Chapter XII: The Second Sea

Leaving to me the visions and the flights of wild hope that his last words induced, Sam went below. In a few minutes he called me to eat. Suddenly I realized that I was very hungry. I looked at my watch. It was eight o'clock.

"Why, is it just two hours since we left the surface?"

"No. It's fourteen!"

Forgetting the intense red sky, the strange, smooth sea, and the damp, hot wind, I went below to meet Sam's wonderful biscuit, with fresh steak and fruit from the refrigerator. A very mild and colorless beginning for adventurers newly fallen into an unknown world, but a very sensible one!

After the meal, each of us took a turn on guard in the conning-tower, while the other slept. Nothing happened. The soft hot wind blew steadily out of the south, the bloody glare of the weird sky was changeless, and the sea lay about in a motionless desert.

The thermometer outside registered 115°, but on account of the automatic temperature control, the machine was comfortable enough, though the heat and humidity on deck were stifling.

When we had rested, we turned the bow of the Omnimobile toward the north and cruised along at a speed of four or five knots. I stood in the conning-tower at the wheel, while Sam busied himself with making an analysis of the air, and of a sample of water from the sea. Presently he came up out of the little laboratory, with his report.

"The air shows to be 31% oxygen," he said, "and 64% helium, with the remainder a mixture of various other gases. The barometer pressure is only eleven pounds, which compensates for the excess of oxygen. The helium is a good indication of the radioactivity which must have produced the gas overhead, since helium is one of the ultimate products of radium disintegration. The oxygen must have come largely from the breaking up of carbon dioxide by plant life."

"Then there is life?"

"There were microscopic organisms, both animal and vegetable, in the sample of water I took. The water, by the way, carries only 1.23% solid matter, mostly sodium chloride. Less than half as much as the sea above, which has 2.7%."

For several hours longer we moved slowly over the surface of that warm, silent sea. In all directions it lay flat as far as my eye could reach, its blue-black depths glancing with the unearthly crimson of the sky. Sam was still working in the laboratory and looking after the machinery.

And then I saw the first living thing!

My roving eye caught a tiny black speck against the gleam of the bloody sky. It was soaring, drifting slowly, like a vast bird--its motion was too irregular, I thought, to be that of a flying machine. I flung the little port open, and tried to get my binoculars upon it. It was very far away, but I made out that it was a vast, strange, winged thing. It seemed very large to be a bird. And its colors were bright--fantastic! It seemed--I was sure--that its wings were green! But it seemed to be moving faster than I had thought. I never got it clearly into focus, and suddenly it dived, and was lost beneath the horizon!

"Sam! Sam!" I called sharply. "I've seen something--something _alive_!"

In a moment he was climbing up into the conning-tower, with a question on his lips. I described my confused impression of the thing as best I could, mentioning the strange colors.

"More than likely, Mel," he said, "you wouldn't have recognized it, even if you had seen it clearly. You could hardly expect to find life here like that we know. The chances are that evolution has taken a widely different course in here. Even the tiny things in the sea were strange to me. And in a world like this, of hot and endless day, we're likely to find jungles with great insects and huge reptiles--a fauna and flora corresponding to that of the Carboniferous Era on the surface."

"Then you think there is land here, trees, even men! You really think--the Green Girl?"

"That was just an idea, about the green tan. But there is sure to be land, of some sort, where the lips of this abyss curve up to meet the water above. And there is no reason why there might not be life upon it--highly developed life, at that. Life may be as old in this place as outside, perhaps older, for it has been protected from the cataclysms of one kind and another that may have swept life off the surface again and again through the ages. And we know there is some kind of intelligence here--"

"No wonder they were willing to freeze the earth! They couldn't tell the difference if the sea were frozen a mile thick!"

Still we held our course to the northward. Presently Sam went back below again. An hour later the horizon was broken by a line of dull blue in the north. A thin blue strip appeared between black sea and scarlet sky, and widened slowly. In another hour I could make out a wall of towering blue cliffs all across the north, rising from the sea as if to support the red sky. They were veiled in the mists of infinite distances. When Sam had made his observations, computed his angles and completed his calculations, he announced that they were a hundred miles north of us, and met the red sky at a level four miles above us as we floated along!

That meant that we were nine miles below the level of the Pacific, according to Sam's figures. The seat of the menace we thought to conquer was a mile below us yet!

As the hours went by, and we still went northward at our crawling pace (we went slowly because Sam thought that the use of the engines at full power would create an etheric disturbance that would reveal our position to our mysterious enemy). The jagged rim of the abyss rose steadily out of the sea. The cliffs, when I focused my powerful glasses upon them, seemed composed of sheer columns of blue rock, reaching up to meet the red roof of waters like gigantic prisms of blue basalt.

At last my searching eyes glimpsed a patch of green below the blue. A vast slope of green hills drew up out of the red-black sea. They gleamed with the pure verdant emerald of well-watered grasslands. Here and there they were marked with huge, strange splotches of purple. I was ever amazed anew at the vastness of the weird world about us.

Steadily the green and purple slopes lifted themselves out of the dark sea before us, and stretched up, through vast plains and low hills, to the sheer wall of rough blue cliffs that lay all about the north, cut off so sharply at the top by the red sky.

At last we came in view of the shore--fringed with a jungle of green and lofty forest. Huge those strange plants were, with long thick leaves, grotesque forms, and fantastic flaming blossoms! I stared at them through the binoculars. They were like nothing that is or has ever been above the sea--like nothing that I had ever seen or imagined! They were strange wild trees of another earth! Their green was weirdly tinted with purple, or with queer metallic tints of silver and bronze! Their incredibly great blooms were prolifically borne and infinitely varied, making the weird jungle an alien fairyland of bright and multicolored flame!

A fit habitat, indeed, for the monstrous things we found there!