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Title: The man who found out
Author: Roger D. Aycock
Release date: August 6, 2024 [eBook #74198]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1954
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO FOUND OUT ***
The Man Who Found Out
By Roger Dee
It's one thing to blow a bubble of glib,
journalistic lies. Quite another to have that
bubble burst in a nightmarish, green beyond.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Universe September 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_Roger Dee! The name has a fine, myth-making flavor, hasn't it?
You'd almost know that our ebullient author--his work has appeared
in many magazines--would excel in just such superb fancy-free
flights of humorous scientific fantasy as he has brought you here
with a spectral chuckle._
The trouble with Fortenay was that he was not merely a skeptic but a
professional skeptic, which is just another way of saying that he was
a widely known and highly paid journalist who had long ago learned to
capitalize on his penchant for iconoclasm. Fortenay was also given
to the sort of reflexive arrogance inevitable to some small men, and
was unscrupulous enough in its exercise to point up the flavor of his
satiric commentary on any currently news-worthy phenomenon with the
strong spice of semantic misrepresentation.
Fortenay was, in short, an able, intelligent, ambitious and thoroughly
offensive little heel. He was precisely the sort who should never have
been permitted in any responsible capacity aboard a scientific vessel
like the oceanographic survey tug _Cormorant_ when she was in the
process of investigating a find as important as the gigantic artifact
which Dr. Hans Weigand had discovered in the six-mile abyss of Bartlett
Deep just south of Cuba.
But Fortenay's publisher was a power among politicians as well as
among publishers, so Fortenay was able to announce in his syndicated
column that his readers would receive on-the-spot coverage of the
investigation, and that no smoke-screen of scientific doubletalk should
keep the truth from them.
The announcement was greeted with great interest, since various
disturbing rumors concerning the nature of Dr. Weigand's discovery were
already in circulation. Most of them--since Dr. Weigand himself was
frankly unable to offer any clue as to their origin or purpose--were
elaborated upon by Fortenay and his colleagues with less regard for
truth than for dramatic effect.
As a consequence, the newspaper-reading public was torn between a
number of equally improbable theories which supposed that:
Dr. Weigand's find was not an artifact at all, but a monstrous bubble
of molten basalt blown up ages before by a subterranean volcano and
frozen solid by contact with sea water. A patent impossibility, since
the thing occurred in an area free of any early vulcanism and was, by
accurate sonar measurement, a sharply-defined oblong body some six
miles long, three miles wide and two miles high.
It was an artifact of recent construction, being nothing less than
an undersea Russian submarine base built secretly during the Korean
diversion and designed to obliterate the Americas under a rain of
hydrogen bombs.
It was a colossal structure erected by the inhabitants of an
antediluvian country like Atlantis and inundated by the waters of some
prehistoric flood.
It was, despite Plato's insistence that that mythical land lay beyond
the Pillars of Hercules, Atlantis herself.
It was neither of these but a self-sufficient city built by a naturally
marine race of men who had taken a divergent line of evolution and
who might, for all anyone knew, be plotting a war of conquest against
the honest, industrious, amicable and God-fearing nations of topside
humanity.
None of these, Fortenay pontificated, was likely. Only one fact could
be accounted certain, he added with clarion determination, and that
Fortenay himself, armed with the invincible power of the press, would
Find Out.
And Fortenay did, because Fortenay never let his readers down.
By luck, the journalist boarded the _Cormorant_ just in time to keep
his promise, for the tug's straining winch was in the process of
swinging from her deck the quartz-glass bathysphere which Dr. Weigand
had designed for plumbing the Bartlett Deep.
Fortenay's appearance was a source of instant consternation to Dr.
Weigand's staff, who had been at their business long enough to know
public-relations trouble when they saw it. Promptly they shifted the
problem of Fortenay's disposition upward through the chain of seniority
to Dr. Weigand himself.
The old oceanographer, in answer to their frantic calls over his
bathysphere telephone, unscrewed the circular hatch of his quartz-glass
ball and put out his head much after the fashion of a bearded and
bifocaled bear peering from his winter den. He made a desperate attempt
to close the hatch when he recognized Fortenay, but Fortenay was not to
be denied.
"Hold everything!" said Fortenay, in effect. "I am here, in the
interests of God and country and twenty million newspaper readers, to
investigate this investigation."
Dr. Weigand protested the interruption of his work, and Fortenay
invoked the power of the press. Worse, he threatened the good doctor
with the personal wrath of Fortenay. His logic was wonderfully cogent.
Dr. Weigand's project depended largely upon government subsidy, and
Congress controlled such subsidies. The people controlled Congress, and
Fortenay controlled public opinion.
"I'll have them screaming for your head on a pike," Fortenay swore. And
Dr. Weigand, who had lived long enough to understand that Fortenay
could do just that, reluctantly surrendered.
Fortenay was a tyrannical little heel, but he possessed a certain
amount of physical courage. "I'm going down with you, Wiggy," he said,
"and see this Lost World shanty for myself."
