The sea horror

by Edmond Hamilton

The other came swiftly toward him, and grasped his arm. "I thought I might find you here, Stevens," he said, quietly. "It was a thousand-to-one chance, but I came."

Stevens stumbled with him to the red-lit window, like a man in a dream. "Clinton!" he exclaimed again. "Where in God's name have you been, while this horror has been rising on the world? When did you come back?"

Clinton pushed him back into the chair by the window, and silenced his questions with an upraised hand. "I came back but a few hours ago, Stevens," he said, "and I came here for you because I sail again in an hour, and want you with me."

"Sail?" repeated Stevens, stupefied. "To where?"

"To the bottom of the Atlantic," said Clinton, calmly.

As the younger man stared at him he dropped into a chair beside him. "To the bottom of the Atlantic," he repeated, his voice suddenly pregnant with dread knowledge, "where I have been for weeks, where there is a secret which I first of all men discovered, where the work of untold ages is whirling now to its climax and sending this mighty flood rolling out to drown our world!"

He was silent a moment, gazing out over the red-lit city while Stevens stared at him in stunned amazement, and then went on. "You were to have been of our expedition, Stevens, and you know what my plans were. You know how we sailed in our submarine to penetrate the deeps that had never yet been penetrated by man. Out of the English Channel, out into the open Atlantic we sailed, west and northwest, until we had reached at last the northern boundary of the Nelsen Deeps. And there our work began.

"I need not tell you of that work, for our own radio reports recorded the main features of it. We headed slowly southward, on the surface, using our trawls, and during the next three days we were amazed at the richness of the fields beneath us, the profusion of new forms and variations of old ones that our trawls brought up. It was late on the fourth day that we lost one of our trawls, as I reported. We drew up the steel cable, to find that it had been severed near its end, and though we were certain, of course, that it had broken when the trawl caught on a snag, it was no ragged break but a clean, sharp cut, as though done by giant shears. That it was which touched us first with a sense of mystery and awe. Around us was only the vast empty panorama of sea and sky, but beneath us were three miles and more of lightless waters, a vast gulf unpenetrated since the world's birth by man or the science of man. We worked on, southward, feeling as though under some strange spell. And then, shattering that spell, came the thing which one of our trawls brought up on the morning of the fifth day, the 11th.

"It was not so much in the trawl as on it, hanging from a corner as though caught and brought up by the ascending trawl. It was a machine, or part of a machine, a thing of shining metal about a foot in each dimension. There was a framework of heavy metal rods, three of them; inside were a chain of little gears and six slender tubes of what seemed glass, with inside of each a red wire or thread. The framework's three thick pillars were broken off sharp at the bottom, as though the thing had been ripped by the trawl from some larger machine, yet in itself the thing was a complete mystery. It was totally unlike anything we had ever seen, the shining metal was a wholly unfamiliar one, and the glasslike tubes, we found, were not glass but a transparent metal of some sort. The thing was constructed, too, with a strength and heaviness unusual in so small a mechanism. No one on earth would construct it thus heavily; but suppose it had been actually constructed at the sea's bottom from whence we had dragged it, to resist the tremendous pressures there? What mysteries could be lurking in the three miles of water below us?

"There was but one thing to do, to descend in the submarine for further exploration, and after sending off a last message in which I hinted of our discovery, without telling more lest the whole thing prove a hoax, we began excited preparations for the descent. The deck-fittings were dismantled, the heavy conning-tower doors clanged shut, and a moment later the submarine's electric motors began to hum and we slanted downward into the green waters, using both ballast-tanks and diving-planes for our descent, and moving downward in a great spiral.