Chapter I: Part 1

The Greatest Adventure

By JOHN TAINE

ACE BOOKS, INC.
23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

THE GREATEST ADVENTURE

Copyright, 1929, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

An Ace Book, by arrangement with the author.

All Rights Reserved

Printed in U.S.A.

JOHN TAINE is the nom de plume of the prominent research mathematician, Dr. Eric Temple Bell. Under his own name he has had published numerous popular books on mathematics and science. Under his pen-name he is the author of fifteen published science-fiction novels.

Dr. Bell was born in Peterhead, Scotland, in 1883. After attending various schools in England, he came to the United States (of which he is a naturalized citizen) in 1902, graduating from Stanford University in 1904. He took his master's degree at the University of Washington, and attained his doctorate in mathematics at Columbia University in 1912.

Since 1926 he has been Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.

* * * * *

THEY RIPPED THE VEIL OFF THE PAST

Dr. Eric Lane's party of five crept across the frozen Antarctic seeking the discovery of the ages. For that explorer-archeologist was following the startling account of a sea captain who had fished a lifeless organism from the nearby waters--a devilish monstrosity which fit no pattern of nature's.

Dr. Lane knew when he saw it that the creature had been manufactured. But how could that be? Had there once been intelligences on Earth so much higher than our own that they could create new life-forms?

But for all his excitement, what Dr. Lane was expecting to find were fossils, and maybe some ruins. He did not suspect--until too late--that he was opening a Pandora's box of living horrors.

* * * * *

1

BIRD OR REPTILE?

Undoubtedly Dr. Eric Lane was a man to be envied. With ordinary luck he might yet look forward to thirty-five years of the keenest pleasure a highly intelligent and healthy man can experience, the discovery of natural laws and their application to the good of his fellow men.

Although today was his fortieth birthday he felt not a day over eighteen. He smiled as the thought occurred to him, for it reminded him of his daughter Edith. She was just the age that he felt.

"We're a pair of kids," he laughed, looking fondly at the white and gold porcelain image of a sleepy tomcat, which she had deposited on his worktable as a birthday offering. Their appreciation of cats was but one among scores of likings which they shared in perfect understanding. Edith's gift of sympathy no doubt was responsible for her father's continued widowerhood. Not once in the ten years since his wife's death had Dr. Lane thought of marrying. His wife had been like Edith, quick to understand when he left the thought but half expressed, and tactfully willing to let him think in silence for days when the mood was on him. Her early death had broken him for a year or two, but with Edith and his work to live for he had gradually taken a grip on himself and set his face to the future.

"I wonder what she is doing," he mused, dwelling affectionately on the sleepy cat of her offering. As if in answer to his unspoken thought the study door opened noiselessly two inches. An appraising brown eye took in the situation.

"Come in," he called. "I'm not working. Your precious cat makes me long to sleep."

Edith entered. "Have you everything you want?" she asked, ready to withdraw at the slightest symptom of work on her father's part.

"Everything," he replied with a smile, "but you. Come in and stay a bit. Birthdays come only once a year."

Edith joined him by the worktable with its litter of microscopes and queer looking specimens pallid in their neatly stoppered alcohol jars.

"Do you know," he said, "it sometimes scares me a little?"

"What scares you, dear?" she queried, for once at a loss.

"Why, that I do have everything I want."

"Well, why shouldn't you? Surely you have earned it."

"So have thousands of other men. Yet they have nothing while I have everything."

"Oh," she laughed, "it isn't so bad as all that. You are not a billionaire. Nor do you want the whole earth as some of the others do, and cry when they can't get it."

"Still," he persisted, "there are thousands of men as able as I am who slave all their lives and have nothing but a bare living to show for all their labor."

He strolled over to the French windows and stood gazing absently at the clear spring beauty of San Francisco Bay and the tawny Marin hills on the farther shore. With all the world to choose from he had selected this spot as his abiding place, high upon Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco and the whole sublime sweep of the harbor. Often he would stand at this window for an hour at a time, lost in thought, only half consciously watching the swift white ferry boats rounding Goat Island with the clock-like precision of mechanical toys.

In all weathers the colorful panorama of bay, city and steep hills had a stimulating yet soothing effect on his mind. Although much of his work with the strangely diseased things of the sea was not beautiful, the ever changing beauty of his outlook seemed to infuse him with inexhaustible energy for the repellent drudgery which is the necessary foundation of any scientific advance. The warm spring breeze rustling the leaves of the young eucalyptus by the open window brought him back to the present and his surroundings.

"Yes," he continued, "there is young Drake, for instance, twenty-nine and as poor as a crow. When I was his age I had been a millionaire several times over for almost six years. Yet Drake has a fundamentally better mind than I have. He simply did not have my chance. That is all."

"But suppose he had been given your chance," Edith protested, "could he have taken it?"

"No," her father replied thoughtfully. "There's not a grain of business sense in him. Still, for all that, I maintain that his head is better than mine."

"Then why doesn't he use it?" There was just a tinge of scorn in Edith's retort. Her father glanced up at her face in surprise.

"I thought you and Drake were great pals," he said.

