The greatest adventure
"In Heaven, before you were born," the Captain suggested. He also was
an admirer of Maeterlinck, having read Ole's bedraggled _Bluebird_.
"Rot," said the Doctor. He was not an admirer of the romantic Belgian.
"But your suggestion, by the law that action and reaction are equal and
opposite, recalls the place where I did see this plant growing. It was
next door to hell."
"San Francisco?" the Captain hazarded.
"No. On that beach of monsters. Ole blew the stomach out of one and in
the process ripped the lining. Some of this plant, as fresh as newly
cut lettuce, dropped out of the rent. I remember now. We planned to
collect some on our way back to the ship. When we returned we were too
heavily loaded to take on more. Also it was getting dark. So we had to
leave it till next day. By morning the oil and slush oozing into the
hole in the ice where the plant lay had made soup of everything. Well,
this more than makes up for our loss. I shall have a chance to settle
whether life remains dormant under the right conditions, practically
indefinitely."
"Ah, your theory of immortal whales?"
"The laugh will be on you when I make this greenish dust grow. The
chances are infinity to nothing that the living plant disappeared from
the earth millions of years ago."
Lane was wrong in his first statement. Less than twenty-four hours
later he found that the laugh was on him. And a nasty, sardonic laugh
it was at that. He spoke from insufficient knowledge.
Between them he and Drake had reconstructed the history of the perished
race whose records the rigors of the Antarctic solitudes had preserved
unviolated. Drake as decipherer, and Lane as scientist, working
together imagined themselves in possession of all the essential details
of the catastrophe which had swept intelligence from the Earth when the
poles were regions of perpetual summer. In the light of what happened
less than twenty-four hours after Lane's discovery of the greenish
spores, neither he nor Drake is now willing to claim finality for their
conclusions. Before the struggle in which they all but perished, both
were confident of their theory. It explained all the facts in their
possession and it was rational.
Their desperate fight for life showed them that they had not visualized
one half of the truth. What they had guessed was the obvious part.
Their failure to reconstruct a single less obvious detail has taught
them modesty. Neither Drake nor Lane will now admit that he knows more
than a small fraction of that obliterated history.
Lane moreover for the present is disinclined to speculate on the
obscure science behind the history. He prefers to leave fundamental
theories and explanations to Ole. And it may be said in passing that
Ole's most ambitious theory has already attracted numerous followers.
His fame, however, is rather mixed. His following is as large as
Lane's is select. For the notorious conservatism of professional
scientists holds them back in following Ole in regions where the more
adventurous layman rushes in whooping.
Lane had been so absorbed in his greenish spores that he failed to
note the disappearance of Ole and Drake. They came into sight just
as Anderson began to swear. Joining the others they voted it a day's
work, firmly strapped on their packs, and started up the thousand foot
scramble to the skyline. Topping it shortly before sunset they marched
fast and reached the site of their last night's camp before dusk. Edith
joined them presently.
"Shall we camp here?" she asked.
"We might as well," Anderson replied. "It is convenient to the crater.
Have you any reason for wishing to go farther back toward the oil lake?"
"Perhaps not. You can decide best. The wind seems to be rising. Up on
the three thousand foot level it is blowing half a gale--thirty miles
an hour from the north. Camped here in the open we shall have trouble
with the plane if the current descends during the night."
"There is only a four or five mile breeze blowing from the southeast
down here at present," the Captain pointed out. "So far as I can see
the weather is exactly what it has been the past nine days."
"All right. If you are satisfied I am. Only I thought if there is any
danger of the wind rising in the night it would be easier to manage
the plane in the shelter of the south bank of the oil lake."
"There is no danger, I am sure. This breeze won't go to more than six
miles an hour at any time during the night. Your speaking of the lake
reminds me of something. Will you take Ole and fly to the cache on the
south shore for more matches? He can dig them out."
"Of course. We shall be back in half an hour."
"And while you are there," her father begged, "dig up some sort of a
tin can for me. Bring one with a lid. I want to pack these precious
spores safely away."
"Very well. I shall bring a fresh tin of ship bread and we can have
a real feast. I know how to make a heavenly hoosh with hardtack and
corned beef. You may have the tin."
"And the rest of you the stew, I suppose?"
"If you go shares on your blessed spores," she laughed, "we'll do
likewise on the banquet."
When she returned Anderson thankfully emptied his pockets of the
greenish gray mess.
"Be careful," Lane admonished, hopping about excitedly on the frozen
snow. "You're losing half of the stuff. The breeze carries it off like
smoke."
The Captain did indeed lose about a pound and three-quarters. Finally
turning his pockets inside out he gave them a thorough dusting in the
breeze. Although Lane was more careful he also lost half a pound to the
wind.
"Well," he said, "I have enough any way." He slapped down the lid.
"With this I should be able to prove whether or not the life principle
can remain indefinitely in abeyance."
