Attack From Atlantis Read online

  WINSTON A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  Attack from

  Atlantis

  By LESTER DEL REY

  Jacket Illustration by Paul Orban Endpaper Design by Alex Schomburg

  Cecil© Matschat, Editor Carl Carmer, Consulting Editor

  THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY Philadelphia • Toronto

  Copyright, 1953 By Lester del Rey

  Copyright in Great Britain and in the British Dominions

  and Possessions Copyright in the Republic of

  the Philippines

  first edition

  Land Under the Sea

  We really know very little about the world in which we live. There isn't even any way to explore most of our planet at the present time. This, of course, is because seven-tenths of the Earth is covered with water.

  And today we know only a little more about the depths of the ocean than was known fifty years ago. We have sent submarines down to a depth of seven hundred feet, but not regularly. In a few cases, one man has gone lower, in a great metal shell from which he can see out for a few feet. But the oceans have depths as great as thirty-five thousand feet—over six miles straight down!

  To prove how little we know about this enormous territory, we keep fishing up forms of life out of the deeps which we thought were extinct for as long as three hundred million years. Down there, nobody told them about being dead, so they go right on

  as always. We have mapped a little of the ocean floor, using a device that shoots a beam of sound down and measures the time required for the echo to come back. But almost anything could be hiding on the ocean bottom without our knowing it.

  Probably no men live down there. And probably there never was an Atlantis. This continent which was supposed to have sunk into the Atlantic Ocean, carrying a great early civilization, is only a myth. Like many things the ancients believed in it is interesting to think about, but there is no scientific evidence that it ever existed. The whole story started as the account of a writer quoting somebody else who was telling a story —and maybe a tall story, at the time.

  Yet men have learned to live under wider differences in conditions than any other animal. Men live close to the North Pole, and right on the equator. No other highly developed animal can do this. Man, unlike other animals, doesn't have to change himself to fit a new environment—he changes the environment enough to make it livable. In almost any situation, he can find some solution that will make life possible.

  Men have lived on the water. The Lake-Dwellers of Switzerland in the very old days spent nearly their whole lives on the water and built houses right out into the lakes. A great many early tribes lived along the shores, as their kitchen middens (garbage heaps) show. With a little luck and a need to do so, they might even have found a way to live in the sea. Other animals have gone from the land to the sea—the whale, porpoise and seal, for example. Man, of course, would

  Land Under the Sea

  do it by changing his environment instead of changing himself. But can we say that the seal can do what human beings can't?

  Until we can get down into the ocean in better craft than we have now, we can't know for sure. We can guess that there are no men living there and we'll probably be right. But we have guessed wrong before. It seems like a good idea to guess for a change there are men there, and then to see what such a civilization would be like.

  The only way to get down, of course, is in an atomic submarine. With unlimited power and new methods of construction, such a ship can go to depths and explore the oceans in a way which has never been done before. It can cruise under the arctic icecaps, or probably go all the way around the world without ever coming up.

  Such a submarine isn't at all fantastic. The Nautilus is already being built. And just as this is being written, word has come that the first tests of an atomic power plant for the ship have been successful. We can say safely now that there will be an atomic-powered submarine plying the waters of the seas within a very short time.

  This means that the first horrible use of atomic energy has now given place to another use. The bomb was a weapon, and nothing else. But out of it has grown a motor which can do anything we ask of it; it can power merchant ships, perhaps even railroads. It can bring light and heat to isolated sections. And it can remake the world.

  First, however, it may show us whole sections of the Earth about which we really know nothing. With it, in a slightly improved form that seems quite probable for the future, we can go down to the depths of the ocean and see what might have happened there, out of sight of all of the men who have been living on the surface.

  Almost anything might be possible down there.

  L. D. R.

  Contents

  CHAPTER PAGE

  Land Under the Sea................................. vii

  1. Test Run.................................................. 1

  2. Operation Depth...................................... 12

  3. Trouble on the Triton............................... 22

  4. Head-On Collision................................... 32

  5. Men of the Sea.......................................... 42

  6. Distress Signal......................................... 52

  7. Repair Task.............................................. ..... 62

  8. Battle Below............................................. 72

  9. Captured!................................................. 83

  10. The Bubble City....................................... 93

  11. Atlantis!.................................................. 104

  12. City of No Return.................................... 115

  13. The Dog-God........................................... .... 125

  14. The Lost People........................................ 136

  15. Incomplete Barrier.................................... 148

  16. Stranded in Atlantis................................. .... 159

  17. The Judgment of K'mith.......................... .... 169

  18. Emergency Plans...................................... .... 179

  19. Mad Dog!................................................ 189

  20. Operation Contact.................................... ... 200

  Chapter 1

  S

  omewhere south of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea, everything looked like a peaceful scene painted on canvas. In the background was an island covered with small fishing houses. On the surface of the calm blue ocean, a small ship cruised along slowly, its motor throttled down until the drone of a plane far above could be heard. Except for that, the ocean seemed deserted.

