Here was the real Arctic, the real polar sea. No sun, no breath of the world above could reach it through its eternal mask of solid ice. As one of the few unfamiliar aspects of the earth, it was as far removed from the imagination of man as if it were part of a far planet hung spinning millions of miles out in space. Men could reach it in shells of metal, but it was not meant for him, and was always hostile. A dozen times a daring one could cross safely its cold lonely reaches, but the thirteenth time it would snare and destroy him for the unwanted trespasser he was.
It was here that the Peary had stepped off into mystery. At this point her hull had throbbed with air, movement, life; at this point all had been well. And then, minutes or hours later, close to here, the sea devil had sprung.
What had happened? What had trapped her? What, even more baffling, had kept her men with their manifold safety devices from even reaching and climbing up on the ice above to signal the searching planes?
Ken Torrance, oppressively alone in the hovering torpoon, gazed through its vision-plate of fused quartz around him. Gray sea, filtering to black beneath; distant eerie shadows, probably meaning nothing, but possibly all important; ceiling of thick ice above, rough and in places broken by a sharp down-thrusting spur—these were his surroundings. These were what he must hunt through, until he came upon the crumpled remnant of a submarine, or the murky, rounded hillocks which gave habitation to the creatures he suspected of capturing that submarine's crew.
He began the search systematically. He angled the torpoon down to a position halfway between sea-floor and ice-ceiling, then swung her in an ever-widening circle. Soon his orbit had a diameter of a half-mile; then a mile; then two.
The torpoon slipped through the water at full speed, her light-beams like restless antennae, now stabbing to the right to dissolve a formless shadow, now to the left to throw into blinding white relief a school of half-transparent fish which scurried with frantic wrigglings of tails from the glare, now slanting up to bathe the cold glassy face of an inverted ice-hill, now down to dig two white holes in the deeper gloom.
Ken continued this routine for hours. Steadily and low the electric motor droned in the ears of the watchful pilot, and the stubby propeller's blades flashed round in a blur of speed between the slightly slanted rudders. Somewhere, miles away, a splintered amphibian plane was slipping down to her last landing, and above, perhaps, the white hell of storm which had brought her low still bowled over the trackless wastes; but here were only shadows and shifting gloom, straining the alert eyes to soreness and tensing the watcher's brain with alarms that, one after another, were only false.
Until at last he found her.
Immediately he shut off all his lights. He no longer needed them. Far in the distance, and below, wavered a faint yellow glow. It was no fish; it could mean only one thing—the lights of a submarine.