Читать книгу Lord of Atlantis - John Russell Fearn - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

UPHEAVAL

Commander Ronald Clifton, chief navigator of the space-liner Atom Cloud, stood gazing out of the big observation window of the bridge. He was looking at something he could not quite understand, something that did not fit into his years of experience in the spaceways between Earth and Mars. Presently he turned, speaking in his clipped voice.

“Have you a moment, Mr. Claxton?” The second navigator glanced up from studying his instruments and moved to his superior’s side. The commander motioned through the window. “What the blazes do you imagine that is?” he asked.

Claxton gazed steadily. Here in the utter depths of space, some millions of miles from Earth—from which the liner was heading in the direction of Mars—a most unusual spacecraft was visible. In these sheer distances where no air intervened, where the sun blazed with relentless, blinding glory, it was hard to estimate mileage.

The object at which both men were staring was probably 3,000 miles away—an enormous wheel, it seemed.

“Not the least idea, sir,” Claxton said. “Looks a bit like one of those alien spacecraft we had trouble with some time ago.”

“Can’t be that; they were all destroyed by the Golden Amazon. Anyway, that thing is much bigger. Get the reflector set up, Mr. Claxton.”

“Right, sir.” The second navigator turned to the powerful telescopic apparatus and adjusted its light-trapping devices and screens so that it was prismatically reflecting the distant object onto a broad viewing screen. The Commander gazed at it and gave a long whistle of surprise.

“Not a disc, sir, as we thought,” Claxton said. “It’s a globe of some sort with glass circles all around it.”

“Yes—if that’s what they are,” the Commander said. “They might even be lenses of great size. Sixteen of them circling that ball like a necklace. There seems to be windows in the ball, too. I certainly never saw anything like it before. Apparently it’s heading in the direction of Earth.”

“Might be dangerous,” Claxton suggested. “Do you think we ought to warn them back home? They’re in no shape for meeting any possible menace while rebuilding everything from the great glacier catastrophe.”

“It’s not our job to issue warnings, Mr. Claxton. That’s a panic action. We’ll report what we have seen and leave it at that. Attend to it, will you?”

“Immediately, sir.” The Commander returned his attention to the big window. It was his responsibility to get this huge liner safely to Mars, not conjecture on the meaning of a strange spacecraft. Nevertheless, he did wonder quite a lot about it as he watched its glittering circle slowly sink into the abyss in the direction of far-flung Earth.

On Earth itself the information concerning the weird craft did not excite undue attention, chiefly because those in charge of world affairs had more than enough on their minds in restoring order after chaos. Only a few months had passed since the whole world had been encased in a cocoon of ice—the Great Glacier, as it had been called—created by the near death of the Sun. That the Sun now blazed again upon the world and surrounding planets, as hot and friendly as of yore, was entirely owing to the combined sciences of Violet Ray Brant—the Golden Amazon—and Abna, a descendant of the lost city of Atlantis, whose home now lay beneath the distant Red Spot of Jupiter. The Amazon herself, acclaimed at last throughout the world for her stupendous feat in rekindling the orb of day, had virtually become dictatress of Earthly policy. Since she had always taken a leading part in world affairs, especially when scientific problems arose, her rise to absolute power really signified but little. She was pleased—and nothing more—that the Earth’s inhabitants had at last decided to elect her of their own volition; otherwise nothing was changed.

Day by day she sat in the headquarters of central London, from where came all the world’s orders, discussing plans with engineers and architects for rebuilding, arranging new social levels, planning endlessly to bring an ordered, beautiful world out of the chaos left by the glacier. Parts of London were already rebuilt. The Dodd Space Line to other worlds was operating again, chiefly so that reconstruction could begin on other planets as well, they also having suffered severely from the sun’s near-extinction.

When the news of the strange craft reached the Amazon, she sat studying its details outlined in the report, oblivious for the moment of the helpers on either side of her.

There was Chris Wilson, Chief Executive of the Dodd Space Line—a fleshy, pink-faced man verging on late middle age. Next to him, musing over a new social outline for the youth of the world, was his daughter Ethel, close on thirty, black-haired, blue-eyed, intensely vital and alert. Farther along the conference table sat Beatrice Wilson, mellow and middle-aged, Ethel’s mother; and opposite her were Commander and Ruth Kerrigan, formerly Dodd, the owners of the space line.

