The Shipshape Miracle : And Other Stories

Rim of the Deep

The Rat slouched into the Venus Flower and over to the table where Grant Nagle was settling down to the serious business of getting drunk.

The newspaperman eyed the Rat with unconcealed loathing. But the Rat didn’t seem to mind. He pushed his cap farther over his left eye and talked out of the corner of his mouth, his words hissing out alongside the smoke-trickling cigarette.

“I got a message for you,” he declared.

“Let’s have it,” said Grant. “Then get the hell out of my sight.”

“Hellion Smith is loose,” said the Rat.

Grant started, but his face didn’t change. He stared at the other icily and said nothing.

“He left word two years ago,” explained the Rat, “that when he cracked the crib I was to bring you a message. I’m bringing it, see?”

“Yes?”

“It was this. Hellion said he was going to get you. Himself, personal, see? Some of us boys offered to do the job for him, but he said no, he was saving you for himself. The chief is funny that way.”

“Why?” asked Grant.

The question took the Rat by surprise. His cigarette drooped suddenly, almost fell from his mouth. His watery eyes blinked. But he recovered his composure and hunched farther across the table.

“That’s a funny question, Nagle. Funny question for you to be asking. When you put the chief out in the Alcatraz of Ganymede.”

“I didn’t put him there,” said the newsman. “All if did was write a story. That’s my job. I found out Hellion was hiding on Ceres with a bunch of assorted cutthroats, waiting for the heat to let up. And I wrote a story about it. Can I help it if the police read the Evening Rocket?”

The Rat eyed the reporter furtively.

“You’re smart, Nagle,” he said. “Too damn smart. Someday you’ll write yourself into a jam you can’t get out of. Maybe you done that already.”

“Look here,” asked Grant, “why did the chief send you around? Why didn’t he come himself? If Hellion’s got business with me, he knows where he can find me.”

“He can’t come now,” said the Rat. “He’s got to lay low for a while. And this time he’s got a place where no snooping reporter is going to find him.”

“Rat,” warned Grant coldly, “someday you’re going to talk yourself into a jam. I don’t know what your game is, but it is a game of some sort. Because Hellion can’t get out of the prison on Ganymede. No man ever has gotten out of it. When a man goes there, he stays there. When he come out he’s either served his sentence or he comes out feet first. Nobody escapes from Ganymede.”

The Rat smiled bleakly, drew a paper from his hip pocket and spread it on the table. It was an Evening Rocket, the ink still damp.

The banner screamed:

“That,” said the Rat, tapping the paper, “should tell you what the score is. I ain’t talking through my hat.”

Grant stared at the paper. It was the five-star edition, the final for the day. And there it was in black and white. Hellion Smith had escaped from the impregnable Alcatraz on the airless, bitter, frigid plains of Ganymede. A mauve-tinted likeness of Hellion’s ugly mug stared back at him from the page.

“So what you told me is true,” said Grant softly. “Hellion has really escaped. And the message is the goods.”

“When Hellion says something he means it,” sneered the Rat.

“So do I,” declared Grant grimly. “And I got a message for you to take back to Hellion, if you can find hm. You tell him I only did my duty as a newspaperman before—nothing personal about it at all. But if he comes messing around again I’ll take a sort of interest in him. I’ll really put some heart into it, you understand. You tell Hellion that if he tries to carry out his threat I’ll rip him up by the roots and crucify him.”

The Rat stared at him with watery eyes.

Grant lifted the bottle off the table and filled his glass.

“Get the hell out of here!” he roared at the man across the table. “Just looking at you makes me want to gag.”

The copy boy found Grant at the table, twirling the liquor in his glass. He shuffled across the floor toward him.

Grant looked up and recognized him. “Hello, Lightnin’. Have a snort.”

Lightnin’ shook his head. “I can’t. The boss sent me to get you. He wants to see you.”

“He did, did he?” asked Grant. “Well, you go back and tell the boss I’m busy. Tell him I can’t be bothered. Tell him to cover over and see me if he’s in a rush.”

Lightin’ scuffed his feet uneasily, caught between two fires.

“It’s important,” he persisted.

“Hell,” said Grant. “There’s nothing important. Sit down, Lightnin’, and rest your feet.”

“Look,” said Lightnin’, pleadingly, “if you don’t come, the boss will give me hell. He said not to let you talk me out of it.”

“Oh, well,” said Grant. He tossed off the liquor and pocketed the bottle.

“Lead on, Lightnin’,” he said.

On the street outside the mechanical newsboys blatted their cries.

“Hellion Smith escapes. Hellion Smith escapes from Ganymede. Police baffled.”

“They’re always baffled,” said Grant.

Soft lights glowed in the gathering dusk. Smoothly operating street traffic slid silently along. Overhead the air lanes murmured softly. The city skyline was a blaze of vivid color.

Arthur Hart beamed at Grant. “I got a little assignment lined up for you,” he said. “One that will be a sort of vacation. You’ve been working hard and I thought a change might do you good.”

“Go on,” said Grant. “Go on and give it to me both barrels. When bad news is coming I like to meet it face to face. The last time you got all bloated up with kindness you sent me off to Venus and I spent two months there, smelling those stinking seas, wading around in swamps, interviewing those damn fish men.”

“It was a good idea,” Hart protested. “There was every reason to believe—still is—that the Venusians are a damn sight smarter than we think they are. They have big cities built down under those seas and just because they’ve never told us they didn’t have spaceships is no reason to believe they haven’t. For all we know, they may have visited Earth long before Earthmen flew to Venus.”

“It’s all over now,” said Grant, “but it still sounds screwy to me. What is it this time? Mars or Venus?”

“Neither one,” said Hart smoothly. “This time it really will be a little vacation jaunt. Down to sea bottom. I got it all fixed up. You’ll take a sub tonight down to Coral City and from there you’ll go to Deep End.”

“Deep End!” Grant protested. “That’s the jumping-off place. Right on the rim of the deep.”

“Sure,” snapped Hart. “What’s wrong with that?”

