I wondered why Dr. Plantet let him go on this last voyage, which, at best, seemed hazardous. I was not present in their Maine coast home when Arturo parted from his father and Polly; but when he and I left the Continental Air-Liner at San Francisco and boarded my ship, Arturo made one comment: “Father wants me to stay in the tower with you all I can, Jeff. He is fearfully interested in this thing--how much so, well you’ll know when we get back. He’s worried; so very busy!” I too had seen a change in Dr. Plantet these last months; a harassed look, a gray, haggard aspect of worry, or perhaps overwork. Though what he, a retired surgeon of forty-five, a student of oceanography as his chosen hobby, would be working at, I could no more than guess. Arturo knew, perhaps, but beyond that one comment he said nothing of it to me. He was more silent than ever, this voyage. A grim, intent eagerness seemed possessing him. A dark flush was on his usually pale cheeks. A trembling eagerness it was. It showed itself in his smoldering dark eyes; a quiver in his voice, so that any one who did not know, might have thought that fear was upon him. He sat with me throughout every watch, peering into the white headlight beam. Green depths of water surged at us; a fish occasionally surprised by our light, darted away. So little to see, and nothing out of the ordinary. * * * * * Nothing--until that night in Micronesia, west of the Marshalls. We were, I think, about ten degrees N., one hundred and fifty-eight degrees E.--it had been some hours since I had checked our exact position. Arturo and I were at the forward tower bull’s-eye. Nothing to see save green speeding water. And then, abruptly, it flashed at us--a dim, illumined something in the ocean far ahead, flashing forward as we sped seemingly directly at it. Arturo gripped me. “Jeff!” The lookout’s voice in the bow-hood sounded simultaneously from the speaker beside us. “Danger ahead.” And a duplicate of the engine-room bells, and automatic warnings to the control operators sounded. In the mirror overhead I saw reflected the startled faces of the two men in the control tower; saw them throwing over the wheels. We turned to port and slanted upward to the surface; so sudden a change that the ship listed perceptibly. An instant only. The whole thing was so swift at our fifty knot speed that in an instant the hovering thing had come--and passed. But we saw it, the vision of it distinctly registered upon our startled minds. A dim, illumined something far ahead of us, glowing as the bow light picked it up. It grew, in seconds, to something round: a globe twenty feet in diameter perhaps. Metallic? I think so. It glowed darkly luminous and smooth in our light. A globular thing, with projections as though it might have been some monster sea-spider, risen from the deeps, resting up here near the surface with crooked, folded legs.