And Fortenay went down, because he was confident that he would come up
again....
Their descent into Bartlett Deep would have been enthralling to Dr.
Weigand without Fortenay's company, and deadly dull to Fortenay without
the doctor's. As it developed, Dr. Weigand could only moon like a
distracted bruin on his leather bathysphere seat and peer miserably out
at the marine wonders rising past his eyes, while Fortenay occupied
himself with assessing the oceanographer's motives in pursuing an
investigation so hare-brained.
For Fortenay did not believe for a minute that it was an artifact which
Dr. Weigand had discovered, but a natural and therefore profitless
formation. His suspicions were confirmed when he learned that the
bathysphere could descend no more than a mile into the six-mile basin
of Bartlett Deep without being crushed--to borrow a simile from
Fortenay's ready stock--like an eggshell under the mounting pressure of
water above.
Since the thing at the bottom stood only two miles in height, it
followed by simple subtraction that three miles of dark and watery
distance must remain between the cameras of the observer and their
target. The only possible inference was that Dr. Weigand had built the
bathysphere for the sole purpose of titillating popular interest and so
justifying a request for additional funds for his project.
"It gets your name in the papers," Fortenay said with caustic irony.
"And makes it easier to bilk the taxpayers next time. And if you're
forced to admit it's only another volcanic chunk then your project will
still be in the black, won't it?"
The unexpected attack, to tap Fortenay's gift for simile again, knocked
the oceanographer for a devastating loop. His reasoning had been much
as Fortenay guessed, though the difficulty of maintaining a truly
important scientific project without government aid had seemed more
than enough to justify the trifling subterfuge.
The doctor saw his mistake now, and while the bathysphere sank lower
and lower into the darkening water he sought frantically for a loophole
of escape from the disaster he foresaw in tomorrow's newspapers.
He might have saved himself the effort. Fortenay had already headlined
his report, and his only interest now was in the sport of baiting his
victim....
The exposure of fakes, quacks, mountebanks and myths, Fortenay
declared, was his specialty. He offered copious proof.
"There was that pig-tailed brat in Arkansas," Fortenay said, "who
claimed she could levitate pianos and start fires by crossing her eyes.
The local papers had half the country believing it until I went down
and bluffed her into a test demonstration with arc lights and a TV
hookup. Maybe you caught that show--the act was a gyp, and I showed the
world. You never heard from _her_ again, did you?"
Dr. Weigand recalled the incident, and thought with some commiseration
that the nervous breakdown which followed the neurotic child's exposure
to Fortenay's baying attack might have been responsible for the loss of
any poltergeist power.
"And those three jokers in Ohio," enumerated Fortenay, "who claimed
they found a dead flying-saucer pilot. I bought it from them and proved
it was only a carnival baboon dipped in laundry blueing. I got those
jerks three years for fraud."
_And here am I_, thought Dr. Weigand, _an honest man and a respected
scientist, about to suffer a punishment even more terrible at the
hands of this trumpeting little ferret because I have sought to keep
my project alive. He will shout my little indiscretion from his
journalistic housetop and my reputation and my job will go like fog
before the wind. I will be discredited and my Anna will hang her head
before the neighbors and my little Karen and Wilhelmina, who know
nothing of it, will be jeered in the schoolyard...._
"_Ach_," said the doctor, who seldom said _ach_. "It should not happen
to a dog. Not yet even to a hyena!"
"--dowser in Oklahoma who charged fees to locate water," Fortenay ran
on relentlessly. "He got away with that racket until I went out with
some geological experts and a cameraman and showed him up. After that--"
_After that_, thought Dr. Weigand, _the poor fellow's gift was
destroyed along with his confidence, and there was nothing_.
But the doctor's commiseration rang hollow even to himself, for it had
occurred to him suddenly that it might not be necessary, after all, for
this thing to happen to him and to Anna and Karen and Wilhelmina.
It would mean the end of Hans Weigand, of course, but his project would
go on. He would be not a heel but a hero, and his family would be
pensioned instead of pilloried. And what is death to a true scientist,
when the man must die anyway but his reputation may live forever?
"--trouble is that people are so _gullible_," Fortenay was expounding.
(He pronounced it _gullable_, not that it mattered.) "They'll believe
anything they're told as long as it has its roots in some old myth
or legend handed down to them. They'll believe it if their fathers
believed it, because they're fools."
* * * * *
He leaned across the cramped cell of the bathysphere and tapped the
doctor on the knee.
"And do you know why people are fools, Wiggy? Because scientists
_teach_ them to be fools. Every superstition that people cling to
was handed down from the time when wise men--the scientists of the
day--taught it as gospel truth. Scientists are always making some kind
of mistake, and the people foot the bill.
"A few years ago they made an error in some law about variable stars, a
little bobble of a hundred per cent, and now they're saying the whole
universe is twice as big as they'd been teaching.