"We are," she admitted readily enough. "But the sheer futility of his everlasting inscriptions rather gets on my nerves. I do wish he would turn his brains to something less trivial."

"How do you know his work is so useless?" the Doctor parried.

"Oh, if you are going to begin one of your scientific attacks on me," she laughed, "I'll retire at once to my humble corner. I'm routed. But can't you see," she protested earnestly, "that all his deciphering of outlandish inscriptions cannot make an atom of difference, one way or the other, to human beings today? What does it matter how a half-civilized race, extinct centuries ago, predicted eclipses of the moon? And who on earth cares whether they counted by twenties instead of by tens as we do? Will it make life more endurable for any human being to know how those dead and forgotten people disposed of their corpses?"

"Perhaps," the Doctor hazarded with a smile, "you would prefer to see our young friend Drake turning his unique talents to the unsolved problem of infant colics?"

"It would be more useful," she flashed.

"But consider," her father demurred, "what would become of the Mexican and Guatemalan inscriptions in the meantime. Who would ever read them, fully and satisfactorily? If Drake can't do it, nobody can. After his brilliant success with the Bolivian puzzles he is almost certain to make short work of the rest."

"Yes," Edith admitted. "And if he does, what then?"

"Why, my dear, he will have saved numberless future generations of young Drakes from wasting their lives on a useless piece of tomfoolery."

She laughed. "I knew when we began that you would corner me. Still, I'm morally right, because you slipped out by the back door. That isn't what you really think of Drake's work."

"It isn't, angel child," he admitted. "You must look at life in a broader way. The conquest of disease and the discovery of the origin of life are not even half the problem. As the old fellows used to say, the whole is one, and you can't change the smallest part in any place without altering the entire fabric everywhere. Drake's Bolivian hieroglyphics are just as vital a part of science as are the obscure fish parasites that I mess with in the hope of learning something about cancer. And I shouldn't wonder," he concluded half seriously, "if some day Drake's work gives us a clue to the central problem."

"And shows us what life is?" she laughed. "When it does, I'll eat that."

She pointed to a particularly loathsome reptile in a glass jar. It was one of the Doctor's favorites, as the tumor to which it had succumbed appeared to be something unique in the history of disease.

"You will eat it without salt or pepper?" he stipulated.

"Absolutely," she agreed.

"Very well then. We shall see."

Edith turned to go. "Shall I send up anyone who comes with a real specimen?"

"Only if it looks pretty good."

"Pretty bad, you mean. All right, I'll inspect the horror and use my judgment."

With a last smile she was gone as noiselessly as she had come. She had her work, and the Doctor his. Her morning would be begun in a short conference with the Chinese servants, short because both she and they were efficient and wasted no words. Then she might work for an hour or two among her flowers in the English garden which was her pride, before settling down to the serious business of the day. This consisted of systematic reading directed by her father. At her own request he had mapped out a course of study and experiment which would enable her to understand something of what he was attempting to do. For two hours every evening a young doctor just from the University eked out his meagre practice helping her over the rough places in the day's work. In this way she made rapid and substantial progress. She never bothered her father with difficulties that any competent teacher could set right.

During the sunny part of the day she studied under the pepper trees by the gate, to be ready to receive and pay the Italian and Japanese fishermen who brought the curiosities of their catches to her father. All up and down the Pacific Coast, and even to Hawaii and far-off Japan, Dr. Lane of San Francisco was a celebrity among the fishermen and sailors. They knew him only distantly and impersonally as a deluded crank eager to pay one dollar apiece for curiously diseased and otherwise unsaleable fish. For weird monstrosities from the deep-sea levels he had been known to give as high as ten dollars each. What he did with all these abominations they never inquired. Sufficient unto their ignorance was the price thereof.

Occasionally some ambitious sailor would offer Edith his ingenious masterpiece of months of painstaking work in the forecastle. This usually took the form of a fantastic kelp and cocoanut mermaid, or an elaborately contrived sea-serpent of fish bladders and sea-weeds. One such offering convinced him that he had been wasting his time. Edith recognized the subtle distinction between abandoned nature and the highest art at the first glance. If the fraud was sufficiently horrible and otherwise pleasing she would buy it for her own collection, intending, as she told her father when he protested at her growing collection of freaks, some day to write a monograph on marine diseases of the imagination.

Left to himself the Doctor returned to the open window. Spring fever was upon him. Work and all its paraphernalia appeared as an insult to nature. Accordingly he yielded himself to the soft influences of the warm breeze and the flashing blue and silver glory of the bay. Standing there he let the memories of a busy lifetime stream through his mind and out to the future with all its promise of great things to be.

Ever since his school days he had been bitten by the ambition to trace life to its secret source and lay bare its mystery. To create life, or at least to control and direct it when once created, that was the great problem. Then, when he had begun to learn something of systematic biology, he had seen the utter hopelessness of a direct attack. Wasting no time he had turned his energies elsewhere, to humbler things, in order that he might, if lucky, surprise the enemy unaware. For he realized that a wholesale creation of a fully living organism by artificial means was probably centuries beyond the capabilities of science, and his was too high an intelligence to waste itself on unsolvable riddles. If in laborious investigations of lesser problems he might catch a glimpse of the goal he would be happy, provided only that his search was not otherwise fruitless and bore abundant good to humanity in the alleviation of pain and preventable misery. But he would not waste his gifts on crass impossibilities.

