"A derelict!" Robert Thorpe exclaimed with unconscious scorn. But Captain Brent was already at a communication tube. "Chief? Captain Brent. Give her everything you've got. Drive the _Bennington_ faster than she ever went before." The slim ship was a quivering lance of steel that threw itself through foaming waters, that shot with an endless, roaring surge of speed toward that distant point in the heaving waste of the Pacific, and that seemed, to the two silent men on the bridge, to put the dragging miles behind them so slowly--so slowly. "Let me see those papers," said Captain Brent, finally. * * * * * He read them in silence. Then: "The eyes!" he said. "The eyes! That is what this other poor devil said. My God, Thorpe, what is it? What can it be? We're not all insane." "I don't know what I expected to find," said Thorpe slowly. "I had thought of many things, each wilder than the next. This Captain Wilkins said the eyes were above him. I had visions of some sky monster ... I had even thought of some strange aircraft from out in space, perhaps, with round lights like eyes. I have pictured impossibilities! But now--" "Yes," the other questioned, "now?" "There were tales in olden times of the Kraken," suggested Thorpe. "The Kraken!" the captain scoffed. "A mythical monster of the sea. Why, that was just a fable." "True," was the quiet reply, "that was just a fable. And one of the things I have learned is how frequently there is a basis of fact underlying a fable. And, for that matter, how can we know there is no such monster, some relic of a Mesozoic species supposed to be extinct?" He stood motionless, staring far out ahead into the dark. And Brent, too, was silent. They seemed to try with unaided eyes to penetrate the dark miles ahead and see what their sane minds refused to accept. * * * * * It was still dark when the search-light's sweeping beam picked up the black hull and broad, red-striped funnels of the _Nagasaki Maru_. She was riding high in the water, and her big bulk rolled and wallowed in the trough of the great swells. The _Bennington_ swept in a swift circle about the helpless hulk while the lights played incessantly upon her decks. And the watching eyes strained vainly for some signal to betoken life, for some sign that their mad race had not been quite vain. Her engines had been shut down; there was no steerage-way for the _Nagasaki Maru_, and, from all they could see, there were no human hands to drag at the levers of her waiting engines nor to twirl with sure touch the deserted helm. The _Nagasaki Maru_ was abandoned. The lights held steadily upon her as the _Bennington_ came alongside and a boat was swung out smartly in its davits. But Thorpe knew he was not alone in his wild surmise as to the cause of the catastrophe. "Throw your lights around the water occasionally," Brent ordered. "Let me know if you see anything."