Chapter FOUR: A Dead Man Comes Back

It was a nightmare trip. The battle below was terribly clear. Twice they dodged flights of the giant rays, saved only because the scent of food kept the attention of the brutes on the ground.

The harbor basin at Wilmington was choked with slippery, struggling beasts. There was hardly a sign of shipping. Bjarnsson made for the flat top of a square building, completely surrounded.

A flight of rays went over just as they landed. A trap door in the roof raised and was slammed shut again.

“Now,” said Fallon grimly, and jumped out.

They were almost to the trap when a ray sighted them. Fallon shot it through the eye, but others followed. Bjarnsson wrenched up the trap. A surprised yellow face peered up, vanished in a crimson smear.

Bjarnsson hauled the body out and threw it as far as he could. The rays fought over it like monstrous gulls over a fish head.

Fallen retched and followed Bjarnsson down.

There were three other men in the building. One tried to shoot it out and was killed. The others were mechanics, with no stomachs for the guns.

They looked over the sub, a small stubby thing of unusual design, and Bjarnsson nodded his gaunt shaggy head.

“These suits of leaded fabric,” he said. “One big, for me. The other smaller, for Kashimo, perhaps. Can you get into it?”

Fallon grunted. “I guess so. Hey! Look there.”

“Ha! A depth charge, held in the claws I use for picking specimens from the ocean floor. They have prepared well, Fallon.”

“You know what that means!” Fallon was aware of a forgotten, surging excitement. His palms came together with a ringing crack.

“I was right! Kashimo was going to hold you here until the Government capitulated. Then he was going out to shut off the power. There’s no projector, Bjarnsson. It _was_ the volcano. If we can close that fissure while there’s still resistance, we’ll have ’em licked!”

Bjarnsson’s ice-blue eyes fixed Fallon with a sharp, unwavering stare, and he spoke slowly, calmly, almost without expression.

“It will take about three days to get there, working together. One fit of cowardice or indecision, one display of nerves or temper may destroy what slight chance we have.”

“You mean,” said Fallon, “you wish you had someone you could depend on.” He smiled crookedly. “I’ll do my best, Bjarnsson.”

They struggled into the clumsy lead armor and shuffled into the small control room of the submarine. Everything had been prepared in advance. In a few seconds, automatic machinery was lowering the sub into its slip.

Water slapped the hull. Bjarnsson started the motors. They went forward slowly, through doors that opened electrically.

Ballast hissed and snarled into the tanks.

Bjarnsson said, “If we can get through this first pack, into deep water, we may make it.” He pointed to a knife-switch. “Pull it.”

Fallon did. Nothing seemed to happen. Bjarnsson sat hunched over the controls, cold blue eyes fixed on the periscope screen. Fallon had a swift, horrible sense of suffocation--the steel wall of the sub curving low over his helmeted head, the surge of huge floundering bodies in the water outside.

Something struck the hull. The little ship canted. Fallon gripped his seat with rigid, painful hands. Bjarnsson’s armored, unhuman shoulders moved convulsively with effort. Fallon felt a raw panic scream rising in his throat....

* * * * *

He choked it back. Heavy muffled blows shook the submarine. The motors churned and shook. Fallon was afraid they were going to stop. Sweat dripped in his eyes, misted his helmet pane.

The screws labored on. Fallon heard the tanks filling, and knew that they were going deeper. The blows on the hull grew fewer, farther between. Fallon began to breath again.

Einar Bjarnsson relaxed, just a little. His voice came muffled by his helmet. “The worst, Fallon--we’re through it.”

Fallon’s throat was as dry as his face was wet. “But how?”

“Sometimes, in the deeps, one meets creatures. Hungry creatures, as large even as this ship. So I prepared the hull. That switch transforms us into a travelling electric shock, strong enough to discourage almost anything. I hoped it would get us through.”

Thinking of what might have happened, Fallon shut his jaw hard. His voice was unnaturally steady as he asked, “What now?”

