Undersea Quest (17 page)

Thetis was our destination—but Thetis was out of reach.

Long before we topped the ridge, while we were still hundreds of fathoms below the normal cruising depth, we ran into the first signs of trouble.

It was only a flickering shadow on the very rim of the microsonar—a shadow that split and wavered, and joined again, and divided to become three shadows.

The Sea Patrol!

Bob Eskow said miserably, “My fault, Jim. I called them.”

I shook my head. “You did what you thought was right, Bob. The question is, what do we do now?”

“Give up,” snarled Brand Sperry. Now that we were out of the Deep itself, he seemed to have recovered his nerve. “You’re beaten, you know. I don’t care what you find in your uncle’s sub—you can’t stand up against my father!”

We ignored him. Gideon said meditatively, “Looking at the charts, I notice something. We’re only about fifty miles from Fisherman’s Island, Jim. Your uncle used to have a post there—used it for air transport connections, back in the days when he had mining operations all over this area. I believe the island is deserted now—it’s just a tiny thing, with a coral reef; never had any native population.”

Bob said, “What about it? What good would that do us?”

Gideon shrugged. “We might perhaps hole up there for a while,” he suggested. “And—well, I don’t know about you, Mr. Eskow. But I’m pretty sure Jim and I are anxious to get inside Stewart Eden’s sea-car as quickly as we can.” He didn’t say why—but I knew without his mentioning it what he had in mind. Neither of us wanted to mention it, neither of us dared voice the hope aloud—

But we didn’t know for
sure
that Uncle Stewart was dead.

Gideon pointed out the advantages to his scheme: The route to Fisherman’s Island was almost perfect for our needs. We could hug the slope of the ridge for half the distance, well below the usual cruising depth of sea-cars, almost certainly beyond range of detection (since microsonar equipment had its limitations, one of which was that scanning
downward,
was harder than scanning
upward,
due to reflection-return from the sea bottom). And even when we breasted the ridge, the bottom at that point was covered with peaks and guyots; we could slip through the valleys between them, and only the wildest chance would let the Sea-Patrol spot us.

The trip took less than two hours, in spite of our serpentine wanderings among the submarine peaks. The ranging Sea Patrol cars were constantly in our sonar screen; but always at extreme range. I was certain they never detected us.

We circled around the underwater slopes that surfaced as Fisherman’s Island, and I headed for the surface. At a depth of only a few yards, operating on the sonar plate, I found the channel to the lagoon inside the coral reef, threaded the passage, the captive sea-car clutched beneath us in the grapples clearing the bottom by scant feet in places, and surfaced a few hundred feet from shore.

It was the first time I had been oh the surface in—was it only weeks? It seemed like years!

I spun the upper hatch open and poked my head out, ready to be blinded by the sun.

There wasn’t any sun. Overhead the sky was a powder bf white.

It was night time; the stars were infinite and brilliant; the water was flickering with luminous life; the shore was dead dark. I had forgotten, almost, that there were such things as night and day!

I quickly checked my chronometer: it was an hour or so before sunrise. Looking hard at the horizon, I thought I could see the beginning of a faint violet glow.

“Let’s get to work,” said Gideon.

It took us an hour to jockey my uncle’s sea-car into position. With the help of every straining combination of grapples and hydraulic extensors, we succeeded in easing it out from under us, heaving it ahead of us onto the coral sand. The tide was high—as high as the gentle tides of the Pacific ever run—and the top of the sub’s hull was just, awash. We waited, then. For half an hour, then half an hour more, until the waterline had receded to just below the entrance port.

All four of us were standing atop the little sea-car’s hull, waiting for the last licking wavecrest to fall below the lip of the port. Brand Sperry was haughty and still; Bob Eskow was plainly bone-tired. But Gideon and I were tense and eager, and it was all I could do to keep myself from opening the port prematurely.

Then we could wait no longer. We left Bob to watch over Brand Sperry; Gideon and I wrenched the port open and clattered inside. A cascade of water followed us as one large wave topped the port; but that was all.

Inside was fetid darkness. The hot, stale air was almost a poison; I found myself choking, heard Gideon’s cough beside me. Gideon had been more foresighted than I: While I was staring around dazedly, trying to see in the gloom, there was a click and Gideon turned on a hand- light.