Grant shook his head sadly. “I don’t like it. I’m a claustrophobiac. Can’t stand being shut up in a room. And down there you got to wear steel armor. Take Coral City, now. That’s not a bad place. Only a couple hundred feet under and you meet nice people.”

“Nice bars, too,” suggested Hart.

“Bet your neck there are,” Grant agreed. “Now, I could go for a couple of weeks in Coral City.”

“You’ll go for Deep End, too,” declared Hart grimly.

Grant shrugged wearily, felt the comforting bulge of the bottle in his pocket.

“All right,” he said. “What’s the brainstorm this time?”

“There’s some sort of trouble down there on The Bottom,” said Hart. “Rumors, unconfirmed reports, nothing we’ve been able to get our teeth into. Seems the glass and quartz used in suits and domes hasn’t been standing up. There have been tragedies. Entire communities wiped out. A story here, a story there, over the period of months, from all parts of The Bottom. You’ve read them yourself. Inquiries that have gotten nowhere.”

“Forget it,” said Grant. “That’s only what’s to be expected. Any damn fool that goes down a half mile underwater and lives under a quartz dome is asking for trouble. When it comes he hasn’t got anybody but himself to blame. When you go monkeying around with pressures amounting to thousands of pounds per square inch you’re fooling around with dynamite.”

“But the point,” said Hart, “is that every catastrophe so far reported has occurred where one manufacturer’s quartz is being used. Snider quartz. You’ve heard of it.”

“Sure,” said Grant, unimpressed, “but that don’t add up to anything. Most of the quartz used down there is Snider stuff. It’s no secret Snider has a pull with the Underocean Colonization Board.” He looked at Hart squarely. “You aren’t figuring on sending me out on a one-man crusade against Snider quartz, are you?”

Hart stirred uneasily.

“Not exactly,” he parried. “You won’t be working alone. The Evening Rocket will be behind you.”

“Behind me is right,” snorted Grant. “A long ways behind. A hell of a lot of good the Evening Rocket will do me if I get into a jam a half mile down.”

Hart tilted forward in his chair. “The point is this,” he said. “If we can find there’s something wrong with Snider quartz, we’ll put the heat on Snider. And if we find the UCB has been winking at Snider stuff when they know it’s wrong, we’ll have them across the barrel, too.”

“What a sweet nature you have,” said Grant. “The sort of a guy that would send his old grandma to the gallows for a ninety-six-point streamer.”

“We have a duty to the public,” said Hart solemnly, looking almost like an owl. “It’s our duty to work for the common good of mankind.”

“And for the good of the dear old Evening Rocket,” said Grant. “Up goes the circulation list. Full-page ads telling the readers how we exposed the dirty crooks. And maybe, after we smack Snider quartz flat, there’ll be another quartz company just dying to insert about a million bucks’ worth of advertising in our columns.”

“It isn’t that,” snarled Hart, “and you know it isn’t.” He became oratorical. “Out there is a great empire to be conquered. The ocean bottom. An area two and one half times as great as all the land areas on the Earth. A great new frontier. We’ve made a start at conquering it. Out there are pioneers—”

Grant waved him to silence. “I know,” he said. “Vast riches. Great fields for exploitation. A heritage for the future. I know it. But save it for an editorial.”

Hart leaned back in his chair. “The latest reports of quartz failure come from the rim of the Puerto Rico deep,” he said. “You job will be to find what’s in the cards.”

“I warn you,” said Grant. “When I get back from this one I’m going to get drunk and stay drunk for a month.”

Hart reached into his desk and drew out an envelope. “Your tickets for the sub,” he said. “The bank at Coral City will have instructions to let you draw expenses.”

“O.K.,” said Grant. “I’ll catch you an octopus for a pet.”

The water was blue, shading to violet—a dusky blue like the deeper shade of twilight but still with a faintly luminous quality about it. Long ago the more showy seaweed beds had been left behind and the character of the sea bed had changed. No more beautiful stretches of sand with vegetation and fishes of unearthly colors, delicate and shifting. No more waving sea plumes or golden sea fans. No more unbelievable brilliancy of color.

Now one seemed to be moving into the maws of night. The blue of the water deepened and blurred only a short distance away and even the powerful light of the underwater tank penetrated for only a hundred yards or so.

There was muck underneath, muck and ooze that was deepening as Grant followed the contour of the bottom down toward the deep. Once the tank floundered into a muck trap with its treads spinning helplessly, and he had been forced to use the retractable gear to lift it out—the gear acting like legs, searching for and getting solid footing, heaving the massive tank along.

The character and pattern of life was changing down here, too. Changing to a grimmer pattern—a more ferocious, unrelenting life.

A thing, that was little more than a living mouth, swam across the vision panel, turned back, pressing its blunt face against the glass, mighty mouth agape, wicked fangs shining. A dark shape slithered by, just outside the beam of light.

Grant dropped his eyes to the instruments. Five hundred and fifty feet down. Pressure two hundred fifty-three pounds per square inch.

The other instruments were shivering slightly, but all read correctly. Everything was going fine.

Grant wiped perspiration from his face. “Running this damn tub gets on my nerves,” he told himself, but instantly was reassured with the thought of the massive steel walls, constructed to maintain a maximum of resistance to buckling and bending, of the ports of shatter-proof quartz, laminated, one with the rest of the construction.

But quartz sometimes didn’t stand up—that was what had brought him here. Quartz sometimes went haywire and when it did men died, men who had put their trust in it—men who otherwise could not have hurled their challenge into the teeth of The Bottom with its chilly depths, its monstrous pressure.

The thing that was all mouth had retreated from the vision glass, but another nightmare of the twilight zone had replaced it—a grotesque thing that resembled nothing that ever should have lived.

Grant cursed at it—swung the spotlight back and forth, trying to pick out landmarks. But there was nothing—he was moving across what appeared to be a murky plain, although the indicator showed it had a decided downward slope.