“Now you learn to operate the ship, in case something should happen to me.” Bjarnsson’s small blue eyes glinted through his helmet pane. “Too bad there is not a radio here, Fallon, so that you might broadcast as we go. As it is, I fear the world may miss a very exciting story.”

“For God’s sake,” said Fallon wearily, and he wasn’t swearing. “Let’s not make this any tougher. Okay. This is the master switch....”

In the next twenty-four hours, Fallon learned to handle the submarine passably well. Built for a crew of two, the controls were fairly simple, once explained. Nothing else was touched. The only extra switch that mattered was the one that released the depth charge.

For an endless, monotonous hell, Fallon stood watch and watch about with Bjarnsson, one at the controls, one operating the battery of observation ’scopes, never sleeping. They saved on oxygen as a precaution, which added to the suffocating discomfort of the helmet-filters.

Black, close, nerve-rasping hours crawled by, became days. At last, Fallon, bent over the ’scope screen, licked the sweat from his thin lips and looked at Bjarnsson, a blurred dark hulk against the dim glow of the half-seen instrument panel.

Fallon’s head ached. The hot stale air stank of oil. His body was tired and cramped and sweat-drenched, and the wound across his shoulders throbbed. He looked at the single narrow bunk.

There was nothing out there in the water but darkness. Even the deep-sea fish had felt the impulse and avoided the sub. Fallon got up.

“Bjarnsson,” he said, “I’m going to sleep.”

The explorer half turned in his seat.

“_Ja?_” he said quietly.

“There’s nothing out there,” growled Fallon. “Why should I sit and glare at that periscope?”

“Because,” Bjarnsson returned with ominous gentleness, “there might be something. We will not reach the volcano for perhaps ten hours. You had better watch.”

Fallon’s hard jaw set. “I can’t go any longer without sleep.”

Bjarnsson’s cragged face was flushed and greasy behind his helmet, but his eyes were like glittering frost.

“All the whisky and the women,” he whispered. “They make you soft, Fallon. The girl would have been better.”

A flashing glimpse of Joan as she had looked in the car that morning crossed the eye of Fallon’s mind--the tumbled fair hair and the sunlight warm on throat and cheek, and her voice saying, “You wouldn’t be bad, Webb ... so lazy and so hell-fired selfish!”

He cursed and started forward. The dark blur of Bjarnsson rose, blotting out the green glow. And then the panel light rose in a shuddering arc.

Fallon thought for a moment that he was fainting. The low curve of the hull spun about. He knew that he fell, and that he struck something, or that something struck him. All orientation was lost. His helmet rang against metal like a great gong, and then he was sliding down a cluttered slope.

A blunt projection ripped across his back. Even through the leaded suit, the pain of it made him scream. He heard the sound as a distant, throttled echo. Then even the dim green light was gone.

* * * * *

The screen flickered abominably. It showed mostly a blurred mob of people, trampling back and forth. Then it steadied and there was a picture, in bright, gay colors.

A starfish twenty feet across wrapping itself around a woman and her stupefied child.

“We saw that,” said Fallon. “On the beach. Remember?”

He thought Joan answered, but there was another picture. A vast red crab, pulling a man to bits with its claws. And after that, the shrieking woman outside the broken window, dragged down by a worm.

“Wonder who got those shots?” said Fallon. Again Joan answered, but he didn’t hear her. The pictures moved more rapidly. Rays, black against the blue sky. Planes falling. Guns firing and firing and choking to silence. People, black endless streams of them, running, running, running.

Joan pulled at him. Her face was strangely huge. Her eyes were as he had first seen them, hard chips of sapphire. And at last he heard what she was saying.

“Your fault, Webb Fallon. This might have been stopped. But you had to sleep. You couldn’t take it. You’re no good, Webb. No good. No good....”

Her voice faded, mixed somehow with a deep throbbing noise. “Joan!” he shouted. “Joan!” But her face faded too. The last he could see was her eyes, hard and steady and deeply blue.

