Undersea Quest (16 page)

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I returned to the controls and sent the little sea-car heeling over as I swung it around.

“We’re going to find out!” I said. “Or we’ll sink ourselves trying!”

We made a curious crew, the three of us, as we bored through the cold, dense waters toward Eden Deep.

Brand Sperry, after the first few minutes, sat himself down in the navigator’s seat and stared unseeingly at the blackness outside.

He didn’t offer conversation; for my part, I was glad to have him quiet.

Fortunately, we knew my uncle’s position when Catroni scuttled the ship. I could still see, through Catroni’s eyes, the entire instrument panel; if the Academy had taught me anything, it had taught me to read the gauges and meters on the control board of any sub-sea vessel in a single sweeping glance. I would have no more trouble putting us right over the hulk of my uncle’s sea-car than I would in finding my way across my bedroom at the Academy in the dark.

The trip, I estimated, would take us another hour and a half. I put the controls on auto; but I was too eager to get up from the pilot’s seat and let the sea-car take itself to the gridpoint. I sat there, watching the distance gauge whirl slowly through its arc, watching the miles reel past, almost unable to keep my hands off the diving rudders and the stabilizers, though I knew perfectiy well that the autopilot would do a far better job of keeping the little car on course than any mere human.

Gideon said: “Tired, Jim? Want to take a little nap?”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “But if you want to—”

“Neither could I.” Pause, while Brand Sperry stared stonily into nothingness. Gideon said, “Are you sure you can take us to Stewart’s sub?”

I shrugged. “I can put us right over it, I’ll guarantee. Getting down—that’s something else. All I can do is dive the car; whether or not it will take the pressure is something I don’t know. Don’t forget, Gideon, that this is the
first
experimental sea-car my uncle built. Maybe it’s as strong as the other—maybe not.”

Gideon nodded slowly. “Well,” he said, “we’ll find out ”

That seemed to cover that.

We plunged on through the dark waters. The little motors of the sea-car whined almost inaudibly, the hissing friction of the waters sliding along the Edenite armor whispered in our ears, the slow, erratic clicking of the autopilot and the instruments lulled me. There were other noises, too—

I realized, abruptly, that some of the other noises didn’t belong there.

I sat up straight, listening. From somehwere in the sea-car there came a faint, furtive scratching. It stopped; in a moment I heard it again.

Gideon heard it too. I caught the look of sudden tension in his eyes as we both got the same idea at the same time…

Someone else was in the sea-car!

Gideon looked a wordless threat at Brand Sperry—who paid him no attention—and silently, holding the captured gun, Gideon stepped to the door to the after compartment. Fools, to have forgotten to search the little sub! I blamed myself angrily.

Gideon flung the door open, peered in, then lunged inside and I heard a scramble of motion.

In a moment Gideon appeared again, frowning. “Jim,” he groaned, “we ought to be kicked. Look who was here, at the aft communicator—heaven knows what messages he was sending!”

He gestured with the gun, and another figure stepped uncertainly through the doorway—

Bob Eskow!

I said, “Bob!”

He stared at me. “I—I thought it was you, Jim,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it! Jim Eden—a thief!”

The expression on his face was impossible to read. Gideon said sharply, “Young man, Jim Eden is no more a thief than—”

I stopped him. I said, “Bob, listen to me. You’ve got to trust me.” As quickly as I could I told him everything that had happened since I came to Marinia—our hopes of finding my uncle’s ship, the duplicity of the Sperrys, the threat to our lives. It was a long story, short as I tried to make it, and I couldn’t tell if he was believing me as I spoke. When I finished he sighed and looked at the floor.

“I—I don’t know, Jim,” he said wearily. “It’s pretty hard to take in. I admit—well, I knew something was wrong. When I saw you at the landing stages and you ran away—”

“Bob! I didn’t run away! I tried to see you—I sent a message—they told me you didn’t want to talk to me.”

He stared at me grimly. “I got no message,” he said. “You see? I can look at that either way—either you ran, or what you say is true, and the Sperry gang kept me from seeing you.” He shook his head. “How can I tell? When you came aboard this ship I was giving it a pre-cruise inspection. I thought it was you, Jim, and it was a hard thing for me to make up my mind what to do. The only solution I could come to was to message Thetis, tell them what happened, let them send a patrol sea-car after us and bring you back. I thought the courts could decide, Jim.”

