Undersea Fleet

15 Abandon Ship!

We lay on the steep slope of the Tonga Trench, nearly four miles down, waiting for the Killer to finish us off.

Gideon and Bob Eskow came tumbling in from the engine room. “She’s going to blow!” Bob yelled. “We ran the engines too long—the reactor’s too hot. We’ve got to get out of here, Roger!”

Roger Fairfane nodded quietly, remotely. His face was abstracted, as though he were thinking out a classroom problem in sea tactics or navigation.

The microsonar was still working, after a fashion—one more drain on our batteries. I could see the blurred and dimmed image of the Killer on the topside screen. They were cricling far above us. Waiting.

The dead Dolphin lay onimously still, except for a faint pulsing from the circulator-tubes of the reactors. Nuclear reactions make no sound; there was nothing to warn us that an explosion was building a few yards away. Now and then there was an onimous creak of metal, an occasional snap, as though the underpowered edenite armor were yielding, millimeter by millimeter, to the crushing weight of the water above.

We lay sloping sharply, stern down. Roger stood with one hand on the conn-wheel to brace himself, staring into space.

He roused himself—I suppose it was only a matter of seconds—and looked around at us.

“Abandon ship!” he ordered.

And that was the end of the Dolphin.

We clustered in the emergency pressure-lock for a final council of war. Roger said commandingiy: “We’re only a few miles from Jason Craken’s sea-mount. David, you lead the way. We’ll have to conserve power, so only one of us will use his suit floodlamps at a time. Stay together! If anyone lags behind, he’s lost. There won’t be any chance of rescue. And we’ll have to move right along. The air in the suits may not last for more than half an hour. The suit batteries are old; they have a lot of pressure to fight off. They may not last even as long as the air. Understand?”

We all nodded, looking around at each other. We checked our depth armor, each inspecting the others’. The suits were fragile-seeming things, of aluminum and plastic. Only the glowing edenite film would keep them from collapsing instantly—and as Roger said, there wasn’t much power to keep the edenite glowing.

“Seal helmets!” Roger ordered.

As we closed the faceplates, the edenite film on each suit of armor sprang into life, rippling faintly as we moved.

Roger waved an arm. Laddy Angel, nearest the lock valves, gestured his understanding of the order, and sprang to the locks.

The hatch behind us closed and locked.

The intake ports irised open and spewed fiercely driven jets of deep-sea water against the baffles.

Even the ricocheting spray nearly knocked us off our feet, but in a moment the lock was filled.

The outer hatch opened.

And we stepped out into the ancient sludge of the Tonga Trench, under four miles of water.

Behind us the hull of the Dolphin coruscated brightly. It seemed to light up the whole sea-bottom around us. I glanced back once. Shadows were chasing themselves over the edenite film—sure sign that the power was failing, that it was only a matter of time.

And then I had to look ahead.

We formed in line and started off, following David Craken. It took us each a few moments of trial-and-error to adjust our suits for a pound or two of weight—carefully balancing weight against buoyancy, valving off air—so that we could soar over the sludgy sea bottom in great, floating, slow-motion leaps.

And then we really began to cover ground.

In a moment the Dolphin behind us was a vague blur of bluish color. In another moment, it was only a faint, distant glow.

Yet—still there was light!

I cried: “What in the world!”—forgetting, for the moment, that no one could hear. It was incredible! Light—four miles down!

And more incredible still, there were things growing there.

The bottom of the sea is bare, black muck—nearly every square foot of it. Yet here there was vegetation. A shining forest of waving sea-fronds, growing strangely out of the rocky slope before us. Their thin, pliant stems rose upward, out of sight, snaking up into the shadows above. They carried thick, odd-shaped leaves—

And the leaves and trunks, the branches and curious flowers—every part of them glowed with soft green light!

I bounded ahead and tapped David Craken on the shoulder. The edenite films on my gauntlet and his shoulder-piece flared brightly as they touched; he could not have felt my hand, but must have seen the glow out of the corner of his eye. He turned stiffly, his whole body swinging around. I could see, dimly and murkily, his face behind the edenite-filmed plastic visor.

I waved my arm wordlessly at the glowing forest.

He nodded, and his lips shaped words—but I couldn’t make them out.

Yet one thing came across—this was no surprise to him.

And then I remembered something: The strange water-color Laddy Angel had showed me, hanging over David’s bed at the Academy. It had portrayed a forest like this one, a rocky slope like this one—

And it had also shown something else, I remembered.

A saurian, huge and hideous, plunging through the submarine forest.

I had written off the submarine forest as a crazy fantasy—yet here it sprawled before my eyes. And the saurians?

I turned my mind to safer grounds—there was plenty of trouble right in front of us, without looking for more to worry about!

David seemed at home. We leaped lazily through the underwater glades in file, like monstrous slow-motion kangaroos on the Moon. After a few minutes, David signaled a halt. Gideon came up from his second place in the file to join David; Gideon’s suit-lamps went on and Roger, who had led the procession with David, switched off his lights and fell back. It was a necessary precaution; the suit-lamps were blindingly bright—and terribly expensive of our hoarded battery power. We had to equalize the drain on our batteries—else one of us, with less reserve than the others, would sooner or later hear a warning creak of his flimsy suit armor as the edenite film flickered and faltered—

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

On and on.

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

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

Whatever the reason, I was breathing bad air.

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

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

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

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

We picked ourselves up and moved on.

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

I glanced at them—then again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David was showing us something.

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

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

But I wondered if it were in time.

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

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

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

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

I looked, expecting to see nothing—

I was terribly, terribly wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was unconscious, passed out cold.