We were in the after compartment. Around us were the signs of Catroni’s treachery—wrecked equipment, smashed instruments, sabotaged engines. It would be a long, long time before this ship would be fit again.

But wreckage was not what we were looking for; we searched every corner of the after compartment with Gideon’s flash, looking for some trace of my uncle—or the other man. There was no one, live or dead.

And there was no sound.

I think that that was the worst moment of all for me. To have salvaged the sea-car itself, in the face of everything, was so great a triumph that I had almost felt certain that we would find my uncle alive inside—I had known, somehow, just what it would be like to open the port and have my uncle, somehow alive and hearty, come chuckling out…

Gideon touched my shoulder wordlessly. The two of us turned hopelessly toward the forward cabin.

There was no destruction here, at any rate—this was where my uncle and his friend had been, all unsuspecting, while Catroni murdered the ship. The darkness was blacker still. Gideon pierced it with his flash…

Together we saw it: A heap of rags, huddled before the control panel, it seemed. We leaped forward, Gideon a half-step before me.

The face, pale and still, was the face of my uncle Stewart. The eyes were closed; there was not a trace of motion. Gideon bent over him with a half-smothered sound.

Time stood still. At last Gideon, his eyes huge, looked up at me.

“Glory be to God, Jim Eden,” he said prayerfully. “He’s alive!”

That was how my Uncle Stewart came back to us.

We got Bob Eskow to help us; the three of us managed to get him up through the tiny hatch, onto our own sea-car, into the light. Stewart opened his eyes and looked at me, and he smiled. But he had no strength to speak.

Once again the Academy helped me. Exhaustion, starvation and the poisonous effects of foul air were no strangers to the men of the Sub-Sea Fleet; and every semester, we had had drilled into us the methods of emergency treatment. From the little first-aid locker of the sea-car we took stimulants and elixirs and the miraculous chemical blends that were guaranteed to bring a near- corpse whooping back to life. Stewart needed them all. While I was mixing up a sugar solution for intravenous feeding, Gideon quickly injected a whole series of stimulating drugs, and Bob arranged the electric heart stimulator coils in position for quick use—if they were needed. We had found my uncle Stewart alive—and we were not going to let him go!

I don’t know how long we worked over him. It must have been only half an hour or so—we hadn’t the complicated equipment to take much longer—but time stopped. It might have been seconds, or years.

And time began to tick forward once more when the last injection was made, and the food solution was trickling into his veins, and my uncle Stewart opened his eyes once more.

They were sane eyes, wakeful eyes. They were the soberly humorous, warmly gay eyes I remembered from my childhood and the New London shore.

And Stewart whispered, with the old chuckling undertone:

“Hello, Jim.”

In the wild excitement of that moment, can we be blamed for forgetting a couple of comparatively unimportant little things?

We propped Stewart up in the closest approach to comfort you can find in a sea-car. We bundled him in warm covers and tried to keep him as quiet as could be, and then, almost at once, we looked at each other with foolish surprise. For we had remembered something.

What had happened to Brand Sperry?

We left Gideon clucking over my uncle, and Bob and I raced for the other sea-car. It lay bobbing gently in the slacking tide, looking harmless and deserted.

As, indeed, it was. Brand Sperry was gone.

Bob and I looked out over the peaceful lagoon at Fisherman’s Island. The peaceful look of the water was a lie. We knew that it was much less than peaceful; we had seen the triangular warning signals of sharks, we knew of the octopus lairs and the scores of other shallow-water perils that that harmless sparkling water concealed.

“If he wanted to get away that bad,” said Bob Eskow, “I say let him go.”

I nodded. “Especially since there isn’t anything we can do about it!” I agreed. “We can’t stay here forever. He’s out of trouble, leave him alone.”

We went back to our own sea-car, feeling relaxed and at ease for the first time, it seemed, in many months.

