The survivor (15 page)

He was moving faster than the bubbles, so he was going up faster than sixty feet a minute.

But how much faster?

By holding his head far back, he could get his eyes above the cloud of bubbles foaming out of his mouth. Above him the world was a bright green glow with, suspended in it, four indistinct dark areas.

They seemed so far away from him, as though leaving him behind, alone. As though the marines were deserting him, leaving him down here to die.

Adam swung his arms down with one powerful stroke, his head still held back.

He ran into a trail of air bubbles which blurred his vision.

He stroked his arms again, turning out of the stream of bubbles, and came up alongside one of the marines.

It was Jason, who was not yet aware that Adam had pulled up alongside him.

It was not so lonely now with Jason there, the foam of bubbles from his mouth streaming around his chin and neck and down his chest. Not so lonely. As he looked up, Adam saw that Guns and the Rebel were only a few feet above him, shrouded in the whitish-green stream of bubbles, which looked almost as real as the crocheting his grandmother used to do.

And then Adam saw the tech. Far away, far above him. The tech's body was a perfectly black shape, and as Adam focused through the salt water on his naked eyes, he saw that the tech was swimming—arms and legs moving rhythmically. No comet tail of bubbles was coming from him.

Adam watched him, wondering, and afraid

again. Maybe tlie tech was right. Hold your breath and swim for it. The tech was certainly far ahead of them, far closer to the surface, to survival.

It bewildered Adam and confused him, and he could feel his mind drifting o£f. Feel it, and yet he couldn't stop the drifting of it.

He was thinking about the bubbles which he could see streaming from Jason's mouth. Suppose, all of a sudden, no more bubbles came out of Jason's mouth, or out of his mouth. That when he tried to breathe out, to compress his lungs, none of the green-silver bubbles came out? Well, Adam thought, then that nut Thorenson was wrong. The pity of it is going to be, Adam thought, that I won't be able to walk out on State Beach at Santa Monica, California, and grab that nut by that crazy straw hat and tell him, "Back to the drawing board, you nuti Your theory doesn't work. I drotvned."

And then, as he looked upward, he saw the tech coming toward him. The tech was no longer swimming, no longer even moving. Bubbles were coming out of him, but they were drifting upward. Not fast, just drifting, so that the tech looked as though he were lying in a cluster of soap bubbles, which Adam noticed now were not pale green like Jason's but faintly tinged with pink.

The position of the tech in the water was what brought Adam's mind roaring back from State Beach.

The tech was lying stretched out, on his back. He was not moving, not swimming.

Adam had seen two men die, both of them aviation cadets, killed by their planes, and somehow because of the fire and the wreckage they had, for him, lost their identity as men. They had become part of the great wreckage of the planes.

But tlie tech was terribly dead. The explosion of his lungs had not disturbed the outer shell of his body. But he was dead, the blood-tinged bubbles still oozing out of his open mouth.

The tech went by him, and Adam did not lower his head to look down into the blackness.

They went on, their trails of bubbles streaming down and dying. A feeling of weakness began in Adam now, a feehng which seemed to move through him with the flow of his blood. A threatening weakness because he could feel now that it took an effort to keep the air streaming out of his mouth. He could feel a dull, all-over ache in his chest and lungs, and it didn't seem to him that as many bubbles were flowing out of his mouth as there had been before.

He looked over at Jason and the sight shocked him. Jason's head was down on his chest, and his arms were half lowered and seemed to be adrift in the water.

Adam reached out and caught Jason by the short, stiff Marine Corps style hair and pulled his head back. Then he wrapped an arm around Jason's belly and pulled Jason hard against him, forcing the air out of his mouth in a burst of bubbles.

Green bubbles, not pink with blood.

Adam turned him loose and pushed him away.

And they went on up.

The bubbles from his mouth covered Adam*s eyes now, and he closed his burning eyes, feeling that he could not strain his head back far enough to get his eyes clear of the bubbles.

Anyway, he thought, what difference does it make?

Six hundred feet from the bottom of the deep sea was too far to go. So it made no difference.

