Read Ebook: Carried Off: A Story of Pirate Times by Stuart Esm

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Ebook has 785 lines and 38317 words, and 16 pages

"Six minutes and a half from the static," he said grimly. "Eighty miles. Sound travels a mile every five seconds. Let's listen. Ten seconds--eight--six--four--"

Now the wave-guide radar had gone back to normal operation. Its silver-plated square tube flickered and quivered and spun quickly in this direction and that, searching all the sky.

There was a booming sound. It was infinitely low-pitched. It was long-continued. It was so low in frequency that it seemed more a vibration of the air than a sound.

It died away.

"It's a concussion-wave," said Soames soberly. "It arrived four hundred odd seconds after the static. Eighty miles.... A noise has to be pretty loud to travel so far! A ground-shock has to be rather sharp to be felt as an earth-tremor at eighty miles. Even a spark has to be very, very fierce to mess up radio and radar reception at eighty miles.... Something very remarkable happened down yonder tonight--something somebody ought to look into."

Gail said quickly, "How about a spaceship from another world?"

"It would have come in from outer space," said Soames. "It didn't."

"A secret weapon," said Captain Moggs firmly. "I shall report to Washington and ask orders to investigate."

"I wouldn't," said Soames. "If you ask orders you promise to wait for them. If you wait for orders, whatever fell will be covered by snow past discovery by the time your orders come."

Gail looked at him interestedly, confidently.

"What will you do, then?"

"I think," said Soames, "we'll find it and then report.

"You were planning a cosey little article on Housewives of the Antarctic; The Care and Feeding of One's Penguin Husband. Right?"

Gail grinned suddenly.

"I see. Yes."

"We take off in the 'copter," said Soames. "We start out ostensibly to gather material for an article on Can This Penguin Marriage Be Saved. But we'll be blown off course. We'll find ourselves quite accidentally where the radar said there was the great-grandfather of static bursts, with a ground-shock and a concussion-wave to boot. We may even be blown farther, to where something dived downward for four or five miles and vanished below the horizon."

Captain Moggs said uneasily:

"Most irregular. But it might be wise."

"Of course," said Soames. "It's always safer to report something you've found than not find something you've reported."

"We start at sunrise," said Captain Moggs authoritatively.

Soames went back to the radar. As he looked at it, it picked out something rather smaller than a marble at a height of seventy-nine miles and followed that unthinkably ancient small wanderer of space down to its spectacular suicide by fire at a height of thirty-four miles.

He went painstakingly over the radar. It worked perfectly. The taped record of its observations carried the story of all that Gail and Captain Moggs had seen when he saw it. Machinery may err, but it does not have delusions. It would have to be subject to systematic hallucination to have reported and recorded what this radar insisted was the truth.

When dawn came, he went out to the helicopter's hangar. There was a supply-plane on the runway, but the helicopter belonged at the base. He found himself excessively conscientious in his check-over. Though he hated to admit it, he knew it was because Gail would be in the plane.

When he headed back toward the main building one of the geophysics gang beckoned to him. He followed to the small, far-spaced hut--now snow-buried to its eaves--in which the seismograph ticked away to itself.

"I think I'm going crazy," said the geophysics man. "Did you ever hear of a ground-shock starting inside out?"

He pointed to the graph-paper that fed very, very slowly past the seismograph's pens. The recording did look odd.

"If you put your hand just under the surface of the water in a bathtub," said the geophysics man harassedly, "and jerk it downward, you get a hollow that spreads out with a wave behind it. It's the exact opposite of dropping a pebble into water, which makes a wave that spreads out with a hollow--a trough--behind it. But except for that one way of making it, all waves--absolutely all wave-systems--start out with a crest and a trough behind it. Everywhere, all the time, unless you do what I said in a bathtub."

"I'm a shower man, myself," observed Soames. "But go on."

"This," said the geophysics man bitterly, "is like a bathtub wave. See? The ground was jerked away, and then pushed back. Normal shock-waves push away and then spring back! An ice-crack, a rock-slide, an explosion of any sort, all of them make the same kind of waves! All have compression phases, then rarefaction phases, then compression phases, and so on. What--" his voice was plaintive--"what in hell is this?"

"Are you saying," Soames asked after a moment, "that ordinary earth-tremors record like explosion-waves, but that you'd have to have an implosion to make a record like this?"

"Sure!" said the geophysics man. "But how can you have an implosion that will make an earth-shock? I'm going to have to take this whole damned wabble-bucket apart to find out what's the matter with it! But there's nothing the matter! It registered what it got! But what did it get?"

"An implosion," said Soames. "And if you have trouble imagining that, I'm right there with you."

He went back to the main building to get Gail and Captain Moggs. They went out to the 'copter hangar together.

"I've talked to the radar and loran operator," said Soames. "I explained that you wanted to see some crevasses from the air, and I'd be wandering around looking for them on the way to the rookery. He will check on us every fifteen minutes, anyhow."

The 'copter went up the long, sloping, bulldozed snow-ramp. Soames checked his radio contact. He nodded. The engines hummed and roared and bellowed, and the ship lifted deliberately and floated away over the icy waste.

The little helicopter was very much alone above a landscape which had never known a growing thing.

Soames kept in radar contact and when he was ready he told the base, "I'm going down now, hunting crevasses."

He let the 'copter descend. The waste was featureless, then and for a seemingly interminable time afterward. Then his estimated position matched the site of the static-earth-shock-concussion-wave-occurrence. There seemed nothing about this part of the snow-desert which was different from any other part. No. Over to the left. A wind-pattern showed in the snow. It was already being blown away; its edges dulled. But it was rather far from a probable thing. There were lines--hollows--where gusts had blown at the snow's surface. They were spiral lines, tending toward a center. They had not the faintest resemblance to the crater of an explosion which might have made an earth-shock.

Soames took a camera out of its place in the 'copter. Gail stared down.

"I've seen something like that," she said puzzledly. "Not a picture. Certainly not a snow-field. I think it looks like a diagram of some sort."

"Try a storm-wind diagram," said Soames drily. "The way a cyclone ought to look from directly overhead. The meteorology boys will break down and cry when they see this picture!"

He took pictures. The shadows of the wind-made indentations would come out clearly in the film.

"Unless," said Soames, "unless somebody got a snap of a whirlwind touching a snow-field and bouncing up again, this will be a photographic first. It's not an explosion-pattern, you'll notice. Wind and snow weren't thrown away from the center. They were drawn toward it. Momentarily. It's an explosion inside out, an implosion-pattern to be more exact."

"I don't understand," said Gail.

"An explosion," said Soames grimly, "is a bursting-out of a suddenly present mass of gas. An implosion is a bursting-in of a suddenly present vacuum. Set off a firecracker and you have an explosion. Break an electric bulb and you have an implosion. That pattern behind us is an implosion-pattern."

"But how could such a thing be?"

"If we knew," said Soames wrily, "maybe we'd be running away. Maybe we should."

The 'copter droned on and on and on. The ice-sheet continued unbroken.

"There!" cried Gail, suddenly.

She pointed. Blowing snow hid everything. Then there was a hole in the whiteness, a shadow. The shadow stirred and an object too dark to be snow appeared. It vanished again.

"There's a sheltered place!" said Gail, "and there's something dark in it!"

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