Page:Amazing Stories Volume 02 Number 06.pdf/29

548 which the gold lace alone remained intact. He was fully awake and conscious now. Groping his way to the conning tower, he saw, in the dim light, the chart protected by a sheet of glass that he had kept marked up to the very last, and the final resting place where he had written "finish" in small letters. He remembered how how he had looked up at the picture of one of the world's powerful rulers, and saluted, uttering the famous words of the gladiators of ancient Rome when they greeted Caesar in the arena before fighting it out to the death for his amusement. "Ave, Caesar! morituri te salutamus," "Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die, salute you." Then he had gone to his cabin, and taken the drug. Now he was alive, and the submarine was heaving up and down gently on the surface of a calm, late autumn sea.

He could not understand the dreadful corrosion and decay. He touched a gauge; it fell to pieces a mass of rust and verdigris. He tried to open the manhole leading out on deck; it was rusted fast. Getting a sledge hammer, he knocked off the fastenings, and the fresh tang of the sea air greeted him in his dungeon, and put the color back into his gray cheeks.

Coming out he looked around in utter astonishment. "We must have been down there nearly a year, by the look of things," he muttered, walking along the slippery deck among the weeds where strange sea monsters stuck out their heads at him, and wriggled back under cover.

Towards the stern was a great dent in the hull, and the metal plates were clean and bright.

"Looks as if we'd been in collision lately," he remarked to himself, "I must see about it."

Groping his way inside again, he felt all around the indentation until a spurt of water confirmed his fears.

"Well I'm glad I'm on the surface where I have a run for my money," he mused. "I never did like being sealed up like a sardine in a can."

He thought of the canvass folding boat, but it, too, had crumbled to dust, and the life belts were in same condition.

"I can swim for two hours or more if the sharks don't get me, and this old craft is good for quite a while yet.." [sic]

His eyes were getting accustomed to the strong light, and suddenly his gaze became fixed on something in the heavens.

"Looks like a zeppelin, but the shape isn't quite the same; however they've probably improved them while I've been down below in this tin fish. I wonder if the old war is still on, and who's winning."

Presently he went below again, and spent an hour in the dark, trying to plug the leak with the remains of his clothing. When he came up again there was a small pleasure yacht, of a design he had never seen before, within half a mile. He waved, and the people aboard saw him. He scrambled for the chart house, where he wildly searched for something to wear.

Now he stood on the sinking submarine, clothed in a chart.

"Did you see anything of Number Two projectile from the Pacific?" called out a short stout man in yachting costume, who appeared to be the owner of the yacht.

"I'm afraid I didn't, but can you lend me some clothes?" was his reply.

HE people on the yacht were astonished at his story, accustomed as they were to strange happenings. He learned that it was a common practice to suspend animation in criminals who could not be reformed, and leave them to be judged and dealt with by a future and less prejudiced generation. To him, his present situation seemed absolutely incredible. Two hundred years; Impossible! They must surely be movie actors on this ship, covered with inventions and innovations of which he, a leader in his own age, knew nothing. The things that he now saw were just a beginning, for in less than an hour, in answer to the ship's broadcast, they were surrounded by airships of every type. No one seemed to bother about Roger Wells, the old world man, except a medical health officer who tested his mentality, and innoculated him against every known disease. A little later, while he stood leaning over the rail of the yacht, a great projectile hurtled down with a roar like a thunderbolt not a hundred yards away, and pulled itself up so that it only went about twenty feet under water. It bore an eminent engineer direct from Italy.

The dent in the rusty submarine had been noticed by those on the yacht, from a distance, and they had unerringly come to the right conclusion. The chart helped them considerably, for with so many wrecks scattered about the ocean floor, it meant time wasted to examine each, for their instruments only indicated a mass of metal and not its shape or size with any degree of accuracy.

"Tell me about this projectile, and how it works?" inquired the ancient young man of his host, as they stood watching the preparations for what promised to be a stupendous task.

"It's really very simple. These projectiles are hurled up into the rarefied air by an air gun, the spring of which is compressed by the tide, or other means, to the required tension; then a couple of air blasts from the rear end will take it almost anywhere. They are only partly automatic, so far, and each one must have a pilot to steer it, and stop it, and communicate with the outside world in case of trouble."

"To my old fashioned notions it seems a far riskier job than the one from which I had been so miraculously saved. How often do they go wrong and get lost like this one?"

"Bless you! It hasn't happened for several years. You see the pilot of this one is a lady, and it appears she must have let her mind wander a bit, because her recorded course as far as Chicago indicates that she had done nothing up to then to retard the projectile, although travelling over three miles per second, and far higher than usual."