After a long time Adam opened his eyes and, with great effort, forced his head back.

Something was wrong. Instead of the green world he had expected to see—green with the bubble-streaked bodies caught in it, there was a wildly shattered and broken silver mirror. A bright, silvery mirror with, right above him, some legs with bare, pale feet hanging down through the mirror.

Then Adam broke through the mirror and felt the soft, warm, fresh air against his face. He breathed it in slowly, riding high in the water with the Mae West shoving him up as though to get him completely out of the water.

BOOK THREE

The Deadly Shore

"T^RETHEREN AN* siSTEREN," the Rebel Said, "that O was the longest trip Ah evah took."

Adam and the marines lay exhausted in the sea, breathing the good clean air, fl9ating in their yellow Mae Wests.

Jason said, surprised, "Hey, you guys. You know how long it took us to come up?"

"All my life," Guns said.

"No!" Jason said, holding up his arm with a watch on it. "It didn't even take two minutes."

"You're kidding," Adam said, amazed.

Jason looked at his watch, shook his arm, held it against his ear. "No, honest. I timed it when I left. It only took a minute and fifty-some-odd seconds. Not even two minutes." Then he said, as though not believing it, "And I feel fine."

Adam was floating near Jason, and he felt fine too. "Thorenson," Adam said, "you nut!" 165

"What?" Jason asked.

''Nothing. Just a guy I knew."

Then Adam noticed the thin, pale trickle of blood coming out of Guns' ears and staining the water. "You okay, Grnis?" Adam asked.

"My ears were giving me a fit, but they feel better now," Guns said. "How about you guys?^

Adam paddled himself around and raised himself up as high as he could in the water.

He knew that they were close to the island because of the wall of surf and spray and haze, but also because of those things he could see no sign of land, nor trees, nor buildings—nothing. But they were close, floating just outside the breaking seas.

*The tech bought it,'* Jason said.

"He bought it. He swam and he didn't let the air out."

"That's a pity. He could have made it."

Guns looked all around and then down at his fatigues billowing around under the Mae West. "We made it," he said, as though just now realizing it Then he raised his head. "I think we ought to get out of these Mae Wests, Lieutenant. You can see 'em for a milhon miles. No use coming all this way and get shot out here in the water."

"We haven't got far to go," Adam said. Then he held his Mae West up as far as he could and showed them how to deflate the things.

He felt much heavier in the water as the Mae West sank in a glowing yeUow shimmer into the sea.

Now all of them were floating low in the water, only their heads above it.

''We shouldVe backed Adam up," the Rebel said in his Yankee voice, and seriously. "We shouldVe said, "Yeh, that's an order' Then maybe more of us could've made it."

"Maybe I should have made it an order," Adam said.

"No, Lieutenant," Guns said. "No oflBcer I know in the Marine Corps would order his men to go on a thing like that when there wasn't any real use in it. You did right. But we should have made them come vAth us. Me and the Rebel and Jason."

"Maybe those guys will look at that old black .45 and get it on up here," the Rebel said.

"I don't think they will," Jason said. "There's nobody to show them how."

Guns turned over and looked at them. "They wont come," he said flatly. "I wouldn't either. Even knowing as I do now that I could make it, I wouldn't try it again, Adam. No, it was too hairy."

"I died eleven times," the Rebel said.

"I died all the time," Jason said. "It was hairy."

Guns suddenly began to laugh. "Man, this is the most formidable invasion force I ever saw. Fom: wet marines without a weapon in the crowd."

"So what do we do now, boss man?" the Rebel asked.

"We'd better stay out here until dark," Guns decided.

"No," Adam said. "With you bleeding, that isn't healthy. Anyway, we've got to see what we're do-

ing when we go through the surf or we might not get through."

"Looks Idnda rough," the Rebel said.

"Nothing looks rough to me any more," Jason said. "After that, nothing."

"Jason, boy," the Rebel told him, "that warnt nothin' but a Little ol' swim."

"A million miles," Jason said, "Can they see us out here?"

