As their spectral shapes slid slowly closer he noted something that had escaped his eyes before. Four or five of them were holding dim objects in their arm-like flippers. Spears, he made them out to be, rudely fashioned from bone. And others held dark-colored loops, which they were slowly forming into nooses.

"They're intelligent, all right," Ken muttered. "Spears--of whalebone, I guess. And ropes--probably seaweed. Weapons! Good Lord, what kind of seals are these?"

Easily, gracefully, the silent circle drew in to perhaps twenty feet of him, where they paused again, hanging motionless at regular intervals in the eery, wavering half-light. Ken licked his lips nervously. Then the one whom he had seen first moved its head slightly, in what was apparently a signal. And in a concerted movement, so bewilderingly rapid that his eyes could not hold them, they rushed him.

He had expected speed, but not speed such as this. He had barely swung his knife-arm up when the wave engulfed him.

Doubling, curving shapes looped around him; blubbery bodies pressed against him; eyes flashed by in streaks of brown; he knew that he was being tumbled and tossed and that his knife and hand-flash had fallen under the shock of the attack. And then there was a sharper sensation.

As he struggled to break free, taut cords trussed his legs and arms like any captive animal's.

The stream of moving bodies slowed in movement and fell back from a breathless, dazed Kenneth Torrance. He then got his first clear view since the a.s.sault was unleashed.

He was upright, many feet away from the killer whale's carca.s.s, his arms bound strongly to his sides with seaweed-rope, his legs locked close together. To one side he glimpsed several of the creatures fastening other rope strands to the whale's flukes. When they had finished, with smoothly thrusting flippers they began to haul the carca.s.s forward, and he felt himself move feet first in the same direction.

He forced a wry smile to his lips. "A swell fight I put up!" he grunted.

"Hold 'em off! Yeah--I bet I held 'em for a full tenth of a second."

He still could hardly believe what had so rapidly befallen him. It was difficult to credit eyes that showed him creatures whose bodies were mainly seal-like, and yet whose weapons and co-ordinated movements spoke for human intelligence. But they were certainly real. At his feet he could feel the pressure of a guard's flippers against him.

He was towed in this fashion for some distance when the pressure of the flippers suddenly tightened and he was pulled into a deep-angled swoop toward the sea-bottom below. Previously he had seen his captors' amazing speed, but now he felt it. Down and down he went, and at last, when it seemed he must crash into the sea floor, his momentum was quickly checked, and he found himself standing in the mud, from which position, lacking support from his guard, he drifted to a horizontal one, face up.

And there, lying helpless on the bottom, he saw the reason for the sudden dive. Far to the right, piercing faintly through the murk, were two faint interweaving beams of white that preceded a slowly moving dark bulk.

The _Narwhal_! Wild hopes of rescue coursed through him.

Dimly, as he watched the beams, he was aware of the rest of the creatures dropping down, guiding between them the whale's carca.s.s. Then a firm pressure was applied to his side, and he was rolled over, face down in the mud. Unable any longer to see his ship, his momentary vision of rescue vanished.

"Hopeless, I guess," he muttered despairingly. The darkness on the sea-floor was too thick, the wavering shadows too deceptive. And his hand-flash and knife were gone--probably knocked from his grasp during the struggle, he thought.

He realized that the seal-like animals were lying low until the submarine pa.s.sed, its size having awed them. The color of the bodies blended perfectly with the gloom, as did that of his own sea-suit. His bonds prevented him from making even the slightest movement to attract attention.

Torturing thoughts raced through the torpooner's brain. He saw, in his mind's eye, straight above, a hazy bulk, with shimmering columns of white angling from its nose. His imagination pictured for him the warm, well-lit interior, and the bunks--the coffee steaming on the fire, the men at their posts and Streight's anxious, beefy face. He saw it all as plainly as if he were inside, cracking jokes with one of the engineers.

The minutes pa.s.sed. The _Narwhal_ must now be gone. Ken's cheek muscles stood out as he pressed his teeth together. "Well, go on!" he exploded in impotent rage. "What are you waiting for? Kill me! Eat me if you're going to!" And he cursed the silent forms around him till his ears hurt from the reverberation.

After the _Narwhal_ had vanished in the gloom, the torpooner's captors lifted him from the bottom and propelled him leisurely forward again, the slight, graceful roll of their flippers slipping them along smoothly.

A dull hopelessness came over him. No longer could he hope that his submarine would find him. Only one thing was certain, and that was that death would soon come. For even if his captors did not kill him at once, he had but thirty-six hours before his air-units would be exhausted.

Certainly, having captured him, the seal-creatures would not release him. And it was too much to expect them to realize that his sea-unit was only an artificial covering which enabled him to live underwater, and not his own flesh and blood.

And as for the chance of breaking loose--the idea was laughable. His speed was snail-like in comparison with theirs. Even if he did manage somehow to get away, what good would it do? How could he, a puny, helpless mite, ever hope to locate the _Narwhal_ in this vast sweep of Arctic sea? His torpoon was wrecked, and he had no means of communication.

His situation was quite hopeless.