“Joan,” he whispered. There was a sound in his head like the tearing of silk, a sensation of rushing upward. Then he was quite conscious, his face pressed forward against his helmet and his body twisted, bruised and painful.

The first thing he saw was Einar Bjarnsson sprawled on the floor plates. A sharp point of metal had ripped his suit from neck to waist, laying his chest bare.

For a moment of panic horror, Fallon sought for tears in his own suit. There were none. He relaxed with a sob of relief, and looked up at the low curve of the hull.

It was still whole. Fallon shuddered. What product of abnormal evolution had attacked them in the moment that he had looked away? Strange he hadn’t seen it coming, before.

The dim, still bulk of Einar Bjarnsson drew his gaze. Crouched there on his knees, it seemed to Fallon that the whole universe drew in and centered on that motionless body.

“I killed him,” Fallon whispered. “I looked away. I might have seen the thing in time, but I looked away. I killed him.”

For a long time he couldn’t move. Then, like the swift stroke of a knife, terror struck him.

He was alone under the sea.

He got up. The chronometer showed an elapsed time of nearly two hours. The course, held by an Iron Mike, was steady. The beast that had attacked them must have lost interest.

Fallon clung to a stanchion and thought, harder than he had ever thought in his life.

He couldn’t go on by himself. There had to be two men, to gauge distances, spot the best target, control the sub in the resultant blast. Why couldn’t he forget the volcano? There were lots of islands in the Pacific, beyond the affected sphere.

He could stay drunk on palm wine as well as Scotch.

He’d never see Joan again, of course. Joan, accusing, hard-eyed, contemptuous. Joan, condemning him for murder....

Fallon laughed, a sharp, harsh bark. “Joan, hell! That was my own mind, condemning me!”

* * * * *

His gaze went back to Bjarnsson’s body, rolling slightly with the motion of the ship. It boiled down to that. Murder. His careless, selfish murder of Bjarnsson. The murder of countless civilians. War, bitter, brutal, desperate.

Fallon drew a long, shuddering breath. His head dropped forward in his helmet, and his slanting wolf’s eyes were closed. Then he turned and sat down at the controls.

The single forward ’scope field gave him vision enough to steer. Anything might attack from the sides or the stern--another beast grown incredibly huge, but not yet a lung breather.

Alone, he probably wouldn’t succeed. He wouldn’t live to know whether he had or not. His gloved hands clenched over the levers that would change the course, send him away to safety.

Savagely he forced his hands away. He gripped the wheel. Time slid by him, black and silent as the water outside. And then....

Something moved in the dark behind him.

Slowly, slowly, Fallon rose and turned. The veins of his lean face were like knotted cords. The hard steel of the hull held him, tight and close, smothering.

Blurred, faint movement. The soft scrape of metal against metal. He had been so sure Bjarnsson was dead. He’d been dazed and sick, he hadn’t looked closely. But he’d been sure. Bjarnsson, lying so still, with his suit ripped open.

_His suit ripped open._ Volcanic rays would be seeping into his flesh. Rays of change--perhaps they even brought the dead to life.

There was a grating clang, and suddenly Fallon screamed, a short choked sound that hurt his throat.

Bjarnsson’s face looked at him. Bjarnsson’s face, with every gaunt bone, every vein and muscle and convolution of the brain traced in lines of cold white fire.

The shrouding leaden suit slipped from wide, stooped shoulders. The heart beat in pulses of flame within the glowing cage of the ribs. The coil and flow of muscles in arm and thigh was a living, beautiful rhythm of light.

“Fallon,” said Einar Bjarnsson. “Turn back.”

The remembered voice, coming from that glowing, pulsing throat, was the most horrible thing of all.

Fallon licked the cold sweat from his lips. “No,” he said.

“Turn back, or you will be killed.”

“It doesn’t matter,” whispered Fallon. “I’ve got to try.”