"The great Swedish chemist Arrhenius almost says it can," Ole informed
them. "He has a theory that life originates on planets by the life
seeds from another planet. The seeds drift across empty spaces for ages
till they strike a planet cool enough for life. When the life seeds
drift too close to the sun or some other star the heat destroys them."
Lane received Arrhenius' famous theory with the silence of disrespect.
He was already familiar with it as a speculation of the well known
physicists Tait and Stewart. To him it had always been the example
par excellence of the incompetence of the average scientist to reason
straight about another man's specialty. The Captain thought he saw the
point.
"The hen and the egg over again, isn't it? What starts life on the
first planet? How do your precious life seeds begin in the first place?"
"They're not mine," Ole retorted indignantly. "Arrhenius invented them.
The life came to the first planet from another planet."
"Exactly," the Captain sneered. "And when the chain is complete you
have perpetual motion. Go and patent it."
The dispute becoming personal, the pacific Drake intervened.
"Both of you are right. Ole can't he held responsible for any
foolishness but his own. Nor can you, Captain, be blamed for
criticizing a scientific theory. The ones that I have looked into are
all like that. They assume the egg in order to produce the hen to
explain the egg."
"And you," the Doctor hotly interposed, "being a bat-eyed archaeologist
are a competent critic of science. You may be able to read prehistoric
picture books but you couldn't tell the difference between evolution
and relativity. Just because you mess about with fossilized opinions
you set yourself up as a judge of modern science."
"Not at all," Drake retorted. "I only say that my training in
antiquities enables me to tell fresh eggs from Chinese. And if
Arrhenius' perpetual motion theory of the origin of life isn't a
scientific bad egg I have no nose. One doesn't need a brain to test
things as far gone as that."
"Now you two," said Edith, giving each of them a shake, "eat your hoosh
before it freezes. You can fight afterwards."
"We won't want to," Drake grinned, "with a gallon of food under our
belts."
"True," the Doctor agreed. "If those poor monsters over there had
been properly fed they might have made great pets. The struggle for
subsistence ruined their tempers."
"I wonder if the blowholes will perform tonight?" Edith asked.
"No," Ole confidently asserted. "By my theory they should not go off
till early tomorrow forenoon."
"Your theory be blowed," the Captain growled. He was jealous. "You're
always theorizing and always wrong."
But Ole was right. There was no flareup till nine o'clock the next
morning.
19
ATTACKED
After the meal they luxuriously crawled into their warm sleeping bags
and lay talking for an hour. Having exterminated the adjacent rookery
of monsters they saw no necessity for setting a watch. The chances of
any adventurous prowlers from the interior of the crater foraging the
icy wilderness were negligible.
They decided to have a good night's sleep and be fresh in the morning
for a deeper descent into the crater. The day following Edith had
reserved to take her father to the unruined paradise which she and Ole
had discovered. The others were to march to the oil lake and wait there
for Edith to take them across. They were then to return to the ship
for a second attempt to reach the black barrier of Anderson's first
objective. Although they had not yet devised a means for traversing
the dangerous trough of blowholes which they had blundered on in their
first expedition, nevertheless they felt confident that necessity would
stimulate their inventiveness to a safe plan.
Anderson was more determined than ever to reach his first goal. There
was no doubt that the black rock barrier beyond the trough was the wall
of another vast ruined paradise. Therefore, he argued, there must be
oil in its vicinity. What was true of one hole in the ice, he said,
must be true of another just like it. Lane had considerably modified
his veto of the possibility of finding oil in such a formation. And the
deciding factor in his change of opinion was his discovery that the
black cement was not of natural origin.
"What do you make of it all, Lane?" the Captain asked from his sleeping
bag.
"I told you the other day. We have discovered the final product of
an intelligence that vanished from the earth before America was a
continent. That intelligence, I believe, either deliberately or
accidentally solved the problem of life. For some reasons I think it
more probable that the initial discovery was a blunder.
"The authors of the mistake were impotent to control it. Everything we
have discovered points to their inability to direct their creation. As
I said the other day they realized what they had done only when it was
too late, foresaw its probable consequences, and destroyed their entire
civilization in the attempt to nullify their blunder. That they failed
to carry out their destructive purpose completely is self-evident. Had
they succeeded not one of those dead monsters over there would ever
have come into existence."
"If they knew enough to create life," Ole objected, "they must have
known how to destroy it."
"Not necessarily. An idiot with a test tube of the right sort of
germs might start a plague that not all the doctors of the world
could control. And so with this thing. The minute specks of living
matter which they created--I am assuming the process for the sake of
illustration only--multiplied like bacteria. Now what is the last
remedy for a plague infested village? Why, to burn it to the ground. So
possibly those rash experimenters learned. But the seeds of life--again
I am merely guessing--had been scattered broadcast over the country by
the winds.
"What was to be done? Fire the whole country? That would have been