Roger D. Aycock

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”