  The plane was up there to see that it stayed deserted. The hard-jawed young man bending over the radar screen never looked up. Another man stayed poised over a radio transmitter, in contact with the boat below, but ready to warn off any chance craft that wandered into this deserted section of the ocean.

  Aboard the converted and disguised PT boat, Don Miller was almost surrounded by radio, radar and sonar equipment. The hot sun had been pouring through the decks, and even the fans had proved of little help. He was stripped to the waist and sweating profusely, but he was still grinning as he finished a

  routine report to the plane, and switched over to another receiver.

  "First test okay," the speaker announced. "We'll surface in fifteen minutes. All clear up there?"

  "All clear," Don reported. He switched off and reached for a towel, without taking his eyes off the sonar screen. Sound waves were emitted from equipment below the water line, and their echoes were picked up and interpreted on the screen to show the presence of any foreign object in the water. Except for one large spot, all seeme
d clear. The spot indicated the source of the communication he had just finished.

  Don was hard-muscled and tanned to a deep brown from his belt to his black, crew-cut hair. He was a trifle shorter than average, though his lean, trim build made him seem taller. Track at college, and swimming for hours every day during his stay here had left him in tiptop condition. It showed in his steady nerves, as he handled the equipment before him, and in the clearness of his dark gray eyes. He patted the sonar screen fondly and grinned. At seventeen, it was good to have a chance to put his knowledge to good use, without anyone standing over him telling him what to do.

  A dog lay at his feet, panting in the heat. Shep was as black as Don s hair, and his schipperke ancestry showed up in an expression that seemed cocky in spite of the heat, making him look like a small, jaunty Belgian shepherd. But now he lifted his head and growled faintly.

  Don swung his head around, to see a round-faced, heavy man in immaculate white naval uniform, smiling doubtfully. Behind the officer, Dr. Simpson moved into view. "And this is my nephew, Don Miller," he said to the other, and then grinned at Don. "And this is Admiral Haller, Don."

  Haller's handshake was firm and friendly, but his sharp eyes were weighing Don. "Glad to know you, Don. I'm sorry I got to this test so late I couldn't meet everyone before it began. Umm, you look a little young for all this, but you seem to be doing a good job."

  "I'm almost eighteen," Don began. Then he caught his uncle's grin, and realized how foolish that must sound to an admiral. An admiral? Suddenly he realized how important this test must be, if it rated so high an officer for an observer.

  "Don knows his stuff," his uncle said quickly. "He's been getting ready for our first real run for three years. Studying advanced communications physics at M.I.T., and he's been licensed for everything since he was sixteen."

  Don's uncle was stripped to his waist, too. He was nearly bald, and he wore a small gray mustache. But in spite of that and his age of nearly fifty, he looked surprisingly like Don. He'd been both father and mother to the boy since Don's parents were killed years before in an auto accident. To the world, he was a leading naval engineer and a metallurgical physicist; but Don was happy thinking of him as just Uncle Eddy.

  The speaker came to life suddenly, snapping the boy back to his job. The message was coming from the big set, equipped with an elaborate scrambling affair to make the messages unintelligible to anyone without such equipment. "Surfacing," it announced.

  Don acknowledged. His uncle and Admiral Haller were already at the rail of the ship. He set the equipment to buzz for him if a signal came in, and ran quickly to a spot where he could see the ocean beside them.

  At first, there was only the tiny buoy that carried the antenna for the submarine below, connected by a thin, insulated wire. Its nearness showed that the submarine would surface beside them.

  Then a vague shadow appeared in the water ahead and began to take on sharper outlines as the sub rose upward at a steep angle. The buoy jerked as the wire was reeled in. The periscope broke the surface and began sliding down, until it fitted flush with the deck as the ship leveled off and floated on the surface.

  It was less than a hundred and fifty feet long, and seemed to be nothing but a slim, gray platform of metal rising a foot from the surface—something like a huge torpedo. Then the conning turret, containing the bridge and periscope, was raised to a height of about ten feet above the deck, and it looked a little more like the usual picture of a submarine.

  A hatch over die bridge opened, and the sharp-featured, blond head of Oliver Drake came into view. The designer of the ship's unusual atomic power plant waved at them. "How are we doing from your end? Everything's smooth as silk here."

  "Doing fine, Ollie," Dr. Simpson called back. "No trouble^"

  "Not a bit—except Hawkes started seeing men in bubbles outside—at four hundred fathoms! Do you think I should take her down all the way?"

  Simpson nodded, chuckling. "It's up to you. And tell Hawkes—"

  But the hatch had snapped shut already. The conning tower was drawn back, and the submarine began diving, briefly showing the name on her stern —Triton I. Then she was gone, with the little antenna buoy streaking out behind her.

  Don ducked back to his radio equipment to keep in touch. He heard his uncle and Admiral Haller move by as he was making his checks.

