VOYAGE OF TERROR
Inset in the hull plates of the submarine were floodlights of mammoth candlepower. Thick lenses protected these. Near each light was an inspection port—a small window of glass which would withstand tons of water pressure from without. The original purpose of these had been to permit those within the submarine to peer out at the under surface of the polar ice pack.
The floodlights were switched on. Glare sprayed. Walls of the cavern seemed to jump out of the black abyss at them. The rock was worn, channeled and ribbed by high waters. There were no stalactites, the usual icicles of stone found hanging from cave roofs. Water seepage was necessary to form those, and there was little rain on the arid waste above to make seepage.
The river, although not flowing, was full of eddies and flecked with foam. It was a tortured monster, bloating, filling the fantastic hole which was its lair.
“I never did like caves!” Monk grumbled, flinging out a furry hand to harvest Habeas Corpus, who was on the point of leaping overboard for a swim.
Long Tom, in the control room, crouched over the sonic device for measuring the depth of the water. The electrical wizard had made this particular apparatus with his own hands. It was a good deal more sensitive than the “fathometer” mechanism, utilizing the same principle, in use on most modern ocean liners.
In addition, Long Tom’s device would measure accurately the distance between the Helldiver hull and a mass of ice or stone above or near the sides. This latter feature would be invaluable, should the sub have to dive in the underground river, since Long Tom’s mechanism would register a distance of a few feet.
Very soon, they had to make such a dive. The cavern closed down into the river ahead. Dropping below, they dogged the hatches. Doc eased away buoyancy and set the diving rudders.
The floodlights were still brightly lighted. Ham took a bow inspection port, Renny and Monk to port and starboard. They kept a close, anxious lookout.
Doc, handling the controls, eased the Helldiver ahead. Microphones and loud speakers were banked along the control-room wall. They relayed each word of the watchers at the inspection ports.
Doc sank the submarine until the runner-protected keel was no more than eight or ten feet from the bottom. Soon there came a slight jar.
“Kind of a ledge in front,” Ham reported. “About thirty feet high—a waterfall effect. Ease the bows up, and we can get over.”
The floor—it was covered with a rubber-composition grid, so it would not become slippery with grease—tilted a bit. They crossed the ledge with a grumbling of steel runners on stone.
“This business is worse than goin’ under the polar ice!” Monk grumbled. “Up there, we always knew that in a pinch we could release a chemical from tanks in the hull, and melt the ice overhead——”
“Dry up!” snapped Ham, who was wearing a headset hooked in the loudspeaker circuit. “Your jabber gives me an ache—for the love of mud!”
Ham’s eyes popped; his jaw fell. He dropped his sword cane, something he rarely did.
* * * *
Spinning slowly with the sluggish current, a hideous, hairy apparition had come within range of the floodlights. It was a body, the cadaver of some hideous dead thing.
In stature, the specter attained nearly six feet. The arms, stiffly outstretched in rigor mortis, had a span somewhat greater than the height of the figure.
The face was an unlovely mingling of the beast and the human. Enormous was the mouth, the bared teeth porcine; the nose was flat, with the nostril holes seeming to open outward instead of downward.
The creature was furred almost as plentifully as a bear. The hair was white, as if the monstrosity had been wrapped in cotton, it seemed.
Dapper Ham, startled as he was, did not pass the chance for a verbal snapper at Monk’s expense.
“Look!” the lawyer howled. “Monk’s ghost!”
The thing did have Monk’s simian build, his furry hide—only that the hair was white instead of a rusty red. The slight underwater bow wave from the Helldiver caused the apparition to be flung outward. Still spinning, first to the side, then head over heels as the vagaries of current dictated, it was lost to sight.
Doc, leaping to an inspection port in the control room, had secured a glimpse of the creature.
“Hey!” Monk yelled. “Was that thing human?”
This caused Ham to give a loud, unkind laugh.
Through the electrical communication circuit, Doc called: “Do you fellers recall the crack the girl made about a White Beast, when she first saw Monk?”
“You mean this must’ve been a specimen of the things?” Monk questioned.
“What’s your bet?”
“That it was one of ’em,” Monk decided. “Furthermore, it was not a white-furred ape or a gorilla, but a human being of low mentality.” Then, as Ham laughed again: “Say, shyster, you ain’t kissed Habeas Corpus yet, as you agreed to do!”
Ham sobered. No more was heard out of him for many minutes.
“The creature was human, all right,” Doc agreed.
“But how come its hair was white?” Renny boomed.
Doc said dryly: “The girl’s hair is white, too.”
Monk grumbled in defense: “Her and that thing don’t belong to the same clan! This guy was a savage! You could tell that!”
“That’s not what I meant,” Doc told him. “Both of them having white hair indicates that both might have come from the same environment.”
Monk snorted. “I don’t think I’m gonna like that environment—if we get there!”
Doc now gave all his attention to navigating the Helldiver. It was a task akin to handling eggshells. This was no ice floe under which they were traveling; if they got stuck in the rock, there would be no melting their way free with chemical from reservoirs in the submarine’s skin.
The river waters, aided no doubt by the grinding effect of great boulders rolled along the bottom by the current, had grooved out sizable trenches. There was always a chance the submarine would wedge into one of these.
