Polaris and the Goddess Glorian

At an eighteen-knot clip, the Minnetonka cut swiftly through the waves, nearer and nearer to the flashing burden of the waves. Soon other eyes not so keen as those of Polaris could descry the strange objective of the ship. Forward along the rail, sailors clustered, shouting their surprise, and staring at the unusual spectacle of the glittering man afloat.

Presently, with a deep thrumming of her valves, the Minnetonka slowed down. With a word to Everson, Polaris left the bridge and hastened across the deck. As a boat was swung over the side in the davits, he sprang into it with the sailors. Less than two-score strokes of the oars took the boat alongside the floating mystery.

Then, indeed, had the sailors cause to stare with open mouths.

On a crisscross tangle of slender beams, oddly twisted and broken, lay the body of a man. So small was the raft of wreckage which supported him that his head and feet projected at each side, and as the waves tossed his unstable craft, first his face and then his heels were dipped beneath the water. Very wide of shoulder was the stranger and powerfully framed, if the outlines of the garb he wore did not belie him.

From crown to sole he was dressed in jointed armor, cunningly fashioned and decorated, and the whole of which gleamed in the sunlight as only burnished copper or red gold can gleam. His hands only were bare; smooth, strong hands, clenched fast about two of the broken beams beneath him.

But it was none of those things, and they were strange enough, that caused the coxswain to cry out hoarsely as the boat wore alongside, or that caused Polaris Janess, bent over with outstretched hands, to draw them back from the floating stranger, while his lips parted and his breath came hard.

"He's alive! By the grace of God, he's alive!" cried the coxswain.

Face downward the stranger lay, as Polaris had said, loose-flung and inert, and sprawled as though some force had pitched him there. But though his head was more often under the water than above it, his broad shoulders heaved and fell regularly. He was alive.

The supreme wonder of it, and that which awed Polaris and the sailors, was that the man breathed when his head was under water!

When a wave tilted the raft so that his face was raised, his breath was expelled with a wheezing, whistling sound. When he was submerged, a stream of small bubbles arose about his neck and clung to the surface of his metal helmet.

For a long moment Polaris stood and looked down at this amazing thing. Then he reached out and very gently took the stranger by the shoulders to turn his face to the sky. So tight was the clutch of those strong bare hands about the two beams of the raft which they held that the entire structure tipped when the son of the snows laid hold. In vain he tried to loosen that grasp. It was not to be done without breaking the man's fingers. To make an end of it, Janess took an axe from the hands of the coxswain and cut through the beams.

Still gripping the wooden fragments, the man turned over on his back.

Then the mystery of the stranger's breathing was partially made clear. Under the flare of the helmet he wore his brow was hidden. His eyes were fast closed. Fitting tightly over the bridge of his nose and extending down so that it covered his mouth and part of his chin, was a projecting masklike contrivance of metal and leather. Its straps covered the man's ears and were made fast somewhere at the back of his head under the helmet. So tightly was the mask affixed that its straps cut into the flesh of the man's cheeks. It much resembled the masks worn by the soldiers in modern warfare to protect themselves from the gas attacks of their enemy.

Through its mechanism the breath of its wearer hissed and whistled like escaping steam.

Alive though the man was, and under circumstances which made his discoverers marvel, he was near death. Above and below the confines of the mask he wore, the bones of his face seemed almost thrusting through the flesh. The flesh itself was wasted and puckered by the action of the sea water, and the skin was cracked and raw. His hands, which clung so tenaciously to the bits of broken wood, were bleeding about the nails, and his wrists were gashed and water-eaten.

"Now, here is work for Dr. Marsey," Polaris said. He gathered the limp form of the stranger into his arms and lifted him into the boat.

At the rail of the Minnetonka as the boat was shipped, a curious crowd met the advent of the man from the sea. Carrying him as lightly as though he had been a child, Polaris laid the man on the deck. The ship's doctor pushed through the wondering sailors and bent over him.

"Not dead?" he exclaimed when he saw the stranger's face. "A most amazing thing!"

"What resurrection from antiquity have we here?" said old Zenas Wright, falling on his knees beside Polaris, who was supporting the man's head. "No museum I ever saw boasted a suit of armor like this one." The scientist ran a finger over the delicate tracery on the glittering corselet of the stranger.