Undersea Fleet (16 page)

And that would be the last sound he heard on earth.

On and on.

Perhaps it had been only a few miles—but it seemed endless.

I began to feel queerly elated, faintly dizzy—It took a moment for me to realize the cause: The old oxygen tanks were running low. We had not dared use power for electrolungs; the little tanks were for emergency use only.

Whatever the reason, I was breathing bad air.

Something shoved against my back, sent me sprawling. I heard a distant roar, rumbling through the water, and looked around to see that all of us had been tumbled about like straw men.

Gideon picked himself up and waved back toward the
Dolphin.
At once I understood.

The
Dolphin’s
overwrought reactors had finally let go. Back behind us, a nuclear explosion had ripped the dead ship’s hulk into atoms.

Thank heaven we were across the last ridge and out of range!

We picked ourselves up and moved on.

We were skirting the edge of an old lava flow, where molten stone from a sub-sea volcano had frozen into black, grotesque shapes. The weirdly gleaming sea-plants were all about us, growing out of the bare rock itself, it seemed.

I glanced at them—then again.

For a moment it seemed I had seen something moving in there. Something huge…

It was impossible to tell. The only light was from the plants themselves, and it concealed as much as it showed. I paused to look again and saw nothing; and then I had to speed up to catch up with the others.

It was getting harder to put out a burst, of extra speed.

There was no doubt about it now, the air in the suit was growing worse.

Down a long slope, and out over a plain. The glowing sea-plants still clustered thickly about us, everywhere. Above us the strange weeds made a ragged curtain between the black cliffs we had just passed.

David halted and waved ahead with a great spread-armed gesture.

I coughed, choked and tried to move forward. Then I realized that he was not calling for me to move up to the front of the column; Laddy Angel was already there.

David was showing us something.

I lifted my head to look. And there, peeping through the gaps in the sea-plants ahead, I could see the looming bulk of something enormous and black. A sea-mount! And atop it, like the gold on the Academy dome, a pale, blue glow shining.

Edenite! The. glow was the dome of Jason Craken!

But I wondered if it were in time.

Someone—I couldn’t tell who—stumbled and fell, struggled to get up, finally stood wavering, even buoyed up by the water. Someone else—Gideon, I thought—leaped to his side and steadied him with an arm.

Evidently it was not only my air which was going bad.

We moved ahead once more—but slower now, and keeping closer together.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that flicker of movement again.

I looked, expecting to see nothing—

I was terribly, terribly wrong!

What I saw was far from nothing. It had been a faint, furtive glimpse of something huge and menacing.

And when I looked at it straight on, it was still there—huger, more menacing, real and tangible!

It was a saurian, giant and strange, and it was pacing us.

I turned on my suit-lamps, flooded the others with light to attract their attention. I waved frantically toward the monster in the undersea jungle.

And they saw. I could tell from the queer, contorted attitudes in which they stood that they saw.

David Craken made a wild, excited gesture, but I couldn’t understand what he meant. The others, with one accord, leaped forward and scattered. And I was with them—all of us running, leaping, scurrying away in the slow, slow jumps the resistance of the water allowed. We dodged in among the tall, gently wavering stems of the sea-plants, looking for a hiding place.

I could hear my breath rasping inside the helmet, and the world was growing queerly black. There was a pounding in my head and a dull ache; the air was worse now, so bad that I was tempted to stop, to relax, to fall to the ground and rest, sleep, relax…

I forced myself to squirm into the shelter of a clump of brightly glowing bushes. I lay on my back there, breathing raggedly and hard, and noticed without worry, without emotion, that the huge, strange beast was close upon me. Queer, I thought, it is just like David’s painting—even to the rider on its back.

There
was
something on its back—no, not something, but someone. A person. A—a girl figure, slight and frail, brown-skinned, black-haired, her eyes glowing white as Joe Trencher’s, her blue swimsuit woven of something as luminous as the weed. She was close, so close that I could see her wide-flaring nostrils, see the expression on her face.

