He felt the boat rock slightly and turned to see that another girl had managed to draw herself up on the gunwale and was looking at him. She was a brunette in her early twenties, with an oval face which might have been beautiful except for its extreme pallor and a squeezed look about the eyes which suggested her sight was very poor. She gave him a direct, knowing smile which disturbed his pulse.
“Help me,” she said, moving her shoulders in a way which made it clear that she was a perfectly developed woman. Tarrant went to her and assisted her into the boat. A part of his mind was puzzled by the way in which her obvious physical well-being contrasted with the lack of strength which made it impossible for her to stand up unsupported. She leaned heavily on him as he helped her lie down beside her companions, and—incredible though the idea seemed—he was almost certain she was unconcerned about the necessary bodily contacts. As soon as she was stretched out on the deck beside the red-haired girl she screened her eyes from the sun and smiled at him again. Tarrant felt a dryness develop in his mouth.
He turned away quickly and helped the remaining swimmers aboard. They were a prematurely greying woman in her thirties, and a fair-haired boy in his late teens. As with the others, they gave every appearance of fitness, yet virtually collapsed on the deck and lay breathing deeply like athletes at the end of a strenuous race. Tarrant picked up his rifle and scanned the waters on each side of the boat, satisfying himself that the big squid had been driven off. He turned back to the rescued swimmers and, now that the sense of urgency and danger had been removed from the situation, suddenly became aware of how closely the scene before him resembled his orgiastic imaginings.
“What happened?” he said, anxious to talk. “Was there a shipwreck?”
“We come from the second place,” the injured man said, frowning with pain, and Tarrant belatedly remembered he had a medical kit. While he was fetching it from its cabinet, he was struck by the fact that although the stranger had spoken fluently his pronunciation had been unusual. Curiously, it reminded him of archaic speech from 20th century films and radio recordings.
“What’s your name?” Tarrant opened the white-painted box and took out a container of antibiotic powder.
“Lennar.”
“Where is this second place you come from?”
The man rolled his head sideways and glanced at his companions. “It is another place. Not on Earth.”
“I don’t get you.” Tarrant began to wonder if he was dealing with a case of delirium. “How long have you been in the water?”
“We have always been in the water.”
“Sorry?”
Lennar breathed deeply before speaking the strangely accented words. “The second place is made of water. It is all water.”
“You’d better get some rest,” Tarrant said quietly. “I’ll patch you up now and get you ashore as soon as I can.” He moved to begin dusting the oozing circular wounds, but the man drew back in obvious alarm.
Tarrant showed him the plastic container. “It’s just a general purpose antibiotic.”
Lennar stared into Tarrant’s face for a moment, coming to a decision, then he relaxed and allowed himself to be treated. Tarrant took some cotton and had begun cleaning the wounds which ran in a diagonal line across Lennar’s chest when he noticed the circular patches of old scar tissue on his shoulders and arms. He stopped work for a moment, wondering, and touched the scars.
“What did this?”
Lennar’s lips quirked. “The Horra and I are old enemies.”
“Is that what you call the big squid? The Horra?”
“That is their name.”
“I didn’t know they had a name.” The pressure on Tarrant’s subconscious became greater. “Nobody around here had even seen one until yesterday.”
“The new current has brought them here from our world.” Tarrant started dusting the fresh wounds. “And your world is made of nothing but water?”
“That is correct.”
“Then how did you breathe?”
“There is some air there, but the air and the water do not remain separate. The big bubbles move slowly and we capture them in cages strapped to our heads.”
Tarrant looked closely at Lennar and saw horizontal indentations such as might have been made by straps running across his forehead. He turned to the rest of the group, pleased at having an excuse to gorge his eyes on the women, and was able to pick out similar markings on their foreheads. In addition, the fair-haired youth had several old, circular scars on his chest and thighs. The brunette smiled again as Tarrant’s eyes met hers, and it was apparent that she was not discomfited in any way at having her nakedness on display before him. Astounded at his own brazenness, he allowed his gaze to travel down her body and back to her face. Her smile grew warmer. Tarrant swallowed and looked away, trying to recollect his thoughts.
The Bergmann Hypothesis!
That was what Will Somerville had begun to outline for him only a few hours earlier, but at the time Tarrant had been able to recall little more than the name. Now, his memory goaded by new knowledge, he could assemble fragments of the fantastic theory. The Earth’s overall temperature had risen sharply by the end of the 20th century, and eventually this had led to a major reduction in the size of the polar caps. It had been calculated that the water set free should have caused the sea level to rise far enough to inundate vast tracts of land. In the event, the polar caps had shrunk as predicted, but there had been no significant rise in the level of the sea, and the land areas had remained as they were.
Had this occurred during the crest decades of the 20th century it would have resulted in scientific detective work on an unprecedented scale, but a hundred years later the peoples of the Earth had more pressing problems on their minds. Nature was restoring her balances by means of careless and casual genocides, and few people had time to concern themselves about a non-event such as the ancient coastlines enduring as they had always done.
Ulrich Bergmann had been an exception. He was a Scandinavian geophysicist who had achieved short-lived and dubious fame by asserting that in prehistoric times there had been a superior technological civilisation—indigenous to Earth, or an interstellar colony—which had taken measures to stabilise the sea level. His theory was that, positioned in perhaps a dozen places around the globe, there were huge underwater regulators. These were “matter transmitters”, fitted with sensors and automatic controls, which came into operation when the Earth entered a warm period.
The excess water released from the polar caps was instantaneously transported to a suitable storage point in another part of the Solar System, where it formed a planetoid around an orbiting matter transceiver. At the end of a hot spot, when the caps were beginning to expand and lock up water, the whole system went into reverse, thus maintaining the planetary equilibrium….
Tarrant now had to decide whether or not he could accept the Bergmann Hypothesis and some of its possible corollaries.
He kept his head down, his hands busy with the work of cleansing wounds and taping pads over them, while he tried to marshal and evaluate the evidence. Will Somerville had told him that the Earth as a whole was cooling down, and that the “sea was changing”. Those facts agreed perfectly with the Hypothesis; and from there it was only necessary to assume that the ocean’s regulators, the sunken matter transmitters, were devices which could transport living matter without harming it. He could presume they were intended to remain on the bed of the sea and draw off nothing but water—but even the super-machines of a super-race could eventually malfunction, become erratic in their mode of operation.
He had no idea of how a matter transmitter might work, but he could visualise an intangible “entrance”, a region of space which was somehow given congruency with a distant location between the planets. If the entrance became subject to fluctuations in size or position it might swallow submarines, ships or even aircraft, together with volumes of air. Tarrant’s mind baulked at imagining the trauma and subsequent hardships the crews would have had to endure in order to survive in their new environment. The death rate would have been appallingly high, close on a hundred per cent, but human beings could be fantastically adaptable provided they were given the smallest toehold. As long as there was food—available in the form of fish—and … Tarrant frowned as a new thought occurred to him.