever seeing her again. Europe, apparently, was doomed, for it seemed impossible that any successful invasion could be carried on over thousands of miles of ocean, but if he could save the one fragment of Europe that meant everything to him, if he could somehow save Kay Lovell, it was worth the sacrifice of pride or of anything else. So he called one final time on the telephone, received the same response from an unfriendly maid, and then left the almost idle office and drove directly to her home.
The same maid answered his ring. "Miss Lovell is not in," she said coldly. "I told you that when you telephoned."
"I'll wait," returned Ted grimly, and thrust himself through the door. He seated himself stolidly in the hall, glared back at the maid, and waited. It was no more than five minutes before Kay herself appeared, coming wearily down the steps.
"I wish you'd leave," she said. She was pallid and troubled, and he felt a great surge of sympathy.
"I won't leave."
"What do I have to do to make you go away? I don't want to see you, Ted."
"If you'll talk to me just half an hour, I'll go." She yielded listlessly, leading the way into the living room where a fire still crackled in cheerful irony. "Well?" she asked.
"Kay, do you love me?"
"I - No, I don't!"
"Kay," he persisted gently, "do you love me enough to marry me and stay here where you're safe?"
Tears glistened suddenly in her brown eves. "I hate you," she said. "I hate all of you. You're a nation of murderers. You're like the East Indian Thugs, only they call murder religion and you call it patriotism."
"I won't even argue with you, Kay. I can't blame you for your viewpoint, and I can't blame you for not understanding mine. But - do you love me?"
"All right," she said in sudden weariness. "I do."
"And will you marry me?"
"No. No, I won't marry you, Ted. I'm going back to England."
"Then will you marry me first? I'll let you go back, Kay, but afterwards - if there's any world left after what's coming - I could bring you back here. I'll have to fight for what I believe in, and I won't ask you to stay with me during the time our nations are enemies, but afterwards, Kay - if you're my wife I could bring you here. Don't you see?"
"I see, but - no."
"Why, Kay? You said you loved me."
"I do," she said almost bitterly. "I wish I didn't, because I can't marry you hating your people the way I do. If you were on my side, Ted, I swear I'd marry you tomorrow, or today, or five minutes from now - but as it is, I can't. It just wouldn't be fair."
"You'd not want me to turn traitor," he responded gloomily. "One thing I'm sure of, Kay, is that you couldn't love a traitor." He paused. "Is it goodbye, then?"
"Yes." There were tears in her eyes again. "It isn't public yet, but father has been recalled. Tomorrow he presents his recall to the Secretary of State, and the day after we leave for England. This is goodbye."
"That does mean war!" he muttered. "I've been hoping that in spite of everything - God knows I'm sorry, Kay. I don't blame you for the way you feel. You couldn't feel differently and still be Kay Lovell, but - it's damned hard. It's damned hard!"
She agreed silently. After a moment she said, "Think of my part of it, Ted - going back to a home that's like - well, the Rockefeller Mountains in Antarctica. I tell you, I'd rather it had been England that sunk into the sea! That would have been easier, much easier than this. If it had sunk until the waves rolled over the very peak of Ben Macdubl-" She broke off.
"The waves are rolling over higher peaks than Ben Macdubl," he responded drearily. "They're-" Suddenly he paused, staring at Kay with his jaw dropping and a wild light in his eyes!
"The Sierra Madre!" he bellowed, in such a roaring voice that the girl shrank away. "The Mother range! The Sierra Madre! The Sierra Madre!"
"Wh - what?" she gasped.
"The Sierra-! Listen to me, Kay! Listen to me! Do you trust me! Will you do something - something for both of us? Us? I mean for the world! Will you?"
"I know you will! Kay, keep your father from presenting his recall! Keep him here another ten days - even another week. Can you?"
"How? How can I?"
"I don't know. Any way at all. Get sick. Get too sick to travel, and beg him not to present his papers until you can leave. Or - or tell him that the United States will make his country an alternate proposal in a few days. That's the truth. I swear that's true, Kay."
"But - but he won't believe me!"
"He's got to! I don't care how you do it, but keep him here! And have him report to the Foreign Office that new developments - vastly important developments - have come up. That's true, Kay."
"True? Then what are they?"
"There isn't time to explain. Will you do what I ask?"