Stewart Eden was sitting up, and his eyes were bright. Gideon declared that he was strong enough to talk, if we didn’t excite him too much. Stewart chuckled: “After the—call it a rest cure—I’ve just gone through, I doubt you’ll excite me too much, Gideon. It was a most restful time, believe me. Plenty of sleep, plenty of idle hours. I had no complaints on that score…”

We pressed him for his story, but there was little he had to tell. What we had plucked from dead Catroni’s mind, what we had surmised ourselves from the wrecked interior of his sea-car—that was the story. There was nothing much beside. Except—

“Uranium!” my uncle whispered, his eyes agleam and fixed on something far beyond us all. “Thousands and thousands of tons of the highest-grade ore, Jim! Just scrape away the ooze, and there it is. Eden Deep is the richest store of fissionable ore the world has ever seen, and with my new Edenite it’s there for the taking. We’ve proved that!” He leaned back against the wall, panting heavily. “It’s power for the world; power to run every machine that man can build for centuries to come. Cheap power, power in quantities the world has never known.” He smiled, and almost as an afterthought he said: “Do you know, Jim, that you will be very, very rich?”

I protested: “It isn’t mine, Uncle Stewart! It’s all yours. You filed claim on Eden Deep; you invented the armor.”

“And what good did it do me, while I was locked away down there, watching the oxygen level go down? No, Jim—it’s not mine, it’s for all of us. A share for you and a share for me, yes—and shares for Gideon and Bob as well. No need to be hoggish about this! There’s plenty for all of us. Why, we’ll be walking on thousand-dollar bills, Jim; well be richer than old Hallam Sperry ever was, we’ll—”

“Hallam Sperry,” said Gideon thoughtfully. “Mr. Eden, you have made me remember something. Excuse me.” He disappeared toward the control chamber; and, in a moment, we heard him grunt as though he had received a blow.

He reappeared, his dark face furrowed. “Perhaps we ought to hold off on the congratulations for a little while,” he said. “They might be just a little bit premature. While we’re sitting around here, counting our money and deciding how we’re going to spend it, trouble’s coming our way. And it’s coming fast!”

I jumped to the microsonar, and Gideon’s words came true before my eyes. A thin single trace across the blue, shining face of the instrument. It was another sea-car, not at extreme range but in close, not patrolling in easy curves, but vectored in on Fishermen’s Island. There was only one explanation: Some time, somehow, Brand Sperry had found a moment unguarded at the communicators and sent an alarm. And his father’s ship was on our trail!

“Secure all ports!” I bawled to Bob Eskow, and with the quick discipline of our days at the Academy he leaped to obey. Gideon jumped to the instruments, and I started the motors. We slipped out from the reef, under the surface of the water and down.

There was no hope of evasion this time. They had us spotted and dead to rights. We could flee; that was all.

As fast as the hard-driven engines could take us, we pounded through the clinging water, straight out in the Pacific deeps.

We slid through the water, deeper and deeper, for long minutes, while we watched the trace of the pursuers in the plates. They were not gaining on us perceptibly, but I knew that the time would come when luck would run out for us. Our little sea-car had been through a punishing ordeal; primitive and crudely wrought, it had been at the very limit of its endurance when we rescued my uncle; underpowered and never broken in, it had been pushed too far too long. If only we could stay ahead of them long enough to reach Thetis, or one of the other underwater cities! At least there we could hope to evade Sperry’s thugs long enough to reach some high official, too high to have been bought by the power of Sperry’s millions…

But it was out of the question. It was a trip of many hours to the nearest of the cities. And we had, at the brutally high speeds we were using, no hope of averting a breakdown for that length of time.

“Go deep,” said my uncle. “Perhaps we can bluff them.”

I advanced the diving planes and blinked at him with the beginnings of hope. “Bluff?” I asked. “But that’s no bluff, Uncle Stewart! You’re right! We can avoid them forever that way! This ship will go clear to the bottom of Eden Deep—they’ll never be able to touch us. We can—”

He was shaking his head. “No, Jim,” he said. “Even at the bottom of Eden Deep, they’d just circle overhead, waiting for us. We would have to come up, some time, and there they would be. But it’s worse than that. Look!”

He pointed to the bulkhead, where a fine dancing needle was feathering into the room. I stared at it, not recognizing what it was.

But Gideon recognized it. “We’re leaking,” he said, in a voice that tolled like the dirges of doom.

Stewart Eden nodded. In his dry whisper he said, “Leaking is right, and we’re only a thousand fathoms down. If we had my own sea-car instead of this one—But we don’t. We’ll never see the bottom of Eden Deep, my boy. But the only hope we have is to persuade Sperry otherwise. ..