Undersea Fleet (10 page)

Roger flushed angrily. “Leave my father out of this!” he ordered.

David nodded, unsurprised. “I rather thought it would be like that,” he said calmly. He didn’t explain that remark, but Roger seemed to understand. He turned bright red, then pale with anger, but he kept quiet. David said:

“I knew there was some danger. Joe Trencher was once my father’s foreman, and now that he is leading the revolt against my father, we knew what to expect. My father told me there was a good chance that Trencher would find some way of getting the pearls away from me.”

“And did he tell you what to do in that case?” Roger sneered.

David nodded. He looked at me. “He said, ‘Ask for help. Go to see Jim Eden, and ask his uncle for help.’ “

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had turned into one of these strange sub-sea saurians before my eyes.

“My uncle Stewart? But—but—”

David said: “That’s all I know, Jim. My father’s sick, as I said. And perhaps he was a little delirious. But that is what he said.”

I shook my head, thinking hard. “But—but—” I said again. “But—my uncle is in Marinia. More than ten thousand miles from here. And he isn’t too well himself.’

David shrugged, looking suddenly tired. “That’s all I know, Jim,” he repeated. “The only thing—”

He broke off, listening. “What’s that?”

We all stopped and listened. Yes, there had been something—some faint mechanical whisper. It sounded like powerful muffled motors, not too far away.

Bob jumped up. “The sea-car basin! It’s coming from there!”

It was hard to believe—but it
did
sound that way. All four of us leaped up and raced out of the little apartment, down the steps, onto the platform that surrounded the little basin where the Atlantic manager’s subsea vessel was moored when he was present.

There was nothing there. We looked around in the glow of the violet Troyon lights. There was the little railed landing, the white walls, the face of the water itself. Nothing else, But—the sea doors stood wide open.

We stared out through the open doors, to where the waters inside the basin joined the straight, narrow canal that led to the open sea. There were waves, shrunken imitations of the breakers outside; there were ripples bouncing off the sides.

There was no sign of a sea car.

David Craken said wearily: “I wonder—No, it couldn’t be.”

“What couldn’t be?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I guess I’m hearing ghosts. For a moment I thought, just possibly, Joe Trencher had followed us here—come into the basin, listened to what we were saying. But it can’t be true.” He pointed to the silent scanning ports of the electronic watchman. “Anything that came in or out would trip the search circuits,” he reminded us. “The electronic watchman didn’t sound an alarm—so it couldn’t have been that.”

Bob Eskow said stubbornly: “I’m
sure
I heard motors.”

David said: “I was sure too—but don’t you see it’s impossible? I suppose we heard some strange echo from the surf—or perhaps a surface boat passing, well out to sea—”

Bob Eskow glowered. “I’m no lubber, David! I know the sound of sea-car motors when I hear them!” But then he hesitated and looked confused. “But you’re right,” he admitted. “It couldn’t have been that. The electronic watchman would have spotted it at once.”

We trudged back upstairs, but somehow the mood of excitement that had possessed us was gone. We were all looking a little thoughtful, almost worried.

It was getting late, anyhow. We quickly made plans for what we had to do. “I’ll try to call my uncle,” I said. “—I don’t know what good it will do. But I’ll try. Meanwhile, David, I suppose you might as well stay here and keep out of sight. We’ve got to get back to the Academy, but tomorrow we’ll come back and then—”

“Then we’ll get to work,” Bob promised.

And that was all for that strange, exciting day…except for one thing.

We left David there and walked slowly back through the fairy garden to the gate. We were all feeling tired by then—bone-tired, exhausted, not only from the strenuous activity of the marathon swim but from the letdown after our strange meeting with David Craken and with Joe Trencher, whoever he was.

Maybe that was why we were out of the garden and a hundred yards down the road before I noticed something.

I stopped still in the coral road. “You closed the gate!” I said sharply to Bob.

He looked around. “Why—yes, I did. I pushed it closed as we came through. After all, I didn’t want to leave it open in case some—”

“No, no!” I cried. “You
closed
it! Remember? It was standing half ajar. Don’t you see what I mean? Come on—follow me!”