"I'll try!"
"You're - well you're marvelous!" he said huskily. He stared into her tragic brown eyes, kissed her lightly, and rushed away.
* * *
Asa Gaunt was scowling down at a map of the dead Salton Sea when Ted dashed unannounced into the office. The rangy Texan looked up with a dry smile at the unceremonious entry.
"I've got it!" yelled Ted.
"A bad case of it," agreed Asa Gaunt. "What's the diagnosis?"
"No, I mean- Say, has the Survey taken soundings over the Isthmus?"
"The Dolphin's been there for weeks," said the older man. "You know you can't map forty thousand square miles of ocean bed during the lunch hour."
"Where," shouted Ted, "are they sounding?"
"Over Pearl Cay Point, Bluefields, Monkey Point, and San Juan del Norte, of course. Naturally they'll sound the places where there were cities first of all."
"Oh, naturally!" said Ted, suppressing his voice to a tense quiver. "And where is the Marlin?"
"Idle at Newport News. We can't operate both of them under this year's budget."
"To hell with the budget!" flared Ted. "Get the Marlin there too, and any other vessel that can carry an electric plumb!"
"Yes, sir - right away, sir," said Asa Gaunt dryly. "When did you relieve Golsborough as Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Welling?"
"I'm sorry," replied Ted. "I'm not giving orders, but I've thought of something. Something that may get all of us out of this mess we're in."
"Indeed? Sounds mildly interesting. Is it another of these international fiat - money schemes?"
"No!" blazed Ted. "It's the Sierra Madre! Don't you see?"
"In words of one syllable, no."
"Then listen! I've flown over every square mile of the sunken territory. I've mapped and photographed it, and I've laid out the geodetics. I know that buried strip of land as well as I know the humps and hollows in my own bed."
"Congratulations, but what of it?"
"This!" snapped Ted. He turned to the wall, pulled down the topographical map of Central America, and began to speak. After a while Asa Gaunt leaned forward in his chair and a queer light gathered in his pale blue eyes.
***
What follows has been recorded and interpreted in a hundred ways by numberless historians. The story of the Dolphin and the Marlin, sounding in frantic haste the course of the submerged Cordilleras, is in itself romance of the first order. The secret story of diplomacy, the holding of Britain's neutrality so that the lesser sea powers dared not declare war across three thousand miles of ocean, is another romance that will never be told openly. But the most fascinating story of all, the building of the Cordilleran Inter-continental Wall, has been told so often that it needs little comment.
The soundings traced the irregular course of the sunken Sierra Madre mountains. Ted's guess was justified; the peaks of the range were not inaccessibly far below the surface. A route was found where the Equatorial Counter Current swept over them with a depth at no point greater than forty fathoms, and the building of the Wall began on March the 31st, began in frantic haste, for the task utterly dwarfed the digging of the abandoned Canal itself. By the end of September some two hundred miles had been raised to sea-level, a mighty rampart seventy-five feet broad at its narrowest point, and with an extreme height of two hundred and forty feet and an average of ninety.
There was still almost half to be completed when winter swept out of the north over a frightened Europe, but the half that had been built was the critical sector. On one side washed the Counter Current, on the other the Equatorial Drift, bound to join the Gulf Stream in its slow march toward Europe, And the mighty Stream, traced by a hundred oceanographic vessels, veered slowly northward again, and bathed first the shores of France, then of England, and finally of the high northern Scandinavian Peninsula. Winter came drifting in as mildly as of old, and a sigh of relief went up from every nation in the world.
Ostensibly the Cordilleran Inter-continental Wall was constructed by the United States. A good many of the more chauvinistic newspapers bewailed the appearance of Uncle Sam as a sucker again, paying for the five hundred million dollar project for the benefit of Europe. No one noticed that there was no Congressional appropriation for the purpose, nor has anyone since wondered why the British naval bases on Trinidad, Jamaica, and at Belize have harbored so large a portion of His Majesty's Atlantic Fleet. Nor, for that matter, has anyone inquired why the dead war debts were so suddenly exhumed and settled so cheerfully by the European powers.
A few historians and economists may suspect. The truth is that the Cordilleran Inter-continental Wall has given the United States a world hegemony, in fact almost a world empire. From the south tip of Texas, from Florida, from Puerto Rico, and from the otherwise useless Canal Zone, a thousand American planes could bomb the Wall into ruin. No European nation dares risk that.
