Undersea Quest (15 page)

I thought, hard. “Well,” I said, surrendering, “you know best, I suppose. Why can’t we tie the watchman up, though? There is only one of him and there are two of us; we can—”

“Jim!” Gideon’s expression was exasperated. “That’s the
main
pump station.
Suppose there should be a breakdown after we go, with the watchman tied up? Thetis would be drowned out, boy! Look, do me a favor. Quit thinking. Just come along!”

I came. Glumly.

But it seemed to be working out, I had to admit. The other port was not, for the moment, tended—the watchman was presumably off making his rounds. We found a pair of Edenite pressure suits that fitted us, gave their armor circuits a quick charge, slipped into the exit lock and sealed it.

The water boiled in around us, splashing against the steel baffles like 50-millimeter machine-gun shells against an armor plate. Even the splattering drops were almost violent enough to knock me off my feet; but it was only a few moments until the chamber was filled, pressure up to the outside intensity.

We opened the outer port, and climbed down a metal ladder to the sea floor.

The muck was almost knee deep. Gideon gesticulated—we were too close to Thetis to use our helmet talkers—and I managed to understand that he wanted me to adjust the suit’s buoyancy tanks as he did. By juggling them, we reduced our effective weight to a couple of pounds—enough to keep us from floating off into the miles of empty water overhead, but little enough so that we could walk on top of the mud instead of sinking into it.

We tiptoed along on top of the muck like slow-motion ballet dancers. It was almost like those training periods at the bottom of the shallow Caribbean tidal waters. Secure in the armor my uncle had invented and given to the world, we had no feeling of the crushing pressure outside, no sense of the towering miles of water overhead. Here the muck was absolutely barren, barren and dark. The lights of Thetis behind us gave enough illumination for us to keep in touch with each other—we could not, of course, use helmet lights for fear of being spotted from a port. Once or twice the glimmering lights of a sub-sea liner slipped silently past overhead; other than that the dark was absolute.

For half an hour we flitted across the wasteland before topping a little submarine ridge. We saw ahead the waving streamers of kelp, the lights and structures of the subsea farms that surrounded Thetis.

The “kelp” was only distantly related to the seaweed of the old surface Sargasso, of course. It was a thick-stemmed, avidly growing vegetation that fed on the wastes from Thetis and the glow of floating batteries of Troyon tubes, where no other vegetation had grown since time began. There were many varieties of the seaweed, in every color of the spectrum, in every size from tiny mosslike growths to huge, thick-bodied things that stretched a score of yards into the chill waters. Some were for food, some for fuel; many were for neither of those, but were living osmotic mining machines, capable of extracting pure elements from the sea water around them. These were the most miraculous of all—for they made it possible to har vest the suspended salts of the sea, drawing out the magnesium, iron, gold, silver—all the countless minerals that the deep sea waters held. They were as efficient as natural kelp was at extracting iodine, which so amazed the early chemists; but, of course, they had their limitations. And some few metals—uranium, the most important of them—did not exist in sea water in quantities large enough to matter, so that we were forced to rely on the mines…

At once I was thinking of my uncle Stewart, under a mountain of water at the bottom of Eden Deep, because of Hallam Sperry. The faceplate of my pressure suit misted—

Gideon thumped my back, bringing his headpiece close to mine, and turned his helmet talker on to low power. “See that building?” He pointed to a group of lights half-hidden by the waving kelp. “That’s where they keep the sea-cars. Because this is a sub-sea fleet base as well as one of Sperry’s farms, it’ll be guarded. But stick with me, Jim, and we’ll make it.”

He led the way; I followed. The growth was thick, occasionally we had to stop and hack ourselves free from the entangling growth with the sea-knives from our knee- scabbards. Far off to the right, harvesting machines floated through the water, clutching at the tangled kelp and gathering it into bales for transportation into the city, and eventual processing. Harvest was not a season but a year-round event in these farms, where the sun never dreamed of touching; after the harvest machines came cultivators and seeders, and a new crop was growing almost before the old one was inside the ports of Thetis.

We were lucky—we were not seen, though sea-cars floated by within scant yards of us, though a score and more of men in pressure-suits were moving about in the kelp jungles around us. If anyone caught a glimpse of us, no doubt he dismissed us as merely another pair of workers; but, so careful was Gideon in leading me through the concealing growths, I suspect we were never spotted at all.