The Amazon handed the report to Wilson without comment. The passing years, so marked now in the elderly members present, did not exist for her, She still looked about twenty-five, graceful as a tigress, amber-skinned, her beautiful face unmarred by a single line. The scarlet in which she was dressed emphasized the flowing gold of her shoulder-length hair and the deep purple of her eyes. Even had her attractiveness been that of beauty alone, it would have been fascinating—but this was her least vital gift. Her power lay in her superhuman strength and uncanny scientific knowledge, both gifts wished on her by the skill of a long dead surgeon during her infancy. Chris Wilson, handing the report to his neighbour, said: “We’ve nothing like that in the spaceways.”

“No, we haven’t.” The Amazon sat musing, her gaze fixed absently through the vast window onto the girders and skeletal buildings of reviving London. “And we also know that the colonists on the Moon and Mars have not. Mercury is dead, Venus is completely uninhabitable. So this craft is either from some unknown spot in the void and contains explorers—or, more likely, it has come from Jupiter.”

Ethel Wilson gave a start. “Aunt Vi, you mean it might be Abna, that god-like man who helped you rekindle the Sun? The one who once saved me from death?”

“Yes, it might be Abna,” the Amazon agreed, and smiled a trifle cynically to herself. “It wouldn’t be a great surprise, either. He never did strike me as being the kind of man to take a beating lying down.”

“I think you did wrongly toward Abna, Vi,” Chris Wilson said. “After all, he had much to give—vast science derived from Atlantis—and all he wanted in return was for you to marry him. Instead of that, you palmed a synthetic image of yourself onto him and let him go back home!”

“He deceived me, so I deceived him.” The Amazon raised and lowered her graceful shoulders. “He only wanted marriage with me for one purpose—because not a single woman exists in his race, inhabiting the domed city under the Red Spot of Jupiter. His idea was to marry me, our offspring to form the basis of a new race. Coldly scientific and biological. It had nothing to do with his professed love for me.”

“I can’t quite believe that, Vi,” Commander Kerrigan said, smiling in his wealth of grey beard. “I could not imagine a better matched pair than you and Abna. He’s every bit as scientific as you are and, surprisingly enough, every bit as strong. You are sure it isn’t jealousy of his power and intelligence that makes you pretend to hate him?”

“I don’t hate him, and I never said I did. He deserved teaching a lesson for hoodwinking me. If it should be he who has returned, I’m afraid he’ll have to learn yet another lesson. As I told him in my concluding words, it will have to be his science against mine.”

She glanced about her at a gradually deepening vibration. The sensation increased until the room, for a moment, seemed to sway and then became steady again.

“That,” Chris said, “was a mighty big earth shock somewhere!”

The Amazon nodded, undisturbed. “Not that it’s anything unusual these days. Earthquakes following the collapse of the great glacier are inevitable.”

* * * *

At that moment, two transatlantic pilots were viewing the cause of the earthquake from a height of 10,000 feet. Their job was flying the four-a-day rocket plane freight flights across the Atlantic from London to New York. This was the third trip of the day. One moment they were streaking through the pale blue spring sky with nothing disturbing the peace of the rolling Atlantic far beneath; the next they beheld the most incredible thing they had never known.

The grey rollers of the ocean parted mysteriously ahead of them, and Pilot Carson suddenly cut down speed as he saw the phenomenon commencing. “Balls of fire!” he breathed, stunned. “Just take a look at that, Jeff!”

Jeff Baxley, his navigator, did not need to be told. Pop-eyed, he was gazing at the waters, agitated by some invisible and inconceivably powerful force, as they rolled upward and outward before the arrival of something from the ocean’s depths. At the same moment, violent air disturbances and a sense of tremendous magnetic strain hit the flier.

It swayed and reeled out of control, spun about in a vast electrical vortex.

Dazed, but still unhurt, unable to control the craft, the two men watched land, buried for centuries under the ocean, start rising from the water, thrusting algae-covered pinnacles into the sunlight, water pouring from every cranny as though from the conning tower of a surfacing submarine.

The pinnacles became large, pointed rocks—then rose higher and became hills. Higher still until they were revealed as actual mountains. Land at their bases came next, thrust out of the ocean’s depths and stretching in a colossal plateau as far as the pilots could see in either direction.