  "So that's it," the admiral was saying, and his voice was disappointed. "What's so special? I didn't have much chance to study the papers they gave me after the last minute switch when Baylor got sick. Suppose you tell me."

  They moved on, out of Don's earshot, but he could imagine his uncle's answer. The Triton wasn't the first atomic-powered submarine; the Nautilus had been that, a dozen years ago, and there were others now. But they simply used an atomic pile to heat the steam for their turbines in place of the older boilers. They still had to have heavy motors to drive them by means of a propeller. The Triton was actually driven by atomic energy. Drake had invented the system. On the little submarine, a very small atomic pile was operating at the highest temperature ever used, generating heat from broken atoms. The heat was used to turn the water into steam, all right-but it was water out of the ocean, and the steam was used as a jet, blasting back through special nozzles at the rear, and forcing the Triton ahead exactly as a jet engine moved a plane.

  It eliminated all the complicated turbines, generators—except a small one to provide electricity for light and control—and motors, and left the ship almost entirely automatic, as far as power went. The Triton could probably cruise around the world twenty times without ever coming up, or anyone going near the heavily shielded power plant.

  Dr. Simpson had designed the ship itself, using new alloys of metal and new methods of adding strength, with the idea of building a submarine that could really go all the way down, instead of a mere three or four hundred fathoms—not over twelve hundred feet or two hundred fathoms for normal cruising. The two men had met some ten years ago, and each had found the other's ideas just what he needed. Now, finally, the result was being tested.

  "Four hundred fathoms," the speaker announced.

  Haller and Simpson had come up now and were listening in carefully. The speaker began giving a series of figures on pressure, the strain on the hull, and everything else that had to be known.

  "Speed thirty knots, depth five hundred," Drake's voice said. "This is it, Ed—three thousand feet, and we're running thirteen hundred pounds pressure every square inch. Not a groan out of the Triton. We've beaten the depth record. Thirty-five hundred feet now. . . ."

  "Better bring her back up," Simpson said into the microphone, leaning over Don's shoulder. "We'll have to go over her inch by inch to see how she takes it before going further."

  "Right, Ed. Up we come. We—Hey, come about! Over there!'*

  There were sounds of confusion suddenly, and Drake's voice shouting from some distance beyond his microphone. Don felt the hairs on his neck lift as he imagined a leak at that pressure. With fifteen hundred pounds per square inch—a hundred times normal pressure—a pinhole would let in a stream that could cut through sheet steel. "Calling Triton" he said tensely into the mike. "Triton!"

  Drake's voice was back almost at once. "Sorry. I thought I saw something. It looked like—well, it looked like a man inside a bubble outside! The same thing Hawkes thought he saw. No trace, now. Must be some odd fish that lives down here."

  "Probably," Simpson agreed. He had picked up Don's towel and was mopping the sudden flood of perspiration off his face, but he kept his voice calm. "Bring her up, Ollie."

  "Right." There was the sound of a switch, and the speaker went dead.

  Haller shook his head. "Maybe the feeling of being down where all that pressure is outside is getting them," he suggested.

  "They wouldn't both have seen the same thing, if it's imagination," Simpson said doubtfully. "Or maybe Hawkes' idea did suggest it to Ollie. But Hawkes thought he saw it at five hundred fathoms. It's probably
just what Ollie thought—some kind of fish we haven't found yet. What's the sonar indicate, Don?"

  Don had been trying to discover that himself. "It doesn't say," he admitted, with a touch of worry. "There's a cold and warm current mixing somewhere between us, and it's making a cold wall that deflects the sonar beam. Uncle Eddy, suppose there are men down there?"

  Simpson chuckled, though his eyes showed traces of uncertainty. "Suppose Shep can fly, Donl Not in pressure like that. It would . . ."

  The radio interrupted him. "Ed!" Drake's voice barked tautly. "Ed, the Triton won't answer. Something's wrong with the stern diving plane, and the bow plane has snapped its cable. Wait a minute, I'm getting an observation on it now. . . . Stuck! There's something that looks like a metal rod stuck in the bow plane somehow."

  "Is she equipped with normal trim tanks?" Haller asked quickly. At Simpson's nod, he swung quickly to Don. "Tell him to blow out his bow tanks, young man."

  Shep growled faintly again at the roughness of the admiral's voice. Don touched him reassuringly, and began relaying the orders. Haller hadn't gotten to be an admiral in the submarine service without knowing his business. With the bow lightened, the Triton should tilt up enough to climb.

  "Trying that," Drake's answer came. "The valve is stuck, too."

  "Then flood the stern tanks," Haller ordered. He

  Tesf Run

  swung to face Simpson again. "I take it you have power enough to make up for any extra weight."

  "Plenty of power," Simpson answered.

  Don's fingers were moist as he relayed instructions, and he snapped a quick look to see that his uncle was frowning tensely. But Haller seemed unworried. "Will they be all right, sir?" he asked.