The Man Who Found Out
By Roger Dee
It's one thing to blow a bubble of glib,
journalistic lies. Quite another to have that
bubble burst in a nightmarish, green beyond.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Universe September 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Roger Dee! The name has a fine, myth-making flavor, hasn't it? You'd almost know that our ebullient author—his work has appeared in many magazines—would excel in just such superb fancy-free flights of humorous scientific fantasy as he has brought you here with a spectral chuckle.
The trouble with Fortenay was that he was not merely a skeptic but a professional skeptic, which is just another way of saying that he was a widely known and highly paid journalist who had long ago learned to capitalize on his penchant for iconoclasm. Fortenay was also given to the sort of reflexive arrogance inevitable to some small men, and was unscrupulous enough in its exercise to point up the flavor of his satiric commentary on any currently news-worthy phenomenon with the strong spice of semantic misrepresentation.
Fortenay was, in short, an able, intelligent, ambitious and thoroughly offensive little heel. He was precisely the sort who should never have been permitted in any responsible capacity aboard a scientific vessel like the oceanographic survey tug Cormorant when she was in the process of investigating a find as important as the gigantic artifact which Dr. Hans Weigand had discovered in the six-mile abyss of Bartlett Deep just south of Cuba.
But Fortenay's publisher was a power among politicians as well as among publishers, so Fortenay was able to announce in his syndicated column that his readers would receive on-the-spot coverage of the investigation, and that no smoke-screen of scientific doubletalk should keep the truth from them.