The announcement was greeted with great interest, since various disturbing rumors concerning the nature of Dr. Weigand's discovery were already in circulation. Most of them—since Dr. Weigand himself was frankly unable to offer any clue as to their origin or purpose—were elaborated upon by Fortenay and his colleagues with less regard for truth than for dramatic effect.
As a consequence, the newspaper-reading public was torn between a number of equally improbable theories which supposed that:
Dr. Weigand's find was not an artifact at all, but a monstrous bubble of molten basalt blown up ages before by a subterranean volcano and frozen solid by contact with sea water. A patent impossibility, since the thing occurred in an area free of any early vulcanism and was, by accurate sonar measurement, a sharply-defined oblong body some six miles long, three miles wide and two miles high.
It was an artifact of recent construction, being nothing less than an undersea Russian submarine base built secretly during the Korean diversion and designed to obliterate the Americas under a rain of hydrogen bombs.
It was a colossal structure erected by the inhabitants of an antediluvian country like Atlantis and inundated by the waters of some prehistoric flood.
It was, despite Plato's insistence that that mythical land lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, Atlantis herself.
It was neither of these but a self-sufficient city built by a naturally marine race of men who had taken a divergent line of evolution and who might, for all anyone knew, be plotting a war of conquest against the honest, industrious, amicable and God-fearing nations of topside humanity.
None of these, Fortenay pontificated, was likely. Only one fact could be accounted certain, he added with clarion determination, and that Fortenay himself, armed with the invincible power of the press, would Find Out.
And Fortenay did, because Fortenay never let his readers down.
By luck, the journalist boarded the Cormorant just in time to keep his promise, for the tug's straining winch was in the process of swinging from her deck the quartz-glass bathysphere which Dr. Weigand had designed for plumbing the Bartlett Deep.