At any rate, we reached the entrance port of the building around which the sea-cars nuzzled without challenge.

There was no question of talking now, of course; I had only the waving of Gideon’s arms to guide me. We crept up on the entrance port and stopped. He peered around, then worked the port controls. There was a rolling motion in the water around us as the powerful little pumps balanced the inside and outside pressure; then the port opened, we stepped into the lock and closed the outer door.

The water level began at once to fall.

If we had come in a sea-car we would certainly have been hailed and spotted. But you can hardly blame those sub-sea workers for keeping a slipshod watch on the port. A sea-car would have been detected by microsonar, and a dozen alarms would have called attention to it; but we, sneaking invisibly through the kelp, were in the sonar’s blind spot, and there was of course no reason for suspecting that anyone would be stupid enough to come across the sea-bottom on foot. Nor, in truth, was there much reason to do so. There was nothing of value at the farms, except for the sea-cars themselves and the complex farming machinery—and those were pretty bulky objects for anyone to steal.

And yet, that was exactly what Gideon had in mind.

As soon as the water was out of the port chamber and the inner doors open, he strode out with assurance, leading me across the entrance chamber. There were men in sight, operating communications equipment, moving about in the corridors, perhaps half a dozen or more; but they hardly glanced at us. As though he knew every inch of the layout well (and, in fact, he did—for Gideon had worked in many a layout like this, with my uncle and otherwise—in his long sub-sea life), Gideon headed for the suit room. We shed our suits there; fortunately no one was in the room.

Then we stole a sea-car.

It was astonishingly easy—up to a point. With Gideon leading the way, we marched openly through the winding corridors of the farm administration building to the entry ports where the little seacars lay nuzzled. Then we became less open. Gideon spotted a small office; when no one was looking, we slipped into it and waited, listening.

The ready room was just outside our door, where the sea-car operators filed their reports and got their orders. Traffic was erratic; at times there seemed to be a dozen men in the room, and a few moments later it might be nearly empty.

We listened to their conversation, trying to judge which sea-car would be easiest to slip into, which held sufficient reserves of fuel for the trip to Seven Dome. There were remarks that puzzled me; it seemed that one of the sea-cars was special, in some way unlike the others.

A dawning idea began to grow in my mind. I nudged Gideon excitedly, but he hushed me. “Wait,” he whispered. “They’re all leaving…”

The group of operators, talking among themselves, went out of the room on some unknown errand. It looked like our chance; Gideon gestured to me, and the two of us started to tiptoe out of the little office, into the ready room beyond which the sea-cars lay waiting…

“James Eden!”
crackled a familiar voice from behind us.

I spun around. There against the other door to the little office stood a tall youth in civilian clothing. He looked familiar, yet somehow wrong. As I stared at him I seemed to see, on his head, the flat scarlet cap of the Sub-Sea Academy, hear the echo of his voice flatly and contemptuously going over me back on the steps of Fletcher Hall.

Brand Sperry!

Gideon was quicker than I. He still had the gun we had taken from Sperry’s “butler”; it was in his hand, and the younger Sperry was staring into its muzzle, before I had quite realized who it was.

“Keep quiet, Sperry,” Gideon whispered softly and dangerously. “If you want to stay alive, keep quiet.”

Brand Sperry stopped as he was about to turn. He looked us over coolly. “What do you want?” he demanded.

I took a deep breath. I had had an idea, the ghost of a thought, listening to the sea-car operators talk; it seemed to me that there was a bare possibility that the “special” sea-car was special indeed. After all, Hallam Sperry had claimed to have something very special in the way of sea-cars, back in the room where Catroni lay dead…

I said: “We want my uncle’s experimental job, Sperry. We know it’s here. Where is it?”

Gideon was a champion; he gave me one quick look, and then backed me up: “That’s right, Sperry! Hurry up!” But he must have thought, for a moment, that I was out of my head.

But I wasn’t. Brand Sperry’s piercing eyes flamed and he snapped: “Eskow! He tipped you off! That little— ”

“Shut up, Sperry!” Gideon said sharply. “You don’t want to attract any attention here—you’ll be the first one hurt!”

