Undersea Quest (13 page)

The ape reached out a casual arm and cuffed me. There was tremendous power on those sloping shoulders and long arms; I spun half dazed, across the room. I heard his voice dimly as he contemptuously said, “Shut up.” He walked out and closed the door behind him.

Time passed. I tried the door, knowing what the result would be.

Locked. I was trapped. I sat there, in the room with that dead man and the clicking, purring machine, contemplating the catastrophe of my plans.

The door opened. It was the butler; with him, hands bound, eyes blazing anger, was a tall black man. Gideon!

“You got company,” the “butler” chortled. “I’ll leave you two boys together; you got lots to talk about.”

He shoved Gideon staggering into the room.

The door locked upon us.

Time passed. Gideon and I talked briefly; then there was nothing more to talk about. He had been waiting for me outside Sperry’s quarters; he had been attacked from behind and dragged in. We were prisoners.

Gideon had been right.

Gideon roamed jestlessly around the room, peering and poking and searching; I sat quietly, trying to work things out in my mind. We were truly in a bad spot. Whatever doubts I had had about Hallam Sperry were now resolved; he was an outlaw, the mayor of Marinia, certainly, but he was an outiaw nonetheless. As prisoners in his home, we were helpless. And we couldn’t hope for outside aid, for who was there to help us? Bob Eskow had denied that he knew me—if indeed he ever got my message. The police—well, to help us they would have to know that we were in difficulties, and that they were not likely to know. My own credentials were confused; if I failed to turn up for the replacements the Immigration authorities would doubtless forget the whole thing. And Gideon was something of an outiaw himself, an indigent from Kelly’s Kingdom, with no family and no close friends to worry about his absence.

No, there was no hope of help from outside.

And little we could do from within. I sat.

Then Gideon said: “Jim! Come over here.”

I looked at him. He was standing by the clicking, humming machine, holding something in his hand—a reel of metallic thread. “Jim,” he said excitedly, “this was on the intake reel. It must be what was extracted from Catroni there.”

I walked over to him, skirting the body on the table. It seemed a low, ghoulish business to me, picking at the privacy of a dead man’s brain; I said, “What about it?”

Gideon put the reel on the machine. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what’s in it; but it must have been something important, for Hallam Sperry to kill Catroni to get it. These machines are not very well thought of, Jim; it is not likely that Sperry advertises the fact he owns one. Let’s find out what he did with it.”

He threaded the metal through a scanning head and turned a switch; it began slowly to revolve and slide through the magnetic scanner. He picked up a couple of headsets, smaller than that on the dead man but much like it in design. He put one on his own close-cropped head, handed the other to me.

I put it on—and at once I was hundred of miles away. I was in another man’s mind. I was seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt; I was watching a scene that had been played months before, far away.

They were in the seacar—Catroni and my uncle Stewart, and a man named Westervelt—the one Sperry had mentioned as having “dropped out of sight.” Cynical humor!

I could hear them talking to each other as though I were there; I could see them walking about, working the ship, manipulating all the dials and levers and gears that sent the seacar on its way down, and farther down.

For this was my uncle’s own seacar, armored with his own new Edenite shell, planned to stand a pressure far greater than any that had gone before.

The seacar was six miles down now—six miles, and going farther. New records were being set at every fath om; and the milky, glowing armor of Edenite was holding out the titanic pressures of the farthest deeps without a strain.

My uncle Stewart clapped Catroni on the back. “It’s working,” he chuckled, in his soft, whispering voice. Catroni nodded impatiently, eyes fixed on the depth gauges before him. There was a whisper in the helmet I wore of Catroni’s own thoughts then—a dark, dangerous whisper that was not in words. I shuddered, listening and watching; and I felt I knew what was to come.

The car went deeper and deeper, while the engineer Westervelt kept the screws turning and Catroni matched the rising levels of liquid in his buoyancy tanks. Stewart Eden, conning the little ship, was a triumphant bronze- bearded figure of a man like some ancient Norse mariner battling against the devil-gods of the fierce Atlantic.

The view was cloudy at times, as though Catroni’s attention had been on some inward thoughts, screened out by the selective electronic filters of the brainpump, rather than on the scene he was participating in. But I could see enough to know what was happening. I could see the little seacar go careening down until, nearly eight miles below the swells of the Pacific’s surface, the glimmering hull touched murky bottom and stopped.