Down there, somewhere ahead, was the Puerto Rico deep, one of the deepest—five and a half miles down. Down there the pressure ranged around six and a half tons a square inch. Too deep for man as yet. Conquest under the four-mile mark would have to await work in the industrial laboratories, would have to wait on man’s ingenuity to build steel and glass that was a little stronger, man’s ability to design new engineering kinks that would give greater strength—or perhaps the construction of a force screen or some other approach as yet merely speculative.

Grant studied his chart. He had kept the course the communications-bureau back at Deep End had outlined for him, but as yet there was no sign of the man he sought. Old Gus, they called him, and it seemed he was a sort of local legend.

“A queer old coot,” the dapper little communications-bureau head had told him. “Depth dippy, I guess. He’s been out there for years, prospecting, fooling around. Couldn’t make him leave now. The Bottom gets in your blood, I guess, if you stay there long enough.”

Grant swept the light back and forth again, but still there was nothing.

Half an hour later the light picked up the dome crouched under a sudden upsoaring of black rock, rising abruptly from the sea floor.

Running the tank in close to the cliff, Grant stopped it and entered the airlock.

Clambering into the mechanical suit, he tightened the lock and slid into the small operator’s chamber with its nightmare of controls. Clumsily, as yet unused to the operation of the suit, he opened the outer lock control.

Outside it was easier and the suit ambled jerkily along, shaking him at every stride. He was within only a short distance of the dome when a shadow detached itself from the cliff and dropped upon him. Grant felt the thud of its impact, saw waving tentacles crawl across the plate, white gristle suction cups seeking to get a hold.

“An octopus,” said Grant disgustedly.

The cephalopod threshed wildly, swinging its tentacles in mighty swipes and then slid off the suit, landing in front of it, hopping to one side. A moment later it scuttled out of the twilit gloom and humped along ahead of Grant.

“I’d like to take a swift kick at you,” Grant told the octopus, “but if I did, I’d lose my balance sure as hell, and a fellow would have to be a magician to get one of these tin cans right side up if it fell over.”

The octopus was a monster. His body was as big as a good-sized watermelon and his eight tentacles would have spanned close to twenty feet.

A suited figure was emerging from the air lock of the dome and Grant shoved a lever to swing his suit’s arm in greeting. The arm of the other suit raised in reply and hurried toward him.

The octopus galloped forward, raising a cloud of murk in its path, and launched itself at the other suit. An expert arm flashed out and warded it off. Steel fingers closed on a tentacle and the suit marched forward, hauling a protesting, squirming octopus along by one of its eight long arms.

“Howdy, stranger,” said the man inside the advancing suit. “Glad you happened along.”

Grant spoke into his transmitter.

“Glad to see you, too. I was looking for a man named Gus. Maybe you’re him.”

“Sure am,” said the other. “I suppose Butch jumped on you.”

“Butch?” asked Grant, bewildered.

“Sure, Butch. Butch is my octopus. Raised him from a pup. Used to sit around inside the dome with me until he got too big and I had to shut him out. He still tries to sneak in on me every now and then.”

Butch squatted to one side, his tentacle still clutched in the steel hand of his master’s suit. His eyes seemed to glint in the deep blue water.

“Sometimes,” Old Gus went on, “he gets kind of gay and I’ve got to trim him down to his natural size. But he’s a pretty good octopus just the same.”

“You mean,” asked Grant, slightly horrified, “you keep the thing for a pet.”

“Sure,” declared Gus. “Safe enough as long as he can’t get at you. Another fellow up north a ways had one and he kind of noised it around his octopus could lick anything that swam, so I took Butch and went up to see him. That, stranger, was a brawl worth seeing. But Butch had it all over that other octopus. Polished him off inside of fifteen minutes and then wouldn’t give up the corpse. Lugged it around for days, taking lunches off of it.”

“Sort of a tough citizen,” suggested Grant.

“Butch,” said Old Gus pridefully, “can be downright ornery when he takes a mind to be.”

Old Gus talked as he brewed the coffee. “A man gets sort of lonesome down here once in a while,” he explained, “and you like some company, even if it ain’t nothing but a thing like Butch. Sharks, now, are downright friendly once you get to know them, but they ain’t no account as pets. They wander too much. You never know where they are. But octopuses are home bodies. Butch lairs out in the cliff back there and comes a-humping every time he sees me.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Grant.

“Only four or five years here,” said Gus. “Used to live up around three hundred feet, but when they put out this improved quartz I moved down here. Like it better. But, all in all, I been living on The Bottom for nigh onto forty years. Last time I was up on the surface I got a terrible headache. Too many bright colors. Greens and blues and reds and yellows. All you get down here is blue, more of a violet really. It’s restful.”

The coffeepot sent out tantalizing odors. The electrolysis plant chuckled. The heat grids sang softly.

Outside the dome, Butch squatted dolefully.

“This a Snider dome?” asked Grant.

“Yep,” said Gus. “Set me back a couple thousand bucks. And then I had to pay to get it hauled down here. Thought I could do it with my old tub, but it was too risky.”

“I hear some of the Snider domes aren’t working out too well,” said Grant. “Breaking down under pressure. Maybe something wrong with their construction.”

The old man lifted the coffeepot off the stove, poured coffee into the cups.

“There’s been a lot of failures,” he said, “but I ain’t had no trouble. Don’t think it’s the fault of the glass at all. Something else. Something funny about it. Some of the boys around here have been talking of getting up a vigilante party.”

Grant had his cup half lifted to his lips, but set it down suddenly. “Vigilante party?” he asked. “Why a vigilante party?”

Old Gus leaned across the table, lowered his voice dramatically. “Ever hear of Robber’s Deep?” he asked.

“No,” said Grant. “I don’t believe I ever have.”

The old man settled back. “A little over a half mile down,” he declared. “A sort of little depression. Bad country. Too rough for tanks. Got to go on foot to reach it.”

He sipped the steaming coffee noisily, wiped his whiskers with a horny hand.

Grant waited, sipping his own coffee. Butch, he saw, was swarming up the dome’s curving side.