“The courts are Hallam Sperry,” said Gideon.

Bob nodded slowly. “So you tell me,” he said. “But—”

A tiny bell was ringing, and it stopped that conversation right there. I jumped back to the controls. “We’re over the gridpoint!” I cried. “If our computations were right—my uncle’s sea-car is right below us!”

I cleared the auto-pilot with a swift touch of the keys and took over manual control. I hesitated, looking over my shoulder at Bob Eskow.

He nodded reluctantly. “We’re this far,” he said. “Go ahead, Jim. If your uncle’s ship is down there—well, that answers a lot of questions. But Jim—don’t forget that I messaged Thetis. A Sea Patrol car should be right on our tails!”

Gideon chuckled softly. “They’ll have a sweet job following where we’re going, boy,” he said. “This is Eden Deep—seven and a half miles straight down. Drop her, Jim!”

I nodded and touched the controls. The buoyancy tanks began to fill as the tiny pumps droned and spurted seawater into them. I set course for a wide circle, gently eased over the diving vanes.

The clinometer showed three degrees dive, then five; then, carefully, I slipped the vanes to the full fifteen-degree crash dive position and opened up the propeller motors…

And our little sea-car began clawing downward into Eden Deep.

Already we were close to the bottom limits of most sea-cars, even with standard Edenite armor. Nearly four miles of water towered over us; the pressure would have smashed steel, squeezed quartz like putty. As we went down and down, four and a quarter miles, and four and a half, I saw something that I never had seen before. At first I thought it was a trick of eyestrain—a faint glimmering twinkle of light on the walls of the cabin. But I saw it again, flickering like witch-fire, and it grew stronger, and I realized that it was the sparkling glow of the Edenite armor, showing on the inside of the hull, giving a faint notion of the enormous forces pressing against it, pressures that could destroy any metal and penetrate even the mighty strength of ordinary Edenite…

Still we sank down.

At cruising speed we swept in a broad descending spiral, a thousand feet a minute. We were at five miles, then six, and the witch-fires on the inside of the hull were sparkling bright.

Brand Sperry was staring at them, his face a rigid mask. Gideon looked at him, then glanced at me warningly; Sperry was in an ecstasy of terror.

For that matter, there were strange tinglings along my own spine. I had never been this deep before—only three men had, or at least only three living men had reached it. Two were certainly dead—one instantly, in the fraction of a second after his suit failed; the other more lingeringly, under Hallam Sperry’s brainpump. The third was my uncle, the inventor of the flickering force armor that was all that kept the water out…and he had done it, I reminded myself, in the ship he had built
after
constructing this first pilot model…

What improvements had he found it necessary to make? There was no way to know—no way to guess whether this armor was going to hold.

Even Edenite armor cannot accept the giant pressure of six miles of water without showing signs of strain. It was only a faint metallic
ping,
the sound of straining metal under any circumstances, so tiny that under normal circumstances none of us would even have heard it—but it brought all of us straight up, eyes wide, faces taut, waiting for the hammering rush of the torrent.

It didn’t come; it had been only a noise and nothing more. But it cracked Brand Sperry. He cried desperately, “Stop! Eden—stop this! Take us back up—you’re killing us!” He glared at me wildly; I opened my mouth to answer—but he was springing at me. I half dodged away.

But Gideon was there before me. As Brand Sperry scrambled past him Gideon brought up his fist and caught him right behind the ear; Sperry went over without a sound, sprawled on the deck, unconscious.

The three of us stared at him wordlessly.

At last Gideon cleared his throat. “Boy,” he rumbled, “that young pirate raises a question in my mind. You and me, Jim, we know what we’re doing; this is a risk we’ve got to take, and I’m not looking for a way out of it. But what about Sperry and your friend Bob, here? It isn’t their risk, Jim.”

