Undersea Fleet (2 page)

He said suddenly: “You’ll make it, Jim. You don’t need any depth shots!”

“So will you.”

He looked at me without speaking. Then he shook his head. “Thanks, Jim. I wish I believed you.” He stared out across the water, his brow wrinkled. It was an old, old story, his fight to conquer the effects of skin-diving. “The raptures of the depths. It’s a pretty name, Jim. But an ugly thing—” He stood up and grinned. “I’ll lick it. I’ve got to!”

I didn’t know what to say; fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything. Another cadet came across the deck toward us. He spoke to us and stood beside me, looking out at the black mirror of the water and the stars that shim-mered in it, colored by the rim of light around the sky. I didn’t recognize him; a first-year man, obviously, but not from our own crew.

“How strange to see,” he said, almost speaking to himself. “Is it always like this?”

Bob and I exchanged looks. A lubber, obviously—from some Indiana town, perhaps, getting his first real look at the sea. I said, a little condescendingly, “We’re used to it. Is this your first experience with deep water?”

“Deep water?” He looked at me with surprise. Then he shook his head. “It isn’t the water I’m talking about. It’s the sky. You can see so far! And the stars, and the sun coming up. Are there always so many stars?”

Bob said curtly, “Usually there are a lot more. Haven’t you ever seen stars before?”

The strange cadet shook his head. There was an odd hush of amazement in his voice. “Very seldom.”

We both stared. Bob muttered, “Who are you?”

“Craken,” he said. “David Craken.” His dark eyes turned to me. “I know you. You’re Jim Eden. Your uncle is Stewart Eden—the inventor of edenite.”

I nodded, a little embarrassed by the eager awe in his voice. I was proud of my uncle’s power-filmed edenite armor, that turns pressure back on itself so that men can reach the floors of the sea; but my uncle had taught me not to boast of it.

“My father used to know your uncle,” David Craken told me quickly. “A long time ago. When they were both trying to solve the problem of the pressure of the Deep—”

He broke off suddenly. I stared at him, a little angrily. Was he trying to tell me that my uncle had had someone else’s help in developing edenite? But it wasn’t so; Stewart would never have hesitated to say so if it were true, and he had never mentioned another man.

I waited for the stranger to explain; but there was no explanation from him, only a sudden, startled gasp.

“What’s the matter?” Bob Eskow demanded.

David Craken was staring out across the water. It was still smooth and as black as a pool of oil, touched with shimmers of color from the coming sun. But something had frightened him.

He pointed. I saw a faint swirl of light and a spreading patch of ripples, several hundred yards from the gym ship, out toward the open sea. Nothing more.

“What was that?” he gasped.

Bob Eskow chortled. “He saw something!” he told me. “I caught a glimpse of it myself—looked like a school of tuna. From the Bermuda Hatchery, I suppose.” He grinned at the other cadet. “What did you think it was, a sea serpent?”

David Craken looked at us without expression.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I thought it might be.”

The way he said it! It was as though it were perfectly possible that there really had been a sea-serpent there, coming up off the banks below the Bermuda shallows. He spoke as though sea-serpents were real and familiar; as one of us might have said, “Why, yes, I thought it might be a shark.”

Bob said harshly: “Cut out the kidding. You don’t mean that. Or—if you did, how did you get into the Academy?”

David Craken glanced at him, then away. For a long moment he leaned forward across the rail, staring toward the spreading ripples. The phosphorescence was gone, and now there was nothing more to see.

He turned to us and shrugged. He smiled faintly. “Perhaps it was a tuna school. I hope so.”

“I’m sure it was!” said Bob. “There aren’t any seaserpents at the Academy. That’s a silly superstition!”

David Craken said, after a moment, “I’m not superstitious, Bob. But believe me, there are things under the sea that—Well, things you might not believe.”

“Son,” Bob said sharply, “I don’t need to be told about the sub-sea Deeps by any lubber! I’ve been there—haven’t we, Jim?”

I nodded. Bob and I had been together through Thetis Dome in far, deep Marinia itself—the nation of underwater dome cities, lying deep beneath the dark Pacific, where both of us had fought and nearly lost against the Sperrys.