“There’s been too dang many robberies,” said Old Gus. “Too much helling around. This country is getting sort of civilized now and we ain’t going to stand for it much longer.”

“You think there’s a gang of robbers down in that deep?” asked Grant.

“That’s the only place they could be,” said Gus. “It’s bad country and hard to get around in. Lots of caves and a couple of canyons that run down to the Big Deep. Dozens of places where a gang could hide.”

Gus sipped gustily at the coffee. “It used to be right peaceable down here,” he mourned. “A man could find him a bed of clams and post the place and know it was his. Nobody would touch it. Or you could stake out a radium workings and know that your stakes wouldn’t be pulled up. And if you found an old ship you just slapped up a notice on it saying you had found it and nobody would take so much as a single plank away. But it ain’t that way no more. There’s been a lot of claim jumping and clam beds have been robbed. We kind of figure we’ll have to put a stop to it.”

“Look,” said Grant, “the Evening Rocket sent me out here to find out why so many domes were failing—why there were so many catastrophes on The Bottom. You tell me robbers are responsible—desperadoes of the deep. Would they go to the length of smashing a man’s dome to get what little treasure he might have inside?”

Old Gus snorted. “Why not?” he asked. “Up on the surface your thugs kill a man, shoot him down in cold blood, to get the little money he might have in his pocket. Down here there are fortunes in some of the domes. Radium and pearls and priceless treasure salvaged from old wrecks.”

Grant nodded. “I suppose so. But it’s not only here it’s happening. Domes are failing all over. On all parts of The Bottom.”

“I don’t know about them other places,” said Old Gun brusquely, “but I know out here most of the failures ain’t the fault of the glass. It’s the fault of a bunch of thieving cutthroats and it it keeps on we’ll sure make them hard to catch.”

The old man sloshed the last of the coffee down his throat and rattled the cup down on the table. “I got a bed of clams posted not very far from here and if them fellows get into that bed I’ll just naturally go on the warpath all by myself.”

He stopped and looked at Grant. “Say,” he asked, “have you ever seen a real clam bed?”

Grant shook his head.

“If you can stay,” said Old Gus, “I’ll show you one tomorrow that’ll make your eyes pop. Some of them five feet across, and if one old girl is open I’ll show you a pearl as big as your hat. It isn’t quite as perfect as it should be yet, but given a little more time it will be. The old girl is working on it and I’m watching it. But I haven’t been over there for a month or so.”

He shook his head. “I sure hope them Robber’s Deep fellows ain’t found her,” he said. “If they ever touch that pearl I’m going to declare me a war right then and there.”

Butch lolloped happily along ahead of them, soaring awkwardly over occasional boulders and making furtive side trips into the deep-blue darkness on either side.

“Just like a dog,” said Old Gus. “He gets cantankerous at times and I have to give him a good whaling to cool him down, but he seems to like me anyhow. But to anyone but me he’s meaner than poison. That’s his nature and he can’t help it.”

They plodded on. Grant was having less difficulty working his suit.

“The clam bed,” said Old Gus, “is just up this way a piece. Robber’s Deep is down in that direction.” He swung his arm toward the down slope, half turning his suit. He did not turn back again. “Nagle”—his voice was a husky whisper—“I don’t remember ever seeing that before.”

Grant turned and through the haze of the water he saw a queer formation, a shady thing rising out of the ocean bed.

“What is it?” he asked. “It looks—Damned if it don’t look almost like a piece of machinery.”

“I don’t know,” said Gus softly, “but, by the good Lord Harry, we’re going to find out.”

They moved forward slowly, cautiously. Grant felt an unaccountable prickling at the back of his neck—an eerie sense of danger.

Butch gamboled ahead of them. Suddenly he stopped, stood stiff-legged, almost bristling. He pranced forward a few steps and waved his tentacles. Then he became a bundle of unseemly rage, rushing about, his eyes red, his body color changing from black to pink, to violet and finally to a dull brick-red.

“Butch sure has got his dander up,” said Old Gus, half fearfully.

The octopus ceased his demonstration of rage almost as suddenly as it had started and headed straight for the hazy mass before them. Old Gus broke into a sprint and Grant followed.

The towering mass was machinery, Grant saw. Two great cylinders standing close together, with a massive squat machine between them, connected to both of the cylinders by heavy pipes.

The muck and ooze had been scraped away for some distance around the cylinders and machine, probably to make way for secure anchorage, and a mighty hole had been blasted in the sea-bed rock.

There was no sign of life around the cylinders or the machine, but the machine was operating.

Butch reached the cylinders and whipped around them and the next instant something that looked like a merman shot out from behind the cylinders, with Butch in close pursuit.

The manlike thing flashed through the water with astonishing ease, but Butch was out for blood. With a tremendous burst of speed he drew nearer to the fleeing thing, launched his body in a great leap and closed in, tentacles flailing.

Old Gus was running now, yelling at the octopus. “Damn you, Butch; you stop that!”

But, by the time Grant reached them, it was all over. Old Gus, still furious, was prying an angry Butch from his prey, which the octopus still held in the death-grip of his tentacles.

“Someday,” Old Gus was saying, “I’m going to plumb lose patience with you, Butch.”

But Butch wasn’t worrying much about that. His one thought at the moment was to retain the choice morsel he had picked up. He clung stubbornly, but finally Gus hauled him loose. He tried to charge in again, but Gus booted him away and at that he withdrew, squatting at the base of one of the cylinders, fairly jigging with rage.

Grant was staring down at the thing on the bare rock. “Gus,” he said, “do you know what this is?”

“Danged if I do,” said Gus. “I’ve heard of mermen and mermaids, but I never did set no stock by them. I been roaming these ocean beds for nigh forty years and I never seen one yet.” He moved close, touched the body with the toe of his suit. “But,” he declared, “this is the spitting image of those old pictures of them.”

