Down to a Sunless Sea

17 Beyond Belief

Leaving Zuarra, who was cautiously sampling the fleshy meat of the great fungus growths, Brant climbed the mossy slope of the hill to where Will Harbin stood awestruck, staring with wondering gaze into the luminosity.

And Brant stopped short, uttering a grant of amazement.

From a gemmy shore at the foot of the other side of the hill, for as far as the eye could reach, there stretched a shining sea.

The water was milky-white, quite opaque, and was clearly the source of the mysterious luminance, for the radiant fluid was like the essence of light itself, curdled into pearly fire.

“A … sea,” whispered Brant faintly. “Here at the bottom of the world … !”

“Yes. In fact, it is the Last Ocean,” said Will Harbin softly. “The last of all the mighty oceans of primal Mars, draining into this cavern and forgotten since the beginning of time itself … what a marvel. A miracle!”

They stood for a moment, staring in awe at the vast expanse of luminous waters, and Doc Harbin murmured something in low tones to himself, his expression bemused and wondering. Brant glanced at him inquiringly.

“More Dante?” Harbin flushed a. little, and grinned.

“No, a British poet this time—Coleridge.” And he repeated a few lines of the old poem.

” ‘… where Alph the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea . . “

Brant grunted, impressed. “You’d almost think he got a glimpse of this place, somehow,” he remarked.

“Maybe he did, in some uncanny way,” Harbin mused. “He said he wrote the poem in a dream, and, when awake, copied down as many lines as he could still remember.”

“What … makes it glow like that?” Brant wondered.

“Natural phosphorescence, maybe. Some luminous chemical. Even algae, just possibly. Or residual radiation,” murmured Doc Harbin. “Anyway, what a sight, Jim! Truly, like the old phrase has it, a ‘shining sea’ …”

After a time, he picked up the thread of conversation again. “When the planet began to dry up, and the surface cracked, most of the prehistoric oceans dispersed into the atmosphere. Mars has a low gravitational field, too weak to hang onto water molecules for long, unlike Earth.

“Remember those dustlands, where we met?” he went on. Brant nodded; he remembered them well. “The Argyre,” Harbin said. “Once the bottom of an ocean. Well, that narrow, deep chasm across it called the Erebus—one of those cracks in the planetary crust I was talking about. It would seem that not all of the oceanwater dispersed into the atmosphere to be lost forever … some, like this, must have leaked into vast caverns beneath the crust, through chasms like the Erebus. No other way to explain it!”

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” drawled Brant.

The three Martians had followed them to the hilltop by now, and stood as if struck by lightning, too paralyzed by astonishment to move, even to speak or cry out.

“Chasm or no chasm, when the old ocean seeped down through the crust, it must have picked up a lot of minerals along the way. It must have taken many centuries to happen. Which may explain the curious phenomenon of the luminescence. …”

“And maybe even the stone stair!” suggested Brant, surprised at his own sharpness. “There were people living up there on the continent we call Ogygis Regio in those days: I found Zuarra and Suoli in the ruins of one of their cities, remember.”

“I recall,” Doc said slowly.

“They were sea-kings, maybe. Like the Vikings of old. And they watched their ocean ebb year after year, generation utter generation. And cut a stairway down to what remained <>l their sea. Maybe they venerated it, had religious feelings about it … anyway, to hew those thousands of steps out of solid rock would sure require centuries of labor.”

Harbin cast him a strange glance. “I’m impressed, my hoy. You’ve a head on your shoulders. I think you have hit on the truth, strange as it sounds to us. But stranger things have happened, and for even less comprehensible reasons . . the building of the Egyptian pyramids, for example. The Great Wall of China. Built to keep the savage nomads away, but it was the descendants of those very nomads that completed the work, for their ancestors had conquered China by then, wall or no wall.”

After a while, they descended the hill to pace the narrow shore. Will Harbin squatted to examine the glittering sand that looked for all the world as if it was carpeted with jewels of every color and description—rubies, pearls, emeralds, topazes, yellow zircons, amethysts, opals, lumps of amber and jade, sapphires, even dull but lucent diamonds.

“Mineral deposits,” he decided, “not gems. The water must be incredibly rich in mineral salts. They would coagulate like this, coming together into lumps, forming pebbles by conglomeration, under the movement of the waves.”

Zuarra bent to pick one of these from the shore. It was smooth as glass, more oval than teardrop-shaped, and blazing with rich colors, brown, amber, gold, all streaked through with crimson. She exclaimed over the beauty of the thing.