“The Sub-Sea Fleet has explored the oceans pretty thoroughly,” Bob went on. “They haven’t turned up any sea-serpents that I know of. Oh, there are strange things, I grant you—but man put those things there! There are tubeways running like subways under the ocean floor, and modern cities under the domes, and sub-sea prospectors roving over the ocean floor; and there aren’t any sea-serpents, because they would have been seen! It’s crazy superstition, and let me tell you, we don’t believe in these superstitions here at the Academy.”

“Perhaps you should,” said David Craken.

“Wake up, boy!” cried Bob. “I’m telling you I’ve been in the Deeps—don’t try to tell me about them. The only time either Jim or I ever heard the words ‘sea-serpent’ used, the whole time we were in Marinia, was by silly old yarn-spinners, trying to cadge drinks by telling lies. Where do you hear stories like that, Craken? Out in Iowa or Kansas, where you came from?”

“No,” said David Craken. “That isn’t where I came from.” He hesitated, looking at us queerly. “I—I was born in Marinia,” he told us. “I’ve lived there all my life, nearly four miles down.”

At the bow, the stubby little sub-sea tugs were puffing and straining at the cables, towing us at a slow and powerful nine knots toward the off-shore submarine slopes. It was full daybreak now, and the sky was a wash of color, the golden sun looming huge ahead of us, wreathed in the film of cloud at the horizon.

Bob Eskow said: “Marinia? You? You’re from—But what are you doing here?”

David Craken said gravely: “I was born near Kermadec Dome, in the South Pacific. I came to the Academy as an exchange student, you see. There are a few of us here—from Europe, from Asia, from South America. And even me, from Marinia.”

“I know that. But—”

Craken said, with a flash of humor: “But you thought I was a lubber who’d never seen the sea. Well, the fact of the matter is that until two months ago I’d never seen anything else. I was born four miles down. That’s why the sky and the sun and the stars seem—well, just as fantastic to me as sea serpents apparently are to you.”

“Don’t kid me!” Bob flashed. “The sea-bottoms have been well explored—”

“No.” He looked at us almost imploringly, praying us to believe him. “They have not. There are a handful of cities, tied together with the tubes. There are explorers and prospectors in all the Deeps, an occasional deep-sea farm, a few miles away from the dome cities. But the floor of the sea, Bob, is
three times larger
than the whole Earth’s dry-land area. Microsonar can find some things; visual observation can find a few more. But the rest of the sea-bottom is as scarcely populated and as unknown as Antarctica…”

The warning klaxon sounded, and that was the end of our chat.

We raced across the deck toward the hatchways, even while the voice of sea coach Blighman rattled out of the loudspeaker:

“Clear the deck. Clear the deck. All cadets report for depth shots. We dive in ten minutes.”

A dark, lean cadet joined us as we ran. “David,” he called, “I lost you! We must go for the injections now!”

David said: “Meet my friend, Eladio Angel.”

“Hi,” Bob panted as we trotted along, and I nodded.

“Laddy’s an exchange student, like me.”

“From Marinia too?” I asked.

“No, no!” he cried, grinning. His teeth flashed very white. “From Peru. As far from Marinia as from here is my home. I—”

He stopped, queuing up at happening. The working crew was yelling for Sea Coach Blighman.

We turned to look toward the stern. Lieutenant Blighman, his shark’s eyes flashing, came boiling up out of the hatchway. We scattered out of his way as he raced toward the stern.

One of the fathometers was missing.

We could hear the excited cries of the working crew. They had been securing the first of the fathometers on deck, where it would provide a constant record of our dives. The second, still on the landing staring toward the stern. We were the hatchways, but something was stage—was gone. Gone, when no one was looking. Nearly a hundred pounds of sea-tight casing and instruments; and it was gone.

We lined up to get our shots. Everyone was talking about the missing fathometer. “The working crew,” Captain Fairfane said wisely. “They didn’t lash it. A swell came along and—”

“There was no swell,” said David Craken, almost to himself.

Fairfane glowered. “Ten-
hut!”
he barked. “There’s too much noise in this line!”

We quieted down; but David Craken was right. There had been no swell, no way for the hundred-pound instrument to fall over the side of the landing stage. It was just—gone. And it wasn’t the first such incident, I remembered. The week before, a sub-sea dory, pneumatic powered, big enough for one man, had astonishingly disappeared from the recreation beach. Possibly, I thought excitedly, the two disappearances were connected! Someone in a sub-sea dory could have slipped up behind the gym ship, surfaced while the work crew was busy on deck, stolen the fathometer—

No. It was impossible. For one thing, the dory was not fast enough to catch even the waddling raft we were on; for another, the microsonars would have spotted it. Pos-sibly a very fast skin-diver, lying in wait in our path and vectoring in to our course in the microsonar’s blind spot, could have done it, but it was ridiculous to think of a skin-diver out that far on the Atlantic.