“That,” said Grant, “is a Venusian. A native of Venus. A fish man. The boss sent me to Venus a couple years ago to find out what I could about them. He had a screwy idea they were further advanced in science than they ever let the Earth people suspect. But I couldn’t do much about it, for it would be sheer suicide for a man to venture into a Venusian sea. The seas are unstable chemically. Always with more or less acid—lots of chlorine. They stink like hell, but these fellows seem to like it. The acid and pressure and chemical changes don’t seem to harm them and maybe the stink smells good to them.”

“If this is a Venusian, how did he get here?” asked Gus suspiciously.

“I don’t know,” said Grant, “but I aim to find out. To my knowledge a Venusian has never visited Earth. They can stand almost any pressure under the water, but they don’t like open air, even the Venusian air and that’s half water most of the time.”

“Maybe you’re mistaken,” suggested Gus. “Maybe this ain’t a Venusian but something almost like one.”

Grant shook his head behind the plate. “No, I’m not mistaken. There are too many identifying marks. Look at the gills—feathered. And the hide. Almost like steel. Really a shell—an outside skeleton.”

The newsman turned around and stared at the cylinders, then shifted his gaze to the machine squatting between them. It was operating smoothly and silently. Several large blocks of stone lay in front of it, and several similar blocks protruded from a hopperlike arrangement which surmounted the machine. The dangling jaws of a crane showed how the blocks had been lifted into the hopper. To one side of the machine were a number of small jugs.

“Gus,” Grant asked, “what kind of rock is this?”

The old man scooped up a couple of splinters and held them before his vision glass. The suit’s spotlight caught the splinters and they blazed with sudden moving light.

“Fluorite,” said Gus. “Crystals embedded all through this stuff.” He flung the splinters away. “The rock itself,” he said, “is old; older than hell. Probably Archean.”

“You’re sure about the fluorite?” asked Grant.

“Sure, it’s fluorite,” sputtered the old man. “The rock is lousy with it. You find lots of it on The Bottom. Lots of old rock here, and that’s where you find it mostly.”

Grant dismissed the subject of the rock and turned his attention to the engine and the tanks. The engine seemed simple in its operation—little more than a piston and a wheel—but it seemed without controls and it ran without visible source of power.

The hopper was a hopper and that was all. Across its throat flashed a ripple of fiery flame that ate swiftly at the block of stone, breaking it up and feeding it into the maw of the machine below.

Grant rapped against one of the tanks with his steel fist and it gave back a dead clicking sound unlike the ring of steel.

“Would you know what those tanks are made of?” he demanded of Gus.

The old man shook his head. “It’s got me all bogged down,” he confessed. “I seen some funny things in forty years down here, but nothing like this. A Venusian feeding rock into a machine of some sort. It just don’t add up.”

“It adds up to a hell of a lot more than we think,” said Grant gravely.

He picked up one of the jugs and rapped it. It gave back the same clicking sound. Carefully he worked the stopper out and from the neck of the jug spouted a puff of curling, deadly-appearing greenish yellow. Swiftly he jabbed the stopper in again and stepped back quickly.

“What is that stuff?” Gus shrieked at him, his blue eyes wide behind the plate of quartz.

“Hydrofluoric acid,” said Grant, a strange tenseness in his voice. “The only acid known that will attack glass!”

“Well, I be damned,” said Old Gus weakly. “Well, I be damned.”

“Gus,” said Grant, “I won’t be able to look at those clams today. I’ve got to get back to Deep End. I have a message to send.”

Gus looked gravely at the cylinders, at the body of the Venusian. “Yes, I guess you have,” he said.

“Maybe you’d like to go with me. I’ll come right back again.”

Gus shook his head. “Nope, I’ll stick around. But you might bring me back a couple pounds of coffee and some sugar.”

Out of the twilit waters came a charging black streak. It was Butch. He had made a flanking movement and now was coming in to get the dead Venusian.

His strategy succeeded. Gus rushed at him roaring, but Butch, hugging the body, squirted himself upward at a steep angle and disappeared.

Gus shook a fist after him.

“Someday,” he yelped, “I’ll give that danged octopus a trimming down that he’ll remember.”

Hart had been wrong, apparently, about the Snider glass, but he had been right, that time before, about the Venusians. For there could be no doubt of it. The Venusians were coming to Earth—might have been coming to Earth these many years, roaring down out of the sky in their ships, diving into the ocean, their natural habitat—quietly taking over Earth’s oceans without making any sort of fuss.

And then Man, pressed by economic necessity, by the love of adventure, by the lure of wealth, spurred on by scientific and engineering developments, had invaded the sea himself. For centuries he had ridden on it and flown over it, and now he had walked into it, embarking upon the last great venture, invading the last frontier little old Earth had to offer.

Strange tales of flashing things that dropped into the sea—strange reports of mystery planes sighted in midocean, planes that had a strange look about them. Planes tearing upward into space or dropping like a flash into the water. For years those reports had been heard—way back in the twentieth century—even in some instances in the nineteenth century, when planes were yet a thing unheard of.

And tales much older yet—tales from antiquity—from the old days when men first pushed outward from the shore, talks of mermaids and mermen.

Could the Venusians have been coming to Earth for all these centuries? Quietly, unobtrusively dropping out of space—perhaps carrying on a lucrative trade for many years with treasures snatched from Earth’s ocean beds. Perhaps even now there were many Venusian colonies planted on The Bottom. That could easily be so, for Man as yet had only started his exploitation of the sea beds. His health and tourist resorts, his sea farms and oil fields, his floral gardens and mines only fringed the continental shelves, and at no point was The Bottom thickly settled. A few depth-dippy coots like Old Gus, spending their lives on The Bottom, caught by the mystic love of its silences and weird mystery, had pushed ever deeper and deeper, but they were few. The Bottom, to all intent and purpose, was still a wilderness. In that wilderness might be many colonies of Venusians.

Grant Nagle pondered the matter as he headed his tank back into the depths from Deep End, back to Old Gus’ dome.

He chuckled as he remembered the result of his visaphone call to Hart.

He could imagine Hart now—cussing up and down the office, ripping things wide open, laying down the law to Washington. By nightfall Hart would have every government submarine in the entire world combing the ocean bottoms.

