The sea girl

“What? Oh, yes, I suppose so. Aren’t you going to bed, Arturo? That accursed liner--I don’t know why they can’t guard against things like that--puts us two hours late. We’ll be fully that long making Pearl Harbor. The old man’s furious.”

“Is he? I say, this is a fugue of my own invention, Jeff. Listen how I weave in the two voices.”

I rang up our chief engineer to see what he thought of the chances; it would be too bad, on this our third voyage, to be late. The London office would score us.

“Wait a minute, Arturo, shut that damn thing off--”

And then Randall came running down the passage outside. I caught his words: “The Malaysia’s sinking! We’re nearest to her--”

The old man rang my bell; I was ordered up to the control tower. Randall was telling some one in the passage: “That finishes our schedule, all right; we’ll be all night on this job.”

Arturo followed me. “What’s the Malaysia?”

“Surface vessel,” Randall called after us. “An old roamer. She’s sinking, they don’t know why. Piled to the funnels with cargo; she’ll go down like a stone. They ought to keep those old traps in the rivers--”

“Where is she?”

He told us. Less than a degree and a half away, north by west, well off our course. Already we were swinging, and mounting to the surface.

Arturo stuck to my elbow. He was always unobtrusive. The old man allowed him the run of the ship, partly because he liked the boy, and also because of Dr. Plantet’s influence and the considerable investment he had made when our line was financed.

Arturo was excited and awed. The sea held for him a curious fascination. It did for me also, but in a wholly different way. To me the sea was primarily a world of mechanisms; of mathematical charts, schedules to be maintained; a scientific business to be handled with skillful exactitude.

To Arturo it seemed still to be a world of fairy romance, or a mighty monster in its anger. To his eyes its surface still held scudding ships of ancient fashion; argosies sailing hopefully over the storm-lashed waves toward unknown shining harbors. Or, again, his fancy saw a realm of monsters, hideous, fearsome things of the deeps, coming up to frighten the sturdy mariners of old; or oceanids disporting themselves on the beaches of desert islands; sirens with soft luring voices. Or sea horses, racing the Ægean waves with the car of Poseidon. A fairy world of dreams. To him our throbbing steel mechanisms were the unrealities, the anachronisms.

He was wildly excited now at the shipwreck call. But there was nothing to see; nothing to hear. The one hurried signal that Randall had picked up was the last.

We reached the scene and cruised the surface. A litter of wreckage floating in a wan moonlight on an oily sea. We dived as far as we dared. But even under our brilliant lights there was nothing significant to be seen. The Malaysia had gone on down. We were not far from the Marshall ridge here, but there were still several thousand fathoms down to this floor of the great Pacific basin. The Malaysia had gone, and we could not follow her.

This was the first of the many queer things that happened that spring and summer of 1990. I find them difficult to set down in any logical sequence, for at the time they seemed to have no logic. There were several other unaccountable sea disasters to surface vessels. A whaler, with its attendant searching wasp planes loaded on its landing stage, was cruising south of the Aleutians, coming back to Skagway. It never reached there--never was heard from again. As though in the old days, before any of the aërial or underwater communications were perfected, it merely vanished.

Again, there was another old roamer like the Malaysia. It was at fifteen degrees N, south of the Hawaiians. It sent out one startled call: “Sinking--no reason.” It was gone before help could reach it. And, like the Malaysia, none of its lifeboats were found, no life rafts; none of its safety devices put to any use; no single person found alive or dead upon the scene of its sinking.

There was at first little newspaper or radio comment. The public news organizations were engrossed with the “Yellow Peril” complications. The Yellow War, so recently passed, had its aftermath of bitterness, mingled with the cupidity which was rapidly forcing a renewal of commerce. The “mysterious sea disasters” passed with a cursory comment.

The air lines made more of them. In April, the great Trans-Pacific Aircraft Corporation began a broadcasted inquiry into the dangers of ocean travel. It was propaganda solely; and suddenly several of the world governments shut down upon it.

The subject, quite naturally, was of vital interest to our company. There were two vessels lost in March; two in April; and in May no less than six. All surface ships, slow, old-fashioned freighters, food-laden. And, what interested us most, all were lost in the Pacific, or its fringing seas.

By this time there would normally have been a very great world comment. I wondered why there was not, and did not dream until afterward that by April the whole subject was under strict government censorship, with all publicity forbidden.

By May, the surface lines were gradually withholding their Pacific sailings. Our line was rushed, overloaded with business. There was, with us, considerable official perturbation. I knew it, though we were strictly forbidden aboard ship to mention it. Our directors were frightened, especially when Lloyds and the Amalgamated Marine Underwriters raised our insurance, though as yet no submersible anywhere had met with disaster, or even with any unusual occurrence.

And then, in June, one of our largest vessels, sister ship of the one on which I had my post, left Guam and, apparently, headed into the Nero Deep and stayed there! It brought consternation to us all. I was ashore at the time, visiting Dr. Plantet with Arturo and Polly in their home on the Maine coast. A radio came to me from our New York office; my ship would sail once more, and then be laid up until further notice.

With these events from March to June, there were intermingled throughout the world a hundred others which afterward I was to realize as significant. But they did not seem so at the time.

An unusual volcanic activity was reported almost simultaneously from several different quarters. Etna burst forth with a cloud of steam; harmless; unexplained--a puzzle to the scientists. Fuji, so long dormant, began rumbling, threw Japan into a panic, flung up a cloud of smoke and gas which whitened into steam. The craters of the Hawaiians were everywhere steaming. The geysers of Western America were abnormally powerful in their action; the New Zealand hot springs were suddenly, unnaturally active.