Tired as I was, I trotted back to the gate. It was closed, all right, just as Bob had left it. There was the twenty-foot high hedge, thorny and impenetrable. There was the gate, with the monitoring turret of the electronic watchman at the side.

We stopped in front of the gate, panting.

Nothing happened.

“You see?” I cried. They blinked at me.

“Don’t you understand
yet?
Watch me ” I pushed the gate open. It swung wide.

Nothing else happened.

Roger Fairfane got it then—and a moment later, Bob Eskow caught on.

“The electronic watchman!” Bob whispered. “It—it isn’t on! That’s an automatic whispered gate—you shouldn’t be able to move it, unless the red scanning ray identifies you…”

I nodded.

“Now you see,” I told them. “The watchmen’s been turned off—somehow. It isn’t working. Wires cut, I suppose.”

Roger looked at me worriedly.

“So—so those motors we thought we heard down below—”

I nodded. “It wasn’t imagination,” I said. “They were real. They disconnected the watchman and came in. And every word we said, they overheard.”

Eastward and down. Our destination was Sargasso City.

Neither Bob nor Roger Fairfane could get a pass; it was up to David and me to go to Sargasso City and look over the
Killer Whale.
We argued for a long time whether it was safe for David to come along—if a cadet should see him and recognize him, there would be questions asked! But it seemed that there should be two of us, and that left us no choice.

We booked passage from Hamilton on the regular sub-sea shuttle to Sargasso City, a hundred and fifty miles east of Bermuda and more than two miles straight down. In the short time before our subsea ship left I found a phone booth and placed a long-distance call to my uncle Stewart in far-off Thetis Dome.

There was no answer.

I told the operator: “Please, it’s very important. Can you keep trying?”

“Certainly, sir!” She was all professional competence. “Give me your number, please. I’ll call you back.”

I thought rapidly. That was impossible, of course—I wouldn’t be there for more than a few more minutes. Yet I didn’t want to have my uncle phone me at the Academy, since there was the chance that someone might overhear. I said: “Keep trying, operator. I’ll call you from Sargasso Dome in—” I glanced at my watch—“about two hours.”

David was gesticulating frantically from outside the booth. I hung up and the two of us raced down the long gloomy shed that was the Pan-Carib Line’s dock. We just reached the ship as the gangways were about to come down.

I couldn’t help feeling a little worried for no good reason—naturally, my uncle had plenty to do with his time! There was nothing much to worry about if he wasn’t at home at any particular moment. Still, it was halfway around the world and rather late at night in Thetis Dome; I felt a nagging doubt in the back of my mind that everything was well with him…

But the joy of cruising the deeps again put it out of my mind in a matter of moments.

We slid away from Hamilton port on the surface. As soon as we were safely past the shallows of the shelf we dived cleanly beneath the waves and leveled on course for Sargasso Dome.

The little shuttle vessel was a midget beside the giant Pacific liners in which I had traveled to Thetis Dome long before, but it was two hundred feet long for all of that. Because it was small, discipline was free and easy, and David and I were able to roam the crew spaces and the enginerooms without much trouble. It made the time pass quickly. At seventy knots the entire voyage took a little less than two hours; the time was gone before we knew it.

We disembarked at Sargasso City through edenite coupler tubes and immediately looked for a phone booth.

I poured coins into it, and got the same operator once more by dialing her code number.

There was still no answer.

I left the call in, and David and I asked directions to the Fleet basin where the surplus ships lay idle, waiting to be sold at public auction.

The
Killer Whale
lay side by side with the old
Dolphin
in the graving docks at the bottom of Sargasso Dome.

Neither was particularly big—they’d both been small enough to fit in the ship lock that let them into the city from the cold deeps outside. But the
Dolphin
seemed like a skiff next to the
Killer Whale.
We didn’t waste time looking at her; we quickly boarded the
Killer
through the main hatch and examined her from stem to stern.

David looked up at me, his eyes glistening. “She’s a beauty,” he whispered.

I nodded. The
Killer Whale
was one of the last Class-K subsea cruisers built. There was nothing wrong with her, nothing at all, except that in the past ten years there had been so many improvements in subsea weapons—requiring different mounts, different design from stem to stern—that the Fleet had condemned every vessel more than a decade old. The process of conversion was nearly complete, and only a few old-timers like the
Dolphin
and the
Killer Whale
still remained to be replaced.