Far ahead, a dark shape grew in the foggy murk, and as they neared, spread upwards and outwards. They angled up and up; the sea-floor was higher there. Ken, peering as best he could, made out that the mountainous, looming bulk was the face of a giant underwater mound, whose uneven formation indicated that it was the result of some long-past upheaval. It was the first of a rolling series of such hillocks, six or seven in all, stretching back into the gloom. Their rounded peaks reached to within a few feet of the water's ice-sheathed surface. Surely the creatures' home was among these mounds.

He was skirted round the base of the first hillock and caught a glimpse of something in its face which was apparently of his captors'

construction. It was a hole, dark, mysterious, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, and barring it were three great gray stakes, reaching from top to bottom. Behind the stakes, Ken got a jumbled impression of a body, large and sleek, of black streaked with white, that moved restlessly back and forth in the hole and occasionally seemed to lash out in anger.

He wondered what it was. Before long, he knew.

The party of seal-creatures stopped before the second of the row of hillocks. In its face, too, was a hole--a well of blackness--but with no stakes across it. He twisted his head back and saw the carca.s.s of the killer whale he had slain being guided up to the entrance and shoved through. Then, from the upper rim of the hole, three stakes similar to the others he had seen slid down and barred it.

"Storehouses!" he muttered. "Storehouses, I'll bet anything. And killer whales are their food. They keep 'em in the holes until they're needed.

But I'll swear it was a live whale I saw in the first one--and how in the d.i.c.kens could they capture a mighty killer with their d.i.n.ky spears and ropes?"

There he had to leave the question, for its answer implied greater intelligence in the creatures than he would admit.

Intelligence--in seals!

And now he was guided smoothly forward to the third hillock, where the leaders of the group glided through a V-shaped cleft in its face. His guards brought him along behind.

A wry smile twisted Kenneth Torrance's lips. To him, the cleft was more than an entranceway. To him it signified the beginning of the hopeless, lonely end of his life....

The cleft led into a corridor, and the corridor was softly illuminated with a peculiar light whose source he could not discover. It served to show him a pa.s.sageway that was wide rather than tall, and gouged from the firm, clayey soil by blunt tools that had left uneven marks.

Straight ahead it led, and, as they continued, the mysterious illumination brightened, until suddenly, rounding a turn, its source appeared.

Like will-o'-the-wisps, a score of arrows of light flashed softly into view down the corridor. They were of delicate green and orange and yellow, glowing and luminous, and hovering like humming birds between floor and ceiling. Ken looked at them in some alarm until his nearer approach showed him what they were, and then he exclaimed in amazement:

"Why--they're fish! Living electric bulbs!"

A school of slender, ten-inch fish they were, each one a radiant, shimmering, lacey-finned gem of orange or green or yellow. In concert they shot to the ceiling over the party of seal-creatures, who still swam impa.s.sively ahead, paying no attention to them, and from there scattered in quick darts in all directions, showering the cortege with washes of spectral luminosity. Then the corridor crooked again, and with one simultaneous movement they were gone. And the scene that lay revealed before Kenneth Torrance took his breath from him.

In the pa.s.sageway he had seen a score of the living jewels; now he beheld hundreds. He peered up at a shimmering sheet of brilliance, composed of hundreds of the slender refulgent fish, all swimming in slow rotation. Below them was a large cavern, which he guessed had been created by hollowing out one of the underwater hillocks. The sides were rounded, and pitted with holes that represented other pa.s.sageways, showing dark against the luminosity from above. And streaming out from these dark holes of corridors came dozens of the seal-creatures, gathering in response to some unheard, unseen signal that had called them to witness the strange captive their fellows had brought in....

Ken's guards gripped him more firmly and he was guided forward and downward to the smooth black floor of soil.

Scores of large, placid eyes stared at him from the slowly undulating, brown-skinned bodies packed close about him. The sight was so weird, so beyond his imagination, that he laughed a little hysterically.

"Dreaming!" he said. "Dreaming! But what a dream!"

Silently, a s.p.a.ce cleared in the center of the horde. His bonds were taken away, the guards released his arms and he righted himself and stood there on braced legs, the object of a concerted gaze.

This, the torpooner felt, was the crucial period. Something was about to be decided. If it looked bad he would make a wild--and of course, futile--break for freedom, and die quickly when they punctured his suit.

But meanwhile he would stick things out. Anything might happen in that fantastic convocation.

There came a stir in the tiers of brown bodies. An aisle cleared, and down it a single seal-creature glided slowly towards Ken Torrance--undoubtedly the leader of the herd, ruler of the underwater labyrinth.

Gracefully the creature glided up to the lone human, and when only a foot away extended one of its long upper flippers so that its webbed edge rested on his sea-suit's casque. And its placid brown eyes hung close to the face-shield and gazed through inquisitively, intelligently!

Intelligently! No longer did Kenneth Torrance doubt that. As he held absolutely motionless under the close-searching scrutiny, his brain rang with the conviction that this creature, this thing of blubbery body and long, webbed flipper-arms and legs--this brown-skinned denizen of the Arctic underseas was, with all its fellows, related to him, a man of the upper world.