There was a cloudy lapse of time, as though Catroni was guarding his thoughts even from himself. But I caught glimpses. Glimpses of my uncle, Westervelt and Catroni himself by turns putting on gleaming Edenite armor, testing the locks, stepping out onto the sea floor. There was little enough to see, in truth. The brilliant floodlights of the seacar, visible fifty miles off on the surface, were damped and blackened within yards in the opaque, crushing waters at the bottom of the deep. And the bottom itself was featureless mud.

Catroni and my uncle came inside together, Westervelt standing at the lock pumps to admit them. Then Westervelt and my uncle disappeared into the engine room aft…

And Catroni did the job he had been paid to do.

While they were gone, Catroni murdered the seacar.

He destroyed the life of the ship as ruthlessly as ever, in the old days, he had blotted out the life of another gangster with his hammering machine gun.

While Westervelt and my uncle were aft, Catroni shorted out and discharged three whole tiers of the cold-coil cells that held the lifeblood of the ship’s power. He flooded all the ballast tanks, and then smashed the marvelous pumps that Stewart Eden had designed to clear them, against any pressure. He systematically destroyed the sonic beam communication equipment.

Then he waited for my uncle and Westervelt to come forward again. When they did, he slipped aft, trusting that they would not look at the dials or gauges, knowing that no hint of his work was otherwise visible—for the covers had been replaced on the smashed pumps, and the cold- coil cells looked as they always had.

Aft, at the lock, Catroni disabled the suits of Edenite armor that Westervelt and my uncle had worn. His own he left intact…

And the first warning the other two had of what he had done was when they heard the lock opening to the outer depths as he fled.

In his Edenite armor, Catroni lingered near the seacar for half an hour. He knew, surely, that neither Westervelt nor my uncle would give up easily; he waited to see what move they would make.

He saw. Ponderously, slowly, the lock door behind him closed again. In Catroni’s mind, as we saw it in the reel from the brainpump, was cold wonder and a hint of almost contemptuous admiration.

Closing the lock door in itself was an astonishing feat. Somehow the two he had left to die had stripped the cold-coil cells of the last dregs of their power, in order to run the motors that closed the door. It would be hopeless to try to pump the water out of the lock; all they could hope to do would be to open the inner door and let the trapped water spill into the little seacar. It would make life just that much more miserable; and the energy they used would steal from them days and weeks of life, for once the cells were drained entirely the cold would kill them—if the failure of the charge on the Edenite armor of the seacar did not admit the crushing pressure of the sea to kill them first.

But they tried it.

And they had managed to repair one of the suits of armor.

We felt, in Catroni’s mind, consternation and fear. He watched the lock door open again, watched a slow-moving figure in glimmering armor step wearily out; and we could feel his silent battle with himself as he hesitated and wondered if he should attack the man who dared live on, there on the bottom of the deep.

But—the ocean did Catroni’s work for him.

The armor had been wrecked indeed. Jury-rigged, patched and faltering, the armor was not equipped to stand against the pressures that bore against it.

Catroni, hidden outside the last rays of the weakly glimmering seacar’s floodlights, saw the armored figure move a little away from the car, across the blue mud. He saw the man trying to start the tiny propeller that would lift him to safety, saw the gleaming arm raise confidently—

Then one whole side of the armor went black!

The Eden effect, that miraculous activation of the molecules of metal that forces pressure to fight itself, lasts only so long as the milky glow of power lasts in the film that coats it. When it dims and dies—the armor becomes mere metal, and utterly unable to resist the crushing immensities that drove down upon them where they stood.

The dark side of the man’s armor flattened like creased tin in a giant hydraulic press. The other side swelled, and suddenly went dark. A thin bubble formed and went spinning upward out of sight.

And some vagrant current drifted the body away.

Catroni waited a moment more, against the faint chance that the other man in the seacar, whoever he might be, would try the fatal adventure too. Then, satisfied, Catroni switched the propeller of his own intact armor on, and the power in his shoulder pack carried him up, seven miles and more, to where a chartered amphibian diving-vessel waited in rendezvous…

We might have seen more. But we had seen enough; and we were interrupted.