His course at first had been hard and indirect. Forced by poverty to work his way through school and college, he had come early to a wisdom far beyond his years. With absolute clarity he had seen that freedom from worry over money matters is the first essential for genuinely creative scientific work. While constantly harassed by poverty he had been powerless to concentrate his abilities on any problem worth the solving. He therefore decided in his second college year to swerve aside temporarily from his ambition and make money. To the regret of his instructors he abruptly threw up the study of medicine and changed over to geology.

The new science was congenial. At many points it touched the past story of life if not the present. Putting every ounce of brain and energy into the work, he mastered the geology of coal and oil formations and graduated easily at the top of his class.

He was now twenty. The day after graduation he shipped as a coal passer on a steamer bound for China. Arrived there, ignorant though he was of the language, he disappeared into the interior.

His subsequent career is one of the classics of mining engineering. In eighteen months he had located one of the richest anthracite fields in the history of coal. Moreover he had obtained from the Chinese government certain concessions which, if worked, would make him one of the hundred richest white men in the world. All he had to do was to stay on the ground and let his prize develop. Capital would come almost unasked.

It was here that he showed the stuff he was made of. Instead of degenerating into a money-making machine he placed all his rights in the hands of an English company. Within six weeks he had sold out for ten million dollars cash all of his interest which, if nursed with ordinary business acumen, would have netted him a hundred million before he died. But he had no time to squander in making money. The most precious years of his life were slipping through his hands, and he was still but half educated for the work he had set himself.

While idling about Shanghai waiting to close up his business he met and married the English girl who for eight years made him a flawlessly happy man.

Having invested his fortune in government bonds he forgot it and proceeded with his wife to Vienna to finish his medical education. That accomplished, he left his wife and infant daughter with his mother, and took a year's holiday with half a dozen friends exploring the southernmost extremity of Patagonia in a fossil hunting expedition.

The fossils aroused his purely biological interests. On returning to civilization he again went with his wife to Europe. There he specialized for two years in the great centres of pure biology. At twenty-seven, on returning to America, he felt himself fitted to begin useful work.

Resolutely putting from his mind the fantastic hope of discovering the origin of life, he concentrated his powers on the difficult problems of cell growth. Thus gradually and naturally was he led to the study of cancer, on which he had now been engaged for about ten years, publishing little but learning much, if only in a negative way. Always, subconsciously, at the back of his mind loomed up the greater problem. In his reading and in his experimental investigations he let slip no chance of following out the slightest clue. These excursions into the unpractical sometimes cost him weeks of precious time. Yet he never regretted them, for the least profitable yielded two or three definite facts worth the having.

With singular detachment he had kept his mind free from speculative theories. He followed neither Driesch nor Loeb. To him vitalism and mechanism, as judged by their positive achievements, were equally impotent to describe life. One side philosophized without experiment, while the other, experimenting blindly without reason, contented itself with a vague reference to electricity as the probable source of all living phenomena. Profound technicalities like the intriguing "polarity" and "heliotropism" that seemed to the unthinking to "explain" so much while in fact they explained nothing but their authors' taste in names, left him cold. All this might be the first step, but surely it was no more. With the rapidly changing fashions in science and the influx of men of genius into biology, ten years might see polarity displaced by some newer fetish equally noncommittal. In the meantime he would remain neutral.

The door opened softly and Edith appeared.

"Oh," she said, "you're not working. I'll bring him up, then."

"Bring who up?"

But Edith had vanished. Presently she reappeared, ushering in a gray-bearded stranger, evidently a seafarer. The new-comer carried a tar-soaked box about four feet long and ten inches square.

"This is Captain Anderson," she said. "He insisted on showing you what he has brought himself."

"Pleased to meet you, Captain," said the Doctor, advancing to shake hands with his visitor. "Won't you sit down?"

"After you have seen what's in here."

Captain Anderson produced a huge clasp knife and proceeded methodically to pry off the lid of his long box. As he worked crystals of rock salt spilled out over the table and floor. The mess seemed to trouble him not at all. Evidently he had great faith in the soothing efficacy of his pickled monster, whatever it might be.

At last the cover was off and the closely packed salt invitingly ready to be scooped out by the handful. The Captain used both hands. Then, reaching in, he got the deceased monstrosity by what had been its neck, gave it a vigorous shake to free it from the last crystals of salt, and asked complacently,

"Isn't he a little peach?"

Edith, case-hardened as she was to monstrosities, could not repress a gasp and a shudder of repulsion. Lane looked paralyzed.

"Good Lord," he exclaimed, "what is it? Bird or reptile?"

