Chapter VI

For an instant I was stunned, with so great a rush of horror that the weird scene blurred before me. Then I leaped, tearing at the quivering vine-rope that held Nereid in its grip. Ghastly thing. I tore it loose, broke it--gruesome, squashing, flimsy stuff. But as I cast broken segments of it away, more seemed to come.

Weird, horrible combat. A slithering tentacle gripped my ankles. Another was winding itself around my throat. There was a terrible moment when I thought that Nereid and I would go down; and on the platform now at our feet, another leafy vine had come crawling, with lashing feelers and red pods that opened like little bloody jaws.

Then I tore Nereid loose. The whole platform now seemed cluttered with writhing vegetation. From overhead dangling things were swinging, reaching down at us.

"Nereid, our boat--which way?" In the dim luminous light I was confused. Nereid led me; and we staggered to our boat, tumbled into it. A vine-end like a rope threshed at us as we frantically shoved off.

And in the silence now, with only the leafy rustling of the growing vines, the gibbering, maniacal laughter of the imbecile still sounded.

"Kent, look--" Nereid touched my arm as she guided our little boat out into the open water. On a rock nearby, a hunched, gnome-like figure was crouched. Then I saw his face, goggled with great round eyepanes and nose-breather, with a pipe that led to a pack on his back.

Nereid steered us toward him; we stopped and I reached and seized him.

"You did this?" I demanded. "You turned loose the gas that killed these people? Who told you to do it? Who gave you the gas, and the mechanisms to spread it?"

His laughter turned to a terrified whimpering. Nereid murmured,

"That mask he's wearing--the workers use that, in our agriculture when they spray with the nitro-carbon. But we have no sprayers that could do a thing like this, nor gas deadly enough."

"You did it?" I shook him.

And then he was laughing again. And suddenly I realized that of course he could not understand English. I cast him loose. And Nereid flung questions at him in her own language.

"Figures came up from the water," she said. "He happened to have his mask and saved himself."

We left him there on the rock, still laughing. Tollgamo's first attack! Would he try to loose this gas on Arron? Our little boat sped past the Water City. I could see now that the quivering, slithering vegetation everywhere was engulfing the flimsy houses. Its stimulated growth would persist, an hour or a day, and then subside.

Shuddering, we drove our boat onward. The great Arsenal rock loomed ahead of us now, a huge almost square lump of metallic rock rising sheer from the water to a height of two or three hundred feet. On all sides it was like that; its only access was from beneath where subterranean passages ran into its honeycombed, grotto interior. Impregnable fortress, save from beneath the sea.

Nereid tied our little craft to a metal fastener against the black, sleek rock-cliff. Then for me she produced the air-mechanisms and round transparent helmet with elastic gasket to fit around my throat. And heavy, metal-weighted shoes for us both.

But no helmet was needed for her. "We will be there in ten or fifteen minutes," she said. "I can see better without the head-covering."

We dropped into the luminous, opalescent water. Nereid held my hand as I floundered a little, trying to remain balanced upright while our weighted shoes carried us slowly down. It was a descent of some fifty feet, with the opalescent surface light fading into the black-green of the depths. Then slowly an undulating dark surface seemed coming up to us; and we landed, swaying on our feet. Weird, submarine world. The jagged slope to one side went on down into the depths. Beside us, swaying leafy vegetation stood upright in the water--a little thicket here, with what seemed a rocky path, ascending along the edge of the black abyss.

Through my transparent helmet I stared at Nereid. She was smiling, unbreathing, as much at home down here as on the land. She gestured that we were to take the ascending path; and held my hand to steady me as we started our swaying, shoving climb. I could see now that ahead of us there was a little tunnel into the cliff where we would emerge into air.

And suddenly I felt Nereid's hand tighten convulsively on mine. I saw the blurred figures in another second, two upright swaying blobs close ahead of us as we emerged past the seaweed clump. Two men down here. Tollgamo's men? I shook loose from Nereid and plunged forward.

Then in another second I could see the faces in the transparent helmets. And one of them I recognized. It was Leh and Allen here, as startled as ourselves at the sudden encounter.

* * * * *

I think now I need only briefly sketch that following hour or two while within the Arsenal fortress Allen and I met Peters and his men, and all of us hastily prepared for Tollgamo's attack. I found Nereid's father quite what I had expected--a quiet, grave-faced man of somewhat my own type, garbed like his fellow scientists in tight trousers and blouse of sleek black fabric. There was no time then to exchange more than the briefest of questions, as Nereid hastily told him what had happened to her since her little note had informed him of her furtive departure for Earth.

"You worried me very much, my daughter," he said quietly. And the same sense of humor which she herself had twinkled now in his grey eyes. "But I think this is no time for reproof."

