Fortenay sat, but said nothing, for there was nothing to say.
Fortenay sat for a long while and breathed hard through his thin inquisitive nose while the bathysphere sank down and down into gathering green darkness. After a time it dawned upon him with a great rush of relief that Fortenay the columnist, whose facile wit daily entertained twenty millions of people, could not possibly die in any such fantastic fashion.
It simply couldn't happen. He was the victim of a peculiarly vivid dream—three-dimensional, complete with technicolor and tactile sensations, but still a dream—from which he must waken shortly.
But there was no denying that it was a horribly convincing dream. The monstrous artifact he had come to investigate—it really was a building of some sort, he saw now, and not a ruin at all—rose closer and closer until its vast top spread out under the bathysphere like a mossy green plateau.
A random eddy of current caught the bathysphere and pushed it gently outward as it sank, so that it missed the edge and fell on toward the bottom, and the barnacled wall that slid up to tower over Fortenay was as blank and final as the rim of the world.
They were approaching the bottom of Bartlett Deep when they saw the first gigantic splashes of lettering, emblazoned like the heraldic script of a Titan across the face of the wall. The doctor was beside himself with the frenzy of his discovery, but could make nothing of it because the wall was much too near. It was like looking at a billboard from a distance of six inches, and so Dr. Hans Weigand passed the last moments of his life as he had lived the greater part of it, in disappointment and frustration.
Fortenay, bemused by his dream, took no such interest. Actually he felt a little smug that he should have had the acumen to recognize it for what it was even before he woke and that he should have been able, even in the grip of a nightmare, to face down a big-time myth-making scientist like Wiggy on his own ground.
All this would vanish soon, he told himself, even as the first sudden tracery of strain-fissures appeared in the quartz-glass shell of the bathysphere. A dream is a myth and a myth is a dream, and he would wake up soon—
The bathysphere burst, crushed, as Fortenay would have said, like an eggshell.
Fortenay woke, not from a dream but from an existence. He found himself standing on a smooth floor of shell before a vast and featureless building whose facade towered mistily up out of sight. Little eddies of current bore tiny, feathery creatures that brushed past and through him, glowing phosphorescently. Glittering fragments of the shattered bathysphere fell like a rain of outsized diamonds about his feet.