2

CAPTAIN ANDERSON'S STORY

The Doctor and Edith stood dumb before Captain Anderson's dried monster. Its elaborate hideousness, unlike that of any living thing, held them with a perverse fascination. Neither bird, reptile nor fish, it was an incredible mongrel of all three. The serpent-like, heavily scaled belly contradicted the bat-like wings with their short, bristly feathers; while the exaggerated beak, crammed full of cruel yellow teeth, revealed by the hard backward snarl of the horny lips, refuted the monstrosity's claims to be considered a bird. Flattened against its withered flanks were two lizard hands armed with ugly claws, to one of which still adhered the dried scales of the last fish the creature had devoured.

A skeptic at first glance would have declared the creature an impossible fraud perpetrated by some over-imaginative sailor in his misused leisure. But Dr. Lane, also at the first glance, thought he knew better.

"It's only a baby of its kind," he said. "The parents have been dead millions of years. This is the one perfect specimen in existence." The Doctor thought he knew what he was talking about.

"Then there are others like it?" Captain Anderson asked, somewhat crestfallen.

"No, only their fossilized bones and impressions of a few feathers in the rocks that were mud when these things flew. The most perfect impression was found in a mine in Bulgaria about four years ago. But it was only a mark on the stone--not a shadow to this beauty. Where on earth did you get it?"

"In the South Polar seas."

"Frozen into the ice?" the Doctor hazarded. He recalled instantly the reputed discoveries of long extinct mastodons in Alaska, Northern Siberia and elsewhere, their meat as fresh as on the day the giants were trapped on the ice floes hundreds of centuries ago.

"No," the Captain replied. "This thing was still warm when we picked it up. It could not have been dead more than fifteen minutes."

"But how on earth--"

"First let me ask you one or two questions. What is it?"

"I don't know," the Doctor confessed doubtfully. "At first I thought it might be the missing link between the reptiles and the birds--a half-way creature something like a pterodactyl and not quite an archaeopterix. The last is the ancestor of all the birds. We know only its fossil remains. Then I thought--but, here see for yourself."

Dr. Lane strode over to the bookshelves and selected a large green portfolio. "Put your beast on the table and compare it with this," he said, exhibiting a photographic reproduction of the famous Bulgarian fossil. "Now, isn't yours like this?"

"In the main, yes. But that snake-bird in the mud had no scales on its belly," the Captain objected.

"So much the better for yours. Either this is a forefather of the known reptilian ancestor of the birds or it is a distinctly new species."

"Now for my second question," the Captain continued. "What is this thing worth?"

"That depends upon whom you ask to buy it. A fishmonger down the street might give you ten cents for it as a curiosity. Then again the American Museum of Natural History would offer you, I imagine, whatever it could afford. For this specimen is priceless."

"Very well. I'm only an ex-mining engineer and an old whaler. I know next to nothing about such things and must take your word for the value of this. Now, my last question. How much will you give me for it?"

Dr. Lane hesitated, but only for a second.

"Nothing," he replied.

"Then that's settled," the Captain retorted, restoring his despised monstrosity to its coffin.

"Hold on a minute, Captain. By itself your wonderful find is of little or no value to me. I care only for diseased things. This is perfectly sound. A museum is the proper place for it after the right men have worked out its anatomy in detail. When I said that I would give you nothing for it I meant what I said. But I will give you a considerable sum if you take me to the exact spot where you found this thing, as you said, still warm."

The Captain desisted in his efforts to scoop up all the salt spilled in his first exuberant haste.

"When you say a considerable sum what do you mean?"

"Name what you think right and I'll see."

"Ten thousand dollars?"

"It is not too much. I would offer even more under certain conditions."

"For instance?"

"That you could show me where to find a living specimen like this one you found so recently dead. Can you do that?"

"Let me be aboveboard with you from the beginning, Dr. Lane. I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because we picked this up in the sea a hundred and twenty miles from the nearest land."

"It had fallen into the water from exhaustion and been drowned?"

"I guess not. In fact I know that it never flew the hundred and twenty miles from the land. For I saw it roll up from below directly under the stern of our ship."

"Did it leap out like a salmon? If so that was a queer performance for a creature built like this."

"No, it boiled out, dead as a dummy."

The doctor regarded the grizzled whale pirate with rather more than a touch of suspicion.

"If I had not seen this thing with my own eyes," he remarked, "I should disbelieve your whole story."

"You haven't heard it yet," the Captain dryly rejoined. "Before I tell it will you agree either to pay me ten thousand dollars for it or to keep still about it after I leave this house?"

"That's fair enough. I agree."

"And this young lady?" the Captain queried, with an interrogative glance at Edith.

"My daughter Edith, Captain Anderson. Pardon me for not having introduced you before."

"Oh, we had a fine row in the garden," Edith laughed, "before I came up. I agree too, Captain Anderson, if you will let me stay and listen. Only please cover up the hideous thing before you begin. I shall have nightmares for a month as it is."

With a laugh the Captain replaced the cover of his box. But the Doctor, after a moment's hesitation removed it, telling Edith she might turn her back if the creature's beauty overpowered her.

"I want to have a good long look at this thing," he said. "It isn't what I thought it might be. Well, Captain, how did you happen to come to me with your find?"

"It was on the mate's advice. One of my men, it seems, once got five dollars from your daughter for a fake mermaid. I thought," he added with a malicious glint in his steel gray eyes, "she might be willing to give me ten for a real one."