There were crew quarters for sixteen men. “We’ll rattle around in her,” I told David. “But we can handle her. One of us on the engines and one at the controls; we can split up and take twelve-hour shifts. She’ll run like a dream, you’ll see.”

He put his hand on the master’s wheel as though he were touching a holy object. “She’s a beauty,” he said again. “Well, let’s go up and see about putting in a bid.”

That took a little bit of the spell off the moment for both of us. Putting in a bid—but what did we have to bid with? Unless my uncle Stewart could help—and he was very far from being a rich man—we couldn’t raise the price of the little escape capsule the
Whale
carried in her bilges, much less the cost of the whole cruiser.

In the office of the lieutenant-commander in charge of disposing of the two vessels we were informed that the rock-bottom bid that would be accepted was fifty thousand dollars. The officer looked us over and grinned. “Pretty expensive to buy out of your allowances, boys,” he said. “Why don’t you settle for something a little smaller—say, a toy sailboat?”

For the first time in my life I regretted wearing the dress scarlet uniform of an Academy cadet—in civilian clothes, I would have felt a lot freer to tell him what I thought! David stepped in front of me to avert the explosion.

“How do we go about putting in a bid?” he asked.

The officer lost a little of his amused look. “Why,” the said, “if you’re serious about this, all you have to do is take one of these application forms and fill it in. Put down your name and address and the amount you’re prepared to bid. You’ll have to post a bond of one-third of the amount you’re bidding before the bids are opened, otherwise your bid won’t even be considered. That’s all there is to it.”

“May I have a form for the
Killer Whale
then, sir?”

The lieutenant commander looked at him, then shrugged.
“Killer,
eh?” he said, scrabbling through the pile of forms on his desk. “You’re smart there, anyway. The
Dolphin’s
nothing but a heap of rust. I ought to know—I served in her myself, as an ensign. But what in the world do you want a cruiser for, young man—even if you had the money to pay for it?”

David coughed. “I—I want it for my father,” he said, and quickly took the forms from the officer’s hand.

We retired to the outer office, clutching the forms. It was a big, public room, full of people, some of whom looked at us curiously. We found a corner where we could go over the papers.

I looked over David’s shoulder. The forms were headed
Application for Purchase of Surplus Subsea Vessel,
and on the first page was a space where the names of the
Killer Whale
and the
Dolphin
had been filled in for us. David promptly put a big check mark next to the
Killer Whale.
He filled in my name and address and hesitated over the space marked:
Amount offered.

I stopped him.

“Hold on a second,” I said. “Let me try calling my uncle again. There’s phone booth right across the room.”

He grinned. “Might as well see if we’re going to be able to pay for it,” he agreed.

This time my call went right through.

But the person who answered was not my uncle. It was a vision-phone, and the picture before my eyes swirled and cleared and took form. It was Gideon Park—my uncle’s most trusted helper, the man who had saved my life in the drains under Thetis Dome so long ago!

His black face looked surprised, then grinned, his teeth flashing white. “Young Jim! It’s good to see you, boy!” Then he looked oddly concerned. “I guess you want your uncle, eh? He’s—uh—he can’t be reached right now, Jim. Can I help you? You’re not in trouble at the Academy, are you?”

“No, nothing like that, Gideon. Where is my uncle?”

He hesitated. “Well, Jim—”

“Gideon! What’s the matter? Is anything wrong?”

He said, “Now, hold on, Jim. He’s going to be all right. But he’s—well, he’s sleeping right now. I’ve had the phone disconnected all day so as not to disturb him, and I don’t want to wake him up unless—”

“Gideon, tell me what’s wrong with my uncle!” He said soberly: “It isn’t too bad, I promise you that, Jim. But the truth is, he’s sick.”

“Sick!”

Gideon nodded, the black face worried and sympathetic. “He had some sort of an attack. Three days ago it was. He got a letter from an old acquaintance of his. He was reading it, right here at his desk, when suddenly he keeled over—”