“Keep it, then,” shrugged Brant good-humoredly. “Nobody else is likely to stake a claim to It.”

She gave him a shy smile, dimpling most charmingly, and tucked it away in a pocket of her robe. Brant was studying the sea. The surface seemed in constant turmoil, swirling this way and that, coiling into miniature shallow whirlpools, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of waves.

He pointed this out to Will Harbin.

“Not this far below the surface, even if the moons of Mars were big enough to make tides like our Moon does back home,” murmured the older man. “Chemical ferment, perhaps; amoeboid life. Even centrifugal force, caused by the planet as it swings on its axis.”

He bent, dabbling his forefinger in the milky luminance, tasting a drop of the seawater gingerly. Then he made a face.

“Mineral salts, all right!” he exclaimed. “Ugh, what a taste! And so thick with salt it would rust stainless steel. Well, there’s the last proof of our theorising … to get that rich in minerals, the water just had to seep through interstices in the crust for long centuries.”

At Brant’s side, Zuarra spoke up timidly:

“Is it … is all of this water, O Brant?” she whispered.

He nodded. “Water of a sort,” he grunted. “But I wouldn’t try drinking any of it, if I were you. Which makes me think, Doc—are we likely to find any fresh water down here? We certainly can’t drink this stuff, and my canteen’s nearly empty. I guess all of them are, by now. And we’re going to start getting mighty thirsty before long.”

“As to springs of fresh water, who can say?” was Harbin’s , reply. “Maybe, maybe not. But there’s lots of juice in those 1 huge mushrooms, so we won’t suffer from lack of fluids.”

He scratched his nose. “Pity you couldn’t carry the pressure-still along. It could easily have been adjusted to extract the pure water from this mineral muck. As it is, we may have to do it by ourselves, by the slow process of evaporation and condensation. Collect the sea-water in some kind of container, boil it over a fire—the dry stalks of some of those fallen fungus-trees back in the forest ought to burn like tinder. Then ; we rig a shield out of something … maybe the nioflex of our thermal-suits, collect the condensation, funnel it off …” his voice trailed away, uncertain as to the details.

Brant grinned. “Oh, I guess we can put our heads together and figure out some way of doing it.”

He glanced out over the surface of the luminous sea. “Can we take baths in this muck, d’you suppose? It’s been so long since I’ve had a swim, or even a halfway decent bath, it sure would be a treat!”

Doc grinned. “Expect it would be safe enough,” he said. “One thing’s certain, you won’t have to worry about drowning, no matter how much about swimming you may have forgotten. In that sea, you couldn’t drown if you tried to!”

Brant looked puzzled. Harbin chuckled.

“Water’s so rich with salt and minerals, it’s hard to sink in. Look—” he picked up one of the larger gemlike pebbles, weighed it in his palm. It looked about as heavy as a baseball, but when he tossed it a little ways out to sea, it floated.

“Just like Great Salt Lake in Utah, or the Dead Sea in Palestine,” he said. “Our bodies are pretty buoyant as it is. In this stuff, though, we’d float like corks.”

Brant shook his head wonderingly.

“This is sure one hellova strange place,” he said, with a low whistle of amazement.

“It is that,” Doc agreed. And then he added, soberly: “And I’ve a feeling we’ve only seen a few of the marvels we’re going to discover before long.”

And, as usual, the older man proved right, eventually.

Since it had been long enough since Agila had devoured the meat of the giant mushrooms, and he showed no signs of sickness or discomfort, they returned to the midst of the fungus-forest and made a zestful meal, sampling the flesh of different-colored growths.

Brant found them all tasty, but the one he liked best was his own discovery. The huge stalk, crowned with its nodding head the size of a barrel, was silvery-gray on the outside, mottled with irregular lavender spots. Inside, the flesh proved creamy in color and of the consistency of vanilla pudding. But it tasted like nothing else than the finest white meat of the tuna fish. The succulent, meaty taste pleased them all, even the three Martians, who had never tasted anything remotely like fish in their lives.

“Well,” sighed Brant contentedly, patting a full stomach at the conclusion of their feast, “after weeks of canned rations and lizard meat, it’s good to have a decent meal again!”

Harbin grinned in agreement. “Even if the dishes were a trifle exotic,” he said. “The meat from that tuna-tree might taste even better with a chewier consistency. We could try broiling slices over a slow fire. …”

Brant stifled a huge yawn. “Incidentally, Doc … d’you suppose it ever gets dark in this place?”

“I doubt it. We’ve been here quite a while by now, and the luminosity does not seem to wax or wane. We’re going to have to learn to sleep with the lights on, that’s all.”