"You may be sure, Captain Anderson," Edith retorted indignantly, "that I knew perfectly well what I was buying. And if I gave your man five dollars for a wretched fake worth fifty cents it was because the poor fellow looked half-clothed and underfed. Really, Captain Anderson, you should treat your men better."

"He can't have been one of mine. The only thing my men suffer from is a lack of rum."

"That's fortunate," the Doctor interposed. "Otherwise they might pass by feathered reptiles as mere creations of a rummy imagination."

"True," the Captain agreed. "As a matter of fact all my men know of you and your hobby. I was only trying to get a rise out of your daughter for what she did to me in the garden. We're quits now."

"Are you sure?" Edith asked with exasperating calm.

"Not so sure as I was a second ago," the honest Captain admitted. "No wonder your father lets you do the buying. Now, Dr. Lane," he continued with a change in tone, "as I said in the beginning I want this whole business to be open and aboveboard. So I should like you to know that one of the main reasons for my troubling you at all is the fact that you are a rich man with barrels of money to spend on your hobbies. I have known of you for years. They still talk of your big coal strike over in China. Now a man who knows as much as you do about coal should be able to appreciate the value of oil."

"To a certain extent," the Doctor smiled. "I have sense enough to let wildcatting alone."

"I haven't. And that, in a word, is why I'm here. Unless I can persuade you for once to invest heavily in oil I shall have to take my queer fish elsewhere."

"Perhaps I can afford to throw ten thousand dollars down your oil well to feed the fish at the bottom. Go ahead and see if you can sell me."

"Then here goes. Don't call me a liar until I've finished. I shall tell you only enough to let you see for yourself whether you want to come in or stay out and forget all about me and my queer fowl.

"I was educated as a mining engineer, but gave up my profession to follow the sea. For the past twenty years I have been master and part owner of a whaling vessel.

"About eighteen months ago, having cleaned up for the season, we started north. We were in the South Polar Seas, to the east of Cape Horn and considerably south. That is close enough description of our position for the present. The nearest coastline of the Antarctic continent lay about a hundred and twenty miles southeast of us. The season, though well advanced, was extraordinarily mild and open. For eight days we had sighted no ice.

"One night shortly before eleven I was awakened by a peculiar jarring of the whole ship. It lasted fully forty seconds. The mate and the man at the wheel also felt it. Like me they could make nothing of it till daylight. Then we guessed. For the water was a peculiar milky green as if muddied by finely powdered chalk. There had evidently been a submarine earthquake and a volcanic eruption on the ocean floor during the night. All that morning the water grew milkier and milkier. By noon it was the color of a dirty river and as sluggish as molasses.

"Suddenly, about two o'clock in the afternoon, the whole surface of the water began to boil up in huge bubbles like a cauldron of hot porridge. The ship rattled and clattered as if it were being shaken to bits. The men, of course, acted like a pack of panic-stricken idiots. Discipline went to the devil. That fool of a mate's account of what probably was happening a mile or two beneath us drove them clean crazy. Then I took a fist in things and knocked some sense into their silly heads.

"But for the infernal boiling there was a dead calm. It was shortly after three o'clock that the first great bubble of black oil burst with a gurgling plop half over the decks. Inside of ten minutes the sea was a heaving blanket of heavy oil three feet thick. If only we had been a fleet of tankers with pumping gear we could have made our fortunes within a radius of half a mile. Sheer to the horizon the whole sea was a dance of sleek black bubbles as big as whales.

"About five o'clock the oily mess began to boil more furiously. Our decks were one black slop from stem to stern. Then without warning a great gusher of sticky brown tar burst right under our bows and shot roaring straight up a hundred and fifty feet above our masts in a tumbling spout.

"We had banked our fires at the beginning of the row. Otherwise we should have been ablaze in a sea of fire hours before. Now the filthy brown tar began streaming down our funnels to the boilers. There was only one thing to do, stuck there as we were, and we did it, half smothered in the sticky brown mess. Somehow or another we got the funnels capped with tarpaulins. There we rocked and rattled in that boiling filth till dark, unable to get up steam and dodge the worst of it, stuck fast under that slapping deluge of brown muck.

"Night came down slowly. Except for the eruption of oil and tar, and the queer deadness of the air, the last hours of that rotten day were like those of any other open weather twilight in the South Polar Seas. Just as it began to get too dusky to see clearly that beastly tar spout gave a mumbling gulp and dropped down into the pitch as dead as a stone. That was the end of it.

"We thought our troubles were over. And so they were in a way. I sent the mate below to kick the men up to swab the decks. The sea was still boiling violently when he left. I was alone on deck when the next nightmare, and the jumpiest of all, leapt from the sea."

Captain Anderson paused for a moment in his narrative, seeking the right words to convince his curious audience of his veracity.

"The mate had just disappeared," he resumed, "when a terrific jar, as if the ship were being hit with a hundred battering rams, warned me that the devil was about to break loose. And he did. A huge chunk of black rock--the size of the Baptist Church down the street--shot from the heaving oil about a hundred yards east of the ship, whizzed clear over us in a crazy curve and sent up a whooping splash of black muck as it dived that nearly swamped us. If that chunk had been aimed a trifle lower I shouldn't be here now.