Then the electrical vortex was gone and they gazed at mighty tidal waves receding from them, one in each direction, which must finally crash on the shores of Britain, Federated Europe, the United States, and perhaps eastern South America.

With difficulty Pilot Carson got the flier under control again. “Dry land!” he cried. “Just look at it, Jeff! Dry land where there was ocean—a huge plateau of it! I’ll bet it goes all the way from Britain to America across the Atlantic.”

Jeff switched on recording cameras, and changing direction, Carson set the machine flying over the dripping rock landscape where formerly the Atlantic had rolled in majesty. Everywhere the two men looked there were lakes, still draining off into the depths of the plateau. Where the water had already vanished there were endless acres of green algae and sea fungi. The most incredible things of all were the mountains towering into the sky.

Carson said, “The tops of those mountains were originally the islands of the Azores. Now they’re sticking nearly 3,000 feet into the air.”

The navigator said, staring ahead intently, “Looks to me like a city or something, under a glass cover.”

As the flier swept onward there loomed up a mighty gleaming hemisphere, entirely devoid of algae and catching the light of the sun in a myriad reflections. It rose perhaps 300 feet at the highest point—a perfect dome.

Carson swung the flier so that they swept over it in a circle, the cameras recording steadily. There certainly was some kind of city inside the dome, but of people or life of any kind there was no trace. In fact, there was more than a city under the dome. There seemed to be quite a lot of forest as well.

“That’s the biggest saucepan lid I ever saw,” Carson said. “Must be all of thirty miles across at its base. We’ll finish our hop and then tip them off with the information in London. Good job we have a camera record, otherwise they’d think us crazy.” The machine darted westward to continue its course toward the United States. It appeared that a link had been born uniting Britain and Federated Europe with the American continent.

The havoc caused by the initial earthquake itself, followed by the vast tidal waves that crashed in on the shores of the United States and Britain, was sufficient to cause inquiry in all directions. To the Golden Amazon it became a matter of paramount importance to discover what had happened. Though central London had survived the full fury of the tidal wave which had come up the Thames, a great deal of it was under water, and the new building projects had been destroyed to the accompaniment of a heavy death toll.

It was an hour after the initial earthquake that the tidal wave arrived, and for another two hours after that, well into the afternoon, the Amazon was busy at her communications desk, asking for details of the disaster. In the office with her there still remained Chris Wilson, his wife, and Ethel. The Kerrigans had departed to their own executive offices.

“As far as I can make out,” the Amazon said finally, “there is something abnormal out in the Atlantic—some kind of land-rise about which the facts are not clear. That, of course, would create a tremendous water displacement that would account for the tidal waves. I suppose I ought to go and look, but with things in their present state I don’t see how I can spare the time.”

“I can,” Ethel offered. “There’s a New York air liner leaving in an hour. I could go and see what’s taken place, then radio the information back to you. Save a lot of secondhand reports. I could fly my own plane of course, but there are so many climatic upheavals at present I’d prefer the safety of a liner.”

“Good enough,” the Amazon agreed promptly. “You do that.”

Ethel nodded and hurried from the office, and the Amazon said: “A landrise in the Atlantic, coming on top of the report of that globular spacecraft seems remarkably coincidental. If, as I have suspected, it is Abna who has returned, the first thing he would perhaps do would be to try to resurrect the land where his ancestors were born—the continent of Mu, the mountains of which are believed to be the present Azores.”

“But Vi, what on earth are you getting at?” Beatrice Wilson demanded blankly. “You don’t mean to say that this man, Abna, has deliberately created all this havoc? He wouldn’t! He’s not that kind.”

The Amazon smiled. “It still takes you a long time to realise the lengths to which some men will go to achieve an object, Bee, doesn’t it? Believe me, if Abna was resolved on restoring Mu, and perhaps the lost city of Atlantis itself, he’d not for a moment consider the upheaval caused thereby. Anyway,” she added, shrugging, “it’s all assumption until we have definite information. Certainly I don’t propose to go rushing about to investigate until I get the facts.”

Then the automatic speaker in the ceiling made an announcement. “Pilot Carson and Navigator Baxley to see you, Miss Brant. Most urgent communication.”