It was easy enough to see, for she wore no pressure suit! Here four miles down, she was breathing the water of the Deeps!

But I had no time to study her, for the monster she rode took all my attention. Even in the poisoned calm of my slow suffocation, I knew that here was deadly danger. The enormous head was swaying down toward me, the great supple neck curving like a swan’s. Its open mouth could have swallowed me in a single bite; its teeth seemed long as cavalry sabers.

The blue-gleaming forest turned gray-black and whirled about me.

I could see the detail of overlapping scales on the armored neck of the saurian, the enormous black claws that tipped its great oarlike limbs.

The gigantic head came down through the torn strands of shining weed, and I thought I had come to my last port…

The grayness turned black. The blackness spun and roared around me.

I was unconscious, passed out cold.

I woke up with the memory of a dream—huge, hideous lizard things, through the sea, with strange mermaids riding their backs and directing them with goads.

Fantastic! But even more fantastic was that I woke up at all!

fantastic swimming I was lying on my back on a canvas cot, in a little metal-walled room. Someone had opened the helmet of my pressure suit, and fresh air was in my lungs!

I struggled up and looked about me.

Roger Fairfane lay on one side of me, Bob Eskow on the other. Both were still unconscious.

There was a pressure port in the wall of the room, and through it I could see a lock, filled with water under pressure. I could see something moving inside the lock—something that looked familiar, but strange at the same time.

It was both strange and familiar! The strange sea-girl, she was there! She had been no dream of oxygen starvation, but real flesh and blood, for now I saw her, pearl-eyed like the strange man named Joe Trencher…but with human worry and warm compassion on her face as she struggled to carry pressure-suited figures into the lock.

One—two—three! There were three of them, weakly stirring.

It was—it had to be—Gideon, Laddy and David. She had saved us all.

And behind her loomed the hulk of something strange and deadly—but she showed no fear. It was the gaping triangular face of the saurian.

As I watched, she turned about with an eel-like wriggle and slapped the monster familiarly on its horny nose. Not a blow in anger—but a caress, almost, as a rider might pat the muzzle of a faithful horse.

It was true, what David had said: The saurians were domesticated. The sea-creatures he called amphibians truly rode them, truly used them as beasts of burden.

The sea-girl left the saurian and swam inside. I saw her at the glowing dials of a control panel.

The great doors swung shut, closing out the huge, inquisitive saurian face. I saw the doors glow suddenly with edenite film.

Pumps began to labor and chug.

Floodlights came on.

In a moment the girl was standing on the wet floor of the lock, trying to tug at the pressure-suited figures of my friends toward the inner gate.

Bob Eskow twisted and turned and cried out sharply: “Diatom! Diatom to radiolarian. The molluscans are—”

He opened his eyes and gazed at me. For a moment he hardly recognized me.

Then he smiled. “I—I thought we were goners, Jim. Are you sure we’re here?”

I slapped his pressure-suited shoulder. “We’re here. This young lady and her friend, the dinosaur—they brought us to Craken’s dome!”

David was already standing, stripping off his pressure suit. He nodded gravely. “Thank Maeva.” He nodded to the girl, standing wide-eyed and silent, watching us. “If Maeva hadn’t come along—But Maeva and I have always been friends.”

The girl spoke. It was queer, hearing human speech from what I still couldn’t help thinking of as a mermaid! But her voice was soft and musical as she said: “Please, David. Don’t waste time. My people know you are here.” She glanced at the lock port anxiously, as though she was expecting it to burst open, with a horde of amphibians or flame-breathing saurians charging through. “As we brought you to the dome, Old Ironsides and I, I saw another saurian with a rider watching us. Let us go to your father—”

David said sharply: “She’s right. Come on!”

We were all of us conscious again. David and Gideon had never really passed out from the lack of oxygen, but they had been so weak that it was nearly the same thing. Without Maeva to help them, and the saurian she called “Old Ironsides” to bear them on its broad, scaly back, they would have been as dead as the rest of us.