Combing the ocean bottoms to ferret out Venusians and their deadly little chemical plants where they were manufacturing hydrofluoric acid.

Maybe they didn’t mean anything by manufacturing the acid. Maybe it was for some perfectly innocent purpose of their own. But the fact that hydrofluoric acid was the only acid known to have an effect on glass, the fact that quartz domes had been failing all tied up too neatly to be disregarded.

After all, wouldn’t that be the logical way for the Venusians to proceed if they wished to keep the oceans for themselves. If they wished to drive Earthmen from the beds of their own seas, how better might they do it than by making Earthmen fear the sea, by destroying their confidence in the quartz that made possible domes and submarines and tanks and underwater suits? Without quartz man would be practically helpless on The Bottom, for quartz was the eyes of men down here. In time to come, of course, television could be worked out so that quartz would be unnecessary, but that would be an unsatisfactory substitute—indirect sight instead of direct sight.

And if the worst came to worst, might it not be possible that the Venusians, with their chemical factories, might entirely alter the chemical content of the oceans? The material lay at hand. Fluorite for hydrogen fluoride. Most of the compounds in the oceans’ waters were chlorides—simple to juggle them chemically. Vast deposits of manganese.

Grant shuddered to think of the witches’ broth that well-directed chemical effort might stir up in these depths. A great job, truly—but not impossible—especially when one considered the Venusians might have developed chemical treatment, might hold knowledge of chemistry which was still a closed book to Man. That machine and the hopper and the cylinders—nothing like one would find in an Earthly chemical plant—but apparently efficient. With unlimited raw material, with many machines such as that—what might not the Venusians be able to do?

And it didn’t make a bit of difference to them. In Venus they lived in seas that frothed and bubbled and stank to the high heavens—seas that seethed with continual chemical change. A few chemical changes in Earth’s seas wouldn’t bother them at all, but it would the people and the creatures of the Earth. All sea life would die, men would be driven from The Bottom, perhaps many sections of country lying close to the sea would become virtually uninhabitable because of the fumes.

Grant cursed at himself. “You damn fool,” he said, “creating a world catastrophe when you aren’t absolutely certain of any fact as yet.”

No facts, of course, except that he had actually found a Venusian operating a machine which produced hydrofluoric acid. He studied his chart closely and corrected his course. He was getting close to Old Gus’ dome.

Half an hour later he sighted the black, shadowy cliffs and cruised slowly in toward them.

He didn’t see the dome until the tank was almost on top of it. Then he cried out in amazement, jerked the tank to a halt and flattened his face against the glass, playing the spotlight on the ruins of the dome.

Old Gus’ dome had been literally blown to bits. Only a few jagged stumps of its foundation, firmly anchored to the rock beneath, still stood. The rest was hurled in shattered fragments over The Bottom!

There was no sign of Old Gus. Apparently the old man had been away when the dome had crashed or his body had been carried away.

But there was little mystery as to what had caused the dome to fall. The broad wheel marks of a large undersea tank led away from the scene of destruction. Deep footprints still made a tracery about the dome site and the interior of the dome had plainly been rifled after the dome itself had been destroyed. This had been the work of men. A shell, loaded with high explosive, driven by compressed air, had smashed the dome.

“Robber’s Deep,” said Grant, half to himself, staring along the direction in which the tank trail led. The tale of Robber’s Deep, as he had heard it from Old Gus, had sounded like one of those tall tales for which The Bottom men were famous. Tales inspired by superstition, by loneliness, by the strange things that they saw. But maybe Robber’s Deep wasn’t just a tale—maybe there really was something to it after all.

Grant turned back to his waiting tank. “By Heaven,” he said, “I’m going to find out!”

The tread marks were easy to follow. They led straight away, down the slope toward the Big Deep, then angled sharply to the north, still leading down.

The water grew darker, became a dirty gray with all the blue gone from it. Sparks flittered in the darkness—flashes that came and went, betraying the presence of little luminous things—sea life carrying their own lanterns. Arrow worms slid across the vision plate, like white threads. Copepods, the insects of the deep, jerked along with oarlike strokes, like motes of dust dancing in the sunlight. A shrimp, startled, turned into a miniature firecracker, hurling out luminous fluid which seemed to explode almost in Grant’s face.

A swarm of fish with cheek and lateral lights flashed by the glass and a nightmare of a thing, with flame-encircled eyes, bobbing lantern barbells and silver tinsel on its body, crawled over the nose of the tank, perched there for a moment like a squatting ogre, then slipped out of sight.

The gauges were swinging over. Deeper and deeper, with the pressure rising. The grayness of the water held and the lights outside increased, like little fireflies rustling through the gloom.

What had happened to Old Gus? And why had his dome been smashed?

Those two questions pounded in Grant’s brain. If Gus was still alive, where was he? Out rounding up the vigilantes he had spoken of? Hurrying back to Deep End to inform the police? Or haunting the trail of the marauders?

Grant shrugged his shoulders. Old Gus probably was dead. The old coot was depth-dippy. He would fight at the drop of the hat, no matter what the odds. Somewhere a blasted tank or a shattered suit was hidden in the ocean’s mud, marking the last resting place of the old Bottom man.

But why the attack on the dome? Could Old Gus have had treasure there? It was not unlikely. He had talked of old ships loaded with treasure, he was watching a five-foot clam with a pearl as big as a man’s hat. Even at the lower price of pearls due to their greater abundance now, that pearl itself would represent a small-sized fortune.

The trail led deeper and deeper, down into a darker gray, with more fireflies dancing, with monstrous shadows slipping through the water. Weird formations began to thrust themselves out of the ocean bed and the trail dipped swiftly. The track of the larger tank wound tortuously around the outcroppings.

Without a doubt they were approaching Robber’s Deep. The depth gauge read slightly under two thousand feet and the pressure gauge sent a shiver of fear along Grant’s spine. Exposed to that pressure for an instant, a man would be jelly—less than jelly, less than a grease spot on the floor.

