CHAPTER V
I stared at Nona silently. The air bubbles from her mouth grew less, until soon there were almost none of them. The tidal air in her lungs had been forced out; water had taken its place. Through her opened mouth she was drawing in the water and expelling it—rapid respirations taxing the intercostal muscles almost to their limit.
Nona smiled up at me through the water, which in spite of its milk-white color, was curiously limpid and transparent. I felt the tug of her hand; I stepped forward, and in the deepening water my face went under.
Whatever may have been my previous existence, an experience such as this quite evidently was no part of it. My instinct was to hold my breath. I did so until I could no longer. I struggled against Nona’s hand and tried to get my head above the surface. But she held me; and my fear of having her know me to be afraid was greater than my fear of the water.
At last I let out my pent-up breath. It gurgled from my mouth in bubbles. Then, in a gulp of desperation, I inhaled. The water choked me. I tried to cough; but could not—or at least the cough became my exhalation.
My ears were roaring as though the torrents of your Niagara were rushing past them. My head and chest seemed bursting—icy-cold at first, then burning with fire.
My eyes were open. I was standing beside Nona and she was looking up at me. Through the half-light of the water I could see her almost as plainly as through air. She smiled encouragingly at me, and I tried to smile back.
I was drawing the water in and out swiftly now, with my mouth held extended like an expiring fish. It was a tremendous effort, this respiration. The muscles of my chest and diaphragm were tired in a moment. A weight in my chest seemed smothering my heart; I seemed on fire inside—a million inflamed little lung passages rebelling at this unaccustomed medium.
Spots were dancing before my eyes. I was losing consciousness through lack of oxygen. The poisoned venous blood was dulling my brain.
Then I began to feel better. I was respiring now almost as swiftly as Nona, and with far less effort than I had used at first.
You are skeptical? Because you cannot breathe your Earth-water, you assume that I could not breathe this water on my meteor. What quaint logic that is! Yet I find all you Earth-people think on similar lines. It is your inadequate mentality, I suppose, so I must hasten to enlighten you.
There are two fundamental objects of respiration. First: the introduction into the system of oxygen by which the products resulting from the disintegration of the muscular, nervous and other tissues of the body may be converted into compounds easily eliminated. Secondly: the direct removal of the most noxious and therefore most important of these waste products—carbonic acid gas.
In man, as you know him on Earth, this is accomplished by the lungs. The venous blood, charged with its carbonic acid and its waste products, needing a renewal of oxygen and a removal of the carbonic acid, is pumped by the heart through the lungs. These by their construction present an immense amount of internal surface covered by a vascular network, through which the blood flows in innumerable minute streamlets.
In respiration, the inhaled air is separated from the blood only by an extraordinarily thin membrane—less than 1/20,000 of an inch in thickness. Through this membrane the blood absorbs oxygen from the air, giving in return to the air its noxious carbonic acid gas.
Such is the basic process in you Earth-men. In the case, let us say, of your Earth-fishes breathing your water, there is little fundamental difference. The blood in their gills is brought practically into contact with a steadily moving stream of water. But fishes do not get their oxygen from the water in some mysterious fashion. Did you think they did? They get the oxygen, not from water, but from air—the air that is held in solution in the water.
But for two things, you on Earth could breathe your water. First, your lung passages are too minute to receive a substance so heavy, so unvolatile, let me say, as is the water of Earth. Secondly, there is not proportionally enough air in your water.
Both these conditions were different on my meteor.
This water on my meteor was very different from water as you know it. I have already said it was light and thin. To be exact, I estimate that on your Earth it would have a specific gravity of no more than .18, placing your water at 1.00.
In your sea-water a normally fleshy man will float with a small margin to spare. This water on my meteor was not saline; but more than that, Nona and I stood submerged in it with hardly any perceptible feeling of buoyancy.
Let me make my point still clearer. The low specific gravity of this water compared to yours was principally caused by the large amount of air it held in solution. It was, in a word, highly aerified to an extent proportionally eleven times more than is your average water on Earth. For this reason, my lungs needed but one-eleventh the amount of it from which to secure the necessary oxygen.
On Earth, your normal respiration varies widely; sixteen to twenty times per minute for a healthy adult at rest might be taken as a fair average. I was breathing this water at approximately eighty respirations per minute.
I do not know how long I stood there under the surface with Nona before I attained semblance of normality. But gradually the burning in my chest and the smothering of my heart subsided. My brain cleared.
I looked about me curiously. The water was clear and transparent to a remarkable degree. There seemed inherent light diffused through it, like a phosphorescence.
We had taken several steps forward and were well below the surface now. Underneath my feet was a sandy soil. To the right and left were rocky walls—the sides of the submerged tunnel. And ahead lay open water, dim in the distance, with the narrow sandy floor sloping downward like a path down a hillside.
Everything was slightly blurred in outline. Nona’s hair floated out and above her. The freedom of movement we had had in the air above was gone. We were hampered in moving by the friction of the water.
But it was nothing like the friction of walking in your water. Indeed, it was far more like your Earthly existence on land.
I am very specific in detailing these sensations. You will see why in a moment; you will see that this experience was the means of saving both our lives—Nona’s and mine—and projecting us into a new era of my existence.
For after the very next time of sleep, the catastrophe to our tiny world overtook us.