“Wait a minute, Gideon,” I said. “What’s this about Eskow?”

“You know,” Brand Sperry sneered. “I told my father. I knew it was a mistake bringing him here. We kept your message from getting to him the first time, but I knew you’d reach him sooner or later—and I knew he’d spill everything he knew to you!”

I said, “Sperry, I haven’t seen Eskow except through the viewport at the docks. Not that it makes any difference. Where is he?”

Sperry shrugged. “Last I saw, he was in the ready room a couple of hours ago. My father transferred him off the liner because he thought we might get information out of him about you. I warned him!”

I stared at Gideon pleadingly, but he read my mind. “No, Jim,” he said. “We haven’t got time to look up old friends. Any minute someone might walk in on us, and then where will we be? You, Sperry—we want that seacar. Take us to it!”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Sperry said frostily—and for a moment there, I almost admired him; he might have had a squad of sea-police at his back as he confronted us. “Put that gun down. I’ll have the guards take care of you two ”

Gideon kept his grin. He said gently, “Mr. Sperry, I don’t advise you to make any trouble. I really don’t.”

Abruptly his tone changed to a crackle: “You young idiot!” he blazed. “Jim Eden and I were
that
close to being brain-pumped by your father. We know that he sank Jim’s uncle—tried to kill Jim half a dozen times—we know that every dirty deal and corrupt official in Marinia belongs to him. Do you think I’d hesitate to shoot
you
if you give me half a chance? Get a move on, man! Take us to Eden’s sea-car—
now!
And thank your lucky stars I don’t shoot you dead this minute!”

Brand Sperry saw the light of reason.

He conducted us to the sea-car, conscious of the gun in Gideon’s pocket. He sharply ordered the dispatcher to mind his own business when the man appeared and started to ask a question. Heaven knows what the dispatcher thought—but he had undoubtedly learned, working for the Sperry interests, that it didn’t pay to get in the way of anyone named Sperry.

Sperry strode stiffly before us into the entrance hatch of the seacar, never looking back. We followed him.

And then the three of us were inside, and the vessel was sealed, and cast loose from the little dome.

We were free!

“Smart work, Jim,” Gideon acknowledged. “I heard what the operators were saying, but it never occurred to me that this was that first sea-car your uncle built. That makes it yours, I guess—so we aren’t even stealing it!”

“We’ll see what the law says about that!” snapped Brand Sperry, his voice rising. “You men are thieves, plain and simple!”

Gideon only looked at him, and gestured gentiy with the gun; Brand Sperry was silent—but fuming.

Gideon turned the controls over to me, and I set course for Seven Dome. He stood over my shoulder, thoughtfully watching, until I grew uneasy and said: “Isn’t that where you want us to go, Gideon? Seven Dome? You said—”

“I know what I said, Jim,” he agreed hesitantiy. “Only—”

“Only what?”

He looked around him at the insice of the sea-car. It looked much like any other—perhaps there was a slightly brighter glimmer from the Edenite armor, to show that it was stronger, more powerfully charged, than most. Gideon said:

“This one has the same kind of armor as the one your uncle Stewart was lost in, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I agreed.

“So it ought to be able to take quite a lot of pressure, right?”

But this time I was used to Gideon’s long and complicated way of getting at anything he had to say; I only nodded without trying to rush him.

He said, striking off in another direction, “You remember what we saw in the reel that was brainpumped from Catroni?” I nodded, and he went on: “Sure you do. After Catroni pulled out, a man followed him. Only the other man’s armor had been sabotaged; it couldn’t take the pressure, and he was killed.”

“That’s right, Gideon. My uncle.”

“Was it?” Gideon demanded sharply. “We’ve been thinking it was, sure—but how did we know? There was another man on board, after all—Westervelt, the engineer.”

I said slowly, “You mean the man who was killed might not have been my uncle?”

“That’s right, Jim.” Gideon’s dark face was sober as he looked at me. “Now, it’s only a guess—don’t get your hopes up! Even if that first one was Westervelt, your uncle might have tried a little later in another suit, if he could patch one together—or the sea-car’s armor might have failed over the weeks he’s been down there, or he might have run out of air—Oh, it’s only an outside chance. But what if he’s still alive at the bottom of Eden Deep, Jim?”