I swallowed—it wasn’t easy. The temptation to say enthusiastically, “Sure, Gideon!” and send the sea-car up again as fast as its propellers could drive was almost overpowering. For the flickering on the inside of the Edenite armor was a dazzling blur of color now; I could hear a symphony of tiny metallic creaks and squeals as the armor settied under its load; I had all too vivid a picture in my mind of the Edenite charge leaking off the atmor under the stress of the pressure, and the sea thundering in to destroy us.

I looked at Bob Eskow. He was the calmest of us all. His face was like something carved out of sea-basalt; he said:

“Keep going, Jim.”

Six and a half miles.

Seven. I came out of a half stupor, tore my eyes from the clicking, purring depth gauge, switched on the scanning drive of the microsonar. Faint spots of color began to appear in its viewplate, nothing recognizable as yet.

Gideon’s voice was very quiet. “Jim,” he said softly, but with a note that snatched my eyes off the viewplate. “Look at the floor.”

From the after compartment, through the door, came trickling a thin, lazy line of water.

Training counts for a great deal.

I think that if it had not been for the years of constant pounding and discipline in the Academy—
Panic is the enemy!
—I would have cracked right then and there; I would have manhandled the little sea-car straight up, crash-blasted the ballast out of the tanks, lost control and most likely killed us all.

But some little voice inside me, something that had more wit than I, stopped me, told me that the picture was somehow
wrong.
I held off wrenching the controls to full-climb for a fraction of a second.

And in that fraction of a second I understood. At seven miles, sea-water doesn’t
trickle.
What made that thin line of water I didn’t know—but it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, a leak.

I jumped up from the controls, leaving them locked in position, and raced back to the after compartment. There, lacking occupants and therefore lacking heat, the walls were icy cold; moisture was condensing on them; it was that moisture that had trickled in.

I went back to my seat more slowly. I told Bob and Gideon what it was. Neither of them said a word.

Brand Sperry was beginning to stir. Gideon stood close to him, one eye still on Bob, but ready to handle Sperry if he still wanted fight. There was no fight in him, though; he opened his eyes, looked at me once, and then lay staring at the ceiling.

I went back to my controls.

And on the microsonar screen was a tiny, torpedolike shape, its outline blurred and half drowned out by bottom-return, but easy enough to recognize. It could be nothing else; it had to be my uncle’s ship.

The armor held.

We gently, prayerfully, settled down atop the other sea-car; there was a gentle bump, and we were locked hull-to-hull.

That was as far as bur planning had gone—if “planning” is the word for as frantic and harum-scarum a dash as Gideon and I had made from Thetis to Eden Deep. We were actually touching my uncle Stewart’s ship—or his tomb.

What next?

Gideon and I looked at each other questioningly.

It was impossible for us to cross from one ship to another—we had no armor capable of standing these pressures. The armor in the sea-car was standard Edenite, like every other suit of depth armor on every other sea-car in the oceans; perfectly safe at four miles, even five—but not at seven and a half!

Gideon said, “The grapples, Jim.”

I crossed my fingers; but I nodded. It was the only way. I coaxed our little sub into perfect alignment with the pattern of the other on the microsonar; then gently opened the rheostats to the magnetic grapples. It was quite a load to try on them; but it had to work. There was no alternative.

I started the ballast pumps, forcing a part of the water out of the buoyancy tanks—not too much, for too much strain on the grappling magnets would break our grip for sure. Then, gently, I rocked the two linked sea-cars back and forth with the drive propellers…

It was a strange thing, but in shallow water it would have been impossible. Here it was—almost—but not quite.

In shallow water there would have been currents and turbulence; the scouring of the water flow would have heaped silt around my uncle’s sea-car, half buried it. I never could have broken the suction of hundreds of tons of mud.

But at the bottom of Eden Deep, the water lay dead and cold.

There were no currents—it is heat that makes currents in the water, just as it is the sun’s heat that makes the winds of the air, and here, nearly forty thousand feet down, the sun’s heat never reached.

There had been some slight disturbance from the coming to rest of the sea-car itself; but the suction was not great; and ifwas only a few moments before we were free.

We were free!

I set course for a steep, ascending curve, to top the ridges that surround Eden Deep, en route to Thetis.