Moreover, no nation in the world, not even in the orient where the Gulf Stream has no climatic influence, dares threaten war on America. If Japan, for instance, should so much as speak a hostile word, the whole military might of Europe would turn against her. Europe simply cannot risk an attack on the Wall, and certainly the first effort of a nation at war with the United States would be to force a passage through the Wall.
In effect the United States can command the armies of Europe with a few bombing planes, though not even the most ardent pacifists have yet suggested that experiment. But such are the results of the barrier officially known as the Cordilleran Intercontinental Wall, but called by every newspaper after its originator, the Welling Wall.
***
It was mid-summer before Ted had time enough to consider marriage and a honeymoon. He and Kay spent the latter on the Caribbean, cruising that treacherous sea in a sturdy fifty-foot sloop lent for the occasion by Asa Gaunt and the Geological Survey. They spent a good share of the time watching the great dredges and construction vessels working desperately at the task of adding millions of cubic yards to the peaks of the submarine range that was once the Sierra Madre. And one day as they lay on the deck in swimming suits, bent on acquiring a tropical tan, Ted asked her a question.
"By the way," he began, "you've never told me how you managed to keep Sir Joshua in the States. That stalled off war just long enough for this thing to be worked out and presented. How'd you do it?"
Kay dimpled. "Oh, first I tried to tell him I was sick. I got desperately sick."
"I knew he'd fall for that."
"But he didn't. He said a sea voyage would help me."
"Then - what did you do?"
"Well, you see be has a sort of idiosyncrasy toward quinine. Ever since his service in India, where he had to take it day after day, he develops what doctors call a quinine rash, and he hasn't taken any for years."
"Well?"
"Don't you see? His before-dinner cocktail had a little quinine in it, and so did his wine, and so did his tea, and the sugar and the salt. He kept complaining that everything he ate tasted bitter to him, and I convinced him that it was due to his indigestion."
"And then?"
"Why, then I brought him one of his indigestion capsules, only it didn't have his medicine in it. It had a nice dose of quinine, and in two hours he was pink as a salmon, and so itchy he couldn't sit still!"
Ted began to laugh. "Don't tell me that kept him there!"
"Not that alone," said Kay demurely. "I m
ade him call in a doctor, a friend of mine who - well, who kept asking me to marry him - and I sort of bribed him to tell father he had - I think it was erysipelas he called it. Something violently contagious, anyway.
"And so-?"
"And so we were quarantined for two weeks! And I kept feeding father quinine to keep up the bluff, and - well, we were very strictly quarantined. He just couldn't present his recall!"
The Adaptive Ultimate
Dr. Daniel Scott, his dark and brilliant eyes alight with the fire of enthusiasm, paused at last and stared out over the city, or that portion of it visible from the office windows of Herman Bach—the Dr. Herman Bach of Grand Mercy Hospital. There was a moment of silence; the old man smiled a little indulgently, a little wistfully, at the face of the youthful biochemist.
"Go on, Dan," he said. "So it occurred to you that getting well of a disease or injury is merely a form of adaptation—then what?"
"Then," flashed the other, "I began to look for the most adaptive of living organisms. And what are they? Insects! Insects, of course. Cut off a wing, and it grows back. Cut off a head, stick it to the headless body of another of the same species, and that grows back on. And what's the secret of their great adaptability?"
Dr. Bach shrugged. "What is?"
Scott was suddenly gloomy. "I'm not sure," he muttered. "It's glandular, of course—a matter of hormones." He brightened again. "But I'm off the track. So then I looked around for the most adaptive insect. And which is that?"
"Ants?" suggested Dr. Bach. "Bees? Termites?"
"Bah! They're the most highly evolved, not the most adaptable. No; there's one insect that is known to produce a higher percentage of mutants than any other, more freaks, more biological sports. The one Morgan used in his experiments on the effect of hard X-rays on heredity—the fruit fly, the ordinary fruit fly. Remember? They have reddish eyes, but under X-rays they produced white-eyed offspring—and that was a true mutation, because the white eyes bred true! Acquired characteristics can't be inherited, but these were. Therefore—"
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 40