Peters of course had known that Tollgamo's attack was imminent; and he was almost ready. Allen and I could help little here with everything so indescribably strange. Nereid's virgins were arriving now in little dripping groups that scattered through the workshop grottos with chattering voices that added immeasurably to the confusion. They were all like Nereid, most of them clad in the brief, shining sea-green garment, all of them with flowing hair and eager, excited little faces. But I could see now the evidence of Nereid's Earth heritage--these other girls, even more slim and frail-looking, with oval faces and pert little pointed chins. And their skin was distinctly less pink-white than hers.

Finally the departure for battle. Assembling of this weird little sub-sea army. I watched it with silent, awed amazement. There was but one type of sub-sea vessel here, the small underwater cylinders such as Leh and Allen had come in from the country of the Gorts. Most of them were that same twenty foot size, to carry two men; and a few of them were some thirty feet, with space for three. An underwater electronic ray armed them in bow and stern. Leh explained the weapon to me. It had an effective range of fifty feet, with a current duration of some ten seconds. It would kill any living substance at that range almost instantly; and with duration would eat into the metal armour of Tollgamo's ships.

"My father has had no opportunity to build an underwater weapon of more range and power than this. It is all we have," Leh was telling us. And my heart sank, and Allen and I exchanged glances of dismay, as Leh added:

"Tollgamo has built them up to a range of three hundred feet."

There were about fifty of the small cylinder-boats; most of them to take two men. For battle tonight it was all Peters could assemble. But the cylinders were fleet as darting fishes. We had mobility, and courage, but with sinking heart I wondered if it would serve us.

And I also wondered what Tollgamo would have. Leh's information gave us little hint; and presently he, Allen and I took one of the larger cylinders.

We ran without lights. For a time all I could see was a turgid vista of dark-green depths. An abyss of water at times was beneath us. Then there were the tops of jagged mountain peaks, naked black needle spires rising in clusters out of the depths. Leh knew very well the oceanography here in this undulating terrain of seascape. We headed for the mouth of the inlet at the head of which Tollgamo's city was perched. But before we reached there, little lights down in the watery green haze suddenly appeared. An orange, blurred haze, separating in a moment into dotted points of light.

"Tollgamo's forces!" Leh murmured.

At perhaps a hundred feet of depth, we shut off our tiny rocket-streams of oxo-hydro fluorescence and hung poised. The three of us sat breathless, peering. Had our tail-stream been discovered? It seemed not. There was no undue movement of the Tollgamo lights. Just a slow-moving little string of them, ahead and below us.

* * * * *

I could see the bottom now, a great undulating spread here of dark surface. Rock, doubtless, with slime and ooze on it. The moving dots of light presently disclosed the blobs of enemy vessels. Ten of them, crawling on the bottom in a slow moving line. Cubes and oblongs of metal. Dwarfed by distance they were like struggling little bugs, with lighted eyes and tiny searchbeams waving like feelers before them. Metallic vehicles, perhaps with caterpiller tread, crawling on the bottom.

We drifted closer; almost over them for a moment so that I could guess that each of them was a hundred feet or more in length. Turreted oblong vessels, armoured; and armed with the three hundred foot rays. How many men were in them? Of this Leh had little knowledge, save that he thought perhaps a total of two thousand. Men and women, crawling along in the ooze of this sea bottom, tense, with minds only upon the kill.

"They're heading for Arron," Leh murmured. "In those big ships they surely must have a vast apparatus for land attack."

To come up abruptly within the lagoons and interior waterways of Arron. Perhaps then, on the windward side of the city, to loose their deadly lethal gas.

Two hours, at least, for them to reach Arron. The lights crawled under us; and a vagrant ocean current drifted us away, so that presently we dared fling on our rocket-stream power and speed back to Peters. He was ready now, and his hundred men embarked in the fifty little cylinders. And the five hundred girls were ready, too. I saw them on the ocean surface, from the turret of our cylinder as we bobbed to the top. An amazing army of green-clad nymphs. Each of them had a ray-cylinder of our fifty foot projector. They lay, each of them on a six-foot little sub-sea sled, powered, like our cylinders, with the oxo-hydro gas-streams. In effect, a narrow, six foot long raft, with a hooded bow that housed the control mechanisms and protected the girls' faces from the rush of water. The girls' bodies had a weight of about the same as water. Specific gravity of 1. And the sled with its mechanisms was adjusted to be the same. Girl and sled--neither to float nor sink, but approximately to hang poised. And thus, with little tilting fins on the sled's sides, and lateral and vertical bow and stern rudders, the power would thrust them down into the depths and up again at will.

We started. Running at first on the surface, the largest of our little cylinders with Peters and two of his skilled men led us in a line. And behind us came the girls, in squads of twenty, each with a leader. They had often practiced it, for sport and for the possibility of such a time as this.

As we passed the Water City, we submerged to fifty feet. I turned to look back through our turret. Like darting fishes the girls came down, still holding their formation as we swept on through the green-black depths to battle.