I thought for a moment of the fantastic remark David Craken had made—the sea serpent.…

But that was ridiculous.

The diving bells jangled, and the ungainly sub-sea raft tipped and wallowed down under the surface. Above us, the sub-sea tugs would be cruising about, one of the surface, one at our own level, to guard against wandering vessels and, if necessary, to render emergency rescue serv-ice.

We were ready for our qualifying dives.

The injections were a mild sting, a painful rubbing, and that was all. I didn’t feel any different after they were over. Bob was wincing and trying not to show it; but he was cheerful enough as we raced from the sickbay to our diving-gear lockers.

The gym ship was throbbing underfoot as its little auxiliary engines, too small to make it a sea-going craft under its own power, took over the job of maintaining depth and station. I could smell the faint, sharp odor of the ship itself, now that the fresh air from the surface was cut off. I could almost see, in my mind’s eye, the green waves foaming over the deck, and I could feel all the mystery and vastness of the sub-sea world we were enter-ing.

Bob nudged me, grinning. He didn’t have to speak; I knew what he was feeling. The sea!

Cadet Captain Fairfane broke in on us. I had seen him talking excitedly to Sea Coach Blighman, but I hadn’t paid much attention; I thought it might have been about the missing fathometer.

But it was not. Fairfane came aggressively up to me, his good-looking face angry, his eyes blazing. “Eden! I want to talk to you.”

“Yessir!” I rapped out.

“Never mind the sir. This is man-to-man.”

I was surprised. Roger Fairfane and I were not particularly close friends. He had been quite friendly when Bob and I first came back to his class—then, without warning, cold. Bob’s notion was that he was afraid I would go after his place as cadet captain, though that didn’t seem likely; the post came as a result of class standings and athletic attainment, and Fairfane had an impressive record. But Bob didn’t like him anyhow—perhaps because he thought Roger Fairfane had too much money. His father was with one of the huge sub-sea shipping companies—Roger never said exactly what his position was, but he made it sound important.

“What do you want, Roger?” I hung my sea jacket in the locker and turned to talk to him.

“Eden,” he said sharply, “we’re being cheated, you and I!”

“Cheated?” I stared at him.

“That’s right! This Craken kid, he swims like a devilfish! With him against us, we haven’t got a chance.”

I said: “Look, Roger, this isn’t a race. It doesn’t matter if David Craken can take the pressure a few fathoms deeper than you and—”

“It may not matter to you, but it matters to me. Listen, Eden, he isn’t even an American! He’s a transfer student from the sea. He knows more about sea pressure than the coach does! I want you to go to Lieutenant Blighman and protest. Tell him it isn’t fair to have Craken swimming against us!”

“Why don’t you protest yourself, if you feel that way?”

“Why, Jim!” Fairfane looked hurt. “It just wouldn’t look right—me being cadet captain and all. Besides—”

Bob broke in: “Besides, you already did, and he turned you down. Right?”

Roger Fairfane scowled. “Maybe so. I didn’t actually protest, I just—Well, what’s the difference? He’ll listen to you, Eden. He might think I’m prejudiced.”

“Aren’t you?” Bob snapped.

“Yes, I am!” Roger Fairfane said angrily. “I’m a better man than he is, and better than his pet Peruvian too! That’s why I resent being made to look like a fool when he’s in his natural element. We’re supposed to be diving against men, Eskow—not against fish!”

Bob was getting angry, I could see. I touched his arm to auiet him down. I said: “Sorry, Roger. I don’t think I can help you.”

“But you’re Stewart Eden’s nephew! Listen to me, Jim, if you go to Blighman he’ll pay attention.”

That was something Roger Fairfane hadn’t learned, regardless of the grades he got in his studies. I was Stewart Eden’s nephew—and that, along with five cents, would buy me a nickel’s worth of candy bars at the Academy. The Academy doesn’t care who your uncle is; the Academy cares who
you
are and what
you
can do.