The Atlantic Abomination Read Online Free PDF Page A

with downcast eyes. Peter found her foot under the table and pressed it with the side of his own, wishing he could reach her hand instead. Into the silence that followed, Captain Hartlund’s voice drifted coolly.
    “I must say, Chief, you seem to be getting a hell of a lot out of a few isolated flagstones with hieroglyphs on them—which may only be ornament, after all.” He removed the empty pipe that jutted from his mouth and jabbed it at the screen.
    “I’m not a trained scientist, but I’ve worked aboard the
Bache
and her predecessors long enough for some of it to have rubbed off, as you put it. There isn’t any doubt that here under our feet there’s an epoch-making discovery—literally A hundred thousand years back there weren’t supposed to be people on earth who lived in anything much better than skin tents, or even caves. But what have we actually got? An inexhaustible treasure-trove, or something as tantalizing and mysterious as the Easter Island statues were until they got pushed into a pattern? Peter said he couldn’t see anything else except what might be traces of masonry construction. I figure there’s a chance we may only have come across a sortof—well, a super Stonehenge, for instance; a unique masterpiece produced by an otherwise primitive society for some practical or mystical purpose it’ll take anthropologists and paleontologists years to unravel.”
    The air cleared. Hartlund’s forceful good sense impressed even Gordon, although he seemed deflated.
    “Very well,” he said with a good grace. “I had considered radioing an immediate report and facsimiles of the pictures Peter and Mary brought back. It occurs to me that newspaper reporters may seize on Atlantis, by which of course I mean the fabulous Atlantis of Plato and Ignatius Donnelly, and obscure the much more important possibilities we may later uncover.”
    He sighed, and for a moment was far away again. “But if it is not what you envisage, not a mere submarine Easter Island, then what vistas open up before us! The key to the future, yielded up by the past. Hopes of forgotten lore, of—”
    Eloise coughed, and the Chief broke off. “I’m sorry. As to practical proposals for immediate action …?”

V
    T HE REST of the meeting passed in a normal atmosphere, and when it was over Peter followed Hartlund out on deck. It was nearing sunset, but the air was still and warm.
    “Thanks for putting a stop to that nasty little situation,” he said.
    The captain, tamping shag tobacco into his pipe, smiled without raising his wood-brown face to look at Peter. “We all have our shortcomings,” he said. “I’d begun to think I’d never find out what the Chief’s was.”
    “But to hear him actually blather about forgotten secretlore!” Peter spread his hands in amazement, and then gave up. He switched the subject.
    “How long before we start the ’nef down again?”
    “Depends on how long it takes Fred Platt to give his okay. And on whether the Chief insists on running shallow tests on ‘Dick and Eloise’s Ostrovsky-Wong process before going all the way down. How long is it you have to allow between dives?”
    “Forty-eight hours minimum in sea-level air, and they think six dives below a mile is enough on any one trip. But they don’t know, of course. It may prove possible to cut down the rest periods. They’re playing safe.”
    “’Scuse!” said Platt from behind them, and they stepped apart to let him through. He was carrying the servicing and fault-detection kits for the ’nef, and one of the two apprentice engineers was hot on his heels.
    “Handled like a dream all the way for us, Fred!” Peter shot at the engineer officer’s back. Platt flung his reply over his shoulder.
    “Great! Now let’s see if it works like a piece of machinery!”
    He and his assistant were overside a moment later, swarming out along the line to the ’nef, hand over hand. Hartlund chuckled. “No doubts, no delays,” he commented.