| abstract | - Malmstrom, The. Highly unpopular with sailors, this marine vortex in the Zamonian Sea north-east of the mainland is a whirlpool covering a surface area of twenty square miles and extending to a depth of twenty-five or thirty miles. At its base the whirlpool disappears into the crater of an extinct marine volcano five miles in diameter. The Malmstrom is marked on all charts and should be given a wide berth, because anything that gets caught up in it is inexorably sucked down into the depths. Fish and other marine creatures instinctively avoid the whirlpool; sailors, on the other hand, often fall prey to their irrepressible curiosity and venture too close to it. Little research has been devoted to where the Malmstrom’s masses of water go, and this is a natural breeding ground for legends. Folk tales transfigure the volcanic crater into the Gates of Hell, and certain less than reputable scientists claim that the Malmstrom will continue to suck water into the interior of the earth until the latter explodes. [cont.] Some authorities on dimensional hiatuses espouse the view that the Malmstrom is the largest → Dimensional Hiatus in the known universe. This assumption is at least supported by the genff readings on its periphery, because no greater concentrations of that sewer gas have been found anywhere else. [cont.] In the lower regions of the Malmstrom there occurs a rare and curious quirk of physics which does, in fact, conflict with all the laws of nature. For the last five hundred feet the rate of descent doubles every twenty feet, so an object falling into the Malmstrom would crash on the bottom at almost the speed of light. This is thought to be attributable to the Malmstrom’s torque and suction power and its affinity with a dimensional hiatus.
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