Bjarnsson laughed. Fallon could see his diaphragm contract in a surge of flame, see the ripple of the laughter.

A wave of anger cut across Fallon’s terror, cold and sane.

“I did this to you, Bjarnsson,” he said. “I’m trying to make up for it. I thought you were dead. Perhaps, if you put your armor back on, we can patch it up somehow, and it may not be too late.”

“But it is too late. So, you blame yourself, eh?”

“I left my post. Otherwise, you might have dodged that thing.”

“Dodged it?” Tiny sparkles of light shot through Bjarnsson’s brain. “Oh, _ja_. Perhaps.” And he laughed again. “So you will not turn back? Not even for the beautiful Joan?”

Fallon’s eyes closed, but the lines of his jaw were stern with anger. “Do you have to torture me?”

“Wait,” said Bjarnsson. “Wait a little. Then I will know.”

* * * * *

His voice was suddenly strange. Fallon opened his eyes. The glowing fire in the explorer’s body was growing brighter, so that it blurred the lines of vein and bone and sinew.

“No,” said Bjarnsson. “No need for torture. Turn back, Fallon.”

God, how he wanted to! “No,” he whispered. “I’ve got to try.”

Bjarnsson’s voice came to him, almost as an echo.

“We were fools, Fallon. Fools to think that we could stop this thing with a single puny bomb. Kashimo was a fool, too, but he was a gambler. But we, Fallon, you and I--we were the bigger fools.”

“The kind of fools,” said Fallon doggedly, “that men have always been. And damn it, I think I’d rather be the fool I am than the smart guy I was!”

Bjarnsson’s laughter echoed in his helmet. Fallon had a moment’s eerie feeling that he heard with his brain instead of his ears.

“Wonderful, Fallon, wonderful! You see how circumstance makes us traitors to ourselves? But there is no need for heroics. You can turn back, Fallon.”

The lines of Bjarnsson’s body were quite gone. He loomed against the darkness as a pillar of shining mist. Fallon’s weary eyes were dazzled with it.

“No,” he muttered stubbornly. “No.”

Bjarnsson’s voice rolled in on him suddenly, soul-shaking as an organ.

Voice--or mind? A magnificent, thundering strength.

“This is evolution, Fallon. So shall we be, a million million years from now. This is living, Fallon. It is godhood! Take off your suit, Fallon! Grow with me!”

“Joan,” said Fallon wearily. “Joan, dearest.”

Cosmic laughter, shuddering in his mind. And then,

“Turn back, Fallon. In an hour it will be too late.”

The shining mist was dimming, drawing in upon itself. And at the core, a tiny light was growing, a frosty white flame that seared Fallon’s brain.

“Turn back! Turn back!”

He fought, silently. But the light and the voice poured into him. Abruptly, something in him relaxed. He’d been so long without rest.

He knew, very dimly, that he turned and changed the course, back toward the coast of California.

* * * * *

From somewhere, out of the gulfs between the stars, a voice spoke to him as he lay sprawled across the control panel.

“There was no need for you to die, Fallon. Now, I can see much. It was no monster that struck us, but the first shock of a series of quakes, which will close the fissure far better than any human agency. Therefore, what happened to me was not your fault.

“And I am glad it happened. I, Bjarnsson, was growing old, I had nothing but science to hold me to Earth. Now my knowledge is boundless, and I am not confined by the fetters of the flesh. I am Mind--as some day we will all be.

“You will be safe, Fallon. The invasion will fail as the power is shut off, and America can deal with any further dangers. Marry Joan, and be happy.

“I don’t know about myself, yet. The possibilities are too vast to be explored in a minute. I am not dead, Fallon. Remember that! But--” and, here Fallon heard an echo of Bjarnsson’s harsh, mocking laughter--“if you should ever cease to be a fool and become again a smart guy, I shall find a way to send you back along evolution, to a stupid ape!

“I go now, Fallon. _Skoal!_ And will you name your first-born Einar? I can see that it will be a son!”