The ceiling was still under water. Current had strengthened. They were moving out of the backwater. Doc touched the levers which controlled the motor speed. Whine of the machinery increased. Breasting the river, the sub worked on.
It was like a metallic fish exploring the hole made by some water-dwelling animal. Blind, except for the few yards the floodlights penetrated, it nosed along. If there was peril ahead, they would be almost upon it before its presence could be detected.
There came a jarring, a shriek of runners on stone! The strange underseas boat came to a dead halt.
“Holy cow!” Renny thumped. “The current rollin’ over a ledge ahead jammed us down in a floor groove!”
* * * *
No semblance of hurry entered Doc’s movements. He touched buttons. Compressed air shrieked, water squished and bubbled, as ballast tanks blew. The Helldiver was fitted with two caged propellers, one port, one starboard.
Incidentally, there was a third propeller in the center, completely inclosed in a box of steel plates, which were hinged, and, in an emergency, could be dropped to permit use of the screw. This prop had never yet been used, except in tests. Nor did they need it now.
With a rasping grunt of stone and steel, the sub came free. Letting water pour back into the tanks, Doc trimmed the craft before it banged the ceiling.
They felt their way onward.
Ten minutes later they came to the surface. The cavern roof arched above, sometimes a few feet distant, sometimes many yards. Black enough to be solid, the darkness stretched ahead interminably.
Now that navigation was not so ticklish a proposition, Doc turned the controls over to gaunt Johnny.
Out on deck, Doc sampled the air. “Here’s some encouragement!” he called.
“What d’you mean?” Renny rumbled.
“The air is fresher!”
Every one not needed to navigate the Helldiver now clambered out on deck. The purity of the air—and it was noticeably more breathable, although still saturated with water and cavern odors—indicated there was an opening.
They used powerful flashlights; they were strong enough to give nearly the illumination of a searchlight. These whitened the cave walls to either side and the roof above.
Great crusts of dried salt, resembling a deposit of frost, was the principal scenic feature. The briny water flowing past seemed as sepia as a rushing flood of drawing ink.
Renny yelled to test the acoustics. His vast voice gobbled and thumped, crashing back and forth in echoes that seemed as loud as the original shout. The weird hullabaloo set up by his cry persisted many seconds before it died.
The Helldiver’s Diesel surface engines were turned on. Their clamor, hardly to be considered loud on the open sea, became a monstrous growling in the confines of the huge underground river.
* * * *
Doc and his men discussed the situation. Doc had noted the reading of a sensitive barometric altimeter, and its slow crawl as they progressed. This gave the height to which the river had lifted. It was not great.
“It’s a sluggish stream, as rivers go, at best,” Doc declared. “We have lifted enough, however, to know that there is no doubt but that the lower reaches of the stream, which we just quitted, are flooded.”
“Queer this thing has never been discovered,” Monk muttered.
“The mouth must be under the sea, but slightly exposed at low tide,” Doc suggested. “The rush of water leaving together with the charge of warm air from outdoors to replace the cool air inside, probably combine to make the sounds which gave the cavern mouth its name of Crying Rock.”
Johnny, whose geology knowledge included an understanding of such phenomena, seconded Doc’s reasoning.
“But the river is salt,” Monk pointed out.
“The desert of Rub’ Al Khali lies overhead,” Doc told him. “You remember the discussion we had about the place. Many rumors are heard about what lies in the region—great salt marshes, the ruins of cities erected by prehistoric peoples, and so on. The salt marshes might explain this river. It may be their overflow to the sea.”
Before many hours had passed, Mohallet and his men, imprisoned as well as barricaded within the hull, set up a great clamor. They were starving, they explained.
Doc offered them food for the release of the white-haired girl. They refused.
“You can consider yourselves on a diet, then,” Doc informed them. “No girl, no grub. And if any harm comes to that young lady, you’re out of luck!”
Mohallet tried to argue. Then he sought to obtain information about their progress.
“How many qasabahs have you covered?” he wanted to know.
“Why?” Doc countered.
“Bronze man, you do not know whence we are headed. Make me and my men your partners, and we will share alike. Too, you will have our help. You will need it.”
“You mean there is danger ahead?”
“Great danger! A danger greater than you can imagine!”
“And what else is there?”
“That I will tell you if you will release me!”
“Nothing doing. You got this information from the girl?”
“Wallah! I got it! No matter how!”
“How did the girl get out of this place to which we are going?”
Mohallet’s reply was a derisive grunt.
Doc persisted: “You wanted the submarine to go up this underground river. That’s why you came to New York to get it. But why didn’t you try planes?”
“Wa-asafah, akhkh! Alas! I did!”
This was news. There had been no previous hint that Mohallet had sought the use of airplanes before making his unfortunate attempt to get Doc’s submarine.
“Didn’t the planes succeed?”
“The desert is no place for planes, bronze man,” Mohallet said disgustedly. “The land is of such a great roughness that there is nowhere a landing place. And there are great sandstorms which cause sand to work into the motors. Too, the white-haired girl did not know whither direction this underground river went. Wallah! We searched long from the air! But we did not find the Phantom City! Nor did we find any sign of the White Beasts!”
“So you did get your information from the girl!” Doc mused. “Let’s hear some more about this Phantom City and White Beasts.”
Mohallet proceeded to imitate a clam.