Undersea Quest

16 Father Neptune: Farmhand

We got out of there—somehow.

I was only conscious of Gideon leading the way, the butler sullenly coming along, unlocking doors, keeping an eye open for other members of Sperry’s staff. We were lucky; no one intercepted us. The butler, of course, was even luckier, for Qideon was right there with the gun.

We took the butler along for company as far as the express elevator banks, then we plunged in and left him standing there, just as the elevator doors closed.

We were in a hurry.

Gideon gripped my arm warningly; there were other passengers in the car; this was not the place to discuss our plans. We went down and down, to die bottom level of warehouses, before Gideon tugged at me and led me out of the elevators. Down a long, damp corridor, through a side passage, and I began to hear the rushing sounds of water.

We were back in Gideon’s hermit-hideaway, on the ledge that overlooked the rushing drains. “All right, boy,” said Gideon exultantiy, “let them try to find us here!”

All the comforts of home. Even Gideon’s little store of supplies and firewood still was intact; he busied himself starting a fire and setting a pot of water on it for his favorite steaming tea, while I tried to sort things out in my mind.

I said, “I don’t understand it, Gideon. Brand Sperry shouldn’t be here. He should be at the Academy.”

“The old man must have called him home,” said Gideon.

“But he can’t! I mean, if Sperry left in the middle of a year, that would wreck his chances of graduating. And—”

“And maybe he doesn’t care, boy.” Gideon solemnly handed me a tin cup of tea; I set it down hastily and blew on my fingers.

“Maybe the Academy looks like mighty small potatoes to the Sperrys right now. Something big is up, mark my words.” He looked at me thoughtfully over the top of his own can of tea as he sipped it—he must have had asbestos lips! “Figure it out,” he said.

“One, you were followed all the way from the United States to Marinia. Those were Sperry’s men—do you think they were doing it for fun? Two, one of those same men tried to kill you. Do you think that was just a joke? Three, somebody went to the trouble of trying to impersonate you here—nearly killing you in the process. That’s getting to be a pretty bad joke by now, Jim!”

“But why?”

Gideon set down his tea and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looking at me. “What was your uncle looking for in Eden Deep, Jim?” he inquired.

“Why—uranium.”

“Uranium.” He nodded, his soft eyes sober. “Uranium. And what is it that the whole world is short of now? So short that they have to cut down on power consumption everywhere—so short that the man who had control of a big new uranium lode would pretty near be able to write his own ticket? Uranium! Uranium’s power—and power is what Hallam Sperry loves most of anything in the world.”

I said, “But, Gideon, a man like Hallam Sperry doesn’t have to do that! He’s powerful now—rich, influential. He’s the mayor of Marinia, he has shipping lines and submarine mines and all kinds of properties, more than any man needs.”

“Why?” Gideon pursed his lips. “I don’t know if I can tell you, Jim. You’d have to look inside Hallam Sperry’s mind to know the answer, and to tell the truth that’s not a job I’d much like—not without a brainpump, anyhow. Power’s a disease; the more you get, the sicker you are; and Hallam Sperry’s about as sick as he can be. Marinia? That’s nothing to him, Jim!”

“But— ”

“But nothing, Jim.” He got up and rummaged in the crevices of the wall for the blankets he had neatly and methodically stowed away. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s pretty late and we’ve had a hard day. Let’s get a night’s sleep. Maybe we can find out some of the answers in the morning.”

I slept, all right—but not easily. All night long I tossed and turned, dreaming of the Sperrys and my uncle and the man in the white suit and, most of all, that room with the brainpump and the body of Catroni.

I woke up, and Gideon was gone.

I searched the tunnel ledge all up and down its length without finding him; it was a bad twenty minutes. Then I heard cautious footsteps approaching; I got out of sight until the man coming toward me appeared… and it was Gideon.

He grinned at me. “Up so early, Jim?” he greeted me. “Thought you’d be sleeping for an hour yet.”

“Where have you been?” I demanded. “I thought——”

“You thought old Hallam Sperry had come down here personally and snatched me away, did you? No, not this time, Jim. I just had a little business to attend to, that’s all.” He put down a knapsack and said: “Breakfast. We’ll cook it up and eat, and then we’ll pay a call on a friend of mine. Maybe he’ll have some information for us.”

We ate quickly enough, but then Gideon insisted on sitting and resting for a while, to my irritation. He calmed me down quickly enough, though—”Trust in Gideon,” he said. “I’ve got a friend of mine out digging up information; give him time to get it done. We’re safer here than we will be out there, anyhow. And more comfortable, too.”