"Well, that was only the first of them. At intervals of half a mile to a mile apart the whole sputtering mess of black oil began to spit up the floor of the sea in hunks of black rock as big as city hotels. None of them broke loose or hit closer to the ship than half a mile. The first was our one close call.

"That fool of a mate got the men on deck just when the show was at its best. They let out one yell and ducked back to their holes in the forecastle. The idiots missed a sight they'll never get another chance of seeing, for in five minutes that particular row was over. Either there was nothing left on the bottom of the sea to be thrown up, or sufficient vents had been torn in the floor for what was to come next. It came with a gurgling, oily rush.

"Before it happened, however, the black oil suddenly stopped heaving. No more bubbles rose. Evidently the intermittent supply of oil from below had given place to slow, even gushers. The surface of the oil became almost flat with the whirling ends of stream lines spinning up and twisting out everywhere. It looked just like a gigantic black millrace, gnarled over like the water of a river half a mile below a high fall.

"The mate and I are the only witnesses of what seethed up through the crawling oil. The only human witnesses, I mean. For if our pickled friend in the salt there could speak he might spin us a good yarn. He came up in that slow, churning motion of the pitch, one of thousands like him, and one small fry in a stew of huge beasts whose horny ugliness made him and his bigger sisters look like rosy June brides.

"All the three hundred foot nightmares of our dragon-ridden fairy-tale days boiled lazily up in that infernal black stew. Lizards as big as small trains with grinning mouths jammed full of six-inch teeth rolled over and over in the swashing oil as dead as Trojans, and huge armor plated, four-legged brutes the size of locomotives twirled round and round belly up in the twilight. Some of them had been split wide open, and their insides, black with oil, steamed and smoked like slaughter houses. Smaller beasts in thousands, and a thick scum of broken insects, littered the crawling oil between the slowly plunging carcasses of the big fellows.

"The mate is a fussy man given to footling hobbies. Photography is his messiest. He now dived below to fetch up his camera. Any fool could have told the idiot there was no use trying to get a snapshot in that light. But he kept at it like a mule and wasted five dollars' worth of films. He found out what an extravagant fool he had been about three weeks later when he got time to develop his rubbish.

"His idiocy gave me an idea. Nobody would believe our unsupported story. So I took a line and fished up this freak." He indicated the bird-reptile in its box. "I should have liked one of the big lizard brutes, but that we had no room to stow it on deck. And anyway the light was about gone."

"You said, Captain," Dr. Lane began, "that your catch was evidently just dead when you hauled it in. How do you know?"

"Because I stuck my knife into its neck to make sure. Thick warm blood oozed out. Here, I'll show you the place."

Once more he exhibited his scaly, feathered monster. It was as he had said. There was plainly visible on the left side of the neck a deep gash.

"It's a queer fish and a queerer story," Edith remarked, with a glance of distaste at the poor pickled monster.

Dr. Lane agreed with his daughter's estimate.

"For all its strangeness," he said, "I am inclined to take a chance. Captain Anderson, I will back your oil stock to the extent of ten thousand dollars, on one condition. You must take me to the exact spot where you picked up this wonderful creature. Mind, I am not swallowing your yarn whole. It is just possible that in your excitement you saw things that weren't there. The light, according to your own statement, was about gone."

"But the mate?" Captain Anderson protested. "Was he crazy too?"

"Possibly. Any psychologist will tell you that such things do happen frequently. Collective hallucination is the scientific name for such a state of affairs. Both you and he, I suppose, have seen pictures, or restorations, of extinct animals like the ones you thought you saw boiling up through the oil--dinosaurs, huge lizards three hundred feet long, the ceratops, and the like? You, Captain, must have seen such things when you were studying mining engineering."

"I know I have," the Captain admitted. "And the mate is such a hobby-ridden fool, always messing about libraries and reading rooms when he is ashore, that doubtless he's in the same fix. For all that you can't convince me that the whole thing was a nightmare. I saw it."

"Did any of the men see it too?" Edith asked. "Next morning, I mean."

"Not the main part of the show. All the heavy brutes had sunk. Nothing but the scum of broken insects floated through the night."

"It sounds queer," was Edith's frank comment.

"Indeed it does, Captain," her father agreed. "Now this is my guess. You found this bird-reptile right enough, for here it is. I don't think," he said with a smile, "that even I can explain it away to your satisfaction. What you took for thick warm blood oozing from the slash in its neck was nothing but brown tar."

"Well, suppose it was," the Captain retorted. "What does that prove?"

"Everything. And in a perfectly reasonable way. I accept the eruption of oil from beneath the sea floor as real. Your crew saw that?"

The Captain nodded.

"Very well, then, it's all clear. First let me tell you about a somewhat similar state of affairs less than two hundred miles from here in Southern California. It is at the famous asphalt and oil-hole on the Rancho La Brea. Some years ago the geologists from the University of California began digging out of the oily ooze all manner of bones and other remains of extinct animals--skulls of sabre tooth tigers that haven't lived in this part of the world for the past hundred thousand years, and many others equally interesting.

