The swamp was upside down

by Murray Leinster

"The wind's good and strong, now," he observed. "Let's find out. You've got the starting system all set?"

Sandringham waved his hand. There was a high-voltage battery set. It was of a type designed for blasting on airless planets, but that did not matter. Its cables led snakily for a couple of hundred feet to a very small pile of grayish soil which had been taken out of a bore-hole. They went over that untidy heap and down into the ground. Hardwick took hold of the firing-handle. He paused.

"How about highways?" he asked. "There might be some steam out of this hole."

"All allowed for," said Sandringham. "Go ahead."

There was a gust of wind strong enough to knock a man down. There was a humming sound in the air, as storm-wind beat upon the four-thousand-foot cliff and poured over its top. There were gradually rising waves, below. The sky was gray. The sea was slate-colored. Far, far to windward, the white line of pouring rain upon the water came marching toward the island.

Hardwick pumped the firing-handle.

There was a pause, while wind-gusts tore at his garments and staggered him where he stood. It was quite a long pause.

Then a white vapor came seeping out of the bore-hole. It was perfectly white. Then it came out with a sudden burst which was not in any sense explosive, but was merely a vast rushing of vaporized water. Then, a hundred yards away, there was a mistiness on the grassy surface. Still farther, a crack in the surface-soil let out a curtain of white vapor.

Here and there, everywhere, little gouts of steam poured into the air and tumbled in the storm-wind. It was notable that the steam did not come out as an invisible vapor, and condense in midair. It poured out of the ground in clouds, already condensed but thrust out by more masses of vapor behind it. It was not super-heated steam that came out. It was simply steam. Harmless steam, like the steam out of the spouts of tea kettles. But it rose from individual places everywhere. It made a massy coating of vapor which the storm-wind blew away. In seconds a half-mile of soil was venting steam; in seconds more a mile. The thick, fleecy vapor swept across the landscape. The storm-wind could only tumble it and sweep it away.

In minutes there was no part of the island to be seen at all, save only the thin line of the cliffs reaching away between dark water on the one hand and snow-white clouds of vapor on the other.