The sea girl

The first of the mysterious sea disasters occurred in March, 1990. It did not seem important; it was given very little publicity. A small, old-fashioned freight vessel of some t...

The lookouts had seen the globe; even the old man, on his emergency mirrors in his cabin, had caught a brief glimpse of it. He stopped us at the surface. There was nothing up th...

I find it difficult to convey a picture of those following days. Upon so large a canvas as our great, diversified world surface, the few futile strokes I can give must leave mos...

The Dolphin was ready. We went down to Norfolk with Dr. Plantet upon his last inspection. At least, Polly and I went; Arturo did not go. He was ill, he said, and indeed he looke...

The westward-bound Australian mail left its Hendon Airport at 5 P.M., Greenwich time, August 10. At 9 P.M., Washington time, in the luminous darkness of the late summer twilight...

The Dolphin lay, that midnight of August 10-11, awash on the surface of the Pacific some twelve hundred miles southwest of the Mexican coast. I had thought that for the time Art...

In the pink and gold tropic dawn of the morning of August 15, we took them aboard the Dolphin. Arturo did not mention, then, the globe of metal lying there in the rocks at the o...

But Arturo remained silent. He had conveyed the impression of having other vital knowledge; I think now, looking back upon it, that he did it knowingly, cleverly bending his fat...

There must have been a dozen near panics in New York that night, and in all the other great cities. Throughout all the rural districts, on every distant farm, the agriculturists...

It was a round, gleaming metallic globe some thirty feet in diameter. We entered its tiny doorway; a thick, complicated affair, it reminded me of the door to some great round sa...

The ninth lock was filled with a white, swirling mist, air now; water no longer, yet I had not remarked when the change came. I stood with Arturo at the window; the room outside...

We skimmed over the fortress. The gray figures gazed up at us. We swung down the slope of the mound, close over the city streets and roofs. The houses seemed, most of them, from...

I recovered consciousness to find myself lying on a soft bed. I seemed comfortable, luxurious, with a feeling of well-being and pleasure. I opened my eyes; shuddering memory lea...

He picked up one of the small metal chairs and flung it at me. I ducked. The thing was heavy, and crashed against the bed with a violent clang. I ran at him.

Tad stood in the garden of the castle, with Nereid and her father. Rhana was on the parapet, talking to the Middge crowd. Tad did not miss Arturo and me; he assumed we were clos...

As Tad listened, standing on the caldron’s rim, he heard yet another sound, unnatural and fearsome. It seemed to come through a rift in the side wall here--a cañon rift slashed...

Tad and Nereid had found the apparatus easy to adjust. They tested it before they left Tad’s room; it seemed to work perfectly. It consisted of a long robe of fabric, light as g...

Four of us now, shadowed prowlers. It had taken them only a moment to get me into the robe and adjust its connections. Strange experience! I felt the tiny vibrations of the robe...

I could see still less now; and it was doubtless my very limitation of vision which added to the sense of fear and awe that surged at me. An abyss here, dark and soundless, the...

It seemed for an instant that we had not the courage left to struggle. Yet even a rat within a cage plunged into water frantically fights to its last strength. We stood with ful...

It had been the night of August 15, 1991, when I stood at Park Circle 80, in New York, and saw the news bulletins that the tides again were falling. The days that followed were...

Tad and I struggled upward into the tunnel-passage. The fact that with Arturo and Nereid, and some two thousand of the Middge people, we at last reached the surface I have alrea...

We were upon that gray-white aëro which, like a ghost, swept at the Zero-level along the edge of the Australian Highlands. We had been upon it, and in the encampment of the Gian...

“You shall interpret for me, child Nereid, if we wish to talk at a distance.” Rhana stood before us. “And you, Jeff Grant, are you ready? You shall see me, the great woman conqu...

They call this now the era of our Greater World. This year that has passed has brought us many strange things. I am not one to recount them--the wonders of the Lowlands, the wor...