"The explanation of these remains is quite simple. Ages ago drinking pools of rainwater collected on the sticky surface of the oily ooze. The prehistoric beasts, not knowing the danger, picked their way out to drink. On trying to return to solid ground they quickly mired themselves like flies on tanglefoot. Now is it likely that in an entire continent of tar holes this one at La Brea should be unique as an animal trap?"

"So you believe my reptile or whatever he is was thrown up from some prehistoric asphalt hole buried under the floor of the Antarctic Ocean?"

"Undoubtedly, Captain."

The Captain grinned behind his gray beard. "A thoroughly scientific theory no doubt, Doctor. As such it does you credit. According to you my reptile should be full of brown tar, not dried blood and other stuff. Suppose you cut him open and see."

"That's a practical test," the Doctor assented, rising to get his implements. "If he has anything inside him besides pitch, like a badly cured mummy, I'll double my offer."

"Then you might as well hand me your check for twenty thousand now. I'll equal your offer. If you find nothing but mummy pudding inside I'll let you have my yarn for the stuffing."

The Doctor did not reply immediately. He was too busy making his incision where it would do the least damage to the appearance of the specimen. Presently he drew up with a gasp of astonishment.

"Why," he exclaimed, "it's as fresh as a newly pickled salmon."

"Of course it is. I packed it in salt the minute the mate had finished washing it off with rum and turpentine."

"Great Scott what a find! Edith, bring me the largest of those jars about a third full of alcohol. This beats me. The thing must have been miraculously preserved for ages. My offer stands, Captain. Take me to the place where you found this and the twenty thousand is yours the day we start."

"You will raise that to fifty thousand when I tell you the rest," the Captain prophesied confidently. "I asked you not to call me a liar until I had finished. As a matter of fact I am only half-way through."

"Have you more specimens?"

"No, but I have a round gross of first-class photographs."

"But you said the mate's pictures were a failure."

"So they were that time. He had better luck the next when I could boss him properly."

"Prehistoric animals?"

"Something much better, unless I'm badly off."

"Do go on," Edith begged, "and tell us what else you found."

"In a moment. Shall I telephone the mate to bring up his pictures?"

"Yes, do!" they exclaimed together, and Edith handed him the desk telephone.

Having got his number Anderson asked if Ole Hansen were still about. The answer apparently was satisfactory, for Ole was asked to step to the telephone.

"It's all right, Ole," the Captain shouted, as if his faithful mate were still in the vicinity of the South Pole. "The Doctor has swallowed it all so far, bait, hook and sinker. Bring the rest of the junk up here to his house. Get Christensen to show you the way. Jump on a street car and shake a leg."

3

A PUZZLE FOR DRAKE

"While we are waiting for Hansen," the Captain resumed, "I may as well tell you how he collected his photographs. As the blundering idiot will probably manage to lose himself between the gate and the back door, I have plenty of time."

"Is your mate Hansen so stupid as you make out?" Edith asked with genuine interest. "If so he must be worth studying."

"Stupider, Miss Lane. You never met his equal for cracked theorizing. Well, let us leave him to find his way here and get on with our business. I'll tell you what I want from you, doctor, when I reach the end of my story."

"Although you may not be aware of the fact," Dr. Lane replied shrewdly, "you have already told me. You want me to foot the bill for an expedition to track down those new oil fields in your name. Well, it's all right with me. I'll take the fossils and anything else in that line and you can have the oil. Convince me that I should go in heavily and you need have no worry about finances."

"Hansen's pictures will put the finishing touches to what I begin. Well, except for one thing, the morning after the shakeup was just like any other perfectly clear South Polar calm. The sea was still covered with heavy black oil to a depth of several feet. Only a long, even swell heaved it gently up and down in billows a mile long.

"During the night I had ordered the fires drawn. We dared take no chances with the oil-soaked decks and rigging. With the first light the mate and I got the men out to clean up the mess. We drove them like niggers to keep their minds off the oil. It wouldn't do when we reached port to have them blabbing to the first shark they met. Later we decided to take the whole crew in on the scheme. They are to get a third share of all profits if they keep their mouths shut. That seems to be the only safe way. They're as mum as clams.

"All that day we sweated to get the worst of the oil off or covered up so it wouldn't be noticed when we reached civilization. By nightfall we had done a pretty thorough job. I decided to explain the oil-soaked hull by saying it was an idea of Hansen's to use crude oil instead of paint as a weather defier. It sounds just like one of his theories.

"The next question was how to swim out of the soup. With steam up of course it would have been easy. But the mate and I agreed--for once--that it would be a fool's trick to start any kind of a fire. The air reeked of natural gas and oil fumes. A spark, and the whole sea would be hell. There was nothing for it but to trust to the sails. By dark we were fully rigged and whistling for the breeze.

"It came like a thunderclap from seven directions at once. All in all that was the worst blow I have weathered through in twenty years of dirty squalls from the equator to Cape Horn. The mate of course had a theory to account for the suddenness of the hurricane. Like most of his efforts it came five minutes late. I'll tell you of it presently.