She pressed a button on her desk and the two young men came in. “You have an urgent communication?” the Amazon asked briefly. “Please state it concisely.”

“We’re just back from New York, Miss Brant,” Pilot Carson explained. “Considerable damage has been caused there, and all along the east coast of the Americas, by a tidal wave—damage similar to that caused here.”

“Yes, yes, I know that.” The Amazon sounded and looked impatient. “I heard of it over the communications system. Have you nothing more important to report?”

“There is dry land, about twenty miles in width, now linking America with Britain, which has resulted in partial submergence of other continents by the displacement of water. There is also a city.”

“A city?” The girl’s violet eyes sharpened. “Where?”

“Approximately near the middle of this newly created plateau, Miss Brant.” Carson gave the details and then added: “We saw the whole thing happen, from the moment this buried land and mountain range rose out of the depths. The mountain peaks used to be called the Azores. I have a filmed record of everything.”

“Come into the laboratory where we have better facilities.”

The Amazon led the way into a huge adjoining room filled with complicated instruments that she had devised.

In silence the Amazon, Chris, and his wife—the two pilots in the background—stood watching the extraordinary scenes the cameras had recorded.

“Seems to me that Ethel is going to have a trip in vain,” Chris said. “She can’t usefully add any more to this recording.”

The Amazon said: “Let her go, Chris. Something more may have developed by the time she flies over this newly risen continent. Obviously, it is the resurrected Mu, just as I guessed—and that city under the giant dome is lost Atlantis, evidently perfectly preserved from its long immersion in the depths by the dome which has covered it. The spherical shape of the dome would lessen the deep-water pressure. All of which brings me back to one inevitable answer. Abna!”

“Seems like it,” Chris admitted. “I can’t think of anybody else who could conceivably have any interest in lost Atlantis. Which in turn ties up with the mystery of that spacecraft.”

The Amazon turned to the enormous radar telescope in the laboratory. It ‘found’ its objectives in broad daylight by the radar beam recoiling from a chosen spot in the heavens, the displays showing the size and position of the object. Seating herself at the control board, the Amazon went to work on the keys, her fingers playing up and down them until the beam struck the object for which she was seeking. She studied the readings and calculated swiftly. “That must be it,” she said finally. “It is 20,000 miles from Earth and moving in a slow orbit around Earth. Nothing else in that space location, so it isn’t a meteorite. We’ll have a look at it.”

She switched on the motors controlling the telescope and set the guider that would direct it exactly at the object the radar beam had located. There was an interval as the masterpiece of engineering directed itself, then the viewing screen came to life, mirroring an image of the weird craft.

It shone golden, while around its ‘equator’ there was ringed the curious-looking mirrors, or lenses. There were also signs of exterior catwalks on the object and the dull gleam of domes that could have been glass conning towers or outlook ports.

For half an hour the Amazon studied it, then with grim face she switched off.

“Seems to be of phenomenal size,” she said. “As big as a town and probably equipped with every known scientific device. Abna may be controlling it or he may not. Whoever it is, I’m perfectly sure that the person is responsible for the chaos on Earth here and the resurrection of Atlantis. And it may mean something much more menacing. Why resurrect Atlantis unless it is intended to use it? It doubtless contains many highly scientific engines of destruction, which, turned loose against us, might prove too much even for my science. The original Atlanteans were wizards of science against which my own knowledge might prove puny. I’ll fly out to this craft in the Ultra and see what I can learn. If it is Abna, maybe I can reason with him. If I can’t do that, then I can perhaps destroy him. Whichever course opens, he must be stopped!”

“In other words,” Chris said, with a dry smile, “any chance is better than none to have a look at Abna again?”

The Amazon flashed him a stony glance. “Don’t underrate the situation, Chris! There’s danger there; deadly danger, unless it is crushed at the start. You seem to have forgotten that Abna and I parted as enemies, so we’ll remain so. His science or mine. There isn’t room in the universe for both of us, and if he dares to invade my territory, I’ll wipe him out because I’ll have no alternative. Certainly I’ll never submit to his dictates.” She turned to the door, adding over her shoulder, “Take charge whilst I’m gone, Chris. You know as well as I do how much needs handling. Whatever report Ethel has to make can wait until I get back.”