Strange girl! Her skin was smooth and brown, her short-cut hair black. The pearly eyes, which on Joe Trencher had seemed empty and grim, on her seemed cool and gentle; they gave her face an expression of sadness, of wistfulness.

I thought that she was beautiful.

She was smiling at David, even in the urgency of that moment. I saw her hands flashing through a series of complicated motions—and realized that she was urging him on, to hurry to his father, in some sign language of the Deep that was more natural to her than speech.

Roger caught David’s shoulder roughly and hauled him aside. He hissed, so that Maeva couldn’t hear: “There aren’t any mermaids! What—what sort of monster is she?”

David said angrily: “Monster? She’s as human as you! She is one of the amphibians—like Joe Trencher, but one we can trust to be on our side. Her ancestors were the Polynesian islanders my father found trapped under the sea.”

“But—but she’s a fish, Craken! She breathes water! It isn’t human!”

David’s face stiffened, and for a moment I thought there might be trouble. He was furious.

But he calmed himself. Struggling for control—evidently this sea-girl meant something to him!—he said: “Come on! Let’s find my father!”

We raced through the dome, along slippery steel hills, past rooms that, in the glimpse we caught as we passed, seemed like ancient chambers from a Sultan’s palace, costly and beautiful and—falling into decay.

Fantastic place! A sub-sea dome is a fearfully expensive thing to construct—expensive not only of money, but of time and materials and human lives. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them scattered across the floors of the sea, true—but very few were those which were owned by a single man.

And to build one, as David Craken’s father had built this, in secrecy, with only the help of a few technicians sworn to silence and the manual labor of the amphibians and the saurians—it was incredible!

I counted five levels below the topmost bulge of the dome—five levels packed with living quarters and recreation areas, with shops and docks and storage space, with a monster nuclear reactor chuckling away as it made the power to run the dome and keep the sea’s might harmlessly away. There were rooms, a dozen of them or more, that looked like laboratories. We crossed through one that was lined with enormous vats, filled with the macerated remains of stalks of the strange, glowing weed that grew in the Trench outside. It was glowing only fitfully, fading almost into extinction here in the atmosphere; and the musty reek that rose from those vats nearly strangled poor Maeva—who was having a bad enough time out of the water anyway—and made the rest of us quicken our steps.

“Dad’s experiments,” David said briefly. “He’s been trying to find the secret of the weed. He’s tried everything—macerated them, dissolved them in acids, treated them with solvents, burned them, centrifuged them. Some day—” He glanced around at the benches of glassware, the bubbling beakers that reeked of acid, the racks of test tubes and distilling apparatus.

“Some day things will be different,” David finished in an altered tone. “But now we have no time for this. Come on!”

We came to the topmost chamber of all.

There was no sign of David’s father.

David said worriedly: “Maeva, I can’t understand it! Where can he be?”

The sea-girl said, in her voice which was soft and liquid and occasionally gasping for breath: “He isn’t well, David. He—he is not of the sea. Perhaps he is asleep.” She touched David gently with her hand—and I saw with a fresh shock that the fingers were ever so slightly webbed. “You must take him up to the surface, David,” she said, panting. “Or else I think he will die.”

“I have to find him first!” David said worriedly. He cast about him, staring. We were in a room—once, it seemed, a luxurious salon. It was walled with books, thousands of them, stacked in shelves to the ceiling—titles of science and philosophy mixed helter-skelter with blood-and-thunder tales of danger and excitement. There were long, high shelves of portfolios of art works—left by David’s mother when she passed away, I supposed, for they were gray with dust.

The room was now cluttered with more of the same tangle of scientific equipment we had seen below, as though the man who owned the dome had no interest left in life but his scientific researches. There were unpacked crates of glassware and reagents, with labels that showed he had bought them in Marinia, consignment tags that were addressed to a hundred fictitious names, none to himself. There was a cobalt “bomb” encased in tons of lead. A new electric autoclave that he had found no space for below. A big hydraulic press that could create experimental pressures a hundred times higher than those in the Deep outside. Test tubes and hypodermic needles and half-emptied bottles that Craken had labeled in hieroglyphics of his own.