The trail led into a narrow canyon, with mighty rock walls rearing up straight into the water. There was barely clearance for Grant’s tank—the larger machine must have almost brushed the walls.

Suddenly the canyon debouched into a wider space, a sort of circular arena, with the walls sweeping to left and right and then closing in again narrower than ever, forming a little pocket.

Grant jerked the machine to a stop, tried frantically to spin it and retreat. For in that little arena were other tanks, a battery of them, large and small.

He had run slam-bang into a trap and as he ripped savagely at the controls he felt the cold perspiration trickling down his chest and arms.

A voice boomed in his radio receiver: “Stay where you are or we’ll blast you!”

He saw the snouts of guns mounted on the tanks swiveling around to menace him. He was beaten and he knew it. He halted the tank, switched off the motor.

“Get into your suit and get out,” boomed the voice in the receiver.

He was in for it now—clear up to his neck.

Out of the tank, he walked slowly across the arena floor. A man from one of the tanks came out to meet him. Neither of them spoke until they were face to face.

Then, in the dim light, Grant recognized the man in the other suit. It was the Rat!

“Nice hide-out you have here, Rat,” said Grant.

The Rat leered at him. “Hellion will be glad to see you,” he said. “This is a sort of unexpected visit, but he’ll be glad to see you just the same.” The Rat’s face twisted. “He liked your message.”

“Yes,” said Grant, “I figured that he would.”

Alcatraz on Ganymede had done something to Hellion Smith, had instilled in him a deeper, sharper cruelty, a keener cunning, a fouler bitterness. It showed in his squinted eyes, his twitching face with the jagged scar that ran from chin to temple, the thin, bloodless lips.

“Yes,” he told Grant, “I have a nice place here. Convenient in a good many ways. The police would never think to hunt for me down here and if they did and we wanted to make a fight of it, we could hold them off until the crack of doom. Or if we wanted to run for it, they’d never be able to trail us through those canyons that run into the Big Deep.”

“Clever,” said Grant. “But you always were clever. Your only trouble was that you took a lot of chances.”

“I am not taking them any more,” said Hellion, but his tone still held that puzzling, light note of pleasant conversation.

“By the way,” he said, “the Rat told me you remembered me. Sent your regards to me. I appreciated that.”

“Here it comes,” Grant told himself. Involuntarily his body tensed.

But nothing came.

Hellion waved his arm to indicate the mighty dome which nestled in another larger, deeper arena in the canyon. Through the quartz, even in the murkiness of the gray water, one could see the towering canyon walls that ran up from the ocean floor.

“Just like on the surface,” said Hellion proudly. “All the comforts of home. The boys like it down here. A few things to do and a good place to loaf around. Lamps that take the place of daylight, latest electrolysis equipment, generators—everything. We have it cozy.” He turned to face Grant squarely. “I wish you could stay with us a while,” he said, “but I suppose you will want to be going back.”

Grant gasped. “Why, yes,” he said. “The chief will be expecting me.”

But there was something wrong. No word or action. Nothing in the atmosphere. Nothing at all—except that Hellion Smith hated his guts. Hellion Smith wouldn’t let him walk out of this place and go back to the surface.

And yet—that was what he had said: “—you will want to be going back.”

“I’ll walk to the lock with you,” Hellion offered.

Grant held his breath, waiting for the joker. But there wasn’t any joker. Hellion chatted amiably, his scarred face twitching, his eyes a-glitter, but his voice smooth and easy. Small talk about old times back in New York, gossip of the underworld, life in the Ganymedean prison.

Grant’s suit stood within the lock, just as he had left it.

Hellion held out his hand.

“Come and see us again,” he said. “Any time. But maybe you had better get started now.” And for the first time Grant sensed a note of warning and of mockery in Hellion’s voice.

“So long, Hellion,” said Grant.

Still puzzled, he clambered into his suit, screwed shut the entrance port, snapped on the interior lights. Everything all right—dials intact, mechanism O.K. He snapped on the power and tested the controls. But there was something wrong. Something missing. A soft purr that should have been in his ears.

Then he knew, and as the realization struck him the strength seemed to go out of his body and a cold dew of perspiration dampened his entire body. “Hellion,” he said, “my electrolysis unit has gone haywire.”

Hellion stood just outside the lock, ready to slam home the port. He smiled engagingly at Grant, as if Grant might have just told him a funny joke. “Now,” he said, “isn’t that too bad.”

“Look, Hellion,” shouted Grant, “if you want to wipe me out, use your guns.”

“Why, no,” said Hellion. “I wouldn’t think of that. This is so much neater. You have your emergency reserve of oxygen, enough for three or four hours. Maybe in that time you can figure out a way to save your neck. I’m giving you a chance, see? That’s more than you gave me, you dirty little pencil pusher.” He slammed the port and Grant watched it spinning home.

Water was hissing into the lock, shattered to fog by the mighty pressure, raising the pressure inside the lock to that outside the dome.

Grant stood still, waiting, mad thoughts thundering in his brain. Four hours’ air at the most. Hours short of the time that would be necessary to get back to Deep End. If Old Gus’ dome still stood, no problem would have existed, for he could have made the dome easily. Probably there were other domes as near, but he had no idea where they were.

There was just one thing—and he had to face it—death within his suit when his air gave out. Four hours. Plenty of time to get to Gus’ dome.

His mind snagged and held, revolved around one idea. Time to get to Gus’ dome. Follow the tracks left by the tanks. Scale the canyon walls and cut southward to intersect the tank tracks.

The site of the Venusian’s machinery was a scant quarter mile from Gus’ dome. Two hours would do it, less than two hours. Two hours to go there—two hours to come back.

He wondered grimly what a dozen jugs of hydrofluoric acid, dropped into the canyon, would do to the dome. He chuckled and the chuckle echoed ghastly inside the suit. “We go out together, Smith,” he whispered.

Climbing the canyon wall had been no child’s play. Several times he had nearly fallen when the mighty grip of the suit’s steel hands had slipped on slimy rock. Not that such a fall would have been fatal, although it might have been.

