ore dreadful thought flashed into his
mind. All those men, of the whaling company and the sanitarium,
thought him a little crazy. And, since lunatics are always convinced
of the reality of their visions, what if the sealmen--his adventure
amidst them--had been but a dream, a nightmare, an hallucination? What
if he were in truth crazy? The fear grew rapidly. What if he were?
God! He, hunting for the _Peary_, when all those planes and men had
failed! He, expecting to achieve what those searchers, with far
greater resources, had not been able to! Did not that give evidence
that his mind was twisted? Creatures, half-seal, half-men, living
under the ice--it certainly seemed a lunatic's obsession.

Then something within him rose and fought back.

"No!" he cried aloud. "I'll go bugs if I think like that! Those
sealmen were real--and I know where they are. I'm going on!"

And, an hour later, the dashboard's shaded dials told him he was on
the exact spot where the _Peary_ had last reported....

* * * * *

Here was the real Arctic, the real polar sea. No sun, no breath of the
world above could reach it through its eternal mask of solid ice. As
one of the few unfamiliar aspects of the earth, it was as far removed
from the imagination of man as if it were part of a far planet hung
spinning millions of miles out in space. Men could reach it in shells
of metal, but it was not meant for him, and was always hostile. A
dozen times a daring one could cross safely its cold lonely reaches,
but the thirteenth time it would snare and destroy him for the
unwanted trespasser he was.

It was here that the _Peary_ had stepped off into mystery. At this
point her hull had throbbed with air, movement, life; at this point
all had been well. And then, minutes or hours later, close to here,
the sea devil had sprung.

What had happened? What had trapped her? What, even more baffling, had
kept her men with their manifold safety devices from even reaching and
climbing up on the ice above to signal the searching planes?

Ken Torrance, oppressively alone in the hovering torpoon, gazed
through its vision-plate of fused quartz around him. Gray sea,
filtering to black beneath; distant eerie shadows, probably meaning
nothing, but possibly all important; ceiling of thick ice above, rough
and in places broken by a sharp down-thrusting spur--these were his
surroundings. These were what he must hunt through, until he came up