There was an alien roaring, and I felt someone clutch at me. The helmet was jerked from my head, and the distant visions went out like a turned-off lamp.

The apelike butler was grinning at me, Hallam Sperry standing just behind.

“Busybodies you are, gentlemen,” rumbled Hallam Sperry with sinister good humor. “Poking and prying. Well, we left you here and I don’t suppose I have a right to complain.”

I tried to get at him, but the giant strength of the squat “butler’s” arms held me easily. “Sperry,” I yelled, “you hired that gangster to kill my uncle!”

Sperry shrugged. “Why, perhaps I did,” he agreed. “We play for high stakes here, young man. One uses whatever methods are necessary. The means don’t matter—as long as you win!”

I felt Gideon, behind him, tensing to make a jump at Sperry; but the butler saw it too. He dropped me and jumped back, pulling a gun from his pocket. “Hold it,” he warned thickly.

Hallam Sperry chuckled. “Sit down, gentlemen,” he ordered. “Brooks here will be more comfortable, and so will you.”

Brooks. I looked at the squat man again, a name ringing in my mind. “Oh,” I saw slowly. “Stupid of me. I remember you now. You were one of the men who jumped me and threw me in the drainage tube.”

Sperry nodded enthusiastically. “You are very perceptive,” he said. “Very correct; he was. But that’s over and done with, so let’s forget it. Question is, what do we do with you now?”

“The same as you did with my uncle, I suppose,” I said bitterly. “You’d kill me without a qualm.”

“Oh, certainly. Perhaps I’ll have to. But I wish—” Sperry looked at me speculatively—“I wish I had a little more information. That fool Catroni, as you perhaps saw for yourself, was a little hasty. His orders were to wait until Stewart Eden logged the results of his expedition before scuttling them. He was worried, perhaps, that the surface vessel wouldn’t wait for him; at any rate he left a little prematurely. As a result, I don’t know the one thing that I want to know most of all: Is there or is there not uranium at the bottom of the Deep?”

The butler, Brooks, said eagerly, “Want to brainpump them, Mr. Sperry?”

Sperry shook his head. “Patience, Brooks,” he rumbled. “Young man, you know what the brainpump can do. I had to use it on Catroni because I couldn’t believe he was as stupid as it seemed; I thought, unjustly as it turned out, that he was holding out on me. He died as a result of my suspicion. Not comfortably; the brainpump is not comfortable for its subjects.” He looked at me narrowly, then went on in a meditative tone. “I don’t really suppose,” he continued, “that you know any more about your uncle’s affairs than I do. But I need not chance being wrong. I could quite easily put vou under the brainpump and find out. once and for all. Of course, after I do that, you know, you will be dead.”

I said tightly. “You can’t bluff me, Sperry!”

“Oh, I never bluff. T am just considering the possibilities. And I won’t try to hide from vou the fact that T don’t want you dead just now. You still do own that stock. I want it. With you dead, the stock would go to your heirs, whoever they might be. If they turned up, I’d have them to reckon with; if they couldn’t be found, the surrogate’s court would step in to protect their interests for some future date. You understand that I have a great deal of influence here in Marinia; such an event would not be a catastrophe. But it would be—inconvenient.”

I said, “What do you want?”

He said sharply. “The stock. Sign it over to me.”

“And then what?” I demanded. “Then you kill us?”

Sperry spread his hands. He said gently, “What can I say?” He stepped closer, his eyes burning into mine. He said, in a tone that was still mild and gentle: “I can tell you this much: There are worse things than merely being killed, young man.” We locked gazes for a long moment. Then he blinked, and was a gentle old man again. He said:

“I tell you everything in my mind, you see. Open and above-board; it always pays. I want you to understand my position very clearly, Mr. Eden. I have some of the stock in Marine Mines; I want it all. I have your uncle’s first experimental seacar, with the same sort of armor on it as the one that Catroni—ah—neutralized for me. I imagine it will work just as well. If there is uranium there, I mean to have it. The world will pay through the nose for it, Mr. Eden. Perhaps they will pay in money; perhaps in other things. For the world is short of uranium; and the man who owns enough of it can own the world.”