"For the moment I didn't give a damn for theories, being more interested in trying to save our masts. Except for a few whistling ribbons like rags on a clothesline the sails were gone. The filthy black oil broke over the decks in buckets and hogsheads, smothering us whenever we attempted to make a line fast. All our deck tackle went by the board, knocked clean off the plates by the sledge-hammer kicks of the heavy pitch.

"After the first mad wrench the hurricane settled down to a steady, snoring gale from the north. The ship drove dead ahead for the ice barrier a hundred and twenty miles south of us. Nothing was to be done. We could only sit tight for the smash. Unless the wind fell we should ram the ice cliffs full tilt some time between midnight and dawn. The wind held.

"Tired of holding his breath, Hansen suggested that all hands join in prayer. He is always at it, before meals, at meals and after meals. I told him to go to hell and took the wheel out of his lily white hands. In the howling uproar he misunderstood the order. Evidently he thought I wished him to hold chapel in the forecastle. Anyway there is where I found him at daybreak with half the crew bellowing Norwegian hymns to beat the devil.

"Toward midnight I first noticed a cherry colored glow coming and going in the sky ahead of the ship. If I thought at all in the mad rush to the final smash I put the flickering down to an aurora, and tried to steer a course that would graze the ice when we struck. By my reckoning we should have been smashed about three o'clock in the morning. Four o'clock passed and still the ship staggered on through the oil under the terrific gale. I began to think I must have misjudged our speed. Five o'clock came, and with the first light the wind began to drop. In half an hour it was broad daylight over a sea with only a film of oil coating the waves, and not a sign of the ice barrier ahead. I left the wheel to hammer some sense into those hymn singing idiots of Hansen's.

"When they shot up on deck the wind was no longer a gale and the ship was manageable. Hansen said we had been saved by his bawling in the forecastle. About an hour later he sighted the volcano. Then he gave it the honor and glory for everything, including the wind.

"For a stretch of at least twenty miles the great ice barrier had been wiped out. Whether it had sunk, or whether it had been lifted up bodily by the eruption and tossed back on the continent I don't know. Hansen says the rock and ice just cracked apart that far in the earthquake. Anyhow the twenty miles of solid ice and rock was gone. In its place stretched a long broad inlet as straight as a street running clear out of sight into the continent.

"The wind dropped abruptly to a mere breeze, and the last of the oil film fell away in our wake. All about us the water was as white as milk, thick and soupy.

"When we came fully to our senses we noticed the unusual warmth. The air was as balmy as a spring day in California. It occurred to me to test the temperature of the water. One of the men drew up a bucketful of the milky soup. It was lukewarm.

"A yell from that excitable idiot Hansen made me drop the bucket. He was pointing up the inlet to a huge pillar of ink billowing up like the smoke from a burning oil well. I judged it must have been at least fifty miles from where we were. But I had no means then of making more than a crude guess.

"As we stood gaping at it the whole mass of ink was suddenly sucked down out of the sky. Only a dirty brown mist marked the place where it had been.

"'It's an eruption,' Hansen was good enough to explain. He meant well, but who ever saw an eruption acting down instead of up? There was no time to argue it out with him, for while we were looking the show began in earnest.

"First an enormous black smoke ring teetered crazily up and mushroomed out over the sky line like an umbrella. Then a solid pillar of red flames gushed up after the smoke. My common sense was working in spite of me, for I found myself counting off the seconds. When I got to fifty-eight, the fist of the explosion struck us with all its force. Being ready for it I was braced against the funnel with my hands over my ears. Hansen, theorizing as usual, wasn't prepared. Nor were the men. For an hour after they had picked themselves up they went about staring like owls.

"If my count was right the volcano must be two hundred fifty to three hundred miles inland. At that distance I had no fears for the ship.

"The next thing to do was to get out before something started under our keel. Before doing so I could not resist the temptation of lowering a boat to see what had happened ashore--if anything was to be seen without dangerous delay. I decided to take Hansen and two men to pull the oars. When he understood what was doing--he was still deaf, like the rest of the theorizers--he made a dive below to bring up his everlasting camera and a bale of films.

"The pull through that beastly warm milk to the shore was both pleasant and disgusting. How these society women can bathe in hot milk--as I understand from the Sunday newspapers they do--beats me! That by the way, however. I see Miss Lane is blushing. Our landing was as easy as a picnic on a river. We at once tramped inland over the level snowfields to see what was to be seen.

"Hansen saw it first. About a mile ahead of us he made out a black dot on the snow. We made for it as fast as the loosely crystallized surface would let us. Coming up to it we found a chunk of black rock the size of a cow. At least that was all of it above the ice and snow. The rest lay buried in the star-shaped pit which its fall had dented through to the ice and underlying rock.

"One side of the rock was smooth. The rest was just a jagged nothing. Hansen took a photograph of the smooth side.

"I don't blame him for wanting to find another of the black chunks. Nor do I criticize him for stopping to take its picture. If the camera had been mine I should have been just as unreasonable. He dragged us over that forsaken wilderness of snow and ice for ten mortal hours hunting black rocks. There was no returning to the ship until he had shot his last roll of films. In all he got twelve dozen first-class negatives.