But now Grant was near the top. Slowly, carefully, he manipulated the right arm of the suit toward a projection, hooked the fingers around it, tightened them savagely with a vicious thrust of a lever. The motors droned as the arm swung the suit, scraping along the rocky face of the looming wall. Now the left arm and the fingers hooked upon a ledge, anchored there. Grant jerked on the arm several times to make sure of the grip, then applied the power. The arm bent, mechanical muscles straining, and the suit moved upward.

Time was valuable, but he must be careful. One slip now and he would have to do it all over again—if he could, for the fall might crush him to death on the rocks below, might crack his visor, might damage the suit so it wouldn’t operate.

It had taken him longer than he thought to reach the top, but there was still time enough. Time to reach the Venusians’ camp and get the acid. Time to get back and hurl jug after jug out into the canyon. Time to watch the jugs settle and break on the glowing dome down on the canyon floor. Time to watch the yellow-greenish liquid creep over the quartz. Time to see the quartz walls crumple inward beneath the terrific pressure of the deep.

“A message, Hellion?” he shrieked into the watery canyon. “I’ll have one for you. I’ll have a dozen of them—in jugs!”

But maybe he was just kidding himself. Playing at dramatics. Jousting with windmills. Maybe that much acid wouldn’t touch the dome—maybe it would take hundreds of gallons of the stuff, dumped into the canyon, before it would affect the quartz. Maybe the jugs would collapse under the pressure before he could get them down this deep. That was funny stuff they and the cylinders were made of—neither steel nor quartz, and steel and quartz were the only two materials that would stand up even at five hundred feet. In the laboratories on the surface hydrofluoric acid was kept in wax containers, but that, of course, would be just as crazy at this depth as quartz containers.

Those jugs must be made of some new material, some material unknown to Earthmen, but developed by the Venusians. The Venusians, naturally, would have developed materials of that kind—materials that were immune to acid action, could withstand tremendous pressures.

The oxygen jet, hissing warningly, roused Grant from his speculations. His eyes went to the reserve-tank pressure gauge and what he saw was like a blow between the eyes. Of the two tanks, one was empty—or almost empty, just enough for a few more minutes. The second tank was at full pressure—but something had happened to that first tank. He had counted on it carrying him almost to the Venusians’ camp—on not being forced to call upon the second tank until he was ready for the return trip to the canyon’s edge. Some imperfection, perhaps a faulty gauge—it didn’t matter now, for the damage was done. The hissing of the jet ebbed lower and lower and Grant snapped on the second tank.

Well, that settled it.

He’d never live to get to the Venusians’ camp and back to the canyon. Two hours—that was all that was left to him of life—perhaps not even that much. And that wasn’t long enough.

Someone else would have to get Hellion Smith. Perhaps Old Gus, if Old Gus were still alive. Perhaps some stony-eyed veteran of the Undersea Patrol—perhaps one of the government submarines, nosing around to find other camps of the Venusian invaders.

“The last story,” said Grant Nagle, staring out over the canyon, down into the depths where the dome gleamed dimly. “The last story and I won’t write it.”

Grant swung the right arm of the suit upward, found a handhold with his spotlight, hooked the steel fingers on it, tested their grip and geared the motors. The suit bumped and scraped against the rock as the arm levered it up a few feet.

Only a few feet more and he would reach the top of the canyon wall. What would he do then? What was there to do? What does a man do when he had just an hour or two to live?

He shifted the spotlight to find a hold for the fingers of the left arm and, as he did so, a shadowy, ghostly thing leaped over the canyon’s lip and plunged out into the watery space behind him. An oblong thing, a tubelike thing, that seemed to be spinning as it fell. A thing that plunged down, straight at the dome below.

Grant twisted the periscopic lenses to watch and, as he recognized it, he sucked in his breath. That falling thing was one of the cylinders from the Venusians’ camp! One of the great cylinders to which the motor had been connected! The cylinder was falling faster now, faster and faster, still spinning along its axis.

From above came a coughing hiss, as if someone had uncorked a bottle, and down toward the spinning cylinder flashed a shimmering projectile. Someone had fired an airgun!

In the split second before the projectile struck, Grant found a handhold for the left hand of the suit, clamped the steel fingers into it savagely. The concussion of the exploding projectile as it blasted against the spinning cylinder battered his suit against the wall. But the fingers held and, hanging there against the canyon rocks, he saw the cylinder split open as if a man had sliced it with a knife. Saw it spill a flood of curling greenish-yellow substance down upon the dome.

With little regard for safety, Grant swarmed up the wall those few remaining feet, pulled himself over the edge and turned to stare down into the depths.

The dome was gone—flattened out—shattered into a million shards as the acid had weakened it, allowed the pressure to get in its deadly work.

Hellion Smith was dead. So was the Rat and all the others. Except for a few, perhaps, who might be guarding the tanks.

The waters of Robber’s Deep were painted a ghastly yellow—a yellow that swirled and crawled and eddied like fiendish, writhing arms.

“Who the hell are you?” asked a voice.

Grant whirled. “Gus,” he cried. “Gus, you old devil, you did it!”

The suited figure stood stolidly in the gloom, a gun clutched in one hand. Behind it bulked the outline of an underwater tank.

“I kind of got my dander up,” Old Gus explained. “First they knocked over my dome and that put me out of sorts, and then they took my pearl and that made me downright sore.”

He turned his spotlight on Grant’s vision plate. “It’s Nagle,” he said. “I was wondering where you were.”

“It’s a long story,” said Grant.

“You can tell it to me in the tank,” said Gus. “I got to be getting back.”

“Where are you going?” asked Grant.

“I got to get Butch,” said Gus. “When I went up to the Venusians’ camp and got ready to haul the cylinder down here, Butch was bound to follow me. I told him the pressure would be too much for him and I tried to make him stay. But he got stubborn, so I had to stake him out.”

Gus chuckled thinly. “I bet he’s madder than hell by now,” he said.