"And do you know why scientists make stupid mistakes, and why they
change their stories ever so often? Because they're fools too, and
thieves into the bargain. Like you, Wiggy."
"I _must_ do it," Dr. Weigand muttered. "Yes, I think certainly. It is
the only way."
"Scientists are always starting myths," Fortenay gabbled, never
dreaming of what went on behind the doctor's bifocals. "Take the legend
of Atlantis, for instance."
The soft sheen of undersea light, like a patina of moonbeams filtered
through deepest jade, was lost on him. The deep-water cold of Bartlett
Deep that crept through the quartz shell of the bathysphere troubled
him not at all.
"When a hairy old Greek named Plato wrote a book about Atlantis,
everybody believed him because he was a scientist," Fortenay went on.
(He pronounced it _Platto_.) "And now you pop up with a story about an
undersea artifact--you might as well have come right out and called it
a building--and what you're really trying to do is to start another
crazy myth about a drowned civilization right here in our own backyard.
That's the way these lies start."
He might have enlarged further upon his topic if Dr. Weigand had
not stood up suddenly, like Samson in the temple, and yanked an
innocent-seeming lever that disconnected the bathysphere from its
overhead cable and let it drop like a stone toward the bottom of
Bartlett Deep.
"Perhaps we start a little myth of our own, you and I," Dr. Weigand
said as the telephone wires ripped loose. "Perhaps our friends up there
will say to the newspapers that a sea monster came up and ate us,
_nicht wahr_?"
Fortenay, of course, sprang upon the burly old oceanographer in a
frenzy, and of course accomplished nothing.
Dr. Weigand took him by the shoulders and replaced him in his leather
seat.
"We can neither of us do anything now," the good doctor said. "Sit, Mr.
Fortenay, and tell me more about how you do not believe in myths."
Fortenay sat, but said nothing, for there was nothing to say.
Fortenay sat for a long while and breathed hard through his thin
inquisitive nose while the bathysphere sank down and down into
gathering green darkness. After a time it dawned upon him with a great
rush of relief that Fortenay the columnist, whose facile wit daily
entertained twenty millions of people, could not possibly die in any
such fantastic fashion.
It simply couldn't happen. He was the victim of a peculiarly vivid
dream--three-dimensional, complete with technicolor and tactile
sensations, but still a dream--from which he must waken shortly.
But there was no denying that it was a horribly convincing dream.
The monstrous artifact he had come to investigate--it really _was_ a
building of some sort, he saw now, and not a ruin at all--rose closer
and closer until its vast top spread out under the bathysphere like a
mossy green plateau.
A random eddy of current caught the bathysphere and pushed it gently
outward as it sank, so that it missed the edge and fell on toward the
bottom, and the barnacled wall that slid up to tower over Fortenay was
as blank and final as the rim of the world.
They were approaching the bottom of Bartlett Deep when they saw the
first gigantic splashes of lettering, emblazoned like the heraldic
script of a Titan across the face of the wall. The doctor was beside
himself with the frenzy of his discovery, but could make nothing of it
because the wall was much too near. It was like looking at a billboard
from a distance of six inches, and so Dr. Hans Weigand passed the
last moments of his life as he had lived the greater part of it, in
disappointment and frustration.
Fortenay, bemused by his dream, took no such interest. Actually he
felt a little smug that he should have had the acumen to recognize it
for what it was even before he woke and that he should have been able,
even in the grip of a nightmare, to face down a big-time myth-making
scientist like Wiggy on his own ground.
All this would vanish soon, he told himself, even as the first sudden
tracery of strain-fissures appeared in the quartz-glass shell of the
bathysphere. A dream is a myth and a myth is a dream, and he would wake
up soon--
The bathysphere burst, crushed, as Fortenay would have said, like an
eggshell.
Fortenay woke, not from a dream but from an existence. He found himself
standing on a smooth floor of shell before a vast and featureless
building whose facade towered mistily up out of sight. Little eddies
of current bore tiny, feathery creatures that brushed past and through
him, glowing phosphorescently. Glittering fragments of the shattered
bathysphere fell like a rain of outsized diamonds about his feet.
* * * * *
Dr. Weigand stood beside him, bifocaled eyes speculative, his whiskers
comfortably afloat like seaweed in the green water.
"I think we go inside when the door opens," the good doctor said.
"Inside?" echoed Fortenay. "To what?"
"To a myth," said Dr. Weigand. "A myth that was made for such lost ones
as you and I."
Fortenay saw the legend then. It was far up on the facade, above the
doorway, and at such a distance the quaint antique script, like its
meaning, was wonderfully and fearfully clear: DAVY JONES' LOCKER.
The door that opened led downward and outward, companion-wise, to a
green and enigmatic beyond.
"Let us go, my little friend," said Dr. Weigand. "It is better not to
be sent for, I think."
And Fortenay went, because he had no choice.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO FOUND OUT ***
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