"I don't think so," Adam decided. "Not unless they're really looking for us, expecting us."

"It's easy to tell," Guns said. "If things start going chunk and the water splashes around, they've seen us."

"Let's go see what it looks like," Adam said. "I feel Hke stretching out on a beach somewhere and letting the flies walk around on me."

"No," the Rebel said, "Ah want one of those dusky maidens to fan off them flies."

Adam started swimming through the warm, clear blue water, and as he swam he noticed that the color was fading into a dark and then pale green, and soon, down through it, he could see the roil of the surfs backwash.

He had not heard it before. Rather, he thought, he had heard it but had not registered it in his mind because he was then only happy to hear any sound at all. But now he heard and listened to it and paid attention to it.

The sound was in three parts: first, a low, steady, mushy roaring; then a slow beat of waves break-

ing; and then after each break the long, hard rumbling of the water crossing the land.

The sound alone told him that it was a high, hard surf. The water was deep, right up to the coral of the island; so the waves swept in, long, unbroken, and silent, with no opposition from the bottom of the sea until they met the sudden shallow barrier of the coraL

Here, where they swam, there was almost no indication of wave action. Their bodies rose slowly and fell slowly in a smooth surging motion, and the water, in the windless air, was smooth and pretty as tinted glass. They rose, they fell, and the suri ahead of them seemed disconnected from the sea they were in.

As Adam approached the line of the surf he began to realize that getting through it was going to be almost, if not more, dangerous than the ascent from the submarine. The waves were booming like cannon, and he knew that these shore-breakers were high and fast, breaking straight down on, he suspected, the coral barrier reef, not on sand.

But, Adam remembered, if the operation plan called for going into the lagoon at sunset they must now be twenty or thirty miles from the lagoon entrance, where the surf would be milder or, perhaps, nonexistent. Twenty or thirty miles was too far, too risky, and anyway there would probably be people on the beaches there. Here, he hoped, with this surf constantly breaking there

would be no reason for people to be wandering around.

"Is that thunder?" Jason asked.

"Waves," Adam said.

"What are we going to do?**

"A little plain and fancy surfing, m'boy," Adam said. 'Tes, a little surfing."

He swam on toward the island, watching the surf ahead, and now feeling the smooth pull of the water trying to draw him on toward the rising wave or draw him back as it fell.

He let himself be carried up almost to the break of the crest and, from there, he looked down.

He had never in his life seen a wave break more viciously than this. From the crest he stared almost straight down for, he guessed, forty feet. Stared down at bare, broken, and dead coral, with only trickles of the previous wave running in it. As he backed off, the wave broke, curling almost straight over and falling. It hit the land with a force so great that Adam could feel the shudder of the land in the water around him.

These waves were impossible. As he swam away from them he felt a bitter, mean defeat attacking him. There should be a reward now, he thought bitterly: We've come out of the submarine. We came six hundred feet from the bottom of the sea and we lived. Can't we rest now? Can't we He on the beach beyond the coral and rest? Be rewarded for what we've already done? Why must this line of surf hold us out here in the sea after what we've done?

As he swam away from the roar of the surf, he knew that those waves were impossible, their threat to his hfe greater even than the six hundred feet.

"How does it look?^ Jason asked.

**A Httle rough," Adam said.

He swam on past the three marines, swimming away from the island until, when he looked back, he could not even see them except when their heads came up on the high swells of the sea.

Now he looked back at the white curtain drawn between him and the land, looking for some break in it, or if not that, then at least some small place where it was not so high, so furious.

He remembered now seeing on the aerial photographs of this island the extending white areas on the seaward side, Httle finger reefs of coral sticking out from the shore a Uttle farther than the rest of the formation. Perhaps, with these finger reefs breaking the wave action, the surf would be less monstrous between them.

It was hard to tell in the high haze of water and the white blasting of water beyond the blue backs of the waves, but as he watched, he thought he saw two places where the waves broke a little sooner.

Adam swam back to the others. "AU ashore as is going ashore," he said.

''Ah'm ready," the Rebel decided. "In fact. Ah been ready."