“More comfortable” was right. When finally Gideon decided it was time to move, he led me through byways and passages that I hadn’t dreamed existed, to parts of Thetis I had never seen. We came out in a broad, high-ceilinged chamber, where the floor was a slimy trickle of greenish liquid and the air smelled of sour seaweed and iodine. Gideon stopped at the entrance and murmured, “Ever wonder what a place like Thetis is good for, Jim? Here’s the answer, right in front of your eyes!”

All across the floor were stacks of sodden kelp and other marine vegetable growths. They were on raised platforms, a few inches above the floor of the chamber; from them liquid trickled and ran off, contributing to the dampness underfoot. “This is the draining chamber,” Gideon whispered. “What they harvest in the farms outside comes in here; it’s stacked and drained, and baled and sent to the processing chambers.”

“It smells pretty fierce,” I said.

Gideon chuckled. “Try and stand it for a few minutes,” he advised. “I’ll be back.”

He left me standing there while he walked cautiously across the wide chamber and out of sight. No one else was around; I heard distant voices, but evidently the draining room didn’t require much in the way of workmen.

I didn’t have long to wait. I heard someone coming—fast. It was Gideon. As he drew near he panted, “Come on, Jim. We’ve got to get out of here! Sperry’s got the whole city looking for us—we’ve got to leave fast!”

I followed almost without thinking, back the way we had come, through the back ways and secret passages Gideon knew so well. As we trotted along he filled me in: “Had a friend of mine checking up on what was going on,” he panted. “Trouble, Jim! Sperry’s captive police force—they’re after us. Shoot on sight are the orders!”

“But he can’t!”

“Jim, he can do anything! He’s the mayor—he’s the law in Thetis. You and me, we’re just nobodies. We’ve got to get out of Thetis right away.”

“But where can we go?”

“The ocean, boy! Where else? Where would your uncle go when he was in trouble? The Deeps!”

I said stumblingly, “But surely, Gideon, surely we can go to the officials here and straighten everything out. Sperry can’t tear up the law!”

“He can sure try,” Gideon panted grimly. “Boy, don’t you understand yet? Sperry is the law in Thetis. We’ve got to fight him sooner or later, yes, but not this way. Our word against his—we’d be laughed out of court. You don’t even have a passport, remember! You’d be picked up the minute you walked into a police station—if you lived to get that far!”

I shook my head. I said stubbornly, “What’s the use of trying to get away? We’d get about as far as the gangway of one of Sperry’s liners, and—”

Gideon grinned. “Who said anything about a liner?” he demanded. “Come on!”

He led the way. I followed, doubting—but what else was there to do? Twice we dodged into alleyways as the scarlet uniforms of the sea-police came into sight. It was unlikely that they were looking for us—but we couldn’t take chances.

At last we came to a desolate tangle of grimy tunnels, where the sub-sonic pounding of mighty engines throbbed. It was the main pumping station for Thetis’ drains—the point, perhaps, where I would have been caught in the suction and cast out into the crushing deep if Gideon hadn’t plucked me from the stream.

He said: “Quiet, now. We’re about to break a few laws.”

He led the way through a narrow tunnel to a chamber lit by a single flickering Troyon tube. It was occupied by an elderly man, half asleep, his head bobbing on his breast; the room was lined with what seemed to be racks of diving gear. We paused at the entrance, Gideon silent as a wandering ghost, as he stared thoughtfully at the old man. Then, still silent, he shook his head and drew me back along the passage.

“Can’t take a chance,” he whispered. “The watchman would have the police on us in two minutes; we’ll have to try the other port.”

“To do what?” I demanded.

“To steal a pressure suit, Jim,” he said. “What did you think? We’re going out into the ocean.”

I said, “Gideon, that’s crazy. Where can we go? We can’t get to another city in a pressure suit—we’d be picked up there just as easily as here if we did. Let’s go back to the upper levels and—”

“And turn ourselves right over to Sperry, is that it? Jim, sometimes I wonder what they taught you in the Sub-Sea Academy! Just leave it to me, Jim. We’ll get ourselves a couple of suits, and we’ll sneak out to the farm belt. Chances are we’ll be able to borrow a seacar there; if we do, we’ll head for Seven Dome. Don’t worry about us being picked up in Seven Dome—we’ll take our chances. All clear? Now let’s go get the suits. We can’t get them here, with that watchman; we’ll have to try the other port.”

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 gently 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 hesitantly. “Only—”

“Only what?”

He looked around him at the inside 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?”

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!”